Death and Gratitude

"He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it."  ~Clarence Budington Kelland


“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.” — Denis Waitley


I realize that many of you who read this blog like the recipes. And I realize I haven't posted any in a while. Or posted anything in a while, for that matter. I'll try to post some recipes soon, or at least post my ideas about recipes (actually, I'm not a big fan of recipes and I'll soon explain why). But, today I have something different. Something you may not think is health-related, but everything is part of everything else.  This post which focuses death by necessity focuses on life as well and therefore, health. It also deals with gratitude, an attitude that makes everything, even grief, better.


Until today I've shared this story with only a few people. It's about my father's death and how my his death became his last great lesson to me. Or, the last time I was able to learn a great lesson from his example as my father was not a man of many words and everything I learned from him, I learned from observing how he lived.


My father died of kidney failure on November 20, 2009. He'd been on dialysis for over four years. My father never wanted to start dialysis - he'd had a brother go through it years ago and he knew what it entailed: four to five hours, three days a week hooked up to a machine. The process is exhausting. It left him drained but unable to sleep. It can can be painful and you really don't want to know how swollen and bruised his forearms were after years of having needles in them so many hours each week. There's never a vacation from dialysis and you never have the option of saying, "Nah, not today." 


My father only agreed to go on dialysis because my mother and I couldn't stand the idea of losing him. He stayed on dialysis as long as he could, waiting for our understanding to catch up to his own: that death is not always the worst part of life.


During the last few months of his life, Dad was failing. He had three hospitalizations for three different problems (a blood infection, fluid on the lungs, and pneumonia). On the morning of the last time he was admitted to the hospital, he'd told my mother he was too sick to go for dialysis, that she should call an ambulance. She did and one came. The paramedics took Dad's blood pressure and ran a few other tests. They said he wasn't sick enough to go to the hospital. So, off he went to dialysis, 89 years old and with pneumonia. He had hours of dialysis and only then was told to head off to the hospital. I can only imagine the strength it took for him to get through that - add to the normal exhaustion of his daily life, pneumonia, dialysis, his age...still he made it through. 


Dad wasn't strong enough to walk in the hospital and hallucinated much of the time. After dealing with the infection, the doctors told us to put him in a rehabilitation hospital, by which they meant a nursing home. They said it would take months of rehab before he'd walk again. They said he might never come back to his senses fully. We didn't have the heart to take Dad anywhere but where he wanted to be: home. 


He arrived home late in the evening - on the way home, this man who travelled the globe in his mind in the hospital started looking out the windows of the ambulette, tracking our progress, making sure the drivers knew the way. Arriving at his apartment building, he was dismayed to realize he didn't have his wallet - even when I assured him the bill was taken care of, he apologized to the driver that he didn't have money to give him a tip. That was Dad - always taking care of business, always thinking of other people, and always acting with generosity. As soon as he was home, his faculties all came back and he was walking within a day.


The week that my father had been in the hospital, my family and I realized it was time to release Dad from this world. It had been time for him for years - when visiting, I'd often catch him sitting on the couch, staring off somewhere so deeply that it seemed he wasn't even of this world anymore. I'd felt caught between a rock and a hard place for a long time: I knew it was time for him, but my mother was petrified of living without him - and my children loved him and I didn't know how to explain it to them if I told their beloved grandfather I gave him my permission to die. But that week, we agreed that should Dad make it home from the hospital, we'd tell him we'd all be fine if he chose to stop dialysis. Amazingly, his first morning home, before we had a chance to bring it up, Dad called us together and told us he wanted us to be strong, but he was done. He didn't want any more dialysis. Understand this: my father saved us from initiating the conversation with him - which was a huge gift. Another gift he gave us that day: he agreed to another week of dialysis so that his grandchildren, and son- and daughter-in-law could have time to travel to Florida and see him before the effects of being off dialysis took hold.


The next couple of weeks were amazing. Upon arriving home, Dad stopped taking his medication. It didn't seem to do him any harm. We were warned that without his blood pressure medication, he could get terrible headaches: they never came, his blood pressure never even went up. He stopped taking the antibiotics that were prescribed for the pneumonia yet he didn't get sicker. Once he stopped dialysis, his energy came back. He was his old self from years before, playing cards, making jokes. He stood straighter, he was happy again. He was relaxed and I'd say just a bit impatient, seemingly surprised from time to time when he awoke to find himself still alive.


The family came together - from various parts of New York State and California we came to be with Dad. You'd think those days would be hard and sad but there were smiles and laughter. Dad delighted in seeing everyone. Everyone delighted in being with Dad. Was there sadness? Of course. But love was the overriding emotion.


