June 1, Monday

1952 Dad and me

Four months ago I retired from my job as a home health nurse. I had been nursing for 25 years ever since my youngest child started to school. Nursing was an amazing opportunity for service. At the same time, for me anyway, it was very stressful. It's only now after stopping for a while that I can see how stressed I was. One of the consequences of stressful work in the world is that significant inner work piles up unattended. Being a mom of three and working as a nurse made my life so full that there was no time to process much of anything. Now in the relative quiet of my life in the woods there is time to look deeply at those places where I had only peeked before.

So in the last few days I've decided to start out with one of the big ones and take a look at death. This was triggered by the fact that last Sunday was the 35th anniversary of my father's death. Every year I remember those last days of his life. He was 70. It was 1974 and I was 28 years old, a mother of two four year olds and a five year old. I lived with my husband and kids in a clapboard house in rural Mississippi with no laundry or even potable water. My husband taught at Tougaloo College and I volunteered to register rural voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democrats Party. I thought we were helping to save the world or something like that. It was all-consuming.

One day I got a call from my mom saying that Dad was very ill and in the hospital. She wanted me to come home right away. So I went. They had just moved from Minneapolis where I grew up to a small town in Northern Minnesota where Dad planned to fish for the rest of his life. He went to the hospital for a routine cardiac procedure. The admission chest x-ray showed a spot on his lung which they identified as cancer. On Dad's 70th birthday, May 21st they performed surgery to remove part of his lung but found massive caner through out his thorax and closed him up without removing anything. Ten days later he died on May 31st, 1974.

The ten days that Dad was in the hospital were crazy. Mostly I was crazy. I need to preface this part of the story by saying that, as an only child I was unusually close to my father. He was my source of absolute unconditional love. I thought he was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise. Kind of like the standard version of God. This adoration continued right up until my marriage. At 28 when I was called back home these feelings were barely below the surface.

I remember years earlier my grandfather died and our huge extended family sat in the hospital waiting room. I was 15, yet in front of my all my aunts and uncles and cousins I sat on my dad's lap and cried, "Don't ever leave me!" The fear of losing my father was deep. I quickly buried the fear and never looked at it again until he died. Even then I barely peeked at it; I was on the run.

At this point I've had quite a lot of experience with death as a nurse and EMT, even working in hospice for 3 years. I've read many books of the apparently required reading list on death and dying, taken a 5 day workshop with death guru Elizabeth Kubler Ross and nearly completed an MA in grief counseling. I know we all handle the death of our people differently, but when my dad was dying I was pretty much of a mess. In the hospital I sat with him day and night until they asked me to leave. I was hostile to the hospital staff, plainly they were not doing their job of making him better. I sat by his bed and cried which must have made him fell terrible since he never wanted to see me hurt. Even though I was not a religious person, I tried praying over him, saying the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm plaintively. I made pilgrimages to the hospital chapel to plead and bargain with God to save my dad. Nothing worked. When he finally died I remember feeling totally defeated. Mom and I stuffed his clothes into a paper sack and left the hospital in a daze.

Over the years the memories of my dad both living and dying have faded some. Mom and I had 30 more years together - time enough to evolve into friends before she died at age 88. I did better with her death. Again it happened quickly with eight days of vigil in the hospital. We had a hospice room. I played soft music, did as many of her personal cares as I could, talked with her gently and let her go. I could see that she was ready and at peace. We had done our work as much as possible.

As Jim and I age I realize we have a lot of work to do to get to the point of welcoming our own and each other's deaths - not in a morbid sense, but in a sense of being complete with this life. I'm not planning on either of us dying anytime soon but I also don't want to close the door to that possibility because closing the door to that possibility puts a big lid on the possibilities of living. Fear does that. The possibilities of death are all around; the possibilities of life are also everywhere and plenty, and they are related.

There is a song that keeps coming to me by the Arkansas Benedictine nun, Macrina Wiederkehr in her book Seven Sacred Pauses:

Put everything in order
as day begins to fade.
All things are passing,
moment to moment,
breath by breath.
All things are passing,
moment by moment,
birth to death.
Take off that cloak of fear,
the divine strength you seek is here,
and you know you are dying to live,
you know you are dying to live.
So put everything in order as day begins to fade.

The words in this song that really get to me are :"And know you are dying to live." Macrina must see these as important too because she repeats them, "...and you know you are dying to live."

I can see that I have made some progress over the years in my acceptance of death. But you know, it feels like there is a big piece that hasn't been looked at or faced. There is a significant Buddhist practice that I have so far managed to avoid. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn gives us an explanation of this meditation:

The Buddhist Sutra of Mindfulness speaks about the meditation on the corpse: meditate on the decomposition of the body, how the body bloats and turns violet, how it is eaten by worms until only bits of blood and flesh still cling to the bones, meditate up to the point where only white bones remain, which in turn are slowly worn away and turn into dust. Meditate like that, knowing that your own body will undergo the same process. Meditate on the corpse until you are calm and at peace, until your mind and heart are light and tranquil and a smile appears on your face. Thus, by overcoming revulsion and fear, life will be seen as infinitely precious, every second of it worth living.

Granted at first or second glance this is not an appealing practice. I have to admit that I have avoided it for years. It always seemed too macabre. Of course the whole point is not to make yourself miserable but to release yourself from the fear, to let yourself finally live. And "you know you are dying to live."

God, or the Universe, if you prefer, has already helped me accept my death by giving me gradual loses to observe - the keenness of my eyesight, the sharpness of my memory, the swiftness of my gait have all gradually diminished. It's hard to deny, although we all try. What kindness! Helping me to see that this body, mind and personality are impermanent, easing me along. Perhaps now I am ready for the corpse meditation. I have hundreds of oak, hickory and walnut teachers and the perfect place to decay right here in the woods. Perhaps someday soon I will post a blog piece on the progress of my decay complete with photos.