As I write, I’m sitting across the room from my Dad and he breathes shallow breaths. I feel like I should be counting them. They will be his last.
I’ve watched at least a hundred people die in my job as a hospital chaplain. But now, it’s my turn to sit with my Dad. And I find my familiarity with death both comforting and unhelpful. I know the signs. I know how to counsel someone through their feelings. But these are my Dad’s signs. These are my feelings.
I know what to do and that’s good. But I don’t like it.
I was visiting a patient recently and I had to cut the visit short. He was being a jerk and intentionally so. I’d been warned by his nurse before I went in his room. On other days, I would have been fine. But I had no tolerance for it. My Dad is dying and I had no capacity for nonsense.
Then I got paged to a trauma. And as I spent time with the patient’s sibling, I felt the presence of my Dad’s dying with me. And I used the feelings that came with it to provide attentiveness and compassion to the patient’s sibling. Yes, my Dad is dying, and I have a wider range of feelings close at hand to offer to others in their pain.
Death just might be the most human thing about us. We’re called mortals for a reason. We carry death around in our bones from the day we’re born. And yet we act like it’s a stranger. It’s an enemy — the “last enemy,” according to St. Paul — but it’s no stranger. It walks into our lives and our homes as if it owns the place.
I was talking with a man whose wife was dying of cancer and he recounted a conversation they’d had when she was still talking.
“Why did this have to happen to you? You’re such a good person.”
“Why not me?” she replied.
So true. So wise.
Why are we so surprised when death walks in the door? Why are we shocked at suffering when we’re told to “consider it pure joy”? Did we think we’d escape suffering and death? Do we wish our pain on someone else? We’re not too good for it. I know I’m not.
No, we take our breaths for granted. That is, until we’re sitting across from our fathers, counting their breaths, knowing there will only be a few more.
As I do, I whisper a “Thank you.” To my Dad. To God. To this beautiful world and the one to come.