Just One More Conversation
If you could have just one more conversation with a loved one, what would you say?
I recently lost my father. He died from metastatic bladder cancer, which progressed rapidly. One day, we were told he’d fallen in the middle of the night and couldn’t get up, and that he was in the hospital. I imagined a short stay until he stabilized. Within a few days, we were hearing he was transitioning into “comfort care” (hospice), and we’d better come as soon as possible.
In addition to the cancer which we were unaware of, he had also begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s over the last year or so, but other than some aphasia, grasping for words, and some memory lapses here and there, it wasn’t apparent how quickly it was progressing, at least from the remove of living in another state with the busy family life and often hectic schedule which comes with being married to a physician and raising two teenaged daughters. In hindsight and in closer proximity, it was clear his dementia was becoming more pronounced than we realized.
After the initial conversations, I’d booked a flight for a few weeks out, when family responsibilities and schedules aligned. When the next call came, we dropped everything and went. We made it in time, in a manner of speaking. He was still conscious and relatively aware, at least for brief periods.
What “making it in time” looked like was brief flashes of recognition of who was present, followed by his awareness inexorably drifting back to the soothing nature scenes playing on the television in his hospital room. He’d pretty much lost the ability to speak beyond a few mumbled phrases, mainly in response to his nurses’ questions. But what he lacked in words, he seemed to be trying to make up for in his facial expressions.
When he saw my eldest daughter, his eyebrows rose and he seemed to communicate, mainly through his expressions and gestures, “You’ve grown so tall!” After which his focus drifted back to the nature scenes in short order.
By the next day, he wasn’t really conscious anymore. We’d gone to dinner with my brother and his family, and then I’d returned to the hospital and sat with my father for several hours as it seemed his time was getting short. I was torn about staying with him that night. I vacillated until about 11:30 before deciding to get some sleep and return early in the morning. As I was getting ready to go the next morning, I got the call that he had just passed. I hadn’t made it in time.
In Daoism, death isn’t regarded as an ending, but simply the last visible change in a series of natural transformations. However, this doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. Grieving is also a natural part of life. As the book of Zhuangzi acknowledges, we all naturally mourn the loss of a loved one, but it also reminds us that when we reflect on their lives, we realize that we all go through many transformations that follow a natural course, like the seasons.
We are born and grow through the Spring of our lives. We reach maturity and our prime physical years in Summer. We reap the rewards of wisdom and experience gained over many years in Autumn, and we enjoy our hard-earned rest in the Winter of our lives when we leave our legacy and prepare for our final transformation back to the formless state we enjoyed before our birth. This isn’t necessarily seen as a leap of faith into the great unknown, but as a return or a homecoming.
We have a series of ponds in our neighborhood. I’m not sure if they have always been there or if the creek, which now flows mostly underground, was integrated into the storm drainage system in the area, or used to flow above ground in their place. I walk our dogs around them frequently and stop often, looking for wildlife. Especially for the otters, which took up residence last fall.
We spotted a family of four a few times in the waning days of autumn before they seemed to have disappeared over the winter. I’ve spotted at least one of them again this spring. Otherwise, I keep an eye out for the occasional muskrat or mink, blue or green heron, great egret, or painted turtle. From the woods around the ponds, a deer or three, or an owl, either great horned or barred, will sometimes appear. Recently,, I’ve been walking the ponds around sunset when the great egrets have been returning to the island they take up residence on for a few weeks every spring.
One evening at sunset I was struck by the silhouette of an empty bench facing the brilliant display of color reflected in the pond and the overwhelming wish that I could sit on that bench with my dad and have just one more conversation.
The conversation that so many of us wish we had. The one that we missed out on, whether because we didn’t arrive on time or that we simply didn’t take the initiative to have on countless occasions throughout our lives, or theirs. The one about what mattered most to that person who is now gone. The one that seems like it might somehow fill the hole left in our hearts.
Of course it wouldn’t. It is their absence that we feel, and that won’t be filled. And yet, as with so many things in life, their absence also brings them back to us in the form of long-forgotten memories. Somehow, the idea of them becomes more and more vivid after their departure. We inevitably take people for granted when they are still with us. Especially our parents.
For as long as we can remember, they’ve always been there, and so naturally a part of us assumes they always will. In a sense, they are, but not in a way we can see, hear, or touch. The Daode Jing says the Dao is invisible, inaudible, and formless. We understand it by observing its patterns and manifestations in the natural world around us and within us. This is also how we attempt to understand the impact of a life when someone we love has returned to the formless, through the patterns and manifestations they’ve left behind in the many lives they touched.
My father always loomed large in my consciousness. Both physically and mentally. He was a relatively tall man at six foot three. Only a couple of inches taller than I am, and yet for much of my life, his presence seemed much larger. But by the time we saw him in the hospital, he’d grown gaunt and spare, despite how his long frame filled the length of the bed.
He was born in 1940 and grew up in the small towns of the sagebrush and rimrock country of Eastern Oregon, playing basketball and football in high school and hunting deer with my grandfather. On the other hand, I have practically never met a team sport or activity I would participate in. He joined ROTC in high school with an eye on getting out of his small town and seeing the world, joined a fraternity in college, and ended up as a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne. I grew up skateboarding and listening to punk rock, alienated and aimless. On the surface, we couldn’t have been more different, or at least that’s how I felt growing up.
