He has reached a point where the toxins of renal failure have begun to occupy his days and his nights. A by-product are deep episodes of hallucination. He sees ants on the floor, stuffed animals coming to life. Most likely, he speculates, these are the animals my daughter once kept in what was her room before we moved him here to live with us. These animations run through the heating register or stand around staring at him goggle-eyed. From the dining room window, he expressed admiration for the marina in our back yard (I wish).
My father is not alarmed by the visions, not the animals anyway; he is mostly bemused and sometimes finds the antics of the five-inch monkey under the bed humorous. If the creature becomes bothersome he waves his cane at it and it slips away until later.
He slips into a sleep that hovers between actual sleep and something else. During the “something else” he will have conversations with imaginary people, like the girl at the front door who, for unknown reasons, refuses his invitation to come all the way in and sit on the sofa. Or the shadowy man in the corner, who, he insists with great agitation, owes him five hundred dollars for reasons as obscure as the shadow. He dredges up old and strange memories. Yesterday he started reciting miles-per-gallon averages for various makes of automobiles he has owned. When a young man, he would buy a new car every year and keep meticulous performance records on every vehicle. When gasoline was thirty-eight cents a gallon, he recorded the MPG he got from every tank he put in his three-hole Buick. I can probably find it for you from his files.
He spent a day in bed unable to arise, unsteady and weak when he tried. Then a good day followed by again another day in bed, complaining once more of the ants and tossing tissues at them while apologizing, not wishing to call our housekeeping habits into question. Our dog, now his boon companion, enjoys tearing paper and considers these tissues dropped from on high a treat. He sometimes sings—what, I can’t quite make out. His vocal quality explains why he never would do it if lucid.
The hospice folks suggest when he is in this state—talking to himself, carrying on imaginary conversations, even singing—he is “resolving issues” he has not heretofore faced, ”coming to terms” with approaching death, seeking “closure.” The basic premise here, from an article about death anxiety, “is that accepting death is part of developing an affirming and meaningful experience of life.”
While I am very grateful for the nurses and aides, I regard that on the whole as just so much esoteric nonsense. I am more apt to believe that renal toxins are overwhelming his neurological functions along with everything else, and some days the kidneys just work slightly better than other days, and when they work they filter out more of the poisons and some lucidity is temporarily restored. It will be like that until the day when renal failure is complete. Then he will fall into death.
This is hardly in keeping with the “good death” of the hospice component of the death awareness movement: Every death becomes a good death with a final, fulfilling opportunity for personal growth, ultimate maturation, a developing readiness to move on to an affirming and meaningful experience. But I am pretty much of the opinion that death means personal annihilation. Psalm 30 certainly suggests it.
What gain is there in my destruction,
in my going down into the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?
If you have to ask, don’t you already know the answer? And if it wasn’t personal annihilation, it was Sheol that awaited the dead, which in my mind is about the same as dying and moving to west Texas.
Either way, the only remedy is resurrection. I believe it will be God’s final word through Christ, a voice loud enough to crack graves open and sharp enough to command the dead to rise.
Meanwhile, I tend my father.
Russell E. Saltzman is a dean in the North American Lutheran Church, and an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary. His previous On the Square articles can be found here.
RESOURCES
We All Have Fathers
Meaningful experience of life
Hospice in a Death Denying Society
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Comments:
Your writing about the aging and dying of your parents has been profound reading. I've already been there with an Uncle and mom. May the writing be a healing for you, and God bless you for walking this path with your Father.
Prayers for you and your Father, Prov 30
What do you mean by the statement, "But I am pretty much of the opinion that death means personal annihilation."?
Best, Bill.
Thank you for sharing this visceral personal story of your father’s terminal illness. This serves as a momento mori for the rest of us in this culture terrified to confront death and its finality. For you, of course, it is much more than this.
I hope that when my parents’ time comes, I’ll be there with them as you are with your father, and that I’ll have the same strength to be with them through that terrible time, whether they’re fully aware of the fact or not.
Thank you for sharing this non-anesthetized reality. I’m very sorry for the suffering your father and his loved ones must endure.
