Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings

I guess my contemporaries and I are finally at the place in life where we take up the habit of looking at the obituaries. I don’t do it, but I have a couple of friends who have this habit. As I passed through north Texas the other day on the way to my home in east Texas, I had coffee with one of these guys. As we talked, I remembered to tell him that I had heard a couple of weeks ago of the death of an elderly woman from the small community where he had lived for close to 30 years. I was too late. He already knew because he subscribes to the local rag so that he can keep up with such comings and goings.

We come and we go, and especially as we get older, we wonder about what we are going to. “We believe in the eternality, the immortality, and the continuity of the individual soul, forever and ever expanding.” So reads one of the statements of belief from the United Centers for Spiritual Living.

For me, I’m not talking about heaven and hell, as those brought up in fear of God are taught. I remember as I child being a little preoccupied with the end of the world. At that point, I had heard enough hellfire and brimstone from the Baptist preacher to at least have a concept of beginnings and endings, rewards and punishments, and had developed a fairly healthy concern for the seeming nothingness that death brings. I realized at a young age that I didn’t want anything to do with those Baptist Sunday mornings. When I was in my early 30s, my Daddy overhead a conversation between my middle sister and me, where she asked if I believed in the devil. “You mean the devil with horns, cloven hooves, tail and pitchfork,” I asked. “Yes,” she replied, and “no,” I answered. “Well, you’re going to hell,” my daddy insisted from his chair at the breakfast table. So he had been taught, and so he believed. I give thanks that my mother, who had somehow evolved beyond her conservative Lutheran upbringing, never spent her time talking about hell.

At that point, Daddy was only three years from his own death from congestive heart failure, although we didn’t even know he was sick. I can only wonder now what he felt in the days leading up to his death. I know that he wanted to get well enough to make a trip to the country—the place where Joan, my oldest sister, now owns the house that was a retirement home to our parents and the place where the barn that was our Daddy’s refuge in the four short years he got to live here became my home more than 10 years ago. As I recall, he might have gotten to make one trip, but I remember clearly that only a few days before he died he longed to make his own “trip to Bountiful”. Whether our Daddy was afraid of death I cannot answer. The only clue we have is what middle sister Sue and I heard Daddy say as he lay in his hospital bed only minutes before he died.

Daddy was in ICU for several days on his last trip to the hospital, and we had become accustomed to visiting him at appointed times. On that late Saturday afternoon, when we arrived at the hospital we found that he had been moved to a room, without our having been notified. He was no longer hooked up to any monitoring devices. He simply lay in the bed. Because we were naïve in some ways and laboring more than a little from denial, the meaning of this move didn’t register with us. As Sue and I stood at Daddy’s bedside, we thought we understood him to say that he wanted to pee. So Mother, Sue’s husband, Henry, and I helped Daddy to the commode, where he died, looking straight at me, his bluer than blue eyes locked onto me, as I squatted in front of the commode and Mother and Henry braced him from either side. Later Sue and I agreed that Daddy was no doubt saying, “Peace, peace.”

On the day that Mother died, almost 26 years later, she awoke restless, lying in the hospital bed she had occupied for less than a week at the house here in the country. On this last day of her time here, she registered no blood pressure when the hospice nurse arrived late in the morning. For several days, we had wondered how she could look at us with her penetrating dark brown eyes—the same eyes shared by Sue and me—and not respond to our attempts to talk to her. “Keep talking to her,” we had been advised by hospice, informing us that hearing is the last sense to leave us. “She is crossing over,” was the explanation for how she could seem to be awake and aware, but at the same time not answering in the voice we longed to hear one more time.

The morning of Mother’s death, after the hospice nurse had gotten a blood pressure reading, she positioned Mother so that she was sitting up against the pillows of her bed. The den was filled with family and friends. With those penetrating brown eyes open wide, Mother looked around the entire room, smiling. “In recognition,” I ask, I wonder, I hope. “This is a gift,” the nurse said—to me, it seemed, although she might have said it loud enough for everyone in the room to hear her. Yes, it was a gift. Mother died six hours later, as she slept quietly.

For three years now, I have thought about the gift from our mother on the day of her death. And I think of it each time I have cause to consider the departure from this life of family or friend or myself. I have thought about the so-called “crossing over” explained to us by the nurse and chaplain. How privileged we were to have been there and to have experienced first-hand this gift—and not to have simply heard about it later on. And now, as I reflect on the words of our daddy on the first day of spring 1981—the word “peace” that my sister and I have chosen to take as our witness of that brief but huge moment in our lives—I can only shake my head in acknowledgement. How do we wrap our hearts and minds around this frightening yet ever beckoning mystery? September 9th would have been my mother’s 93rd birthday. Amazing as it seems, my 67th birthday is one week later. The journey continues.

Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings—Normangee, TX (September 7, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis