Driving to the hospital in Gjøvik is cozy. Trees still bursting in color and beauty along the road. Celebrating the season, the changes – life, death, aging, let-go… The autumn is getting darker. Rainy days. Low clouds. Longer nights. Shorter days.
For me too; Many times I stay in bed for 14-15 hours a night. Not sleeping that long, just resting. But during these last 24 hours, I stayed in bed for about 20 of them. I was exhausted.
Wednesday I received the fifth dose of chemotherapy. Thursday I ended up in the hospital again, as I got a high fewer after the chemo, and had to check the immune system. When I came back to Hedalen on Friday, the mountains wore pure white snow.
Everything happened very well in the hospital; I was blessed with a single room, my immune system was just fine – and I experienced a beautiful and surprising meeting on the way. Still; by the time I reached home to my own bed, I was finished.
I don’t function as I have been used to.
My father often visits my thoughts these days. He lived with Alzheimer’s disease for almost 15 years, from he was 65. The first years the disease evolved slowly. After my mother died, the downhill became steeper, and the wheels were rolling faster.
A few weeks before he left the body, I visited him in the elders home. I had been traveling and was busy with my own life, and hadn’t seen him in several months.
A nurse welcomed me, and walked me to the room. This was during Covid, and I wasn’t allowed walk around on my own.
She opened the door, and a man sat there in a wheelchair; pale, almost light grey skin, no facial expression. He was placed, with one bag of potato chips in his lap, and one of his hands into it – staring out in the empty air, like a wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. Instinctively I looked at his belly. It was moving. He was breathing. That was the only sign he was not already dead.
Was this my father? I looked confused at the nurse. I didn’t recognize him, and for a moment I thought she had brought me to the wrong room. I had seen the decay of my father coming, I had even lived with him for a while before he moved to the elders home. But not like this. Absolutely not like this.
The nurse didn’t even notice my confusion before she left the room, and I was left alone with those empty, staring eyes.
On a small table by the window, I found an album and some books to look in (they were his, it turned out I was in the right room), I tried to talk, find something to escape into, but truth is I was shaken.
It came to me that aging; this level of decay – is so much more brutal than death. I had seen my mother go from a healthy and active 72 year old, to dying – and it all happened in a very few months. I had been sitting by the burning ghats in Kathmandu, seeing the dead bodies being burnt – because I wanted to face my own mortality.
But this staring man in the wheelchair shook me much more than any of it.
I put the albums back.
One thing is that I wanted to be there for my father, to say good bye to him as beautiful as I could. But it was not only about him. It was not only my father sitting there; it was myself, it was all of us. In one way or the other; the decay of the body will happen to us all, if we live that long. I knew that if I avoid meeting and feeling this, it will stay in me as a ghost, as a fear.
It was, and still is, a deep wish in me to meet and experience life as it is, with whatever it brings.
Anyway; the only way I could truly say good bye to my father, was by seeing him and accepting him, with everything that he was in that moment.
I placed my chair in front of him.
He moved his eyes, and looked at me – and we sat like that, meeting each others eyes, with no words. Almost like a tratak meditation, with everything that follows.
Some times he took an extra deep breath, shivering in the in-breath – and letting go in the out-breath. Some times a tear ran down his cheek. Some times, I needed to take a deeper breath – to be able to stay present, to open space; and not rejecting or escaping from this moment.
Now and then, he closed his eyes to rest, before he came back. We sat like this, maybe for 45 minutes.
When I was about to leave, I kissed him on the forehead, and he looked up at me – shining – with big, blue eyes. Those eyes have been with me since; Pure trust. Pure innocence. Like a small child; Wide open, no defense.
I had never seen him as beautiful as this.
Two times more I visited him in the same way, sitting meeting each others eyes. Wordless.
Later on, I have reflected about these moments with my father;
Everything I had known as «my father» was long gone. His identity, his personality – it was all gone. Everything he had accomplished in his life… All his ideas and creative solutions, his skills, his disappointments and his achievements… Even his humor and playfulness… It was all far gone.
Still, some of my dearest and most precious memories of my father are from these meetings, and from his deathbed.
Who are we, when we have lost everything we were?
In the end of my fathers life, many people asked me; «Does he still recognize you?».
I have no idea if he recognized me as his daughter. But I saw in his eyes, and I felt in my heart, that he recognized me as a trusted shore, that he recognized me as Love.
Honestly,
I cannot say that I recognized that man sitting there in the wheelchair as my father either. But I did recognize him as Pure Being –
As Existence. Innocence. Eternal Sky.
I never saw him more beautiful than this.
A few days after the last of these meetings, my brother received the phone call from the elders home; that our father was very sick, and that they didn’t know if he would survive the evening. It lasted six nights and six days after that. I shared about some of those moments in the post “like the eternal night sky, and the golden autumn light“.
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