My father’s birthday was this past week (March 3rd) and while I always remember and think of him at this time, it’s a bit different in some ways now. Why? Because I realize that I am now about the same age he was when he passed away, and that thought just boggles my mind.
“So young!” I cry. He couldn’t have been ready, could he? (are we ever?). And for sure it meant we were all deprived of whatever relationship there could have been had he lived longer, including the chance for he and his grandsons to know each other. But at the time that he died, back in 1982, I found myself completely at peace with it. I did not shed a single tear. Not one. For I had experienced what could be described as a real out of body experience, that left me totally OK with saying goodbye as he left for that great tavern in the sky.
Here’s the story.
Dad was living in Toronto with his wife Ronnie, down in the Beaches area of town. I was off at graduate school in London (Ontario) a couple of hours drive away. He had been sick – liver disease – for awhile. He had survived earlier crises but now it was back and he was seriously ill and in hospital.
I drove down from my home in London to the hospital where Ronnie and some of her family, along with my brother Rob, were waiting outside the intensive care unit where he lay. I went into his room. I hadn’t seen him for awhile and was shocked at his appearance. His body was so much smaller than it was in health, and they had put some kind of a helmet on him, which was a surprise. A small, shrinking body in what looked like a big football helmet. The nurse told me why it was there, but I don’t remember, or didn’t understand the answer. He seemed sort of semi-conscious but he did wake up long enough to see me and I know he recognized me.
After awhile I left to drive back to London, where I had classes the next day. Back home, I had barely entered the house when the phone rang. It was Rob. “You had better come back”, he said. So I got in the car and headed back to Toronto to the hospital.
I was about an hour away from the hospital, driving along the 401, when all of a sudden my father was there with me. I saw him. Outside, through the windshield along the right side of the car, in the air beside me, there he was, larger than life. It was not the image of him I had left behind at the hospital earlier, instead, there he was, robust and healthy, with that very distinctive grin. Happy and looking great. As real as anything is or ever will be. My worry and heavy heart lifted, as I felt his joy and love – so vivid, that all these decades later, the feeling is as strong as ever.
He was there with me for several more miles and then eventually he faded and I was again alone on the highway. When I reached the hospital my brother was there by himself, waiting for me. Ronnie and her family had left. Rob told me Dad had died an hour earlier. At the very time that I saw him.
There really is nothing to fear.
