Six months ago today my father passed from this world to the next. That’s not how he would have put it. He thought that death was final and that our lives here in this reality were the only ones we would ever know. He feared dying – not so much death itself – but the process of dying brought him almost unbearable anxiety. He feared the pain, the lack of dignity, and the lack of control. In truth it does not take dying to experience those things. He lived in that reality of dying for fifteen months. Battling cancer is called fighting, it is called living, and it looks a lot like dying. For a stage IV pancreatic cancer diagnosis there didn’t seem to be any other option, at least for him. For my Dad, a man who battled depression his entire life, I don’t think that there was a choice that it could look any different.
His death was merciful in ways that are beyond the end of his suffering and the end of our caregiving. In the oddest of moments, it was in the discussing the eminence of death that I found hope with him. I had spent a tearful morning on the phone with Dr. Gary (his hospice doctor to whom I am grateful beyond words). My father was drifting. There was a connection with this reality and this world that had come loose. There was a turn in his mind, in his cognitive ability that had been persistently sharp his entire life, and it was a turn that felt definitive. The tangible signs of uneaten food and increased medication were insignificant compared to what I could feel: Dad had let go of whatever force of will had anchored him – against all odds – to this world for fifteen months.
Dr. Gary came that evening to our home. We sat in my Dad’s room and I watched Dr. Gary act not as a doctor but as a man of faith. He asked my Dad what he felt about where he was in his illness. We were scarcely one month into a three-to-six-months-left-to-live prognosis. Dr. Gary had told me that morning on the phone that we had transitioned from speaking in months to speaking in weeks, possibly days. How does someone tell another person that they have days to live? How could it even be true? But I could see it, I could feel it; we were barreling down a hill and gaining speed. The acceleration was the part I had never counted on.
My father responded to Dr. Gary like no other person involved with his care. He saw Dr. Gary as a friend, a man who he would have liked to swap books of poetry with and discuss favorite authors and religious practices. He was able to tell Dr. Gary what he couldn’t tell me:
“I feel a longing,” he said in his weakened and raspy voice, “like the longing in Hawaiian music – a longing for what’s next.” He waved his arm to the side signifying that “next” place. I knew in that moment that he felt what we could all see and he greeted it with open arms. He had spent so much time and energy up until that point fighting death through his fear. Now he not only accepted it, he welcomed it with love.
In that moment he gave me a gift I had not known I needed and only now do I know how much I cherish it. He spoke of death not as a finality but as the next stage, and he alluded to another chapter waiting to begin. He was only ready to be done with this reality and there was something much greater that he encountered, something much greater that he sensed.
Grief has been almost annoyingly cliche: shock, numbness, delayed reactions, triggered by the smallest of things. Anger, pain, sadness, regret, they have all made an appearance. I am grateful that the good moments are the ones that stick with me, that linger in my mind. He sounded so sweet when he spoke of longing. There was a gentleness in him I hadn’t heard there in months. In his death there was a spark of his old self – That Dad I had before cancer.
Regret is a bitter feeling and it feeds on the finality of death. I look back at those fifteen months, especially the last six months of his life when he lived with my husband and me, and I feel regret. I regret my own weariness with caregiving, my impatience, and mostly my choices of how to spend my time. I feel regret clinging to every date night I took, every day I went to work; I feel regret with anything I did that was for me and about me and therefore not about my Dad.
My regret is not soothed by reminders of how much I needed self-care, or of how incredibly negative and difficult my Dad was in his illness. I am not soothed by knowing how much I did give to him in those six months, or fifteen months, or the last twenty-six years. Regret seems to trump reason in emotional hierarchy. But I have found comfort. My own belief in heaven, in a life after this, was never enough to comfort me before my Dad died. I knew for fifteen months that I would lose him; rarely did we think of “if he dies” but “when he dies”. Pancreatic cancer just sucks that much.
Dad gave me the gift of comfort in his own hope for there being more after his death. It was never enough for me to believe that we would meet again, I needed him to believe that there was more. I needed him to believe that one day we would reunite and that in some way the rest of my life was not lost to him. His hope was the last and most precious gift. When he retreated into himself, no longer able to communicate with us I had the words of comfort that he gave to me that I in turn gave to him. My sister and I spent three days at his bedside describing the beaches and sunsets, the “next” that he was longing for and we promised to meet him there one day.
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