Stay here a while
My father, Gabriel, died twice the day before we were supposed to close on a new house. He, my mom and sister were going to move in four blocks away from where I live with my husband and sons. We were going to share in his caregiving. I was ready to see him every morning. Drink coffee together. Play tric trac. Make him deserts he could enjoy without spiking his glucose. I was going to show him my deep love and admiration every single day, but then, he died just before we started that new and final chapter.
His heart seized and then stopped twice before being revived. We lived in the ICU for four days— a ventilator to bring oxygen back into his blood, medicines to help his heart pump and his blood flow through his small veins. “His heart is drowning” the cardiologist said, and I almost dropped to my knees.
But, the truth is, he died once before. Fifteen years ago when his brain gave way to dementia and we’ve been grappling with that ambiguous loss ever since. So, now we are entering the realm of compounded loss.
***
When they let us into the ICU after he had had a heart attack in the cath lab as they were trying to put in a stent to open the blockage, we entered the twilight zone. A crowd of scrubs all around him, machines blaring, his gown stripped open, his chest with his 25-year-old-triple-bypass surgery scar exposed, his skin yellow, almost green, what seemed like truck headlights blaring down on him.
Hearing is the last thing that goes. I need to get through. I need him to hear us. Grab him back from where he was going, walking across the valley of the shadow of death. I did not want him to walk alone. He cannot walk alone.
“Let us through” I cried out to the ICU doctor. “Please he needs to hear us!”
“Ok, let them through let them through.”
A moment of grace in the midst of hell.
“We’re here Poppy!!” I screamed from the doorway. “Don’t go! Stay with us! You’re gonna get better. Stay with us!!! We love you! Thank you for being our teacher. We love you… we love you…. We love you… don’t go… don’t leave us.. we are with you… we are with you… we…are…with you…”
He stabilized. He came back. A miracle, they said.
***
Hope is an action. I found myself searching for every possible glimmer and when I lost one, I looked for another. His oxygen is at 98. His blood pressure is going up in a good way. The numbers are steady. His ventilator is helping. He can wiggle his toes. I think I saw him smile. I pumped that muscle, that hope, like I was running a marathon. Hope would get us through this, I thought. But, it’s not hope that did, it’s love.
“Al hamdulilah, ya Poppy, you’re improving.” He would nod and smile through the ventilator and the pain meds. “Al hamdulilah!” His lips said.
I fixated on the word patient. The noun as the adjective, the adjective as the noun. He embodied it on his death bed, just as he did throughout his life— when his father was kidnapped and killed as a casualty of the Lebanese civil war, when he witnessed the atrocities of the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, when bombs fell and we were on the other side of the city from him, when he worked tirelessly to rescue the needy, repair the divisions, advocate for love in the face of destruction, when we emigrated to the US and he lost his purpose, language and community, when dementia started turning off parts of his sharp brain. He always emanated patience and I think that patience is a form of hope. I think I see that now.
***
When the medicines that pumped his heart stopped working, and his blood stopped flowing through his veins, carrying oxygen to his organs, the only choice we had left was to turn off the medical and mechanical interventions. The morphine shrouded the pain and the belabored breathing and with an icon on his chest, our hands wrapped around his, and the Deacon reading the Psalms and anointing him with water and oil, we walked him home. We came to the end of the valley of the shadow of death, reciting through the tears and the agony, “al hamdulilah ya Poppy” for a rich life, a life of purpose, a life of love, a life of sacrifice, for the end of suffering, for the reunion with our ancestors, for having had the chance to love him deeply one last time on this earth, in this time-space continuum. Al hamdulilah.
Now, the world mourns with us. Messages from around the globe tell us the good shepherd is gone, an ecumenical giant has fallen, a new Saint has entered heaven, the Angel Gabriel is going back as our intercessor. For me, for us, our father and husband is gone. The gentle spirit. The humble man. The performer. The clown. The childlike elder. The force of equanimity—holding, embodying, modeling the duality of the human experience, of sorrow and joy co-existing in every moment, every breath, every choice, and every season.
***
I try not to see the images of him reaching for something on the hospital bed, his extremely dry mouth, the bruises all over his body from the IV and lines going through his arms, his neck, his groin. I try not to let the memory of his trying to tell us something through the ventilator haunt me. I try not to relive how they turned him over on his side, his face in agony, red and screaming through the breathing tube for mom and me standing there where he could see us… I am trying to remind myself that that’s over. That that was then and this is now. That that was part of the journey home. Everyone has their own journey home—it’s rarely easy, often a compressed, microcosmic version of our life’s trajectory, of the intermingling of suffering and release that is part of this whole human experience.. We must respect each person’s journey, however grueling, however ugly, however simple, however beautiful. It is our fate, our story, part of what we are here to learn and to teach.
***
Maria noticed that he did the big brother thing and went first, before any of his living siblings, even those that are older and sicker. Again, he led the way for them, for us. For me, Maria and mom, witnessing his death taught us what courage looks like, that faith in an everlasting life brings about the courage to take that walk through the darkness and the misery, through the fear and the anguish. Indeed, he was the good shepherd, leading the way to peace in both his life and his death. It takes a certain type of spirit to bear the suffering of your lived experience without resisting it and then to accept the suffering as part of your final walk, to know when to let go of the body and of worldly attachments and to trust in renewal through death.
