Oliver

Oliver
Issue 150 - September/October 2008
by Peggy O'Mara, Editor and Publisher

Three weeks ago tomorrow, my father died. His death was a surprise, but it was not a tragedy. In fact, it was a victory. He was 86, had survived enemy fire in three wars, and died peacefully in his sleep. Death is a mystery, to be sure, but what is surprising is that death—like birth—can also be an ecstatic experience. My early experiences of death were certainly not ecstatic. When my grandparents died, I could not afford to attend their funerals, and believed then that I didn't want to see them dead. Now I know that seeing the dead body is a powerful reassurance of the immortality of the spirit.

When I was in my twenties, one of my friends died of brain cancer. She was the first person I had been close to who had cancer, and I felt inadequate to her disease. Her death was a tragedy. When my friend Noel rolled his car and died instantly, that, too, was a tragedy. And especially tragic was the murder of my best friend when I was 31. But by 13 years ago, when my friend Steve fell off a mountain and died, I was no longer so afraid of death. Inspired by the Hindu tradition, Steve's wife, Christa, anointed him with oil and placed flowers around his body. She invited me to participate and witness her ritual, and this affected me profoundly. When I saw his body, I realized that Steve was somewhere else. His spirit lived on.

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Believing in immortality makes death more bearable, but a tragic death is bearable only in community. When my friends Cyndee and Bruce lost their beloved daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to the Kauai flood in 2006, it was only community that helped them bear their unspeakable despair. Santa Fe friends got together to grieve and tell stories, and we made a Tear Soup to send to Cyndee and Bruce. (We got the idea from the book of the same name.) Into a basket we put flowers, poems, talismans, and our tears on paper tissues. It became a spontaneous outpouring of our love and helped us all stay afloat.

These young deaths were all tragedies—deaths that made no sense, and whose memories are therefore always accompanied by regret. My father's death, on the other hand, is not something I regret. On Father's Day, when he came to my house for a meal, Daddy was weak and could not walk very far unassisted. The next day, the nurse from his residence called to ask me to take him to the emergency room. He was in a lot of pain, and she thought he had dislocated his shoulder. At the hospital, however, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. When I heard the diagnosis of pneumonia, I wondered if this meant he was going to die. The signs were there. His emergency-room number was 11, and his regular room number was 2214—both numbers are significant to our family. Significant events happened as well.

On my dad's first night in the emergency room, I asked a nurse to help me move him to a more comfortable bed. When the nurse came in, we got to talking about Daddy's military career as a rescue-helicopter pilot, and the nurse began to cry—he, too, had served in Vietnam. He thanked my dad for the people who are alive today because he'd rescued their fathers. I told the nurse that my dad had been awarded the Air Force Cross. He yelled to my dad, who was hard of hearing, "You have the Air Force Cross?" "Two," my dad answered. "You have two Air Force Crosses? You must be crazy!" My dad laughed until his whole body shook.

There were friends in the hospital: Another emergency-room nurse was the daughter of old friends; the nurse on the floor was an old friend of my son's. But while the signs seemed to be everywhere, my dad appeared to be getting better and was discharged from the hospital on the fourth day. As we drove back to his place, he immediately removed his oxygen tube, rolled down the window, and put his arm out to catch the air. He was glad to be out of the hospital.

My dad was fiercely independent. A few years ago, I told him that I had come to drive him to the eye doctor, who was going to dilate his pupils, and he couldn't drive with his pupils dilated. He looked at me in a condescending way. "Peggy, those rules don't apply to me."

This story belies the fact that the vascular dementia of his later years meant that my dad's judgment about his own safety and capabilities was questionable. He remembered loved ones and things that had happened before the dementia set in, but had little short-term memory. For many years he was cared for at home, but in recent months he'd lived in a retirement residence, where he received extraordinary care 24 hours a day.

After he was released from the hospital, the staff of the retirement residence suggested that he receive supplementary care from a hospice service; they thought he was in the end stages of dementia, and would die within six months—no one expected him to die this month. The hospice nurse, social worker, and doctor couldn't have been better suited to our family, and in the final weeks of his life my dad received additional care from them at the retirement residence as well. My last memory of Daddy alive is of him walking down the hall, his arm around the hospice nurse's shoulder, laughing with him about helicopters.

Despite his dementia, in the last months of his life my father formed new relationships, and was beloved by those who cared for him. Although his mental faculties were compromised, the strength of Daddy's spirit attracted to him good people and excellent care. He lived and died a lucky man.

My dad was also a lucky man because he died in his sleep, something he had prayed for, nearly his entire life. I wondered how I would be with my parents at the end. I had heard the stories of my friends—of one who had sung to her parents in their last hours, and of another who had held his mom in his arms as she died. I wanted it to be like that for my parents and me, but I really couldn't imagine it.

It's probably not a surprise that a man as private as my dad was died in his sleep. Gayle Peterson, author of Birthing Normally, says we birth as we live; I imagine that we die as we live as well. Upon hearing of my father's death, his youngest brother said, "Isn't that just like Ollie: to leave without telling anyone."

Oliver looked peaceful in death, his head thrown back as if in a snore. His hands gently held the blanket and his eyes were shut. There was no sign of struggle in his body. The facts that he'd outwitted death on so many occasions, made new relationships despite his handicaps, and died on his own terms were triumphs that made me feel ecstatic. Surprisingly, it was being in the presence of Daddy's body that was the source of this ecstasy. I got to see and touch his body many times. This convinced me that he was really dead—not just on TDY*—and altered my consciousness. I felt this altering each time I came in contact with his body—it was as if he, or the experience, were holy.

Because of what Christa had taught me at Steve's death, I had some hints of how to honor my father's body. From the house I brought oils: lily of the valley, frankincense, spikenard. At Whole Foods Market I bought three dozen fair-trade roses: one dozen each of deep red, white, and off-white with pink tips. I brought the roses and the oils to the funeral parlor, and into the room where Daddy's body lay in a Minimum Alternative Container—a plain box of coated, green-gray cardboard. (New Mexico state law requires that a body be cremated in ?a container.)

First I applied the oils to my father's head, face, hands, and feet. Then I cut the roses and put them behind his ears, between his fingers, and by his feet and neck. I laid long-stemmed roses along the sides of his body. The flowers provided a beautiful frame for his body and smelled sweet. A couple of times while I was doing this, I was tempted to write on the container. I wanted to write "Keep Your Chin Up"—he'd always cajoled his daughters with this aphorism, and when he died his own chin was up. When my sister joined me, we both spontaneously began writing all over the container: favorite expressions of Daddy's, names of family members, hearts, little prayers. This spontaneous outpouring of love for our father energized us as, hand in hand, we accompanied his body to the oven. We witnessed our dad's body being put into the oven, and saluted him as he went up in flames.

My father died on the birthday of his oldest grandchild, my daughter. She feels that he gave her new life. When, years ago, some of my grandmother's belongings arrived at my house, I remember feeling that death gives new life to the living. My dad is everywhere now. In the end, his triumphant spirit taught me that death can be a victory.