Death Teaches You How to Live While Fear & Trust Take Your Hands and Wipe Your Tears

I lost my dad exactly two months and 13 days ago to cancer.

Death teaches you how to live. Not just in the way that it reminds you how every kiss, hug, memory, and connection is a special and fleeting moment, but in the way that it brings you into a closer understanding of yourself, the ways you interact in this earthly world, as well as a deeper understanding of the Being you lost. It also teaches you how to soak in every last bit you can, while you can, before you can't anymore. I feel like I have soaked in ten years of wisdom through the loss of my father, and feel a deep, yet sometimes disoriented, spiritual connection to him since his passing.

The passing of my father wasn’t as big of a shock as a death can be. His diagnosis was a shock, his inability to talk to anybody about it, was a shock, and watching his strong, healthy body deteriorate over the course of two and a half years, was a shock. But his final resting felt almost like a breath of fresh air. Which felt strange, because for the last weeks of his life he spent in hospice in the comfort of our cozy home, he breathed borrowed air from the oxygen machine that still haunts me with its nauseating sound of life stealing death, stealing back life.

My dad and I got ‘Breathe Easy’ tattooed together after we completed our Scuba Diving certification when I was 17 years old. We made a deal that if I did that with him, he would get my first tattoo with me. During his final moments, as I crippled under fear that every breath would be his last, and as he struggled between each, reaching deeper and deeper to the life still left in his lungs, I kept whispering to him to ‘Breathe Easy’, and he did, steadily, focused and determined.

He made his way to the top of a mountain in these moments. A mountain I seek to discover, a cliff I cannot wait to get to, so that I can get closer to him.

I ran outside to be with the moon during his final moments, as the fear and physical pain was too much for me to bear, but, he did breathe easy, all the way to the next stage of his souls existence.

My mother, sister, and I had a lot of time to comprehend what was happening - watched it close up, and couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it. It was this agonizing, slow, painful process that doesn’t make much sense when it comes to understanding the course of life and death. Every day was a kick to the gut with a slap in the face of reality reminding you that yes, this is real, and yes, this will define the rest of your life whether you want it to or not. You lose all sense of control over every single thing happening in your life, you have no say in what will happen next. This slow process allows you no time to heal, because how can you when every second of every day is a ticking clock staring you in the face, seemingly laughing at your gripling to get back into the given health we are born with. It was as if he was dying a thousand deaths.

You fight so hard against your body that no longer wants to work for you, to know that eventually, sooner rather than later, it would come to an end, and all the fighting, although necessary, wasn’t necessarily worth it. Your quality of life will never be the same once you start fighting poison with poison… everything around you starts to become poisoned.

My dad was clear about how dissatisfied he was with this entire situation he found himself in and that he truly didn’t believe it to be as bad as it actually was. His last two years was spent being devastated and pissed he couldn’t go do the things he wanted to do, like be outside, fish, hike, run, bike, Be. But he did all that he could with the time he did have, and it reminded me to not take a single breath for granted.

Papa B truly believed that when you speak something out loud - complain about it, stress about it, talk about it - you were manifesting it into existence. This was unacceptable when it came to his diagnosis. It didn’t exist within him, or so he convinced himself, and he started to convince all of us of that if we continued to build on that faith that things would turn around for the better.

He was one of the chosen ones - one of the ‘hosts’. In this painful experience, his body decided it would manifest into this poisonous evil that would eventually cause his demise. For a man who was so spiritual, his ego sure got ahold of him throughout this process. He was ashamed of himself for not being able to fight this, he hated the way the chemo made him look, he was disgusted with how the painkillers made him feel, but what he forgot was that that didn’t mean HE was weak, and I think that’s where he lost himself, because no longer did he have any say over what was going to happen down this dark journey he found himself walking.

I was fully aware that although this ‘meat-suit’ we find ourselves confined in didn’t always work the way it is suppose to, that doesn’t mean it’s our fault, it doesn’t mean our soul essence is losing the battle, too. In fact, I’m starting to believe that maybe it is winning the fight. Maybe all of the best people get taken somewhere better, as they were tested, and passed into the next stage of this multi-dimensional universe, (but that is a discussion for another day).

I find it interesting and terrifying how comforting it is to know of so many people who have experienced this same kind of loss in their lives. Why is cancer such a prevalent thing in today’s modern world? Doesn’t that scare us at all? To know that no matter what we do, 1 in 3 people will have some sort of cancer hosting itself inside of their body and through all the treatments and preventative supplements, there is still a very large possibility one of us will host it?

My mother is a saint of a woman. If it weren't for her, he would have gone a long time ago. She is strong, willful, honest, and comforting. She has this sense of grace about her that makes any horrible situation seem surmountable. She is our safety blanket when anything is wrong, and without her, I’m not so sure we would have been able to get ourselves through this. Sometimes I’m amazed by the ways in which she carries herself in the face of such pain. The ways in which, throughout her entire life, the heaviest of storms have passed over and through her, striking down every chance they get, yet she remains calm, despite every wave trying to drown her.

Death is a strange thing to wrap your head around, especially when you believe so wholeheartedly in a dense after-life. Does believing in energy transmutation and reincarnation make death easier to accept? Does knowing that there is a spirit world, fueled by the energy of love, make the days pass with more ease without this person physically in your world? I’m starting to slowly believe so.

Some days are easy to come by as acceptance feels like this weapon I am easily able to hold onto and ward off any unwanted energies. It's like learning to use a sword and I am the best swordsman out there, slicing through any of the doubts associated with grief. Then, there are the days that feel like my body has been turned inside out. I feel like my heart is on the outside of my body and everybody that comes near me, living out their “perfect” lives with their families still intact, is seemingly stabbing me with their own special and perfect swords. I often feel this sense of anger and deep-seated sadness whenever I see people who still have their fathers, who haven't experienced this kind of pain before.

Now, I understand that comparison is a lethal game that only steals the joy out of the present moment, and my dad would have been pissed if he saw me not living presently, like he always taught us to.

As much as hospice was a welcoming goodbye, it came with a lot of trauma. Watching your loved one die, especially too soon, at the raw age of 59, is deafening. The nightmares, the re-occurrences of those final moments, the way he looked, the way he felt… I know that this is just my mind playing rotten tricks on me, but how can one get those images out of their heads? You don’t. You learn to live with them, and remind yourself that those moments do not DEFINE that individual. You must remember them as they were. Not how they ended.