My dad passed in February of 2021 at almost 97 tears of age. He was, by the grace of God, pretty healthy and clear-headed up until a fall left him with a broken hip, which laid him up for months and eventually ended in pneumonia. He transitioned a week later.
My dad always had my back throughout my life, even at times I wished he'd leave me the f*** alone. From my childhood, I committed to taking care of him in his old age, no matter what might happen. He lived between my sister's place and mine for a few years after my mom died, and then when my sister moved to Arizona, he came to my place permanently. We had a good life together, going back to Kansas each Memorial Day for a reunion of his mother's side of the family in Saint John. Sometimes we flew, more often we'd make it a road trip from north of Seattle. We took side trips to Yellowstone, Arches and other places as well. We took weekly drives, ate out often (unfortunately for him, I'm not the greatest cook, but he loved eating out anyway) and we had long conversations about life; especially his, but it was fairly balanced, I'd say.
My dad was a man of faith, a devout Methodist and 65-year member of Rose City Park United Methodist Church in Portland, Oregon. He only discontinued attendance when he moved up to live with me. My spiritual path was much more eclectic and convoluted, from Pentecostal Christianity to the Unification Church, to Islam, to Vedanta, to energy healing work, to the Red Road and plant medicines. Through every turn, despite his solid and unwavering Christian faith, my dad always accepted my path, and we could speak of our spiritual lives as equals and with total acceptance. So much so that, while he was with me, I would have a regular sweat lodge on my property, and afterwards he would come join all the participants as we crammed into my kitchen for a meal together. He was loved by all.
Despite all of that, when he was in the hospital for his last illness, he had only one lucid day before slipping into the process you so eloquently described. On that day, he told his doctor that he was ready to go, and asked him to discontinue any but palliative therapy. I came in to visit that day, as I did every day, and he informed me of his decision. He had never told any of us what he wanted done with his remains, other than opting to be cremated. As we sat there together, the inspiration came to me that I take him back to St. John and bury him in the family plot, near his mother who had died when he was only eight years old. He said, "You know, I think I'd like that."
On his final day, I was there with him, and he was experiencing that "terminal Agitation" that you mentioned, pulling at his clothes, opening his eyes momentarily and looking frantically around, and then grabbing for things in the air that I couldn't see. This was during Covid, and I had to be very assertive to be able to be there with him. I was begging the nurses to give him his morphine so he could relax. I was hoping they might give him enough to ease him on through his transition, but of course, they weren't hospice nurses and were rigid about his schedule.
That evening they were going to move him to the hospice floor. Once I'd seen him receive his meds and relax a bit, I left with the intent of returning in the morning. I got a call that night at 10 PM that he had been moved, and had died about 10 minutes later. I had not expected him to die that night or I'd have stayed. Worse, I realized there was so much I should have been saying to him in those final hours to comfort him and give him assurance that he was reaching the end of the earthly road, but that he had lived a good and honorable life, and most importantly, how grateful I was for his being my father, for all he had done for me to make me the man I am.
It has been eating at me ever since, for the past 5 years. I had the feeling that I had failed him at the most critical moment of our shared time on the planet. I did keep my last promise to him, and in 2022 I carried his ashes back to the final reunion of the Gates family in St. John, having made arrangements with the cemetery to bury him there and having arranged a stone to mark his resting place. His family members who had gathered for that final reunion, the first since Covid, came to send him off. In the ensuing year, most of the people that organized and kept the reunion going passed away, so dad went back home for the final time, and that chapter, that generation, closed with him.
Today your post has relieved me of that remaining guilt over my poor performance at his final passing. I feel the love we shared far outweighs any failures I had in that moment. But what helped me most in your article was seeing how you, whose spirituality and devotion to truth and the highest values I hold in great admiration and esteem, was also at a loss at that most important moment. Ram Das said that when he had his stroke and was being wheeled into the emergency room, all of his spiritual practices and wisdom left him, and he was naked before eternity. I'm paraphrasing that from memory from the film "Fierce Grace." We are frail and small before the Divine, and all we can do is fall into it.
