The day before my father died of a heart attack he rode an exercise bike in his apartment’s garage. He was a very old man by then. Not in years — he had just turned 72 — but his body was frail and falling toward death and he knew it. The doctor had told him so. That scared him, as it would most of us, so he clung to the hope of a second opinion. In the meantime he pumped the bike peddles in order to pump life into the weak vessels of his heart. In the process one of his slippers fell off. He was too weak to pick it up himself so a passing neighbor helped him. The next morning he died in bed.
I wonder if my father learned any great end of life wisdom. How much can you learn when you are so afraid? Three months previously, on the night before my brother’s funeral (he also died of heart failure) my father told me about his pending appointment with his doctor. Things weren’t looking good. He was losing energy. His feet were ballooning with retained fluids like they had 10 years previously, before his bypass. He could hardly walk without a walker, which he refused to use. “I might die,” he said that night with a fear in his eyes I had never seen before. I could say nothing to reassure him. After all, what did I know about death?
My father died with a grimace on his face, which probably indicates physical pain in his last moments. To my mother, this was a source of great concern, but it did not bother me much. It was just one moment in a long life, with various sufferings scattered throughout. The emotional and spiritual pain concerned me more.
Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t fear for his soul or anything. And while we’re at it, I don’t agree with the Catholic church on the subject of our eternal fate, that we will all be judged upon the state of our souls at the times of our death, whether we die pleading for God’s forgiveness or with the stain of some terrible sin washed across us. I can’t believe that the rest of our lives, everything we had done to that moment, falls away in the chemical rinse as God lifts the snapshot of our final moment up to the darkroom light.
But still, if death is coming anyway I’ll ask God for the strength to put fear in its rightful place so I can fully learn from the experience. Because there are only two things we can truly gain from this life: love and wisdom. Riches are a mirage, the facts we learn shift under our feet and are replaced by new facts, and mere romantic love is a flickering candle that is snuffed out by death’s bony fingers, if not before. But real love multiplies in our cells, wrapping around the deep knowledge of life we call wisdom like the invisible double helix of our spirits.
In the end I want to love myself and the world and learn as many things from it as I can, even the Reaper’s hardened profile as he walks into my room and reaches for my hand. That will be a very great lesson. And if there is another life, perhaps I can take my two treasures with me, love and wisdom, stored in the suitcase of my soul. Perhaps I can share a little with my father, who may still be wandering about, looking for his lost slipper.
