The Last Day Here...

My dad died yesterday morning, on Christmas.   I was not there.  After 12 days of sitting beside, it seemed as if he needed us to go, so he could go.  So we did and he did as well.

Christmas Eve Day was hard, so very hard.  He kept choking and coughing and not being able to breathe very well.  It was not a good last day, at least from my perspective.  I forget, how easily I forget, that he had far many more peaceful moments than he did hard ones.  But, of course, I feel the painful ones most acutely.

I would like to call it a good death.  But I am not sure what that even means anymore.  There is no good death, leaving is never going to be easy no matter what we label it.  It is always going to be a blessing, a curse, painful, beautiful, hard, wondrous, challenging and final.  I want to say he had a good death, but I can’t.  So I will instead say that he had a good life.  He was loved by many: his wife and daughter, his grandchildren, his siblings, friends, random people whose lives he touched.  He had a good life that afforded him many luxuries and opportunities.  He got sober at 60 and got to spend the last two decades of his life living sober and atoning for all he got wrong earlier in his life.  Not everyone gets to do that.  He did and I am most grateful for that.

It was not the best Christmas I have ever had, that is for sure.  And just for extra drama, my neighbor’s tree fell on my guest house last night, in the pouring rain.  Do not know the extent of the damage...just heard the crash and knew immediately what it was.  Luckily my friend who rents it is out of town for awhile.  We will take care of that today, as we begin to plan my dad’s celebration of life.  Seems and feels like a lot all at once.  But I feel up for the tasks, I guess.  I mean, it isn’t like I can pretend either thing isn’t or didn’t happen.  It will all get sorted...

Funny thing life...it just comes at you while it is coming for you.  Life is this bizarrely supportive and destructive force.  And it is hard.  So very hard at times.

I am grateful I got to say goodbye to my dad.  I am grateful I got to bear witness to his leaving this earth, to being untethered to all it means to be human and this existence.  I am grateful I was present for it all and I am grateful his suffering is over now.  He is released.  And I am grateful he was released from the prison of his body yesterday, even on Christmas.

Christmas is just another day for me.  We have never been religious and it has always been more about the Coca Cola version of Christmas than it was about Jesus.  If I am honest, it was never about Jesus, for us, at all.  And I know there are many people whose Christmas’s would have been devastated by losing their father on Christmas so I asked God to please let my dad’s death on Christmas spare someone else from losing their loved on on that day.  I don’t know if that worked or not, but I do know that I felt better for asking that to be true.  

My mom and the kids and I were eating breakfast yesterday after the funeral home came to get him.  They even remembered on Christmas to bring a flag to drape his body in as he left the facility!  What kind people there are in this world.  I suggested that since Christmas is now forever owned by my dad, perhaps we could start a new tradition of telling funny stories about him on Christmas...everyone agreed and we did.  All of us had a story, or more than one, that exemplified him as the man he was:  the aisle policeman, the Army Ranger/Green Beret, the funny guy, the other people;’s trash was his treasure guy, the guy who, at least at the end of his life, was always smiling.  And for the briefest of moments, he was there with us again.

He was a complicated man.  And we had a complicated relationship.  But recovery gave us a new platform on which to build.  Each of us having done our best to destroy ourselves and our lives, and so we stood amidst the rumble of life lived on self will and selfish motives and began to rebuild again.  And, we were pretty successful.  I am not sure either of us was ever the other’s most favorite person, but I do think we came to know each other better and have more respect for who the other was, without trying to change them to suit ourselves anymore.  And without recovery, I am very sure this whole life and relationship would have gone down quite differently.

So when he died yesterday, there was nothing left to say. Nothing left to request forgiveness for, or to forgive.  We were clean.  Spiritually clean.  He owed me nothing, I owed him nothing.  Recovery taught me how to be a kind and loving daughter because it grew me up and into a woman of dignity and grace.  And recovery made me into that person in every facet of my life.  And provided a firm foundation upon which to rectify all that went so horribly wrong between my dad and I for decades prior to recovery.  Without recovery, he would have never lived to 82.  Without recovery, I would not have lived to see 30.  And so sobriety gave us longevity, but it also gave us spiritual tools that we needed to repair the things we broke along the way and to have guidelines for interacting and relating as we moved forward.  I am forever grateful.

I will miss him.  I do miss him.  But I can see the divinity in his leaving.  His last day here could have been worse, even though it felt quite brutal as it was occurring.  I am grateful he is released from this life and all its constraints and hardships.  I am grateful he suffers no more.  I am grateful we went to the tree lighting event together.  We laughed and had a good time.  It was light and breezy and that time carried me through the pain and hardship of the past 12 days.

And perhaps more importantly I have been gifted the idea that we are more than our last day here.  Our lives are not neatly summarized in the moments of our last day here on earth.  Instead, they are forever encapsulated in the fire and sparks that fueled our everyday.  We are not our deaths.  We are our lives.  And I pray that as my dad got his 7 minutes of review, I know he received whatever heaven there can exist in this world.  I know he saw the love, devotion and sweet understanding that surrounded him most of his life.  The love and affection my mom gave him for the last 60 years.  I know he felt my kids love and respect for the grandfather they were closest to.  I know he knew I loved him, no regrets and no exceptions.

Our last day here is just the last, and perhaps, for some, a defining day.  I pray that the last day’s memory fades for me and is supplanted with fun memories of his smile, his laughter and his humor.  He was an intelligent, driven, hilarious, broken, healing man.  And I am so very grateful that I sat in witness and testament to his life as he spent his last day here...

Forever, always.

Photo credit: Eric Lauderdale with permission.