Last Wednesday my father had a heart attack. When I got the news I caught the next available flight to Michigan (thanks to my wife Marielle). I didn't know if he would be alive when I arrived. I was in prayer the entire trip; not intercessory or full of words -- it was a state of closeness, acceptance, focus, preparation, reverence, humility... Can a wordless state be de-scribed?
This isn't a drama, but there is a sequence -- how do I write about it? Disclose the essential fact: my father was alive when I arrived. He still is. But his heart condition is inoperable, and the doctors think he'll live less than six months. These cold words are the bare framework -- the stonework of the chapel where the light filters through stained glass.
Where do I go next? I can't describe first seeing my father in his hospital bed, holding his hand, looking into his eyes. More than these facts is too intimate, subtle, and personal to portray, though maybe we're all in this state at some time in our lives -- if we're fortunate.* My mother and brother were there -- all of us. We spoke simply and lovingly, the most important things first, before my dad, in full presence and acceptance, told me the medical details, and I finally began the first full conscious absorption of the inalterable facts.
A small glimpse: My father, a minister for the latter half of his life, retold the story of the great theologian Karl Barth, who was on his deathbed, surrounded by a group of friends. One friend asked the great thinker if he had a thought he could leave them with. Karl replied: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." A deep smile spread over my father's face.
Over the next two days, we were visited by nurses and doctors continually. These were some of the most caring people I've met, and taken in the whole, their presence itself was a healing factor. The hospital -- Saint Joseph's Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor -- and especially the Cardiac Care Unit, is imbued with this sensitively receptive, assertively careful attitude. A woman with a great soul who came to empty the waste basket in my father's room left with tears in her eyes.
Doctors -- specialists in several fields (as necessary) and interns -- huddled for an hour each day to review each patient's case. Their process impressed me as Socratically social and exemplary of human cooperation and knowledge sharing (businesses could learn a lot from the best hospitals). Nurses and doctors shared their observations and thoughts with my father in a direct, receptive way, listening thoughtfully.
My dad is now home and in a hospice program, about which I hear nothing but good things from friends who have experienced them in their families. This particular one has a waiting list of volunteers, probably people who have themselves benefitted from the program. My mother is heroically, in the midst of anxiety, love, and her own worries, learning all she needs to know from the hospice worker and beginning the process of caring for my dad at home. I'm home, wishing I lived closer, and keeping a bag packed.
How can I carry some of the attention, intensity, and caring that I've had for the past week back into the rest of my life? Any meeting between any of us, any conversation, can be our last. If only we could acknowledge and remember this.
*Is this why the Gospels sometimes seem to have a surprisingly matter-of- fact tone? Some states can't be extracted to dessicated words. The full state of the body, the mind, the whole can't be encoded in the ciphers we see with our eyes, trying to reconstitute the original. Only the greatest poets, writers, and artists come close, and they require audiences with their antennae all finely tuned.
May 21, 2002 09:19 AM