Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (34 page)

1/31/13 12:27 PM

218

katy butler

where I looked up citations and drafted a letter to the Middlesex

Hospital bioethics committee, pleading to get the pacemaker

deactivated. At four in the afternoon, I abandoned my draft,

shut down the computer, and surrendered. I would stop shoot-

ing myself with the Second Arrow. I would accept the things I

could not change. I could not shorten my father’s suffering or

hasten his death. I would stop being a warrior and a medical

guardian and simply be a grieving daughter.

I drove back to the hospital. My mother was gone. I held

my father’s warm hand, and felt his strong pulse, his energy still

flowing. He was still my father and I was still his daughter. I held

his hand for hours, letting him give his love to me one last time.

In a study of Zen funeral rituals in Japan, William Bodiford, an

anthropologist, stated that, “One of the purposes of religion is

to guide the living through the experience of death.” My mother

and I craved the sacred, but we did not know how to bring it

to my father’s deathbed. We’d attended Buddhist retreats and

read Pema Chödrön and meditated alone, but neither one of

us had embedded ourselves in a local Buddhist
sangha,
or com-

munity. And only through the flesh and blood of other imperfect

human beings could religion have guided us through my father’s

death. I asked a hospice nurse for a Buddhist chaplain, but in

Middletown, where most of the residents are African-American

Protestants or Polish-American, Latin-American, and Sicilian-

American Catholics, she knew of none.

A gentle woman in a blue dress introduced herself: she

was Elizabeth Miel, a volunteer Episcopalian chaplain. We sat

together, one on each side of my father’s bed. I told her that my

father’s mother had been Anglican, and that when I was a little

girl in Oxford, my parents had gone to communion regularly and

I to the Sunday school at St. Michael and All Angels.

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 218

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

219

There I was told that God was everywhere and saw every-

thing, and I imagined God as a series of transparent shower cur-

tains embedded with multitudinous fish eyes, moving in every

wind. At night I’d kneel by my bed and beg for a sign of His real-

ity. But God was silent, at least in the forms that I expected him

to speak. Until Saturday, when I would ride my bike to green

fields bordering a stream and lie heart-side down in the mossy

grass, letting the green energy rise up into me. There, I had an

inkling of a wholeness beyond the logic of my family. I didn’t

have to work for it. All I had to do was put myself in a position

to receive. Green things continued to feed what I called my soul

long after I abandoned any hope of ever seeing the luminous

fish eyes of God waving in the transparent wind. I worshipped

holy water and holy dirt long before I called it prayer.

There was nothing green in the hospital room.

The chaplain offered to give my father Last Rites. I looked over

my shoulder, worried that my mother might walk in. I said yes.

The chaplain opened a little stainless steel canister contain-

ing cotton batting soaked with olive oil, and made the sign of

the cross on my father’s forehead with her thumb. Opening her

Book of Common Prayer, she began reading from the Litany at

the Time of Death. “Look on this your servant Jeffrey lying in

great weakness and comfort him with promise of life everlast-

ing,” she read.

My shoulders let down. I didn’t think my father would mind.

It might comfort him. It was comforting me.

“Set him free from every bond, that he may rest with all your

saints in the eternal habitations where with the Father and the

Holy Spirit you live and reign.” I liked the notion that the soul

of my poor laboring father was going
somewhere,
even into the

glorious company of the saints in whom I did not believe. “May

his soul rest in peace,” the chaplain said.

She handed me a little blue brochure with a drawing of

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 219

1/31/13 12:27 PM

220

katy butler

someone with a halo on the cover, and together she and I read

aloud the Twenty-Third Psalm, which would comfort me on

many nights to come, when I could not sleep. “Yea, though I

walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no

evil,” we said together. I barely knew the chaplain’s name. I let

a breath fill the hole in my aching heart, and the warmth spread

outward. “Thou anointest my head with oil. Surely goodness

and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will

dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

After a little while, Elizabeth got up and closed the door

behind her.

My brother Jonathan arrived, touched my father’s shoulder,

and said, “It’s all good.”

Three times in the course of his long life, my father had

taken a step toward the ferryboat across the dark river, only to

be blocked by luck, or fate, or medicine. First came his brush

with accidental death as a teenager in the 1930s, on the warm

desert night when he failed to catch up with the red taillights of

the stolen car that bore two of his closest friends to their deaths

in a ditch in the veld outside Cradock. Then came battlefield

death, from whose strong arms doctors wielding penicillin and

surgical knives wrested him in 1944 in a field hospital in Italy.

Then came his natural death, curling like a cat in his slowing

heart and stalking away when the pacemaker went in. Then

came all the tiny deaths suffered as he lost, neuron by neuron,

his memory, freedom, sight, hearing, balance, and personality.

Now, at last, his final, merciful, difficult, and belated death

threaded its way through every man-made obstacle, flying in

on leather wings through an upstairs window quietly opened by

my mother, who, by refusing to give my father water, food, or

antibiotics, fulfilled her marriage’s final, tender, and brutal vow.

With my mother alone at his side the next afternoon, my

father’s lungs and brain gave out, and he stopped breathing.

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 220

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

221

*

*

*

I got her phone call at the house and cried out like an animal.

