SUSAN TYNER | CONTRIBUTOR

I watched my Daddy be born into Heaven today.

We were all around him as he lay dying in his bed at home. I squeezed his hand on one side while Mama grasped the other, my sister balancing on the mattress at his head while my brother held his feet. With our spouses and his many grandchildren crowded around, we sat with him one more time in his bedroom. We were no strangers to this room—there for about fifty years we had yelled at Ole Miss football games on the TV, nursed coffee during early morning talks, climbed into the warm covers while he read his Bible in a close by chair, even played tic-tac-toe in lotion on his back. Decades of normal breathing and living. And so, it was a blessing that when he needed to die, we could be in that familiar-made-sacred space together.

I never saw someone die before, and it’s amazing how the human body will struggle to stay alive. We held our breaths as we counted his. He would pause breathing and we would look at each other, is this it? only to see him gasp air again. This happened so many times that once we laughed because it got comical for such a heavy moment—or maybe we just needed to release a tension we were not used to holding for so long.

The hospice staff told us he could hear us even though he couldn’t respond, and Daddy proved them right when he squeezed Mama’s hand, responding that he loved her. His clavicle strained just like my little boy’s did when he had croup. We felt his pulse slow, lagging only a little behind his breath.

At some point we attempted to comfort him by reciting Psalm 23 as a group. I think we added thirty minutes to his life because we flubbed it so bad my mom had to take over like the school teacher she is. Again, we laughed. How terrible for Daddy to hear us collectively fail a basic test when he had invested his adult life teaching us the Bible. Here we had been telling him to go and not worry about us and he’s lying there thinking, WHAT? My kids can’t even remember The Lord is My Shepherd?? What kind of shape am I leaving them in?

Then, although we knew he was leaving, it was weird when in one moment after midnight, he did not catch his breath. Suddenly, he was gone. And, we did not feel like laughing anymore but going to our corners of the house to be quiet and do whatever one does after watching your role model leave your world.

What seemed like only moments later, the funeral home is on site, desecrating our sacred bedroom. As I fill out paperwork, the hospice nurse tells me that Daddy, who practiced medicine for the hospice company, actually had worked earlier that week for them. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He pushed and tackled cancer’s pain the way he played linebacker at Bentonia High School. Whether it was football, medicine, church, or a good Mississippi snow day, Will Thompson left it all on the field. Why would his death week be any different?

I see them put Daddy’s body in a plastic bag. As a doctor, he saw death a lot and this scene would not shock him. I did not know at the time it was shocking me. I assumed my head knowledge that he was in a better place would inoculate me from shock—that the theology I had been taught would cushion the impact grief causes.

I was wrong.

I went to bed that week surprised that I was not comforted by Jesus more. I thought that I would have a warm and fuzzy feeling of peace knowing Daddy was happy and pain free. But instead, I opened his drawer and smelled the clean detergent scent of his undershirts and wondered how can someone still seem like they are alive and not be where I cannot call him? Does he remember us? Or, is time so weird for him that he won’t have time to miss us before we go where he is?

I felt jolted and untethered. My head knowledge was not serving me very well—it did not tell me what Daddy was doing right this minute. What is he experiencing in his new reality? We are cleaning up his medicines; what is he doing? Did his faith become sight when he died? Is he saying to himself as he said so often alive, COOL! Or did he trust a myth meant to comfort the dying and a daughter’s meeting with funeral home people in the middle of the night?

Yet, eventually my theology did kick in, and I remembered Luke 1 when Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would be a mother. Her response was not distrust or lack of faith, but probably similar to what I was feeling, a total lack of understanding. How can these things be?

How can Mary have a baby without a sperm and how can my Daddy be alive and well in a world I’ve never seen? Gabriel’s response to Mary comforts me as well.

With God all things are possible.

The God I trust, the one who created the worlds and still counts the hairs on my head, can do anything. I don’t have to understand it; I need to believe it, even if I can’t picture it.

As I think back on that bedside death scene, I realize how much it was not a death, but a birth. A backwards birth into heaven. Just like an OB nurse comes out to the family waiting room and says, it won’t be long now, our hospice nurse told us, death’s getting close; it won’t be long now. Just like family members anticipate the new father coming in holding a baby to be fawned over, I imagined an unseen waiting room where angels were jumping out of their skin ready to swoon over the newest addition. And as we were looking at Daddy’s oxygen levels dropping and measuring the moments between his breaths, wasn’t Jesus monitoring those same breaths even more closely and getting off His throne to run and catch Daddy as he was born into heaven?

The angels and my family were on opposite sides of a life that night. As we cried, they cheered. As we let go, they embraced. Just like a family breaks open champagne when a new baby is added to the clan, I’m sure heaven broke open the good stuff when Big Will Thompson burst through the tape. Well done, Daddy.

Precious in the site of the Lord is the death of his saints. Psalm 116:15

Photo by Olesya Grichina on Unsplash