Dad, Are You Dying?

A Son’s Journey of Grief

Fred A. Hartley III

There are only a few moments in life that are truly important and this was one of them. You see, my dad had just died. This was the man who cheered the loudest when the doctor announced, “It’s a boy!” He was the one who taught me how to swim and ride a bike. He was seated on the top row of the bleachers when I hit a home run in the Little League All-Star game. He was both my friend and my hero. And in addition to all that, he was a strong enough role model to give me all the reason I needed to call God, “Father.”

As I stood next to my father’s lifeless body with one arm around my mother and the other around my sister with our shoulders heaving under the load of grief, a couple of thoughts darted across my brain.

• Thank God for the resurrection of Jesus! I have been a firm believer in the resurrection for the past thirty-five years but it had never been as relevant to me as it was at that moment.
• Death stinks! (Actually I used a different “s” word that pastors are not supposed to say.) I was angry and I knew what I was looking at was not right. A month earlier my dad underwent open-heart surgery and five bypasses. Now he was dead.

Waves of Sorrow

Waves of grief and sorrow come over me when I least expect it. I will be talking with my kids and all of a sudden I am slugged in the stomach with the realization he is dead. I can’t predict what will trigger the grief — a picture, a memento, a story, a smell, a similarity, a voice. Last night I dreamt my dad called my name. His voice was as clear as the ring of the phone. As I awoke, it took me several moments before I was able to convince myself that it was only a dream. Rats!

Somewhat ironically, the happiest memories of my father trigger the deepest sorrow. His jokes, birthdays, vacations. The thought of eating at his favorite restaurant makes me lose my appetite; it would seem like betrayal.

The day after Dad died, I watched my mother hold our only grandson in her arms for the first time. The baby was named Allan after my dad. Bitter tears cut across my cheeks like a jigsaw and set my jaw on edge as I thought, “Why could he not hold the baby? Just once.” It hurt to think that he will never look into those big blue eyes.

When my friend, Paul Bubna, lost his wife, he wrote extensively on grief. He said, “I have chosen to welcome grief not as an intruder but as a friend. Feelings of grief and sorrow are the closest I will ever get to my life partner again.”

C.S. Lewis said, “Grief is like fear; it is not fear but it feels like it.” The dry mouth, the lump in the throat, the nauseousness in the pit of the stomach. The energy drain. The incapacitation. The preoccupation. At times grief comes so suddenly, like some thug sneaking up and socking me in the mid-section. Hearing my mom say, “She’s a widow, too” and then watching her break down sobbing as she realizes she has placed herself for the first time in the category of widow. Last evening she was writing an anniversary card to my sister and husband. As she signed the card she wept out loud. “What’s the matter, Mom?” She explained that for the first time in 61 years she signed it, “Love, Mom” (leaving off “and dad”). As a pastor I have wept with many others as they walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I now experience it for myself, but the valley is deeper and the shadow is darker. It is brutally painful.

Regrets

For some reason I really wanted to spend one more week with my dad outside of ICU. I wanted to interact with him on issues important to both of us. I wanted to talk with him about heaven, and values, and husbanding and the lessons he’d learned in life. I wanted to express to him the love and admiration I have for him and I wanted to just listen to him talk about anything. It wouldn’t have mattered. Anything. Just to listen to his voice for a few more hours was all I wanted. It’s not that we have never had such conversations. We’ve had dozens of them. But I wanted just one more so I could savor it, knowing it was my last. Watching that door close gradually for three weeks in ICU and then hearing it slam shut was grievous.

There are moments when I wish my dad could just see me one more time. Just to see his eyes light up as I walk into the room. But he can’t.

I would love to call him on the phone just one more time to hear the tempo of his voice rise quickly when he learned it was me. But I will never hear that again. Not this side of eternity.

I would love to sit with him in his living room one more time. When Sherry and I came to see him, he would drop everything. When we were with him, his world was as big as the space we occupied. But it won’t happen. That opportunity is gone.

The day my dad died I suffered an emotional heart attack. A big piece of me died with him. And it still aches. I think it always will.

Disappointments

I chose to spend the night with my father when he got out of ICU. It had been forty-eight hours since his open heart surgery. He was looking strong. His sense of humor was as robust as ever. When he did his breathing exercise to raise the ping pong ball in the plastic apparatus, he jokingly put his hand above it so that the ball would not go flying out the top. Even the nurse chuckled. When asked about the surgery he commented, “Piece of cake!” He told us he was in no pain. I stood at his side as he took his first post-op steps. He was wheeled out of ICU in a chair and ate a healthy chicken dinner. Everything seemed strong, stable, positive, healthy, moving in the right direction. My flight was scheduled to fly back to Atlanta that evening, but when the ICU nurse told us that it would be best for a family member to spend the night in the hospital, I gladly volunteered and changed my flight. I couldn’t envision my mother staying up all night after the emotional strain she had been through.

