Countdown to the End

I knew it was almost over.  Only a few more breaths to go.  I was frightened by the unknowing of what was to come.  What would death be like for him?  How would it feel?  Would there be relief?  Or would there be pain?  I didn’t know.  I couldn’t process that.  For so long I had known this time would come, but now the unknowing that followed was my beast, my nemesis, my undoing.



I looked at my father, his eyes closed, skin pale, almost gray; the death throes coming fast and hard.  Almost like a new birth, painful and harsh, seeming to never end.  But with birth, there is a bursting of the end.  Pain finally ceases, and a first breath marks the joy of a new life.  Could death be like that too?  Did it come in waves, taking breath after breath, stealing the joy, the life, the being that is?  Did it end on the other side in a burst?  Was it the mark of an end-life in the here, and the joy of a first breath in the after?



I couldn’t tell.  I couldn’t know.  I couldn’t experience his journey to the dark and then to the light.  To family, to friends, to the One who gives so preciously and fully.  I couldn’t know, but how I wish I could have walked the path with him.  How I wished to fill those sad, deflated lungs with breath, so desperately clinging to this world.  But I couldn’t.  It wasn’t my time; it was his.



So I held his hand in mine.  His, once strong and protective, now limp, ready to leave this world and enter another.  “Grasp this hand of mine,” I pleaded.  “Hear me.  Come back.”  But he was ready.  He wanted to break into a new consciousness, a new world; one filled with light.  One without pain, without hurt, and sadly without me.  Or so I thought.



He didn’t breathe so I didn’t breathe.  I made a silent count.



A shadow made a quiet flight across the room.  Was it a dove?  Somehow I knew it had come for him.  A moment passed, filled with images of another dimension and extinguished itself like a light.  It was time.  A current ran from his arm to mine, and I knew it was the end.  And the end I feared most for myself was now a beginning for him.  A new dimension, a new life.



Without realizing, I counted silently to myself, backwards from ten.  Frightened, I turned my eyes, and gazed at the face of the man who was my teacher, my mentor, my hero, my father.  My countdown reached its end, and I knew.  I realized he also knew.  And still holding his hand, I held my breath, and watched as his lips parted one last time and a wind, pure and clean, reached into his lungs and pulled the last from him.  It was done.