Dressing Dad: A Daughter’s Post-Mortem Reflections on Dying Part 2 of 3

On November 5, my 91 year old father died from Congestive Heart Failure and Pulmonary Fibrosis after 36 hard hours struggling for breath. The first calls that he was taking a bad turn came on Sunday morning. After talking with the hospice nurse, I decided to fly out on Tuesday morning to be with him. He died Monday night. I felt guilty and more than sad to miss my usual role in vigil, but was surprised by new ways I cared for him after death. I explore these in this blog and the next, as well as the help they gave me.

There are many silent experiences around death. This blog, based on journal entries, recounts one of them: a spiritual experience just after his death. In it, my father appears during meditation and we engage. This may seem preposterous to you, but I hope you will read with an open mind, leave a comment and stay tuned for the third and final installment.

Jeanne Denney

November 5, 2012

Dad told Leici yesterday that he only had 4 more days. He said the time was near. I will fly out tomorrow a.m. Yesterday, crying in Nick’s arms, knowing he is really going now. Last night at the end of group, Iris Dement randomly comes on the Ipod from shuffle singing “After you’ve gone” (a song she wrote to her dying father). I sob and the group holds me. It’s good for everyone that we do this.

November 6, 2012 – On the airplane to PDX

Last night around 9 or 9:30 Dad died at home in his bedroom that overlooks Portland. Mary, Ken and Betty were with him. I wasn’t. Instead, I did three unusual sessions, then drove home to pack for the morning flight.

I felt Dad all day. I knew he was dying. At home around 9 p.m. I stop packing with an urgent feeling that I should focus and pray for him, then that I should call and have someone put the phone to his ear just to tell him I love him. My call comes at the moment of his last breath. Mary, crying when she picks up the phone, saying “Oh Jeanne…he just…he just. Just as you called…” Betty had told him that she loved him. Ken and Mary were in the room. I notice that I didn’t feel sad for him, he was so well honored, well attended and surrounded with love, complete. I selfishly felt disappointed for me. This wasn’t how I had pictured it. I know better than this crazy thought, but I have it anyway. I should have gone yesterday, I should have gone today. My inner picture of me as self-appointed death guardian crumbles and an ill-defined promise to help seems broken. Was it broken? I should have known. Etc.

There is the flush of exhilaration that accompanies a new death. Later I ache like a mother who misses their child’s graduation or first day of school because of business. I do what anyone in this situation does, I give opinions and suggestions by phone. I ask Mary to keep his body as still as possible for as long as possible. “The morticians can wait”, I say. “Ask them if they can embalm him after I get there”. Thankfully, no resistance to my strange requests.

That night, sleeping is different. I feel newly skinless, unprotected. New world without father or mother. Nick feels this too. Things between us are distant and difficult for weeks, but now we cry and sleep together, admittedly little. At 5:30 a.m. we leave for the airport. Yesterday, the very day that Dad died, Teddy started to take down the old maple that’s been dying in the front yard for 10 years. How apt. Dad was nothing if not a man of trees, a nurseryman. Four trees worth of debris from Hurricane Sandy lay in the yard, war fallen, broadcasting mourning. Pulling out of the driveway. Dull light. Raw world. New treeless land without skin.

“Fancy finding you here”

Settled into my airplane seat after take-off I decide to meditate, the first chance to center  I have had.

I have practiced “finding” people who are dying or in comatose states for years in hospice work, occasionally people who have died. Finding them means seeing them in my mind’s eye. I don’t know how I do this.

When I close my eyes I quickly try to find Dad.  It takes no effort. I immediately see his face without a body floating in the black void midair to the left in my visual field. I rarely have a face so aggressively near. I am startled by it. It is a younger face, puzzled and blank, staring as if seeing me for the first time, which perhaps he is. I don’t expect this or know how to engage with it. I feel uncomfortable, weirdly afraid to look in his eyes.