Everything seemed so positive that night. I even ordered myself an anchovy pizza delivered to my dad’s hospital room. We were happy, hopeful and greatly relieved. I was ready to coach him through his first night out of surgery, get him ice chips, serve him Jell-O, reconfigure his oxygen mask. Once my sister and mother drove home, my dad began doing less than fully rational things. He kept removing his oxygen. That night I got up to help him reposition the mask at least one hundred times. He seemed to like it less but need it more. He grew restless. The nurse tried to help sedate him with medication. Then his heart rate increased and actually went into fibrillation, pounding 140 times per minute. The oxygen level in his blood dropped to an insufficient 80%. With each breath a loud rattle could be heard in his lungs. He seemed unable to help himself and at one point apologized, “I’m sorry to make you get up so often.” Little did I know at the time that a serious door was closing. By 4:00 AM he was back into ICU, the respirator tube was reinserted down his throat, his heart rate was still elevated and his blood pressure had dropped drastically to 60/30. Little did we know that this would be a first of a long line of disappointments. What appeared at first to be a successful open-heart surgery was soon full of complications.

At least a dozen times we heard doctors say, “We still believe he will pull through.” A nurse even said, “We have never lost anyone in his condition.” Promises, promises. The medical community kept making promises.

All we saw were complications and disappointments. His temperature spiked to 104 and for six days never got beneath 101 . His breathing was shallow. They inserted a drainage tube in his chest and removed several units of blood. He required transfusion after transfusion. He received one medication to cause him to relax, another to bring down his heart rate and another to raise his blood pressure. His liver was affected. His kidneys were not functioning properly and the creatine count rose dangerously high. Bronchoscopy after bronchoscopy. We, as his family, experienced the reality of “hope deferred makes the heart sick” ¹

Where Is God?

Death is not normal. It is not kind or beneficial. To put it mildly, death stinks! It is a thief. It is an enemy, an intruder. It is not fair or just or good. It is always an unwanted criminal. Twenty-five years ago I read Phillip Yancey’s classic book Where is God When it Hurts? With the assistance of a medical doctor, Paul Brandt, and through the illustration of leprosy he poignantly clarifies the reality that in a twisted, polluted world pain is not the worst of all options.

Leprosy is essentially a disease that attacks the nervous system. Most of us have the misconception that leprosy is a skin disease. It is not. It is a disease of the nerve endings. The eye socket ulcerates because the eye loses its feeling and fails to blink. The finger ulcerates and eventually falls off because with no feeling we twist a key in the door lock so hard that it cuts into the skin. With no feeling we scratch the shoulder so hard that it punctures the skin and an open sore will fester. In reality pain is one of God’s greatest gifts in our twisted, fallen world. To put it simply it is a God-given gift to be able to hurt when things go wrong. When we put a healthy hand on a hot stove, our brain immediately screams, “Lift it!” When we unknowingly stir up a beehive, at the first sting our brain cries out, “Run!” So in death, there is a sting that says, “No! This is wrong. It shouldn’t be.” I feel the sting of my father’s death because I love him and because death stinks.

The Good Book plainly says, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”² To the Muslim, eternity is a maybe depending on how God sifts out our good works. For the Buddhist, eternity is a vapor. For the Hindu, eternity is another chance in another lifetime. For the Jew, eternity is largely a question mark. To an atheist or agnostic, eternity is denied. But for the Christian, eternity with God is an immediate certainty. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord .³ “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” ⁴

In Jesus we have One who boldly bellied up to the grave, Who set his face like a flint to go to Jerusalem.⁵ He talked tirelessly about eternity with God. He frequently spoke about his gruesome death. He actually grabbed death by the throat and said, “You lose.” I am so glad to know that Jesus has already defeated our final enemy.

Graveside Reflections

This is certainly more of a story than a homily, but please allow me to share a few reflections.

• There are only a few things that are really important in life, but knowing whether or not you will spend eternity with God is certainly one of them. In the motion picture “Gladiator,” Maximus was right when he said, “What we do in this life echoes in eternity.”
• Death stinks. While other world religions try to deny it or explain it away, Jesus Christ grabbed it by the throat and said, “You lose.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ is without question the single most significant event in human history.
• Jesus is uniquely qualified to comfort us in our hour of grief and loss. I’ve been a follower of Jesus for 35 years, but for the first time yesterday, I realized Jesus experienced the grief of losing His Father. From the cross He cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”⁶ Is it any wonder that the prophet Isaiah referred to Messiah a thousand years before His birth as, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”⁷
• Relationships matter. The deepest of relationships matter most. In the last three weeks of his life my dad heard me say dozens of times, “Dad, I love you. I’m so proud of you.” While I certainly said it over the years, I wished I had said it more explicitly and more frequently.
• When it comes right down to it, we will not be judged by the hours we put in at the office or the amount of money in our savings account. We will be judged by the integrity of our name. A good name is to be desired above riches and honor.⁸ My dad left behind a good name.

Since my dad was a veteran and died the week of Memorial Day, I want to end by quoting a poem written by a clergy colleague.