The best part for me those weeks was the radiance of my father's smile whenever he looked at my brother or me. His whole face lit up! My mother, noticing this, and noticing that he didn't have the same reaction to her became upset: she felt it meant he loved my brother and me but not her. I knew otherwise - first of all, because all Dad wanted to know in the days before hospice came was what they'd do to help my mother through the process of his death and with her grieving afterwards. And when he told us he was going to stop dialysis, his one request was that my brother and I take care of my mother. During that last week of dialysis, my father kept asking me, "What's going to happen?" I kept explaining the process of how his body would break down after he stopped having dialysis. He'd shake his head. Communicating was tough - he was mostly deaf and his vision had faded, too. I finally understood: he didn't care about what was going to happen to him - his only concern was who was going to help my mother. So why didn't he smile so for her? I think I know. My mother was my father's air - always there with him. It was special for him to have my brother and me around but it was business as usual for my mother to be there. Just as we go through our days trusting there'll be air for us to breathe, so too do I believe my father trusted my mother to be there for him. 


Dad stayed peaceful and serene through the last days of his life. He was kind to all the nurses that came and went. Those last days, I slept with my parents, my father in a hospital bed, my mother and me sharing the bed next to him. There was a hospice nurse around the clock, but still I'd awaken and check on Dad throughout the night. However, the last night of his life, whenever I'd awaken, I'd notice his breathing, how rattly it was. I'd think to get up and check on him, and wondered if the rattling meant that he was close to death. But each time this happened, I'd feel as if I were being gently pushed back down into sleep - as if something heavy were pushing me down under water. There was no fear or sadness for me, just this strange inability to get up. Just past dawn, the night nurse woke me - my father had died, apparently at dawn. The nurse sat at the bedroom doorway through the night and had checked on my father at just before dawn. Then he'd gone to the living room window to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. When he returned to his post, my father was dead. 


My father was my hero. He was my guru - I adored him my whole life and learned my best lessons - about love, generosity, humility, and responsibility by watching him live. I assumed I'd be devastated by his death. But I wasn't. And, after this whole, long post - that's the message I'd like to pass on to you. We live. We die. It's not always a tragedy. Even when it is a tragedy, it's a part of life. A book that the hospice workers gave us likened death to a boat going over the horizon - the boat's still there but we can't see it. I like this image and I feel that my father's still here with me and for me. He's so deeply embedded in my heart and in my mind that when I need to know what he'd think or say about a given situation, I just have to think of him: I know what he'd say or do. 


Some family members were horrified that my father stopped dialysis. I understand their grief. But he'd protected them from his pain. In the end, it would have been selfish for anyone to ask him to stay. Modern medicine has found ways to prolong the body - but not in ways that necessarily allow people to live. At the end, on dialysis, my father was breathing, but he wasn't living.


For months afterwards, people offered me their condolences which was nice. But, I also felt that some people were waiting for me to fall apart, to be wracked by grief. I didn't fall apart, I wasn't wracked by grief and even during the weeks I watched my father die, I knew I wouldn't be. I neither denied my loss nor my love for my father. But we don't know how we'll react in any given situation until we're in it. Before this process began I thought I'd be devastated when the time came. But, in all honesty, I like to think that I got a glimpse into a different view of death - I got to experience the death of a loved-one when it came when it should. I would have been denying my true feelings about it had I pretended to more distressed just to fulfill a cultural norm. I'm grateful to my father for showing me that death can come peacefully and lovingly and for giving us so much love as he lay dying that it's enough to last me the rest of my life.


This story isn't complete without my adding another story. I got to know my friend Rosangel though the shared experience of our fathers' deaths (her father died 10 days before mine) But, Rosangel's loss was different than mine: she hadn't had the time I had to prepare herself or the time to say good-bye. Lost and surprised by her father's death, she looked to do something positive for herself and others as a way to deal with her grief. Rosangel decided to develop a gratitude practice and share it with the world. If you follow my tweets (madlyhealthy), my daily gratitude tweets were inspired by Rosangel and begun to support her efforts.  I'd already had a gratitude practice for a number of years when I started tweeting - it's easy and it's transformative. You see what you look for - there's nothing mystical or whoo-hoo about this. Look for bad and you'll find plenty. Look for good and you'll find that, too. The more time you spend appreciating your blessings, the happier you'll be. It's really that simple. Got 5 mins? is Rosangel's brand-new blog (which probably means she doesn't yammer on and on like I do). On it is an invitation to join a community group on facebook, The Gratitude Movement. Whatever losses or challenges you're facing, let's face them together with gratitude.