For a few minutes I open my physical eyes and get busy with the world around me, ipod, notebook, shoes. I may be trying to make it go away. When I close them again it is still there, hovering in a black void. I see his eyes again, looking deeper. There is something kind of stultified, clutching and afraid in them. Is this my father newly dead? I hardly know how to meet him or whether to take this experience seriously, after all I am in an airplane. Something is called for, but what? Finally I do what I would do for any hospice patient. I place myself in the picture with him, put my arms around this face, talk to it, thank it, and reassure it. He gets smaller and seems to grow a body. Suddenly we are standing together in this black void, the same size. This is all something like Alice in Wonderland.

I remembered once just after a heart surgery at 85 Dad told of waking in ICU from what sounded to me like a scarier type of Near Death Experience (NDE). “I couldn’t see light or hear sound, I called but no one answered. I thought that I had died but no one was there.” he said, tearing up. I could see him asking “Is that what death is going to be like?”. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about dying. The place I found Dad now was much like this. He seemed lost in a void. Not an evil void, just an empty, dark one as if stuck or disoriented in a tunnel he could not get through.

To say that Dad wasn’t much for the metaphysical is an understatement. He was a fiercely pragmatic Methodist. Church made my mother happy and was “a good social institution”. He served on budget committees, flirted at the coffee hour, went to the men’s breakfast’s and sang in baritone but was not quite a believer. Something in the spiritual stuff irritated him. If he had a prayer life other than the perfunctory family dinner prayer or the care he gave plants in the garden I never knew about it. He was a man of business with many friends in body, not so many in spirit. Dad’s views on the other side?: “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush”. This void was not his terrain. So when I showed up….well, let’s just say it was possible (if you believe any of this) that I was a sight for sore eyes. He clung to me with kind of a “What took you so long?” look.

Dear reader if this seems a bit unhinged from your reality, I understand, but consider that there are many ways of seeing and knowing. Death challenges us to use new ones. I learned this way sitting with non-communicative hospice patients with closed eyes. I did not know what they were aware of or if they wanted me to be there, but searched for clues for how to engage or comfort. As I did this images arose in my visual field. I just watched them. This one sitting in a field of daisies, picking them. That one struggling hard to get up a steep hill in concrete shoes. Another standing before the ocean gazing outward. Another looking hard for something in a field of grass. They were symbolic and highly specific. I most often saw myself interacting and finding ways to help.

In sum, I’ve had enough strange experiences and confirming coincidences to respect these pictures. I interact with them in interesting ways; at the same time they have a trajectory and movement of their own. In other words I don’t create them with my mind. I am observer and participant, not creator. I learned that if I look, there is almost always a source of light, a destination, or something to turn toward. If there isn’t, there is a process being intently focused on. I am usually there to help in some way….chiseling off the concrete shoes, for example, or pointing them in a different direction. I might have a conversation, bring encouragement, give new ideas, listen. I am a companion.

Where two worlds meet

There were two immediate problems with finding Dad here. First, I wasn’t used to a father having a spiritual form. I carefully hid spirituality from my family, and suffered the angst of them not understanding this weird, black sheep part of me. Not only didn’t Dad understand my spiritual explorations, he didn’t get my profession as therapist, my research, writing or interest in death (“what is it that you do again?” “And people pay you for that?” “But what do you actually DO?” “What is this Hospice thing again?” etc). He tried. You have to give him credit. I had fantasized that by supporting his dying he would finally get it. This wasn’t what I imagined.

When I got through first minutes of discomfort, I got that he needed help, which brought about the second problem. He was disoriented. I naturally tried to turn him toward the point of light in the distance which I could see but apparently he could not. However, his eyes were so rigidly fixed on me I could not convince him to look away. I needed help. Remembering Dad was a social animal I finally said…”Dad, it is time you met my friends…” I am not hugely social in ordinary life, but in places like this it is different. I invited a troupe of spiritual benefactors to come and come they did, big beautiful, radiant beings. “Welcome to my world Dad. Let me introduce you …”

