He was 84 years old. A fall in April broke his hip and elbow and started a downward spiral. My brother and sister and I (all being teachers) had the opportunity to spend many weeks this summer with him and our mother. It’s been an intimate time, a blessed time, and a mysterious time. I would like to share some of my experiences because our culture does not share much about dying and I now believe it should. Our society tends to regard death as a medical failure rather than the natural, inevitable end of life within this body. I tended to think in terms of “death”, a state. But dying is a process. Violence can make the transition instantaneous but dying can also stretch for many months as it did for Dad. Dying is a sacramental, primal time. I’ve spent many hours simply holding his hand and that was richly sufficient. Several spiritual teachers talk about consulting our death to help us stay aware of what we should be doing with our lives. Being in the presence of someone else’s dying has a similar effect. Holding hands, saying “I love you” and “Thank you”, what’s more important than that? For both of us. I learned to be comfortable with silence, not try forcing conversation. If Dad said something, I would respond to it. But often he would take a minute before he would reply. Conversations were slower but balanced, allowing them to move below the surface.
Dad’s fall really accelerated a progressive dementia. The light of his mind started to sputter like a dying candle. This created some embarrassing situations but it also led to some very tender, open moments. It also led to a much deeper appreciation of my father because, as the dementia takes away the details, the core of his personality stands out more clearly. Maybe it’s like a tree where all through the prime of life you see mostly green leaves but with the late autumn, you see clearly the central trunk. For example, one of Dad’s wonderful traits was his voice. He gave all his children a love of language, alliteration, and rhyme. But I had never realized how dramatically he had used his voice (he was a salesman) until this year when I, paying more heed to the words coming more slowly, felt the roller coaster of his voice rising and falling, pausing, crescendoing, twisting with each new word’s meaning.
Another core trait is his taking command activeness. With him almost bedridden, this core trait caused all of us the most frustration but it is also very noble. I didn’t realize how much it was a part of him until, like Boromir fighting to the very end, I watch my Dad’s drive continuing, even when his body is no longer able to follow. One of the ways this driving activity expressed itself all through his life was with his logic. As the creator and operator of a one-man business, Dad had to make thousands of decisions and take hundreds of risks; his success depended on him being right most of the time. He was almost reflexively able to spot problems, assumptions, fallacies. “That’s stinkin’ thinkin’” was one of his expressions. It has been very tender watching that great mind working even when the dementia had taken many of the pieces away.
There is a final story I want to tell having to do with massage. Occasionally in Cairns I refer to massage. Let me give you the full background first so you understand my preoccupation with massage. Twenty-five years ago, my soul hit a wall and found itself in a tiny, inescapable room of logic within which it was doomed to spend the rest of its life. All perception and logic confirmed the inevitability of this existential trapped-ness. This dark depression dragged on for several months. On the outside, I made an effort to carry on as normal but on the inside was blackness and I was always aware of the gap, always aware of myself projecting to others an image that was false.
I happened to participate in a dance workshop and in an 18-hour period, I suddenly found my spirit outside the confining room. Once outside, all the perception and logic that had seemed so overwhelmingly inviolable became instantly obviously false, dependent upon the limited point of view within the “room”. Suddenly my spirit was alive again within a vast universe that, as I looked around in this disorienting profound shift in consciousness, felt very mysterious. More assumptions than just the ones I linked to the depression lay open to question. One of the things that changed during the following weeks was I could feel “energy fields” around my hand which, from several inches away, could often feel knots of “energy” within some people’s bodies. This came as a weird shock because I’m a rational, scientific person who tended to hold New Age aura-type stuff at a distance. I sure hadn’t been seeking such stuff; I still have little idea of what it is about. But I found that, without necessarily touching the person, the energy within my hands could dance with their energy knots and release them in a way that the other person experienced as relaxing/healing/awakening. This ability started going to my head and I started flirting with the idea of myself being someone special with miraculous powers. My relationship with the universe started growing unbalanced until, without any specific memories of it, I fell … back closer to my normal relationship with the world and that strange period of my life was past. Life proceeded though with a larger space for spirit. Every now and then the energy in my hands would rise into consciousness. For example, four years later, energy massages opened up Alysia’s heart to me (and I to her) and she became my wife.
Anyway, in May, on my first visit with Dad after his fall, I felt him in a place of fear and pain, marked by a contraction/rigidity of the muscles and spirit. I could see and feel an intense knot of suffering in the area between his eyebrows that cried out in anguish. I gave Dad regular neck and shoulder massages. This was not easy for me because Dad has never been a touchy type of person. But, though he said nothing, he relaxed into the massages and I could feel some of the tension dissolving. But the knot of pain between the eyes remained and I felt called to somehow do a massage of that energy. Now we come to the heart of why I am telling this story. Doing such an energy massage was outside my comfort zone because (1) I wasn’t sure if the energy in my hands would be there and (2) if it was there, I was uncertain how to maintain the proper relationship with the universe while massaging partly because (3) as I shared in an earlier Cairns, I find during such massages that the dance of energy almost always makes me aware of something I need to “move” within me if the massage is to progress and what might that be when dealing with one’s dying father? and (4) this was far outside the accepted bounds of the lifetime of experiences my father and I had shared and finally (5) I wasn’t sure if the goal of the massage was to help Dad recover his life force or to help him release into dying. But that knot of pain, so visible, called to me to help release it and a part of me knew I could do it. I couldn’t turn away. So I prayed. I prayed for the proper balance while I massaged. I relinquished any control over the outcome, praying simply for our dance of energies to nourish upward spirals of energy that would bring us both into greater resonance with the divinity of the universe. During the massage, I could feel the knot of pain moving, then easing. (In my experience, the knots of energy first move before they dissolve.) And to everybody’s assessment, Dad became a more relaxed and spiritually open man thereafter. It was very special being in his presence. My brother and I, talking about this whole special time for the family, agreed that it called for us to step outside our comfort zone but when we did, blessings occurred greater than we could have anticipated.
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