He had died without me. Then I realized he was no longer suf-

fering and that he had not been alone—she’d been with him. As

Jonathan and I headed for the hospital, our brother Michael was

at Bradley Airport outside Hartford, hastily signing the papers to

pick up his rental car. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the

outside of my father’s door.

Inside my father’s chest, the pacemaker was sending its tiny

pulses to dead muscle.

We sat in silence, the three of us. We read no poems and said

no prayers. My cell phone rang, and like a fool, I flipped it open

and talked to a man from a cremation service. I did not know

enough to make the moment sacred, and I was bereft of forms

that could have told me what to do or say.

We did not stay long enough to see peace descend on his

features, although my brother Michael said that when he went

alone to the hospital room a few hours later, he saw translu-

cence and beauty in our father’s face, a reflection perhaps of the

bliss of letting go and stopping all forms of striving.

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 221

1/31/13 12:27 PM

When my great-grandfather James was sixty-seven, four

decades after his nearly fatal brush with tuberculosis,

he knew he was not long for this world. Increasingly listless

and white, he grew short of breath while climbing stairs. The

trouble was his heart. His doctor recommended that he take

a rest from running the newspaper and sip a daily tot of whis-

key, which could have helped, but it was out of the question,

because James was a strict Quaker and a teetotaler. The doctor

could offer little more: it was 1923, and heart surgery and most

heart medications did not yet exist. After a holiday on a relative’s

sheep farm did little to restore him, James wrote to his English

relatives that he was planning to turn over the newspaper to my

grandfather, his son Ernest.

One winter afternoon, James walked unsteadily down Bree

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 222

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

223

Street to the Cradock Methodist church, and as he’d promised,

gave a talk promoting temperance to its Young Men’s Guild.

According to letters his unmarried younger sister Eliza Butler

later wrote to their English relatives—letters I later found in

a file in a South African library—James spoke sitting down.

When he finished, a young man asked a question. My great-

grandfather said, “I think we have come to the end,” slumped

forward, lost consciousness, and died.

Nobody knew whether he’d had a stroke or suffered a car-

diac arrest or a heart attack. Nobody attempted to revive him:

CPR was forty years away. Dying, death, and mourning were

all of a piece then. His body was brought straight home in

the town ambulance. Family letters make no mention of any

involvement by a funeral home, and it’s probable that his body

was simply washed and prepared for burial in the ancient way,

not by strangers but by members of the family or household

servants. His daughter Mary and my grandmother Alice made

wreaths and arranged bouquets to decorate the drawing room,

and there his open coffin was placed, with a handkerchief over

his face to keep flies away. Relatives and townspeople visited.

“I stole in, and Mary followed me,” wrote his sister Eliza to her

siblings in London. “She uncovered his face, and there he was,

so calm and peaceful, pale and stiff, eyes closed, surely at rest. I

said, ‘Poor old Jimmy . . . ’ and the tears flowed freely.” Nobody

expected her to move to “closure” within six months. Before the

public funeral at the Methodist church, Eliza, Mary, and the

rest of the town’s few Quakers held a silent meeting. The cof-

fin was taken by horse-drawn carriage to the church and then

to the graveyard, with almost everyone in Cradock, including

many people of color, walking behind it. One man’s death was

still the business, then, of everyone in town. The bell from the

church steeple—one of the tallest buildings in Cradock—tolled

over the town and into the desert.

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 223

1/31/13 12:27 PM

224

katy butler

The tolling of a bell to announce a death was a ritual stretch-

ing back to the Middle Ages, and it kept the reality of death in

everyone’s mind. “It was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll and

ring so often to-day, either for deaths or burials; I think five or

six times,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary on July 30, 1665,

during the Great Plague of London. “In the City died this week

7,496 and of them 6,102 of the plague. But it is feared that the

true number of the dead, this week is near 10,000; partly from

the poor that cannot be taken notice of, through the greatness

of the number, and partly from the Quakers and others that will

not have any bell ring for them.”

The news of my father’s death was posted on the Wesleyan

Web site.

When we got home from the hospital, my mother did not weep.

She walked through the door at Pine Street, took off her jacket,

picked up my father’s sheepskin mitten from its home on the

shelf above the coat pegs, walked out to the garage, and flung it

into the garbage can. She called Pelton’s Medical Supply Com-

pany in Wethersfield, owner of the stair glide. “Take it out as

soon as you can,” she said. “I can’t bear to look at it.”

Dying is hard on the dying. Death is hard on the living.

She went to the living room and took the waterproof cushion

off the wrought iron outdoor chair my father had used when he

could no longer raise himself from the couch. She put the chair

back on the deck. She undid the safety pins from the stretchy

black strip of cloth that had turned my father’s blue-and-white

checked dinner napkin into the most elegant possible bib. In

the master bedroom, she stripped the waterproof plastic cover

from my father’s mattress. She threw out the long-handled

comb I’d found for him in a disability catalog.

There was a thud. A small, brown bird had flown into the

KnockingHeaven_ARC.indd 224

1/31/13 12:27 PM

knocking on heaven’s door

225

glass wall of the vestibule and broken its neck. It lay still in

the low leaves of the vinca minor. My mother opened the front

door, picked up the bird by its feet, and flung it violently down

the slope, deep into the woods. She came back in, slammed the

door, and cried out, “Jeff! I told you not to die before me!”