On the Death of my Father

My dad died Tuesday night, May 6, 2008. He was 89. He declined rapidly this last few weeks and died peacefully in his sleep.

Our last several days with him were spent at the hospital with my mother and siblings and family reading, and doing crossword puzzles, and sudoku, and talking, and napping in chairs, while my dad mostly slept. The medical care shifted on Monday from trying to determine what was happening to him -- to making him comfortable in his last days and hours. Methodist Hospital staff were caring and efficient and present and respectful. We appreciate their skills and compassion.

I found myself listening to my Dad’s breathing for long periods of time and remembering how I used to listen to my infant son’s breathing at night years ago just to be reassured. My Dad’s heavy and labored breathing during his last hours somehow reminded me of the sounds of the Pacific Ocean he loved and grew up next to, the sounds of the surf we as children heard on those many vacations to Larkspur, and San Francisco, and Stinson Beach. The rhythms of the waves and his breathing seemed the same to me, an appropriate metaphor for life’s rhythms. My son has vacationed at Stinson Beach, too, and endured and listened to those same cold waves.

A regularity of the rumbling and whooshing of the surf punctuated by the sound of breakers crashing on the beach. The unexpected silences as the wave rhythms change for a moment for their own reasons. But then the rhythms would continue…..my Dad's breathing was like that….like hours of the sounds of the surf…regular but with unexpected interruptions....except that it finally ended...it went out and and didn't come back. It was comforting somehow on those vacations years ago laying awake at night hearing that rhythmic rumbling of the breathing ocean’s waves….and it was comfort that my dad found when his last breath went out. We’ll return his ashes to that ocean.

In his last few days before he drifted off in sleep, he was concerned with what time it was. Where was his watch? We had taken it off, but eventually we put it back on for him. He had to be able to see the clock on the wall of the hospital room, or his watch on his wrist, or the clock on his dresser from his bed at home. The connection to time gave him a reference point perhaps, an awareness of the passage of time maybe. But now a lifetime has passed in the blink of an eye.

The vastness of the ocean and the smallness of one person, and the smallness of the earth and the immensity of one person. The importance of a moment and the enormity of time. The contradictions and paradoxes are there, and far greater minds than mine have contemplated them. There are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. And we’ll return his ashes to the ocean he loved and his ashes will be a part of that vast ocean and those tiny grains of sand. And we’ll continue to look at our watches and clocks and schedules, and time will come at us like those waves and receding and returning, occasionally crashing down in those giant noisy roars and startling yet expected silences.

Words seem important to me as I write this, but maybe they’re not. My son suggested I do a painting for my dad, and I will, but not right now. My son and I arrived back at the hospital shortly after my Dad’s last breath Tuesday night. We won’t have the memory of his last breath, but we'll have the memory of that ocean breathing on that beach where my dad liked to spend his time. And now his time is over.

Bud Cassiday