I am trying to trust in that renewal. The leaves do grow back on the bare trees after all. The plant sprouts even when there appears to be nothing there but dirt. Our cells regenerate through sleep. There is resonance and meaning behind silence, not just emptiness. Memory is eternal. The person is both absent and present. I am trying to trust in the mystery of absent-presence because I think that helps to unlock the mystery of renewal through death.
At times, it’s not difficult at all, like when out of nowhere, the day after he died, Maria, mom and I all caught the scent of our very distinct Orthodox church incense as we sat on the balcony for breakfast. It lasted 20 seconds and then just disappeared. The same scent visited my husband on his commute into work after taking two weeks off to be at the hospital with us and help plan the funeral. It lasted twenty seconds, then disappeared. And, again, Frankincense and Myrrh visited my mom as she lay in bed this morning. I know he’s reaching for us and we are reaching for him.
***
Most of the time, I feel like I’m standing in a huge canyon with no map, nothing recognizable around me, just staring into the abyss, feeling completely lost and frozen and at the same time awestruck by the majesty and beauty of this new place. You can hear your family, your friends, your community calling for you, echoing through the vastness, but you can’t quite identify the origin of their voices and you don’t really want to. Standing here, stunned, is strangely comforting because it’s the only place that makes sense. It’s like a magnet is pulling you to this place. Something inside your own heart and beyond yourself tells you to stand here in this grandeur, this stillness and silence. Here, you’ll find an ineffable tranquility. Stay a while. Somehow the vastness is cocooning.
“The only cure for grief is grief,” the poet David Whyte taught me once and I wrote it down in a note on my phone that I titled, When grief hits, try to remember… I understood when I heard those words several months ago that they wouldn’t make sense until I was standing inside the grief. And, here I am inside it and I get it now-- the grief is guiding me. There is an intelligence here. It isn’t just a state or a process. It’s a universe with its own logic, patterns, and language. I see that you have to live inside it for a while and that you’ll intuit when you’re ready to start following the voices back to your active life. But now that you’ve touched this land, this new territory, this canyon, this universe, you cannot unsee it. You will always be standing in it even as you go through the motions of your life. But, I think I see what people mean when they say that one way to try to recover from grief is to do something active to honor the person you lost. When you commit part of your daily round to honoring that person, you begin integrating the you that is standing there in the canyon with the you that exists beyond the canyon, back in the world with your job, your family, your bills, your friends.
***
As we were leaving the monastery where we buried my father in a meadow, the nuns told us to try to remember that the grace you experience after death contains the same quality of grace you experience after birth. This grace is a gift that opens up a new relationship with the departed, one that is purely spiritual, no longer bogged down by worldly baggage. “Notice how your relationship with your father will deepen and grow through his death. You will meet him in a new way and it will be beautiful.”
I trust that. Through this chest pain and these heart palpitations, these tears, this frozenness, this hip and joint pain, these chills in my bones, this overwhelming exhaustion, I trust that my relationship will only grow as it enters the realm of memory and absent-presence. “Your brain and heart are adjusting to the cosmic shift,” one of my closest friends tells me. I feel that shift in my body but I know that I am not breaking. I’m transforming, growing my capacity to hold pain, to come a little bit closer to understanding the mystery of it all. Is this part of the renewal?
Witnessing death brings you closer to it and death is the big revelation. Maybe there’s nothing on the other side. But even nothing is something, isn’t it? At least we know it’s an end to suffering. Everyone says, “at least he’s not suffering anymore.” And, that’s true. Even if you can’t access the spiritual realm or don’t buy it, at least we can say that death reveals absolute peace. And, that is something.
It must be a something to behold. Maybe something akin to--but much more profound than-- this grief I am standing in, this majestic canyon where stillness and quiet and awe prevail.
***
My father is dead. I had to write those words so I could see them so I could feel them so I could process them. But in his death, I’m already learning so much about the human being he was from the tributes and homages flooding our inboxes. My father touched countless lives and I know that that means his spirit isn’t dead. His body has ceased, yes. But, when you witness death and then that person's rebirth through memory and stories and people they knew, you begin to understand that death destroys death somehow. A koan of sorts. Just like grief is the only cure for grief.
So, even though we lost you, we didn’t lose you and you’re not lost. I can feel you there in the good version of the “upside down,” or what my son brilliantly called “the downside up.” I feel your presence in me, in Maria and mom, in the man in the moon-- ya amar inta-- in the scent of Byzantine incense that enters a space without any clear source, in the love our friends are wrapping around us, in language and in the absence of language.
After I stay here a while, sheltered in this vast unfamiliar land, I will find a way to continue your mission. In your death, we will renew your life’s work. For now, thank you for coming back to us that night so we could walk you home. Thank you for giving us the gift of witnessing death. I think you did that on purpose because you knew there was a wisdom that only death and grief can give us access to. It all still feels vague and ambiguous and deeply mysterious but I feel you guiding me, teaching me something profound, something that feels so far away yet so very, very near. Rilke instructs us to “love the questions as they are and someday we will live our way into the answers,” so I will stand here and ask the big questions and trust that somewhere in another spatial-temporal plane or another consciousness, you will guide us, just as you always have, a little bit closer to the answers.
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