Gifts of Passage

I'm in the middle of reading a remarkable book, Gifts of Passage by Amy Hollingsworth. I'm not just saying that because a blurb from me is featured on the first page (although I'm delighted and somewhat mystified that I'd be considered blurb-worthy); Amy has done a beautiful job of talking about the gifts the dying leave us in the form of life lessons, final gestures, and other gifts we might have a harder time recognizing.

She mentions that if you're supposed to be with someone when they die, it seems to have a way of working itself out; she cites hospice workers who talk about people literally delaying their own deaths until a relative can arrive. Other times, someone will keep vigil for days at the bedside of a loved one, only to have them slip away in the brief span when the person goes out to stretch their legs or get a cup of coffee. I found that immensely comforting, as well as extremely sensible. My stepfather died completely alone (he was already gone when a nurse came around to check on him).

My wife and I were moving the day it happened, and we had no reason to think he was going to die in the hospital. Dad was sick, but it was seen as more of a chronic, long-term thing that would eventually spell his death (but not right away, and certainly not that day). The thing that weighed on my mind was having to tell him that he wasn't coming home, but going to a nursing home. I knew that conversation was going to fall to me, and I dreaded it. Around lunchtime, my mom came to our house to tell me that Dad had died in the hospital. She wasn't there, either; she had gone home to get some rest.

I haven't thought about this in a long time (Dad died in 1988), but it's always bothered me that I wasn't there when he died, and that I didn't get to say goodbye. It makes sense, though. Dad wouldn't have wanted to have us there, and he definitely wouldn't have wanted to say goodbye. It just wasn't his way. Dad died the way he would have wanted to--quietly, without fanfare, and without the awkwardness of having Mom and me say things he didn't really want to hear.

I don't know what his last moments were like, but I know that he rejected faith of any kind up to the end. He scrawled out instructions that there be no funeral and no clergy of any kind. My mom reluctantly carried out his wishes, even though she wanted a funeral (it would have been small; just the two of us, my wife, and a few of my mom's friends...he didn't have any). I told her that there wouldn't be much he could do if she decided to go ahead and have a memorial service, but she followed his instructions to the letter. I said goodbye to him at the funeral home before he was cremated; they ushered me into a viewing room where he was lying on a gurney, covered up to his chest with a sheet, his head resting on a block of wood. You know how they always try to make the loved one look like they're asleep? He definitely wasn't asleep. Still, I'm glad I got to say goodbye, even if it wasn't how I'd have wanted to do it.

I still pray for his soul, and I take tremendous comfort in it. I don't know what happened at the moment he died, but I know that even then it wasn't too late for him to reach out to God and seek his love and forgiveness. My prayers for my dad transcend time and space in a way I can't begin to understand. The Church says that I can pray for God to have mercy on his soul; the Church also says that at the moment of death, every person goes through a particular judgment in which his eternal fate is sealed. I know that both those things are true.

It is a paradox that I can pray for God to have mercy on my dad at a point 20 years in the past, but he does really well with paradoxes. He invented them, actually. A virgin conceiving a child, a God who is three persons and yet one God, God becoming a man--and a little thing like having mercy on a man in 1988 because his son is asking for it in 2008? That's barely even a warm up.

Dad had free will, and ultimately he ended up where he chose to be. If he persisted in turning away from God, I won't see him again, and that will have been his choice. God's will is a beautiful and terrible thing; if my dad persisted in his choice to use the gift of his free will to spurn the greater gifts, it was ultimately what he wanted.

God is truly merciful, and our free will is truly free. It's a paradox, but not a contradiction.