Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2014 21:40:08 GMT -5
Our dear Friend and Brother in Christ left for his Heavenly home last night. We will all miss Fred.
This is a note written by his son Steve.
A Perfect Death
November 28, 2014 at 4:16am
If you’re not into spiritual things, you may want to skip this post.
It was such a perfect death, and for so many reasons. We could not have scripted it so good… only God could have planned this, and he’s been at work for months, if not years. 15 months ago, I came to Ohio to take Dad to our church convention at Sharon, Ohio had he been able. I’d taken him to the one at Yellow Springs, Ohio the year before, and that turned out to be his last one. On the last day of the 2013 trip, I took him to see Aunt Bea. Leaving from there, we were trapped several minutes by traffic waiting to turn onto the road back to Welcome nursing home. I mentioned that Mother often said “if you wait long enough, the way will always become clear.” I then said I’d been thinking of collecting some of the things they’d both said into a book. He said (as the way finally became clear and we pulled out onto the highway) “that’s a good idea, and you should do it soon.” I finally finished The Wisdom of Fred & Ruth last week, and sent it off with a rush order to Apple for printing.
We arrived late Tuesday, after they would have already gone to bed. We went over Wednesday, and the first thing I did was to open the book (which had just arrived) and read it to him. It’s illustrated with images from many of our travels. The last page was an image of a little girl peeking around an old artist painting on the streets of Paris (and who resembles Dad quite a lot.) He said “that’s the most beautiful photo I’ve ever seen. Do you think you could get it printed for me?” I told him I would. Our son Sam was with us, and we talked about Thanksgiving dinner… we were going to bring him to our rental cottage tonight for dinner, although Mother is too ill with Alzheimer’s to get out. He wanted to go shopping with us, convinced that he could charm the grocers into donating a turkey to his fellow-residents at Welcome. We declined, and left to shop for groceries.
Later last night, Susan and Hazel arrived, and then called us with shocking news. Dad had a terrible fall, and was at Allen hospital in Oberlin. We rushed over, and by the time we got there, the helicopter was there to transport him to the Trauma 1 center on the west side of Cleveland. We ran out to the car, intent on racing them there, but a medic stopped us… Dad had become unstable, and they brought him back in. After a half-hour of frantic work, they had a tube in his throat and ventured out again. With Susan driving to my navigation, we actually beat the helicopter to Cleveland.
We hadn’t been there long when the doctor in charge brought the fateful news: “If he were 35 years old rather than 85, I’d give him little chance of survival. Since he’s 85, this is clearly a fatal event. I know you came here to enjoy Thanksgiving with him, but it’s simply going to end very differently.” Stunned, we sat there trying to absorb the news. Dad had a DNR Order on file, but Susan, Hazel, and I rescinded it for the night… we felt that we really needed to give him the chance of a day before following through with his wishes.
We arrived as soon as ICU opened this morning. The nurse (a wonderful red-headed lady whose name I must discover) treated us beautifully through the morning, and suggested that she would postpone the doctor’s visit as long as possible, at which point the ventilator was due to be removed in accord with Dad’s wishes. Hazel began singing some of our hymns softly shortly after the nurse left for the first time. I simply could not sing. Susan, Hazel, Wanda, Sam, and I were there. When time drew near to remove the ventilator, I called David and put him on speaker for the next 45 minutes.
Dad had some shaky moments for the next half-hour after the ventilator was removed at around 1:20, but then stabilized. I took David off the call after about 45 minutes. Hazel (and occasionally Susan and Wanda) sang softly to Dad for another hour or so after David’s call ended, but the tedium of the vigil eventually set in, with the normal conversations and Faceb00k-checking. By 5 PM and with Dad’s vital signs virtually unchanged, it was clearly time to divide up shifts. I decided that as the first-born, I simply wasn’t leaving… that was my responsibility. Everyone was exhausted, so they decided that someone would be back by 6 AM to relieve me.
