What Obituaries Don’t Tell You

Betsy was not religious, but her mother is Catholic and wanted her to have last rites, which was not anything Betsy wanted. So Mary, the hospital chaplain who knew her quite well through her professional role, mediated a meeting with Betsy and her mom to come to some sort of compromise, and did just an incredible job. What Betsy agreed to was that when she was getting close to the end we would call Mary and she would come to the house and do a ritual with us. The ritual was just this profound experience for everyone, because everyone at that point was ready for her to let go. I don’t know about Betsy, I have my hunch that she wasn’t ready, but everyone else was telling her ‘Mom, Betsy, we’ll be okay, you need to go, we’re going to be okay.’

Mary did this blessing where we talked about who Betsy was, as a mother, a friend, a nurse, all her different roles. Then she went through parts of her body and invited all of us who were there, her husband, her two children, her mother, and me, to bless that body part if we felt drawn to do so. So you know, it was her eyes, her ears, her hands, her feet. It was very, very intimate, a wonderful way for the kids to say goodbye to their mother. It really allowed them to touch her and be with her and really say what they wanted to say in a safe way, with people they trusted. It had been about twenty-four hours since Betsy had said anything, and during the blessing the subject of yellow roses came up. Her favorite were yellow roses, which she wanted at her memorial service, so yellow roses were mentioned at one point during the blessing. Betsy whispered, ‘Yellow roses are my favorite.’ I believe the ritual woke her up, she was there, she was connected in that moment to what was happening. And certainly I felt she was very connected in, energetically, through the whole experience. That was profound, and not the kind of thing I’ve ever seen happen in a hospital environment. Maybe it has and I just haven’t seen it.

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A few weeks before the end, my parents went to a party back in the rural farming community where we had grown up, about 40 miles away from their last home. On the way back Dad blacked out and put the car in the ditch. He had treated himself to his first brand-new car after more than thirty years of sacrifices, child rearing, and fixing dozens of beat-up cars. In our farming community everyone had a tractor, so it wasn’t hard to find someone to tow the car out of the ditch before the cops came. My stepmother didn’t have a driver’s license; she never learned how to drive, and was just plain afraid of the prospect. So, after forty-eight years of never driving, my stepmother drove them home safely. Dad slept on the kitchen floor. I often wonder how things might have been different had the cops caught my father that night. Those farmers did him no favors pulling him out of the ditch.

A few weeks later my dad was driving with my stepmother on the same road several miles from the first accident scene. I had spent the day with them, and my stepmother was preoccupied and distraught because her eldest daughter had had a nervous breakdown and they were planning to visit her in the psychiatric hospital the following day, justifying a day long drinking binge. That night my father swerved over the double yellow line, killing himself, my stepmother, and injuring three other people. My father died on impact. It took the jaws of life to get him out of the car.

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Even though I can’t say that I had a premonition of his death, I did have a really interesting experience in the spring following it. I was lying in bed in the morning, in a semi-state of coming awake, and I literally feel his weight on me, his head on my head, and he’s there, I can just feel him. And he says, ‘Well, Jim, tell me, was it a good funeral? Who was there?’ He was really excited about it. And I say, ‘Yes, Andrew, it was a great funeral.’ It was so real. I wasn’t asleep; I was coming awake, and I could feel that. I’m still skeptical about religion, I take more of a scientific approach, but when you have something like that it shifts something in your beliefs. And when you do have an experience like that, who do you tell? Who’s going to believe you? I told his mother, but other people would say ‘Oh, it’s just a dream. It’s your emotions being processed,’ things like that, but it wasn’t. I could feel his weight, just kind of tossing and turning a little bit. We used to hug, and I could feel that, and I could hear him. Not like you and I are talking, but we were having a dialogue. So that changed me in the sense that I’m not going to deny the reality of the experience. Maybe my story will give people permission to believe in the visits they may have from loved ones. You know that it’s more than an ordinary dream or a reminiscence because it is so powerful and real, and the memory of it stays with you forever. You don’t have to tell anybody, you don’t need to be afraid of it, you don’t even need to understand it. It’s just part of those dimensions of the universe that we can’t measure yet.

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I was very, very angry at God for taking my mother from me. My sister gave me a book by Ruth Montgomery which helped me through the grieving process, and that’s when I probably first became aware of life after death and I’ve believed in it ever since. It rings true for me for several reasons. About midnight, two hours before my mother died, my sister felt that she needed to come home to spend the night, something told her that she needed to come home. So, when Dad came in to wake me, my sister was in the room as well, and he told both of us that she had passed. This was probably about 4:30 in the morning. My sister and I got up and went for a walk, and it was just a fantastically beautiful sunrise, it was just gorgeous. We felt that that was her, that it was her way of saying ‘Okay, here I am. I’m not sick anymore, life is beautiful.’

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And yes, I have seen deaths that are difficult because of fears and unfinished business. One of the cases I always talk to the volunteers about is a woman who was probably in her eighties who looked to be on her way. She was a sweet, dear little lady, but toward the end she became very, very agitated. She looked frightened, she was restless, she was anxious, calling out, looking tormented. Luckily for us her daughter knew what was probably going on. Our patient, evidently, was raped as a child by her older brother, and at eighty years of age, obviously in her day and time, this was never talked about, never talked about. It was probably “her fault,” you know. The brother was dead, and this woman’s daughter felt maybe she was fearful to die, that she was going to be with her brother. So we thought, ‘What do we do?’ Sometimes anti-anxiety medication is really helpful, and yet we didn’t feel this was the proper thing to do, to suppress all this. We talked about it and worked with our social worker, and what we decided to do was just pretend this was in fact what was happening to her, and she was feeling this, because she couldn’t describe it to us, and just treat her as if she had just walked into the emergency room after being raped; letting her know it wasn’t her fault, that she was safe, and so on. It was an amazing thing to watch her, to watch her settle and feel comfortable and let go, to not have that horrible, anxious, awful, anxiety-ridden death that we were worried she would have.