There was a wonderfully surreal and comical aspect to this vision. Dad was a party thrower into his 90’s. In life, I would have loved Dad to be at my parties (supposing I threw them) or to introduce him to impressive friends (if I had any) because my life would become visible and worthy of his interest. I would appear on his map. I was a loved part of his life but he was strangely absent in mine. I knew his friends, he didn’t know mine. Not being visible or having parents actually in my life felt normal, but was a long-suppressed sorrow. Here it was as if I was introducing him to Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Babe Ruth and Hank Williams all at once as friends. His shock of new understanding. My embarrassment. I saw myself negotiating his care, “Give him anything he needs and charge it to my account” (my account?! what account? I am thinking). They dressed him in a new gold robe, placed something crown-like on his head and off he went with them. He looked beautiful, relieved, excited, grateful as he started off toward the point of light on the horizon. Tired from the concentration, I took a break, stumbled over the lady next to me to get to the airplane bathroom.

A note here on what it means to see and communicate in this void space. It is not exactly like you hear words. You just receive thoughts in download. I see and watch the “me” in these pictures with detachment and curiosity as if watching TV.

I have no idea how time works in this place, but back in my seat I check back in and see him still walking away with the radiant others. This seems wrong so I jump back in to catch up with them. As we walk we chat. “Dad, your obit turned out really well.” (he had been worried about that), “We’ll have a good party for you, don’t worry.” “Remember how much love you have left behind. We are so grateful.” We walked toward the doorway growing ever larger and brighter. I made a quick proposal: “Dad, maybe we could work together more now, kind of business partners of spirit like you and Ken.” (Dad and my brother were business partners. I thought he would like this idea). At the rim of the opening: his parents, my Mom and her parents, Aunt Bernice and others peering out. Radiant. He seems amazed.

Reunion.

Our tearful parting there lasted awhile. I said that I had to go back, but we would be together and find ways to be in touch. I told him that he would probably have things to do, but when he was done to find me in my dreams. I can’t say how I knew to say these things. “We can be in touch that way or we can talk through the trees.” I seemed to be explaining things of both my life and this world to him, things even I could not understand. I could only tell that he was elated, understanding me in the dawn of new respect. I encouraged him to not be afraid of spirit, to walk into this new/old world just as he walked into a new spring season after winter. I returned then, but not before a few tears with them. How hard to return.

Then it was dark and complete behind my eyelids. Dad was gone.

Post Script

Was this wish fulfillment, Psychosis, projection, fantasy? Hallucination, delusions of grandeur, dissociation, menopausal ungluing? I can hear the voices of psychoanalysis saying that my psyche made this up to defend against guilt for not being with him at death. I can’t know. There is little confirmation for these experiences in normal awareness, but occasionally some. For example, once  I “found” a patient on a ferryboat clutching a pier so that it could not depart, this after weeks of helping her “walk up a steep hill” in a series of hospice visits. I handed her a bouquet of flowers so she could let go. Moments later she took her last breath. There are other stories like this.  In the case of Dad I had only three pieces of evidence: the story from the ICU, my tears and the fact that I felt different, happier even elated, stronger and more resolved. I felt I had helped Dad just as significantly as if I were by his bedside, maybe moreso. I lightened. I didn’t regret not being with him as much and could appreciate that my siblings had had new experiences that were right for them. They might have avoided these if I had been there.

Where do these images come from? It is hard to know. People “see” the unseen in unique ways. My job is simply to report that shamanic sight experiences like these occur. And, in this case, allowing it helped me feel I had fulfilled a holy compact, healed an old sorrow, been known, even finally celebrated somehow. I felt more myself and had less pain. Would Dad have found his way without me? Most likely (Experts report that 1-15% of NDE’s are of this type but usually resolve in time to a more typical NDE). It just might have been a lonelier, scarier trip.

As the plane landed through the morning fog I remembered that it was election day. An enduring legacy of Dad’s death is that it kept me from voting for Obama’s second term while he managed to vote against him before he died. “Very clever Dad! You won that one.” I’m chuckling. The last of our little jokes.  For now.

So we begin inventing all the new ways of finding, helping and knowing each other.

Jeanne Denney is a therapist, hospice worker and death educator in the Greater New York area. Her website is http://www.jeannedenney.com and email is jeannedenney@gmail.com.