Seven Years in the Making

I wasn’t there that morning
when my father passed away.
I didn’t get to tell him
all the things I had to say.

Mike and the Mechanics, “The Living Years” (1988)

Dearest Rachel –

I think Daniel was asleep, but not for long thereafter. My phone vibrated at about five-thirty this morning. It was Jenn, with the news we had really hoped would wait until we returned.

Dad was gone.

Of course, you already know this, having been presumably part of the welcoming committee up there.

Apparently, it had happened sometime between three and three-thirty back home, which would have been just after midnight where we were – at which time, we were sleeping off a fairly long day ashore. As a result, Jenn had been unable to reach us at about the time that it happened.

Given the news we received yesterday from Mom while we were out and about, this wasn’t exactly a shock; we knew at that point that he wasn’t likely to be around when we returned – and even if he was, he wouldn’t exactly be there, if you understand my meaning. But up until the time we flew out, it seemed like he was his normal – for the past seven years – self. He wasn’t fine, exactly – he was hope, in hospice care, after all – but nothing seemed imminent… until it was, while we were gone.

This is probably not going to really hit me until I get home, and more specifically, get to the ‘office,’ and find only Mom there. That’s when the reality will probably strike; I understand that the bed and all the accoutrements of his hospice care have already been cleared out of the family room, in fact, so that’s going to be an absence of sorts right there.

Then again, the whole family has been living with the knowledge that this was about to happen at any time for the past seven years. After his first bout of sepsis back in February of 2019, you decided to stay with me that weekend, rather than go down a second weekend in a row to visit your mother; it was a choice between two crises, and you chose me that time. So now, I get to experience that same sort of regret of having made a choice that precluded being there at the moment my parent passed away.

But that’s the thing; it’s been this long in coming that it almost seems like a relief for all of us. Certainly Dad has been ready to go; he’s said so many a time, especially throughout the past two or three years. His illness, and the restrictions on him with regard to feeding and leaving the house have got to have been weighing on Mom all this time, too – although like me, I’m sure she would rather have to deal with that and have him back at the moment. And these same issues have been a weight upon Jenn and myself, as well as Daniel and his cousins to a lesser extent. The concerns are now no longer such, and that’s something to be grateful for.

Plus, he’s in that same, better place that you are. I’ve seen a few texts he’s sent to friends and colleagues at church, talking about how he’s looking forward to eating this, that or the other; there’s a lot about life that had been taken away from him seven years ago, when this all started. Now, he gets to have all the good things of life and creation before him, just as God intended; after all, if God is the giver of all good things, wouldn’t all those things exist in heaven? So now, those good things have been restored to him, and to an extent that you know about long since, but can’t relate to us – nor, perhaps, can we fathom them, or at least how good they are, and were meant to be.

Unlike Mike Rutherford, I can’t say that I have too many regrets regarding things left unsaid. Sure, I would have liked to have gotten back before he left, and told him about the many things we’d seen and done, like we always do after our trips. At the same time, I’ve been writing these letters to you – and filming the accompanying videos – in part to be able to keep track of those moments in real time. Plus, I’d been calling every day as we’ve been out on this trip; this was about as much as could be done.

I also regret not having been able to wish him that final “helsa hemm”; “say hello to the folks back Home.” On the other hand, given that he passed away at such a wee hour of the night, I wouldn’t have been there to see him off in any event. I wonder if he would have just wanted to let go when there wasn’t anyone to be there to watch it happen; had anyone been in his presence, he would have preferred to stay, if only for their sake. So maybe this is how it had to happen; I’m just that much further away, and can’t attend as well to the business end of seeing him off.

Then again, Jenn has a gift for organizing these sorts of things – and the ability to contact all the interested parties – that I never had. So she’s already on top of things. My guess is that this is going to be part of how she’ll be coping with things for the moment; but I don’t know, we’ve never been through this before (I mean, yes, there was you, but that’s different. A sister-in-law isn’t the same as a parent).

Meanwhile, there’s not much for us to do in the meantime. Sure, I suppose we could try to charter a flight from Sitka to Vancouver, and from there home, but we really wouldn’t be home that much sooner. By the time we were home, just about everything will have been put into place; all that there is left to do is to emotionally process things, which is going to be a long, drawn-out process. So we’re going to be going ashore here and in Ketchikan, and ride the ship down to Vancouver as originally intended. It had been agreed from before our original flight that any memorial service would wait until we were home, anyway.

Meanwhile, we just need to go about the next couple of days, and try to take in the places (which makes for an interesting bookend that I’ll address with tomorrow’s letter, I hope). At the rate we’re going, we won’t be back here for another 27 years, so we need to appreciate where we are. For the moment, Daniel is decompressing by watching YouTube, and I’m writing to you like this; we all work through this in our own way, I guess. Thank heaven we don’t have to be out on shore until after noon (although we might step out on our own beforehand).

However this goes, both today and for the foreseeable future, I’d appreciate your eye on us, and your well wishes. Dad is home with you, but we would still benefit from it all.