As I’ve aged, and dare I say, matured (a little), I’ve come to see us as more alike than not. Our differences had more to do with the circumstances we grew up in rather than a difference in temperament. We both rebelled in our own ways. He rebelled against small town life and mentalities, and I rebelled against the corporate world he was a part of after the military, and which was all I could see growing up.
My image of him from childhood was of a man in a suit going off to catch the BART train to his office in San Francisco, or later driving his sports car off to work in one of the many places we lived. I caught glimpses of his childhood mainly through stories told by my grandmother or aunt, but never really connected with it through him.
That said, some of the decisions I made later in my own life, such as working on an organic farm, owed at least a little bit to the knowledge that he grew up in a farming and ranching community and that many generations of my family on both sides had done the same. We both forged our own paths in unexpected ways.
He also served as an example in many ways in which I’ve since come to emulate consciously or unconsciously. He was a voracious reader and the consummate lifelong learner. After leaving the corporate world, he returned to academia, getting a PhD in his fifties and starting a new chapter of his life as a college professor, teaching in various places in the US as well as a decade in New Zealand, before semi-retiring to the Oregon Coast. He had begun teaching online classes for colleges in the US while still in New Zealand, and continued to teach until just a few years ago.
In the early seventies, around the time I was born, we lived in Montreal. In the era of singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Jim Croce, and Gordon Lightfoot, he began writing songs as well. He was never the world’s greatest guitar player, but he learned to play well enough to play what he wanted and often brought out his guitar in the evenings after dinner or when friends came over to visit.
The soundtrack of my childhood is equal parts hearing those records on the big seventies turntable and my dad singing and playing his guitar. He even managed to get a song on the radio when a neighbor in Montreal introduced him to Marty Butler, the Canadian pop singer. The result was a song called Once Loved Woman, Once Loved Man recorded by Butler, which made it to number 27 on the Canadian pop charts in 1973. I didn’t follow in his musical footsteps, but both of my daughters love music, and one has recently started to learn some of his songs on piano from the sheet music we found tucked away in an old wooden chest my parents bought in Abu Dhabi in the mid-seventies.
I’ve never had his same discipline or focus or sense of direction in life. I’ve often felt like I’ve been wandering through life, for better or worse. As the only one of my siblings not to spend some time in the military, I sometimes think I might have benefitted from the discipline of it, but that shipped sailed long ago and I was more likely to have ended up in a monastery than the military, but an ill-conceived first marriage in college changed that early trajectory.
That said, my father did try to impart a sense of determination in us all, a sense that we could accomplish whatever we set out to do. He had a favorite quote which hung in his home office, long before the inspirational posters of rock climbers with quotes about reaching the top or cheesy pictures of mansions with three Lamborghinis telling us that, “He who dies with the most toys wins.”
Before the pervasiveness of search engines and social media, and the endless inspirational memes we have available now. It was a simple framed printout on plain white paper of a quote from Calvin Coolidge, entitled Press On.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
And really, if we are to boil life down to its essence, what else is there to do? Whatever life throws at you, persist. Press on. Keep going. Everything else is built from this simple lesson.
I’d forgotten about that quote for many years, only reminded of it after his passing, and yet I now realize I’ve spent much of my life searching for different ways to learn that same simple lesson over and over again. It’s a universally understood truth which many traditions have expressed in their own ways. In Daoism, one of the ways this lesson is taught is called the Three Hearts (sanxin). These three attitudes or mental qualities are trust, sincerity, and perseverance.
In Daoist practice, these are interpreted in terms of following our spiritual path. We must have trust in our teachers and the teachings; we must be sincere in our learning, and we must persevere in our practice. Of course, one of the keys to spiritual practice, whether we are following the Daoist path, the Buddhist path, or any other, is to bring our whole lives onto the path. In other words, we recognize that our daily lives and our spiritual practice are one and the same. We realize that we will be following our path in each moment, in each situation we find ourselves in, until we take our last breath.
When we extend these virtues to the rest of our lives, we trust in our families and communities, we are sincere in our interactions with others, and we practice perseverance in dealing with our daily responsibilities in life, whether that be dealing with the interpersonal drama of middle-schoolers or coworkers, or digging ourselves out of debt. Not to mention anything we hope to achieve beyond that, like building stronger community relationships, adapting to a changing climate or responding to the specter of fascism.
Life requires perseverance.
If we were able to have that conversation on that bench, I can’t imagine he’d have much more to add, other than to leave the world better than you found it, live a life you can be proud of, and spend it with those you love.
Do you want to support the author, ?
Any payment this article earns will go directly to him!
 | A guest post by
|
It's funny how as we grow older we see more of our parents in ourselves. This is once a moving tribute to your Dad and a commentary on how Daoist theory and beliefs can be of real practical value to our lives. As you say, "we recognize that our daily lives and our spiritual practice are one and the same".
End of life can be very difficult for most people who are left in the world when their dear ones pass. Often the departed ones chose to leave the body when their loved ones aren't around -happy that they have seen them, one last time, but not wishing to leave when they are in the same space. And in fact, you did make it in time. Your Dad saw you had come to see him, he saw his family had come to see him, and contented, he was ready to leave.
Sorry for your loss, Gregory; at the end of a life well-lived and successful, surrounded by people he had set on the right paths, well, that's a lot to be proud of.