We went against the wishes of my dad to be cremated and instead we had him buried.
My mum joked that she hadn’t followed his instructions in life and she wasn’t going to start changing now, but the reality was that her humour hid the pain. In the grief of the aftermath of my dad's death, the flames of cremation were a step too far.
In our minds cremation would have been one more act of violence upon his tired and broken body, and with the losses of a double leg amputation in the months before he died, it was one final physical act of destruction that we couldn’t endure.
His six foot four frame had been reduced first by one limb and then by the second… the gap between each loss being only a matter of weeks. His compromised circulation after multiple aneurism repairs had proved too much for his fragile blood supply and the colour of his legs slowly changed from a healthy pink to a dull grey, and then a distressing black.
Having already survived four previous heart surgeries, and lengthy recoveries, it seemed a cruel after-effect and a bitter consequence of a story that appeared to be turning a corner.
But he was here. And we were planning his homecoming.
The hospital’s occupational health team had visits planned to convert our home into one in which my dad could still move around. There was talk of putting in a lift that would create an access point through the ceiling. A ramp was going to be installed. And we felt that the wait to have him home was coming to a close.
But then, one summer afternoon a huge bleed, which the hospital couldn’t predict or prevent, poured through his body and all my hopeful anticipation of his homecoming evaporated, as he left us to be with his Savior.
The devastation to our hearts was complete.
But the surprising and altogether unwanted appearance in the mix of emotions churning in my heart was anger.
I was angry. Furious even. As my mind raced through the events of the last months I was angry and defiant that the Sovereign God who knew ALL things had allowed us to walk such a road when, in the end, even extreme medical intervention would not ultimately save my dad’s life.
Surely it would have been better if he’d died on the surgeon’s table months before if the end was already in sight? The indignity of amputation, the upset of one and then another felt like a cruel and unnecessary journey, as did the hopeful anticipation that one day he would be home with us again.
I couldn’t understand it. I knew that I would have done it so differently. Better even. How could God have got this so wrong?
I would have chosen a different road.
I would have chosen less suffering, less pain, less time.
Less time? Would I really have chosen less time? My thinking turned a corner as my 21-year-old self considered the implications of the way I might have chosen.
Could I really write off so easily the last months we’d had together purely because they were difficult?
And because they were hard did that mean that they were bad?
If they were easier would that alone have made them good?
And as I reflected I remembered the bitter-sweet hospital visits in those last few months, in which my dad shared observations from life in a hospital bed and we regaled him with stories from outside the confines of the hospital. I recalled us laughing, when yet again, I sat down heavily on the bed and he jumped, thinking I was on his legs. I re-visited the sweetness of the open emotions and the conversations that even now I hold precious.
In those closing months there were moments that I would not, could not, exchange for a different story.
Vaughan Roberts has described the experience of caring for his dying father as “intensely sad and yet also, in a strange way, profoundly beautiful”. I too have found that to be true.
I helped my dad shave, held his hand, wheeled him outside to enjoy the sunshine. He gave me words of encouragement for my future; I fetched him a carton of cold milk and a packet of Doritos from the cafeteria. He complained about the hospital food and I smuggled in a McDonalds.
In that hot little curtained-off bay in the middle of a busy hospital he sang Sunday School choruses from his childhood. He spoke of Jesus to anyone who would listen, and even more determinedly to those who would not. And in those last moments he spoke of seeing angelic ‘outriders’ waiting for him.
He was preparing to go home... Not to our little 3-bed terraced housed in Tottenham, North London, but to a glorious, heavenly, everlasting home in which the saints were preparing to line the way to celebrate his homecoming.
In my fallen wisdom I would have chosen another way—less suffering, less tears, less difficulty. But then I would never have known these and many other such treasures that a different story would have left written out.
In one of our last conversations my dad shared with me, as he often did, a poem frequently found in the writings of Corrie Ten Boom, but whose author is unknown,“My life is but a weaving”. In the final verse it proclaims with tear-jerking confidence the goodness of our Saviour in every circumstance:
Not ’til the loom is silent
and the shuttles cease to fly
will God unroll the canvas
and reveal the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
in the Weaver’s skilful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
in the pattern he has planned.
He knows, He loves, He cares;
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives the very best to those
who leave the choice to Him.
My wisdom is fallen and my heart inclines towards ease, but my dad knew it—and he brought me to see it too—that even in the darkest of threads, the Saviour in his infinite wisdom "has done all things well” (Mark 7 v 37).
Explore more about the Christian worldview on end of life care and assisted dying in Assisted Suicide by Vaughan Roberts.
