I have just experienced my first Fathers’ Day without a father, in fact, without a mother or a father. It has been a very strange time.
Three months ago my mother died. She was 88. Four weeks later my father died. He was 92.
Only a fool wouldn’t have prepared for it, fretted about it, been fearful of it, but realistic that it could and would happen at any time. Probably I’m a fool. It hit me like the falling sky.
Just under two weeks before my mother’s death we had a wonderful celebration with about 50 of their friends. All seven grandchildren and ten great grandchildren were there as well.
We held it in the foyer of my parents’ local church at St Stephen’s Mittagong. The local Mothers’ Union catered and did us proud. In the weeks leading up we all joked that nothing would stop my mother, as sick as she was, being around for this grand event!
We celebrated Mothers’ Day, Mum and Dad’s 66th wedding anniversary and Dad’s 92nd birthday. Mum and Dad were wheeled from guest to guest in their mobile chairs, with hired nurses in close attendance.
Twelve days later Mum was gone.
In those twelve days Mum went to the movies, shopping and eating out with friends, only mobile in a wheelchair with a portable oxygen tank at her side. She must have looked a sight at the movies clutching her oxygen tank like a handbag.
Three days before her death Mum had a fall at home, broke a rib, called an ambulance, got to hospital, admitted, discharged and back home without telling me or my sister. That she was a very independent woman goes without saying. I was informed of her death by phone. I was gutted.
I had visited her the previous Saturday, five days before her death. Living an hour and a half away I tried to see my parents at least once a week.
In the last few weeks I remember climbing into bed with Mum, something I hadn’t done since I was about eleven. I would hug her 40kg frame that only a few years previously had been closer to 80kg. We would chat about all things old and new; friends, relatives, memories and the gospel.
I shared with her some of my half crazy dreams and told her that I wanted her to be around to see them come true. She smiled. She knew the end was near. So did I, but I just couldn’t admit it and I kept grasping at future things that I hoped would keep her hungry for more, despite her desperate frailty.
Mum had lived half her life with rheumatoid arthritis. She fought it like a gladiator. Towards the end her lungs were dusted (she had never smoked), hence the oxygen 24/7. She wanted to die at home. She fought my sister and me over this and won. When she fell at home and broke a rib, every breath was like a knife-thrust in the chest. The fall accelerated the inevitable.
Going to the nursing home with my sister and telling Dad that his wife of 66 years and love of 73 years, had died, was among the most difficult things I have done.
Then on the eve of Mum’s funeral Dad had a fall in the bathroom. He smashed his shoulder. It was amazing that he got to the funeral, albeit in a morphine fog.
Dad deteriorated rapidly over the next three weeks. A virus, a chest infection, pneumonia; it was death in slow motion, but fast compared to some frail-age deaths I have seen.
In his last week my sister and I began a bedside vigil. Liz took the mornings. I went to the office and drove down for the afternoons. We kept in close consultation with each other and the nursing staff.
I wasn’t there when my mother died but, if at all possible, I wasn’t going to miss my father’s final breath.
He was reasonably lucid on the Tuesday. I asked my children to drop everything and come while they could still communicate with him. They had a precious time with him going through holiday photo albums together. We fed on John 3:16 and prayed.
I arrived about 1pm on the Friday. He hadn’t been conscious since the night before. I asked the nurse as to her best guesstimate. “Over the weekend,” she thought. I prayed with and for him. I gently massaged his rattling chest, his nobbly knees and his almost century old toes. I stroked his forehead and ran my fingers through his thin greying hair (still much thicker and blacker than mine). I recited slabs of John’s Gospel to his sleeping, drug filled body. I planned to leave about 6pm to keep an evening commitment and be back first thing in the morning.
But then at 4pm, he stopped breathing.
Just like that. There was no death rattle. His breathing didn’t change. Every breath had been a battle for days.
This man who had loved me unconditionally, who had prayed for me all my life, who had accompanied me on country and interstate missions, telling his story of grace, had, like my mother, four short weeks before him, entered into the presence of Jesus who was their strength, their refuge and their salvation.
Six months earlier, when we were settling Dad into the nursing home, I walked into his room and asked him how he was going.
Dad, who had been a POW on the Burma Railway for four years, growled, “This place is awful. It’s worse than the POW camp.”
Somewhat shocked I said, “Aw, come on Dad, you know you don’t mean that.”
“I do mean it!” he protested. “At least when I was in the POW camp I had a slim chance of escaping. I have absolutely no chance of getting out of here.”
I told him he was both right and wrong. This was where, apart from the occasional day pass, he would live his final days.
But we went back to the Bible, to John 3:16 that we recited together every time I visited. We were reminded that one day we will escape, not by human ingenuity, but by God’s grace, from this wretched half life into the fullness of life in the presence of Jesus, free from death and pain, suffering and grief.
Not because of an escape but because of a rescue, for it is Jesus, and only Jesus, who rescues people from death to life, from the grave judgement of hell to the glorious joy of heaven.
