Life

O.K., I promise this doesn't herald a trend of down and depressing blog entries, but I had been thinking about posting something about my grandfather's recent death anyway, and B's comment about how we let go of those we love on my recent entry got me thinking about this past Christmas Eve. I wanted to post something about Grandad's last night because it was the first death I've experienced that I honestly thought of as beautiful in its way. I think we've all read scenes in books or seen movies about the touching and beautiful farewell, but I honestly thought those must have been invented from wishful thinking, since my own experiences of death or near death had been either violent, premature, or excruciatingly prolonged and painful. It's not that I hadn't come to some sort of philosophical peace with the idea of death itself, it's that the process and the actual moment of parting seem generally harsh and painful. Though there were sad and difficult months leading up to the end, my Grandad's actual last days were different and more peaceful than what I had witnessed before. I'd like to share a little excerpt of what I wrote in my diary very shortly afterward. I share it, not because I think it is at all sad, but that it was a moment of completely unexpected beauty:

He told me that he had decided he was god damn going to make it to see everyone at Christmas Eve, and he did. We were all there around his bedside with the little tree Mum brought to the convalescent room by his table, and Auntie tucking his new blanket up around him to keep away the drafts. I sat closest beside the bed and talked to him about my program, answering his occasional quizzing question on a theological point from Aquinas or some such thing (ever the intellectual inquisitor right to the end). I gave him periodic sips of his Christmas beer--ice cold as requested--and helped him wipe his mouth. The once round and jovial face had become a death's head. The skin clung tightly to the scull, revealing every detail of the bone beneath, and he held his head strangely high, I think because it made breathing more possible. His deep brown eyes, always strikingly large and deep set, now seemed like more than half his face, and looking at them, one was painfully reminded of the sockets of a scull. At first I was repulsed and alienated from this strangely shrunken man, but there is no sense in turning from what is, so instead I sat close and watched him carefully until I became accustomed to seeing something of my Grandad in the person in front of me.

Dad had turned Handel's Messiah on the C.D. player and the others were talking a little amongest themselves while I sat listening beside Grandad. I thought that he was sleeping and had allowed myself to become immersed in the unbelievable beauty of the music--"He shall feed his flock"--until he suddenly gave a strange groaning sound. Thinking that he was in pain, I asked him if he was alright and he just said "shh..music...music." It was then that I realized that his eyes were closed in concentration rather than sleep, that the corners of his mouth were slightly turned up in a smile rather than a grimace, and that the taught skin across the forehead was furrowed up, not from the pain of dying but from that exquisite sense of simultaneous longing and fulfillment that truly great music can bring. In short, I was so expecting there to be an expression of suffering on that altered face, that I nearly missed the fact that his expression perfectly mirrored my own and the fact that we both were possessed in the same way by the emotion in that music. We sat listening for some time. I let the tears run down my face unchecked and unnoticed while Grandad from time to time dabbed at his eyes with the blanket. They were in no way tears of sadness for either of us. They were tears of being. The wonder of it was that I knew with absolute certainty that we were both experiencing the exact same wordless emotion through that music. There was no longer that sense that I was unable to empathize because of our deep separation of age and circumstance. There was no question that, for at least a few moments, that 88 year old man in his death bed and the young woman sitting beside him were experiencing the exact same thing. It was some mixture of joy, longing, release, grief...perhaps every possible emotion mixed into one...that profound sense of simultaneously connecting to everything in this world and coming tantalizingly close to something in the next world that comes at the height of music as it comes from almost no other experience. After a time the music shifted and others in the family came over to talk with him...

...After Mum finished, she passed the book over to me and I read to him a little. The last thing I read to him was Milton's "Lycidas." He kept repeating to me his favorite line from the poem: "Look homeward Angel." The final words I said to him before I left were the concluding lines of that poem:

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay.
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

He closed his eyes in sleep as we all left. The next morning, Christmas morning, I awoke first to the call telling us that he hadn't woken up from his sleep. Before the morning had passed he had moved on to pastures new. He went gently and calmly, without even a death rattle, just a peaceful exhalation of the last breath. At first it wasn't even clear that he had passed, so still and calm had he become as he drifted outward toward a further shore. It was a natural passing, a true release after a warm farewell surrounded by those he loved. I can imagine no more beautiful way of dying.