When death happens around you, it always brings up the questions: Is heaven for everybody, and is hell real?
My mom called me from the hospital where her father, known to me as Papa, was on life-support in the final hours of throat cancer.
“If you want to see him before he passes you need to get down here,” Mom said. “They’re going to unplug the machines this afternoon.”
To plan someone’s death, especially family, was alien to me, but that’s just the way it works out sometimes. You see that person fight and fight, and then it is time to help him surrender to the way God wired it. Papa battled the disease for five years, went into remission and then it came back with furry the second time. I think he was done fighting then.
My grandmother had been waging war along side Papa throughout each bout. At first, she drove him ninety-miles to Duke Medical twice a week for the chemo, and then for a few months she lived in a hotel room while the doctors poisoned his blood to keep him alive. When I saw her a few weeks before, she seemed like she was done fighting, too. Her face was always potent and determined, but she spoke with finality in her voice in the last months. She told my mom that Papa had been drinking a lot, again, and that she found him wandering around outside in the middle of the night on occasion.
As I drove the two hours from my home in Virginia down to the hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I had time to think about the man who was going to die that day. That’s the thing about being aware of someone’s end; the way you interacted with his life comes into better focus. My memory had nitro surging through it, so I went places I didn’t think to go, to those landmarks you thought you forgot to take picture of, but there they are, suddenly, in a box in the garage.
Spring was almost there, so the sun warmed my car enough to comfort me. I messed with the CD player to figure out the music for long, reflective drives. All I could find was Sara Groves. It was fitting, though, because her collection was on life, death and coming of age spiritually. One song is written about your journey being your own, that no one can go through victory or pain for you, or can walk close to Jesus for you; it’s a movement of backward and forward steps. That made sense to me when I thought about Papa.
The route I drove was mostly highway, but the last hour would cut through two-lane farming country, a couple little towns with gas stations, but mostly cows, fences and old white churches marked the road’s edges; and sometimes fresh manure smells would waft through the car window. All I could do was think and pray, and reach down into my gut to rummage out some hope that maybe he’d get up from that bed and live another ten years; but then I wrestled with other parts that said he was gone. You get to the odd privilege of debating these things when a person is scheduled to die.
Pictures started to hit me like eight-millimeter home movies, the yellowish and cracked kind, with the occasional hair flickering across the screen. I remember he let me co-pilot his lawn tractor in the summer time. I sat in front of him when he crisscrossed rows in and around the oaks that shaded his house. He appeared similar to portraits of Robert E. Lee, with aristocratic silver in his beard and hair, but is grey uniform was different from Lee’s; it said NAPA on the patch instead of a flag. For some reason, though, he never made words for me. If I were to scribble out the number he spoke, it probably wouldn’t fill an index card. But, that was okay with me, because he had conversations through aura and presence.
Once, we jumped in Papa’s pickup truck and he took me to Pullium’s, his favorite joint for chilidogs and barbecue. I had always heard Mom talk about the place, because he took her when she was a girl, so I was eager to go and finally it was my turn. We listened to Hank Williams, Sr. on the tape deck and drove the rural back ways through Forsythe County. He said nothing and I looked out at the shacks and trailers that were off the road. People rocked on their porches and hung laundry on the line. Then we pulled into one of those shacks with a gravel drive and we were there. Inside, it was crowded with other silent men. They all stood in jagged lines, crunched up together, because there weren’t any seats, and they devoured their food as if someone were going to steal it. I stood in one of those lines with Papa, ate my hotdog and drank a frosty, glass-bottle Coke, the kind that tingles going down. It was a pleasing combination of taste and manhood.
When we finished, he finally spoke up, “Did you like it?” he asked.
“It was good, Papa,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then we got in the truck and went home.
