My Own Man – Chapter Sixteen

Finding: November 2006

After the third of those three phone calls punctuating the closing act of your life came, I returned to Hillview nursing home to find you lying at peace, at last: your hands joined at the solar plexus; the sheets and white bed blanket smoothed by the nursing staff over your straightened, supine body; your sightless eyes now both closed as though you were engaged in the gentlest of naps. Morning sunlight coming in through the window lent a warm and welcoming glow to the room, and to you.

Your mouth was open slightly, though it evidenced none of the contortedness of those last days of tortured respiration. If one’s life energies leave the body through the final outbreaths, then perhaps it had remained open to accommodate any stubborn stragglers loath to vacate the vessel they’d animated for seventy-nine years. For even in the late precipitous decline of your health, your vivacity was palpable.

None of the staff that had greeted me with sympathetic words upon my arrival entered your room with me, and even the corridor outside the doorway now seemed stilled, absent of commotion, as if the charge nurse might have shooed away or shushed any residents that had been hanging around nearby.

Now I sat on a straight-backed chair next to your bed, trying to take it all in, to wrap my head around whatever I was supposed to understand about this momentous event. From my earliest conscious memories up to that final day of 7 November 2006, you had been a living presence in my existence. And in all those forty-plus years, there had not been a single twenty-four-hour span in which you did not in some way figure in it—whether for good or ill.

Now, at last, I was on my own. And while I held the desire and intent to treat your passing with the solemnity and respect it deserved—and you absolutely did deserve such an observance—it was nonetheless difficult to contain my glee at this change of circumstance, my absolute satisfaction.

That will probably always stand as the unfortunate paradox of our relationship.

The undertakers were due to arrive shortly to take you to the funeral home. And I had yet to contact Dylan, Sophie, friends, and cousins, and ask them to spread the word to others. I placed my palms together at my chest, bowed to you and to your departed spirit. And in the silence of the brightening room, and softly, I sang the farewell chant from Kundalini yoga:

“May the longtime sun shine upon you, all love surround you, and the pure light within you guide your way on.”

I stood then to leave—seemingly in charge of my life at last, answerable to no one, emboldened in this unfamiliar role. For just like that little child toddling off the porch in pursuit of fireflies on that now ancient summer night, the world was opening out for me, and me alone. All things seemed new.

Had I known that this was only a beginning, that my healing as an independent man of his own making was merely underway rather than achieved, would I have faltered? Might I have shrunk at some inkling of prescience that the path ahead would be little different in terms of its challenges, heartaches, and setbacks?

Perhaps so. And maybe I needed this childlike sense of security and trust in self to take those necessary first steps out of Hillview nursing home and into my becoming. No matter, they sustained me for a time. I put one foot in front of the other and repeated the process, blissful in my ignorance.

I’ve stumbled and fallen since then—many, many times. But I’m still walking today. The universe willing, I’ll do the same tomorrow.