For the first hour, I just checked Facebook and worked puzzles… but I began to notice something troubling: Dad’s heartbeat had become really irregular, and his blood pressure began to climb. The irregularities were happening with increasing frequency. All three of Dad’s siblings had died of heart attacks, as had Grandmother, and I really didn’t want to see him go that way. My cousin William Mouzon said something on Facebook (can’t remember what it was) that let me know I had to be more courageous. And so even thought I’d failed miserably at trying to sing earlier in the day, I thought I could at least whistle. So I began whistling the hymns that Dad loved the most. I even managed to hum a few of them. Miraculously, for the next half-hour, there were no irregular heartbeats at all. None. Clearly, although he appeared to be completely comatose, the hymns were getting through so much that they changed his EKG. The only times it failed for a long time was when the nurse came in and I had to talk to him, or when I had to go to the toilet.
But eventually, it became obvious that I was fighting a losing battle. And so I said “if you’re really going to do right for your Dad, you must sing.” I’m not complaining, but to sing when my father was dying seemed like the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I rediscovered what Wanda had taught me so many years ago: “if you have great passion for something, passion overcomes fear.” And so it was. I sang softly at first, but at one point on a bathroom break, I asked the nurse “am I annoying you?” He graciously said “you do what you need to do for your Dad… we’re all good.” I really must get his name as well, because he was wonderful. And the strange thing was, for the rest of his life after I began singing the words instead of just humming the tune, Dad's EKG stayed peaceful pretty much all of the time. Also, I sang while continually walking around his bed in circle after circle after circle, intending to surround him with the songs of Heaven… music all around him.
Somewhere in one of the 30-second Facebook checks, I saw a comment from my great friend and business partner Julie Sanford. I’d had many conversations with her about my parents for many years, telling her how wonderful they were and how I was nothing but a sad and shallow reflection of them. I’ve had a few accomplishments, to be sure, but their great legacy will be their care for and service to other people. I have never been so selfless as they have always been.
I have been blessed with many experiences throughout my life that I call “near-audible-voice” experiences where there’s a voice with a profound message in my mind that clearly did not come from my brain. This was not one of those. Rather, it was a soft and gentle realization that formed over a few minutes that what I had told Julie repeatedly for years didn’t have to be that way any longer. My rejoinder was “if you’re outside my mind and I’m not talking to myself, then let’s do what you did for Elisha: if I can watch one little hour (or two, or three) and am here when you take Dad up to wait for the morning, then give me a double portion of his spirit of service and care for other people.”
I continued to sing hymns to him, right up until the end. I was singing Blessed Footprints of My Savior, but by the time I got to the end of the third verse, it had been a really long time since his last breath and his heart rate was dropping. The end was obviously near… I never started the last verse, which would have said:
“May I ever prize, dear Saviour,
Each blest print of Thy bruised feet,
Ever follow where Thou leadest,
Till Thy radiant face I meet.”
I decided earlier that morning that I wasn’t going to miss out on one of the most important conversations of my lifetime. There’s a great burden of evidence showing that when a person passes from this life to the next, their spirit hovers above their body in the room for some period of time before passing on to their long home. I realized that if I’d done the normal thing and collapsed in tears when the EKG hit zero, I would miss this amazing and rare conversation. And so when the time hit zero and I briefly embraced my Dad’s body, I then looked up, and said “I know you’re not there on that bed any longer… I know you’re above. I can’t see you, but hope I’m looking your way. Earlier tonight, I asked a very difficult thing… I asked for a double portion of your spirit of service. I don’t know if you’ll have much time where you’re going before you sleep until the greatest morning, but if you do, please ask this of our Father.” Not knowing how long it takes for the spirit to leave the body, I waited several minutes, then repeated what I’d said. I’m confident Dad heard one or the other; maybe both.
And now, something I completely can’t explain. It’s after 4 in the morning, and I’m not the slightest bit exhausted. I went to the inn where Susan and Hazel were staying (and where Sam is staying for the night) and told them the whole story. I also told them that “it was essential that everyone else leave. Had people been there, I could not have walked around again and again, surrounding him with song. In all reality, I wouldn’t have been able to sing with anyone else there. And there’s no doubt that the Elisha conversation would never have occurred because I would have been too preoccupied with everyone else. It really worked out perfectly." And so even though I’ve slept very little in 48 hours and would have fully expected to be wracked with grief, I’m actually and inexplicably euphoric. It is a rare thing to witness God planning something so perfectly to bring one of his faithful children home. This is the Thanksgiving Day for which I will forever be most thankful