The closer I got the hospital the more I wondered whether I would cry or not when he died. For some reason, it was a mystery to me. I will fall apart at my parent’s funeral and be institutionalized if my wife or children go before me, so why was it so hard to know that for Papa. There must be those people that you’re around for a lifetime, but they never quite let you through the glass. It was like he was a picture that sat on the fireplace mantle, one to look at but not touch. But I wanted to find Papa in my memories. Maybe, that’s how you form a person’s legacy, you reach back into your recollection to find out what he meant to you. That’s probably why there are four different Gospels about Jesus; you have four different men saying this is what I remember about him, this is what he meant to me.
Papa gave me my first pocketknife when I was eight or nine. To a boy, getting your first knife it is like being knighted into maturity; you’re going along as child, playing with sticks and balls, but then you have a blade and everything changes. The knife was his for a long time, so it had certain character marks all over it, bites and nicks. I like to think he carried it with him in when he went to fight the Japanese, but he probably got it at hardware store ten years before. Either way, when the time was right, he went to his room, took it from the dresser and put it my hand. “That’s yours,” he said. “Be careful with it.”
The blade locked into a steel case that was surfaced in wood and it felt like a hundred pounds in my palm. Unlike other men in my life, the ones who spoke great wisdom, Papa gave it to me tangibly, with simple instruction like, “Be careful with it.” If I had wanted more, he could not have given it. Those simple words were likely the one of his father, proverbs that warned of the great responsibility and danger that comes with certain privileges in life. I was careful with that knife. I whittled spears with it, cut branches for campfires and carried it for protection in case leprechauns ever attacked me. Today, it is stored in a box and will someday join one of my sons’ knife collections. This will be a little of Papa’s legacy to pass down.
The more I drove, gave birth to thoughts and listened to Sarah play her piano and sing, the better I was able to translate Papa’s life. He was complicated, but loving, silent, but impressionable. And, then that hovering question finally dropped down into my car like backseat driver. The voices said, “Jon, where’s Papa going to go when he dies?” That’s the question I had been avoiding. It was the question I had grown up believing was the most important question anyone could ever answer. The question haunted me.
Minutes before the doctor turned off Papa’s breathing machine, I was allowed to go in. They said I could stay until the end if I wanted to. I wasn’t sure, but I was glad I had come. My grandmother said goodbye one last time and then came to me in the waiting room. I stood up and hugged her like a mother eagle would, my wings protective and affirming. She did not cry, but sat down and settled in for what was about to happen. Her heart must have been in agony, one part wanting the machine to breathe for him forever, another part for it to be over.
His room was sterile, the usual medical setup, wires, machines and a bed; they all happened to support the man I had come to bid farewell. His chest was pumped up and down in an unconscious rhythm and his eyes looked welded over. It was so unnatural to watch. I wanted to go pull that piece out of his mouth and breath for him, but I could not. Mom decided not to be in the room at all—too distressing for her—but Papa’s other son and daughter were at his bedside. The two of them stepped back when I went toward the bed. They were giving me space to talk to him.
I held his hand. It felt like his life, weathered and trodden. I thought about the last time he was awake and at home, two weeks before. He amused my two-year-old daughter by playing hobbyhorse on his knee. She giggled and chanted, “Do that ‘gin.” He laughed each time she squealed. Mom said he was different with her than other children. For some reason, she was able to get through the glass. I think maybe he knew time was running out, so he wanted to drink in as much lost time as possible. His hand didn’t move.
“Papa, it’s me, Jon,” I said. “I love you.”No response, just the reverberation of the machines.
“I want you to know that you are not alone and never will be,” I continued. “I will never forget you.”
After that, I stepped back and rested against the wall. I studied his breathing rhythm as the doctor turned off the machine. Up, down, up, down and then it ceased, like a needle rising from a vinyl record; the music had all been played. He vanished into forever, and then I cried, placid and grieving.
I don’t know if Papa made his peace with God, or whether Jesus called him disciple. But that uncertainty conjured a mightier, aching question within: Why didn’t I ask him when he was alive?
