DEATH AND LIFE

consciousness Nov 30, 2024

Death | Just a Change of Address

This week, my subscriptions to The Economist and Harvard Business Review had a change of address; I recently redirected them to my father’s house in Torquay.

As I walk this final path with my father - caring for him 24/7 as his night nurse, cook, secretary and palliative companion I find myself reflecting on life and death.

Witnessing Dad’s inevitable journey is gently shaping my understanding in new ways.

Death isn’t the opposite of life; it’s part of the same process, like the ebb and flow of the tides. When my children were born, they cried as they inhaled fully to enter the world. As Dad lets go, his in-breath is faint, his exhale deep and sharp.

In each moment, each of us inhales life and exhales death.

Caring for Dad is teaching me that life and death are not distant destinations to be discovered; both are always here, unfolding moment by moment through the heartfelt acts of service and love we share with each other every day.

I also see the fear that underlies the ego until it dies. Dad’s egoic resistance to change, to endings, and to letting go fills me with compassion for my own egoic suffering and that of all individuated beings.

I realise that the death of the ego, just like physical death, isn’t a loss but a kind of freedom.

As Dad’s needs have changed, I have let go of who I think I am and have learned to become whatever he needs, moment by moment - a lesson in egoic surrender that is, paradoxically, a gift of renewed consciousness for me.

In his final days, I listen to my father relive his story, perhaps discovering for the first time what mattered most. He recalls cold, lonely nights on sentry duty during his national service, his days programming the first computers at Stanford, and his dance of courtship with my mother - their steamy romantic  pre-engagement moments in his car before he dropped her home each night. He remembers fondly many of his now-felled colleagues. And he expresses pride in his four children and six grandchildren, whom he has lovingly guided as a father and grandfather.

As Dad revisits the stepping stones of his life, he recognises their sweetness. With sadness and joy, he sees how much he loved his life, how much he missed and how good it was. Even now, as his mind and memory start to play horrible tricks on him, he remembers how much he still loves life.

We’ve talked at times about relaxing into the ‘soft velvety void’, that brilliant darkness that leads to his new address, and where he will reunite with Mum.

Death can be a celebration - a change of address, a return to source, reconnecting with the part of us that was never born and will never die.

Dad’s journey reminds me that when life has been lived fully, death isn’t a tragedy but a homecoming. The peace we seek doesn’t lie in control but in acceptance of what is - moment by moment, breath by breath.

Being here with him is teaching me how to live by teaching me how to die.

It’s an exhausting, humbling, and sacred journey, but it’s a privilege too. Life and death are not separate - they are the same endless river we all must ride.

Through my father’s dying, I am finding new ways to live.

I love you, Dad.

Rumi once wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

 

 

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