Pastor,
What do you mean by the statement, "But I am pretty much of the opinion that death means personal annihilation."?
I mean, death is where we stop and nothing begins. "Death," I've written, "is the end of our relationship with each other, with our interior consciousness where we talk to ourselves, and most devastatingly, with God." I see nothing in Scripture to say otherwise; especially I do not see immortality of the soul. Without the finality of death, what's the point of resurrection? Why bother? Oscar Cullman's "Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection?" (1958) is instructive.
†
That being said your observation that death is death; it is not good in and of itself. For ourselves and others we hope for the resurrection of the body and life in the world to come.
May God bless you and your father.
"Today, you will be with me in Paradise." What does the good thief have that you don't, or your father?
I grieve for your loss of your father. I grieve more for your loss of the reason for death, and the meaning of the Communion of Saints.
My father died quietly in his sleep of renal failure. My mother lifted herself off her pillow and reached forward with outstretched arms and a smile when she died. I have tended relatives in extreme situations where they lost all sense of who I was and determined me to be an enemy, and I have tended those in hospice, thanks to morphine, who died with family around, holding their hands.
Our ideal of course, is St. Joseph, the Patron of a "Good Death", who, we suspect, died in the care of Jesus and Mary.
Be of good faith. Death is but a door to eternal life with G-d and His saints and angels. You already know the promises of Christ, but you may reject them in these moments of care and painful realization of disease's effects.
Please read "Heaven is for Real", a small but powerful book. It may provide some comfort in this time of your trial.
G-d bless you!
Perhaps there is no contradiction between Immortality of the Soul and Resurrection, is it not that when one dies one is no longer in Time? Thus when the final Resurrection occurs, no time has elapsed for any of the dead, no matter how many eons have passed in the temporal world. Thus Christ could say to the Good Thief, that he would indeed be with Him in Paradise that very day, along with all the Resurrected and Saved from all times. Maybe I'm talking balderdash, if so could someone put me in my place?
Dear Friends in Christ
Is there good in death? is there grace in death? Sometimes the world redeems something in a dying. Thats the only good the world can do with death, except tax it.
Sometimes someone dying blesses someone else. People breaking down can do/give the good and the grace. It can be remarkable. It can be beyond what we might expect. A couple of times, Ive been blessed by people dying that was as vividly of G-d as any ordained priest has done me.
Sometimes with dying people we dont get it. G-d only asks us to try, to try as well as we can. We re no way perfect. Then G-d asks us to turn it over to G-d, without withdrawing ourselves. G-d redeems or blesses it, redeems or blesses the dying person too, redeems or blesses us too. Its okay to be puzzled, its okay to gripe (to eachother or to G-d), its okay to be amazed, its okay to smile, its okay to thank G-d.
Yes, death is oblivion. Making a pact with death doesnt dodge oblivion.
But, facing death is better. Facing death with someone there is better still. Facing death turning to G-d, we dont begin to know all the good. Facing death turning to G-d with someone there and knowing G-d is there--it gets difficult for the dying person, it gets difficult for us--the actuality of G-d makes G-d's promises good, and maybe we ll realise it too.
Turning down Resurrection, then it is annihilation.
Jesus comes that we may have life and have life abundantly. This s only part of G-d's promise of the Resurrection. Oblivion is only the world's end. Resurrection is our becoming.
The Peace of the LORD be with you
RUSS LOCKETT
Caring for the elderly when "dying" is a cross, and that cross, as all crosses, can bring joy. It is a Christian privilage to care for the "dying", another version of washing a loved one's feet. The only question is, "To what degree do we serve?"
I can't say enough about the importance of supporting someone in this kind of condition. Seeing a familiar face is a tie that binds one to reality when hallucinations and pain are twisting reality out of proportion. I'm sure you will love your father to the very end...and he will know it.
Aquinas noted that at the resurrection our happiness of the spiritual heaven will increase extensively as we see God in the new heavens and the new earth....and in the saved and their glory that varies as does that of the stars.
