"As my father lay dying": remembering a time of uncertainty.

This was originally a comment at 100 Days, but the system was down. The topic in the comment thread (look at Day 34 & 35) was uncertainty. MB, Lorianne, and Stray have written eloquently on uncertainty. I thought this reminiscence, this understanding of uncertainty might be interesting, perhaps inspirational.


I've had two major periods of uncertainty in my life. The most recent is the near loss of everything I've accumulated, all my books, paintings, furniture, objects, the other one was when my father lay dying. He had emphysema and caught pneumonia in hospital and had stopped breathing and was manually resusitated and the interns and nurses ran, wheeling him through the corridors to Intensive Care. When we were allowed into ICU, he had multiple tubes in, multiple tubes out, was unable to talk with the tracheotomy. For six months the doctors refused to say that he had another day to live. 'Any moment', 'We can't say beyond today', this psychic and emotional torture. Each day I went to the hospital not knowing, I held his hand and lip read not knowing, I left not knowing if I was to see him alive again. I couldn't sleep, left my TA at university, didn't work on my thesis, lived in a state I don't want to remember. It was like that Eastern European or Russian author who's name escapes me at the moment who was blindfolded and taken to be shot each day and each day wasn't shot. Excruciating. Existential angst. Everything out of your control.

Perhaps he might still be alive if he had wantd a cybernetic existence, living in tandem with machines for breathing, eating, excreting, even these 22 years later, he was such a fighter, but after six months of this tethered, Gulliver-like existence my Dad had all the tubes taken out, the machines unplugged, and he faced death directly.

Those few days when he lay gasping for breath, dying as his body filled with carbon dioxide that his lungs were unable to expel were unbearable... true uncertainty is not an enviable or desirable state.

Neither was the year I just went through. But for the last decade or so I have become a meditator. With daily meditation, I began to understand how strong we are underneath. There is a deep rhythm to life that we can trust.

I wouldn't call it bedrock but perhaps the song of the bedrock.

Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death.

And finding the rhythm okay, ecstatic even.

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The upper right image was of my father and I in 1976, eight years before his death. The one below is of me, three weeks after his death, in 1984. I've always liked the gentle, accepting, peaceful but knowing look in the eyes of this photograph. Did I ever feel like that? I don't know.