I agree that the advent of the "Death Doula" is one of the most important developments in our society that so fears death and spends billions of dollars trying to escape from it. Please understand the depth of my gratitude for this beautiful offering. It has eased my heart beyond words to express.
Mr. Hartmann. Dying is something we all must do. No one escapes. It is inevitable. Yet we are surprisingly unprepared for it in our society. You are correct in pointing out the unfortunate fact that something important, which in the past we did in the presence of our loved ones, in our homes, is now done in an impersonal setting, in the presence of strangers, usually medically trained people whose expertise is in prolongation of life, not the ending of it. This is a painful, frightening paradox.
Like many others I read Elizabeth Kubler Ross's ground breaking book. But I came away from it unsatisfied. She did not actually address the experience of dying in any satisfying way. I do not intend to criticize her work. She is a pioneer and I am far too uninformed to engage in any worthwhile critique. I did however run into Herbert Fingarette's book on dying which he wrote at an advanced age, in his 90s. This brought home more substantial things, at least for me. The three part autobiography of Bertrand Russell is pretty good also in this regard. Both of these men are serious thinkers with broad experience and learning behind them.
Many of us have no experience with death up close until it is our own time to die. This undoubtedly makes our own time much more frightening than it should be. Unfortunately the only exposure many of us have to death is the unrealistic, short shrift it is given in the popular entertainment of Hollywood films and mystery or police novels. On the other hand there are many Americans, especially men, who are exposed to death in horrific ways through the many bloody wars the American Empire has forced upon our young citizens often in their teen years. The effect is all too often PTSD and broken lives for the survivors of combat. My own favorite uncle was one of those broken men who survived the fighting in the Pacific campaign of WWll.
Thank you from my heart for this, Thom,
My dad passed in February of 2021 at almost 97 tears of age. He was, by the grace of God, pretty healthy and clear-headed up until a fall left him with a broken hip, which laid him up for months and eventually ended in pneumonia. He transitioned a week later.
My dad always had my back throughout my life, even at times I wished he'd leave me the f*** alone. From my childhood, I committed to taking care of him in his old age, no matter what might happen. He lived between my sister's place and mine for a few years after my mom died, and then when my sister moved to Arizona, he came to my place permanently. We had a good life together, going back to Kansas each Memorial Day for a reunion of his mother's side of the family in Saint John. Sometimes we flew, more often we'd make it a road trip from north of Seattle. We took side trips to Yellowstone, Arches and other places as well. We took weekly drives, ate out often (unfortunately for him, I'm not the greatest cook, but he loved eating out anyway) and we had long conversations about life; especially his, but it was fairly balanced, I'd say.
My dad was a man of faith, a devout Methodist and 65-year member of Rose City Park United Methodist Church in Portland, Oregon. He only discontinued attendance when he moved up to live with me. My spiritual path was much more eclectic and convoluted, from Pentecostal Christianity to the Unification Church, to Islam, to Vedanta, to energy healing work, to the Red Road and plant medicines. Through every turn, despite his solid and unwavering Christian faith, my dad always accepted my path, and we could speak of our spiritual lives as equals and with total acceptance. So much so that, while he was with me, I would have a regular sweat lodge on my property, and afterwards he would come join all the participants as we crammed into my kitchen for a meal together. He was loved by all.
Despite all of that, when he was in the hospital for his last illness, he had only one lucid day before slipping into the process you so eloquently described. On that day, he told his doctor that he was ready to go, and asked him to discontinue any but palliative therapy. I came in to visit that day, as I did every day, and he informed me of his decision. He had never told any of us what he wanted done with his remains, other than opting to be cremated. As we sat there together, the inspiration came to me that I take him back to St. John and bury him in the family plot, near his mother who had died when he was only eight years old. He said, "You know, I think I'd like that."
On his final day, I was there with him, and he was experiencing that "terminal Agitation" that you mentioned, pulling at his clothes, opening his eyes momentarily and looking frantically around, and then grabbing for things in the air that I couldn't see. This was during Covid, and I had to be very assertive to be able to be there with him. I was begging the nurses to give him his morphine so he could relax. I was hoping they might give him enough to ease him on through his transition, but of course, they weren't hospice nurses and were rigid about his schedule.
That evening they were going to move him to the hospice floor. Once I'd seen him receive his meds and relax a bit, I left with the intent of returning in the morning. I got a call that night at 10 PM that he had been moved, and had died about 10 minutes later. I had not expected him to die that night or I'd have stayed. Worse, I realized there was so much I should have been saying to him in those final hours to comfort him and give him assurance that he was reaching the end of the earthly road, but that he had lived a good and honorable life, and most importantly, how grateful I was for his being my father, for all he had done for me to make me the man I am.
It has been eating at me ever since, for the past 5 years. I had the feeling that I had failed him at the most critical moment of our shared time on the planet. I did keep my last promise to him, and in 2022 I carried his ashes back to the final reunion of the Gates family in St. John, having made arrangements with the cemetery to bury him there and having arranged a stone to mark his resting place. His family members who had gathered for that final reunion, the first since Covid, came to send him off. In the ensuing year, most of the people that organized and kept the reunion going passed away, so dad went back home for the final time, and that chapter, that generation, closed with him.
Today your post has relieved me of that remaining guilt over my poor performance at his final passing. I feel the love we shared far outweighs any failures I had in that moment. But what helped me most in your article was seeing how you, whose spirituality and devotion to truth and the highest values I hold in great admiration and esteem, was also at a loss at that most important moment. Ram Das said that when he had his stroke and was being wheeled into the emergency room, all of his spiritual practices and wisdom left him, and he was naked before eternity. I'm paraphrasing that from memory from the film "Fierce Grace." We are frail and small before the Divine, and all we can do is fall into it.
I agree that the advent of the "Death Doula" is one of the most important developments in our society that so fears death and spends billions of dollars trying to escape from it. Please understand the depth of my gratitude for this beautiful offering. It has eased my heart beyond words to express.
This video has numerous descriptions of people dying ☠️.
They come back with insights that are similar. None of them are concerned with how much money 💰 they made. Love 💕 is the key event.
https://youtu.be/UYBGm_rDvso?si=uLtIWE9xItGFY0-O
Mr. Hartmann. Dying is something we all must do. No one escapes. It is inevitable. Yet we are surprisingly unprepared for it in our society. You are correct in pointing out the unfortunate fact that something important, which in the past we did in the presence of our loved ones, in our homes, is now done in an impersonal setting, in the presence of strangers, usually medically trained people whose expertise is in prolongation of life, not the ending of it. This is a painful, frightening paradox.
Like many others I read Elizabeth Kubler Ross's ground breaking book. But I came away from it unsatisfied. She did not actually address the experience of dying in any satisfying way. I do not intend to criticize her work. She is a pioneer and I am far too uninformed to engage in any worthwhile critique. I did however run into Herbert Fingarette's book on dying which he wrote at an advanced age, in his 90s. This brought home more substantial things, at least for me. The three part autobiography of Bertrand Russell is pretty good also in this regard. Both of these men are serious thinkers with broad experience and learning behind them.
Many of us have no experience with death up close until it is our own time to die. This undoubtedly makes our own time much more frightening than it should be. Unfortunately the only exposure many of us have to death is the unrealistic, short shrift it is given in the popular entertainment of Hollywood films and mystery or police novels. On the other hand there are many Americans, especially men, who are exposed to death in horrific ways through the many bloody wars the American Empire has forced upon our young citizens often in their teen years. The effect is all too often PTSD and broken lives for the survivors of combat. My own favorite uncle was one of those broken men who survived the fighting in the Pacific campaign of WWll.