Poems intrude: Thoughts on the Death of My father

Poems intrude. The first begins:

“Say this when you mourn for me:
There was a man—and look, he is no more.
He died before his time.
The music of his life suddenly stopped.
A pity! There was another song in him.
Now it is lost forever:”

The second urges:

“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Out of the canon of Scripture we read:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens; a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

In August my father, still strong, still vibrant, still a lover of life suffered a series of strokes. He was left physically debilitated but his mind remained as sharp as ever. I don’t know if the medical teams saved his life or prolonged his death. I know that as a result of their efforts my father suffered, too weak to live, too strong to die. Until he died.

His sons and others who loved him mirrored his physical pain with our own emotional anguish. Seeing him unable to speak, I knew that thoughts were cascading around his brain and that he in frustration could only try and fail to express them. There was so much more to say; I was his son; I am his son; I have learned so much from him about being a man—but there is so much more to learn and suddenly I am fatherless, left to cope with the world as though I knew its answers, as though I even knew what questions to ask of it. I know there was at least one more piece of instruction in my father but he could not move it even the brief distance from his brain to his mouth to my waiting ear. And I know what words I could not speak. I could not say, “Father, you are dieing” because I could not move the words even the brief distance from my brain to my mouth to his ears. He had given me so much; could I deprive him of hope? But because I kept his hope alive (because I kept my own hope alive?) I denied him the dignity of facing up to his own death; I denied myself the last words of truth I could give him.

He did not want to die, though in the last days he accepted death’s inevitability. I think he was afraid to die, afraid to give up the pleasures of life which consisted mostly of kvelling over his grandchildren, walking the golf course, attending schul, schmoozing with friends, breathing air, tasting water. He did not want to die, of that I am certain. He did not want go gently into that good night; he would not even have acknowledged that the eternal night he was entering was good. He wanted to live, but he could not. I wanted him to live, but knew he couldn’t. I did not want his death prolonged, but it was, and selfishly I was happy to have him just a few more days, though it broke my heart to hear him gasping for air. I could have let the mucus in his lungs overwhelm him, but each time I rang for the nurse, “Hurry, hurry, he’s choking,” and each time they did deep suction and each time he suffered the pain and each time I wept.

Once he was young, but now he isn’t and it was his time. By most measures 95 years is a good long life. But he had another song; he struggled to breath. The Stoicism of the poem is a front-porch kind of philosophy, easy and obvious, but he had another song to sing. People whose parents died before they were 95 might resent my feelings. And it’s true, as far as it goes; I was lucky to have him so long. But it wasn’t long enough. There is a time to be born and a time to die—and I have wept on both occasions—for as my first child was born I held him and thought, “What have I done? Selfishly, satisfying my physical and emotional needs I’ve brought this innocent person into the world and he who was not is now destined to die. And then I wept again as my father lay dieing, his teachings incomplete with at least one more lesson he could not get out as he lost his fight against the eternal night.

As I shoveled dirt onto my father’s coffin I thought, “He had been a man, a good man, an accomplished man, an intelligent, loving, kind and wise man. And now I, his weeping son, am covering him with earth. He had covered me as a baby, protecting me from the cold night as I slumbered innocently in my crib. Now I was covering him, and the all the poetry, all the philosophy, all the stories of heaven and resurrection were powerless to bring him back or to comfort me. There lay a man. My father, who was dead.