Farewell to my father

Intermittent, shallow breaths, bed he lay upon.
A gurgle, a grimace, one last gasp, and gone.

Such was the manner of my father's passing on January 30^th, 2023. For the first time in my life, death was not an academic thought experiment, but a real, visceral encounter with mortality. My heroic mother, bedside-bound for days, famished, and sleep deprived, loved him to the end. Though this was her third time keeping vigil over someone in his/her final hour, my mother's undying love for her husband is the stuff of legend in an age where most patients and their caregivers surrender to the inevitable much sooner.

But it’s all wrong. 

Whether the hour is early or late, death is not right. Even though my father’s pain medication was carefully tuned, I could tell, through that brief frown that disturbed his otherwise peaceful countenance over the previous 24 hours, that in those final moments he realized his impending doom. We are meant for life: death is a cosmic disruption of earth-shattering proportions. For a full day, my father's every delayed breath was followed up with quick catch-up breaths to recover precious oxygen – self-preservation to the end. It was agony to watch, though I still tried to keep the mood light around my family.

The late, great Fr. Richard Neuhaus wrote a book about his near-death experience, called As I Lay Dying. In it, he dispelled the myth of our modern ‘dying with dignity’ mentality. “Death is the final indignity,” he said. No matter how we dress it up, death remains a catastrophic rupture in our human fabric – redeemed only by the hope that there is a pathway to reunification.

If we were to help a non-religious person understand Heaven, it’s this: whether the relationship is romantic or filial, we wish to be with be those we love. When you love someone, you want to be in their company all the time. You could talk to them for hours, into the night, and not tire. Sometimes you don’t even need to talk at all – just sit in their presence.

The desire to always be with loved ones is a powerful force. It can inspire a daughter to convince her father to get baptized so that when they do get parted, it won’t be for long. Heaven is the fulfillment of every visit cut short, every meeting ending too soon, every reluctant parting. God, who is Love, breaks down all barriers of time and space so that His love extends through every degree of separation – binding all our individual loves into His. 

My father loved people. He loved with an impartiality that was unrivaled. Everyone was interesting to him. There was something interesting about every individual he met and he was going to talk to you until he figured out what it was. He never said a bad word about anyone (plenty of bad words – just directed at broken farm equipment and other fateful circumstances).

On a scale from orc to elf, I suppose my father would slide neatly into hobbit: short in stature, ale drinking, lover of all things that grow. He studied agriculture at the University of Guelph back when they still had cattle grazing in pastures around campus. The farm he and my mother purchased in Laurentian Valley Township overlooks the Indian River and the fields beyond, like a majestic moviescape. 

All this beauty, and yet his vision was obscured during the back half of his life with congenital cracks in his retina. I vividly recall the sit-down family meeting during which it was announced that he would no longer be able to see our baseball games or, at least at a minimum, not be able to drive us to them. Did that deter him? No. He still coached and ran indoor fastball skills clinics for another decade. He also took up blind bowling, blind fishing, and even blind hockey. Somehow, he managed to drive the tractor and scrape a living off the land with merely peripheral vision.

Strangely, I believe he was better off without his sight. Who knows what kinds of ‘Tookish’ mischief he’d have gotten into? Based on tales from his youth, he’d already fulfilled a lifetime’s quota. Since vision is our dominant sense, my father’s impairment made him more humble, dependent, though understandably frustrated. When I first reached his deathbed, I assured him that he would have a new pair of eyes soon.

In the eyes of the world, my father’s life may not seem so remarkable. But when looked through Heaven’s eyes his life is remarkable indeed – not because of all the amazing things my father did, but because of the amazing things that God did for him.  

Born and raised in the secular science town of Deep River, Ontario, his irreligious upbringing did not portend a death in friendship with God. But he fell in love with my German Catholic mother and agreed to raise any children in her tradition upon marrying. He was never hostile to religion (he saved up any hostility for when his children disobeyed their mother). But religious indifference can be an even greater challenge to overcome. At least the hostile atheist is consciously contending with God on the intellectual level whereas God had to compete with sports and cows for my father’s attention.

He reluctantly entered the Church when my siblings and I were teenagers, much to the delight of his mother-in-law (now in her nineties) and in no small way due to her relentless prayers. Though her weakened memory makes prayer routines more difficult, her daughter (my mother), has taken up the mantle. Her prayer list is long and gets longer all the time because no one ever comes off of it. My father is no exception – it’s just that the nature of the prayer has changed from ‘save his body’ to ‘save his soul’.

My family feels confident that my father is on route to the Good Place, but there has been no shortage of prayers from all quarters to speed his steps along that path. Within a minute after he drew his final breath, the Catholic chaplain just happened upon our hospital room to say prayers for the recently deceased. Within an hour, that same priest said Mass specifically for him in the hospital chapel. The day before, he received the Sacrament of the Sick which he also received 3 weeks prior (when we thought he was dying the first time). An entire archdiocesan seminary’s worth of priests were offering Masses for him throughout the ordeal because my wife works there and kindly kept her boss updated. 

While his medical care was at times suspect, his spiritual care has been second to none. I sure hope that when my time comes, I get the kind of heat in the hot air balloon that he is benefitting from. He may even get time served for the suffering he has endured. But we don’t know for sure, and that’s why we pray.

Here’s to Robert Gordon Austen, a.k.a. Rob, Bobbie, Dad, the ‘dude’, the ‘sausage man’, the ‘sugar bear without no hair’, or just ‘Shug’. Thank you for fathering me. Without you, I wouldn’t even exist, let alone become the man I am today. Now that you can see the puck again, you should start working on your game – I’m looking forward to playing a lot of hockey in Heaven.