To Heaven and Back (13 page)

October 2010; Betsy, Mary, Peter, Eliot and Bill on our first trip without Willie.

I love the water and still enjoy kayaking whenever possible.

I continue to find satisfaction as a surgeon, although I now try to integrate the spiritual component of healing.

Willie posts his first “No Idling” sign in Jackson Hole. Since then, his message of making a difference has continued to inspire people, a growing number of Idle-reduction campaigns have been championed, and signs have been posted in at least thirty cities.

Two weeks after my discharge from the hospital, I received a phone call telling me that my father, Bob, was being taken off life-support. What??? Though my brain was working well and I could hear the words, I could not understand the information I was being given. I hadn’t even known my father was in the hospital, so how could I possibly understand that his life-sustaining ventilator was being removed?

As the story unfolded, I discovered that two weeks earlier he wasn’t feeling well when he had had been visiting my brother in San Francisco. Upon his return to Michigan, he developed severe pneumonia. My father was admitted to the
hospital for treatment, but when his condition did not improve with antibiotics, he was placed on a ventilator in an attempt to improve his oxygen transfer. His condition continued to worsen despite this aggressive care and, when his internal organs sequentially failed, my stepmother made the decision to remove his external life support. Inexplicably, she had also made the decision not to contact me or any of my three siblings (we were all children from his previous marriage) when he was hospitalized, when his conditioned worsened, or before she made the final decision of removing his external life support.

Over the years, my father’s relationship with my siblings and me had been strained by the circumstances in which he lived. He often spoke of how he desperately wanted a close relationship with each of us, but that his wife was entirely unsupportive of this and presented many obstacles. She was a widow with five children, several of whom still lived at home with her and my father. I just don’t think she wanted to accept the fact that my father had a life prior to their marriage or that he had four grown children of his own. She prevented him from having our photographs in their house, calling us from their home, or going out of his way to visit us. He cried often when discussing this with us, but was unable, or unwilling, to demand change. My father’s impending death would make the strained relationships final and abolish any possibility of reconciliation. For these reasons, I knew the importance of our seeing our
father before his last thread of connection to life was severed.

Without speaking to my stepmother, I contacted my father’s attending physician and pleaded with him to maintain the life support until my siblings and I could arrive. Although this would require my father to be on the ventilator an extra day or two, as we were each coming from distant parts of the country, he very grudgingly agreed to do so. I am chagrined to admit that his agreement came only after I acted like a bully.

My siblings were at the airport when I arrived and we drove directly to my father’s hospital. When I entered the room where my father was lying in his hospital bed, I saw that he was sedated and the ventilator was rhythmically pushing air in and out of his lungs. Although he was still “alive,” I had the overwhelming sense, really more of a deep knowledge, that his soul had already departed from his body. He was already dead. Although it is a commonly-held belief that a person’s soul departs at the moment of their physical death, I have come to believe that the departure of the soul defines and determines the moment of death, rather than the body’s physical death determining the moment of the soul’s departure. With the use of modern medicine and technology, the organism that is our human body may continue to physically function and appear to be “alive,” but unless God sees a purpose to return the soul to its body, the person is essentially dead. Not only had I witnessed this during
my surgical training, but there are far too many accounts of near-death experiences in which there is a description of the soul departing the shell of its not-yet physically dead body to ignore this reality.

My father had been a vivacious, active, and physically fit man. He and his twin brother had been National Collegiate Athletic Association track stars, part of an elite crowd of champions and members of the NCAA Hall of Fame. My emotions were mixed as I had a chance to sit alone in the hospital room with my father’s now pale and somewhat shrunken body. I felt joy for him—for his reunion with God—and I felt a little bit sorry for myself, as I still had not reconciled the need for my own return to earth from the river bank in Chile. I regretted that I did not have a final opportunity to express my love and gratitude to Dad for his life, and even more deeply saddened that I never had the opportunity to tell him of my recent experiences in heaven. I could have given him a glimpse of the great joy awaiting his arrival and I think that hearing about it would have made his departure more tranquil.

My brothers, Rob and Bill, my sister, Betsy, our stepmother, and I were at my father’s bedside when the ventilator tube was removed from his body and he slowly took his last breath.

Afterward, Rob, Bill, Betsy, and I returned to our hotel room, where we reminisced, cried, and laughed long into the night as each of us recalled
our childhood adventures with our father. We spent the next several days organizing the flowers and programs, while our stepmother tended to other aspects of his memorial service. To be fair, I should say that my siblings did the organizing while I waited in the car or wherever else they put me since both of my legs were still immobilized in long casts and it was a slow struggle for me to follow them with my walker.

I already described the First Presbyterian Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as being elegant, old, and beautiful. During my father’s funeral, the large, traditional stained glass windows bathed the main sanctuary with an array of color. As I sank into the familiar front row pew, I allowed my mind to go backward in time to embrace and re-experience the wonder I always felt as a child when looking at the images in those same windows.

My father had been well known and well respected in our state, and it seemed that everyone in the region had turned out to pay their last respects. It was a long service, but the attendees were patient as I was painstakingly helped to rise from my wheelchair and step up to the podium to deliver one of his eulogies. By the time the bagpipes played “Amazing Grace” at the end of the service, I was thoroughly exhausted.

My trip back to Wyoming required a change of planes in Cincinnati, Ohio. My flight to Salt Lake City was just beginning to board when the
fire alarm in the terminal sounded. Despite having traveled extensively, I never had this experience and will probably never encounter it again! Everyone in the terminal was instructed to exit the building and stand outside on the tarmac. I tried to follow these instructions but had no one to help me as I rolled myself along with the crowd. I was soon stranded in my wheelchair at the top of a very long stairway leading to the tarmac and, as the other people streamed outside, I began to cry in frustration.

I was feeling extremely sorry for myself and my situation. There were no airport employees anywhere in sight and, thinking that it was more important for Bill to stay in Wyoming with our children, I had declined Bill’s offer to travel with me to Michigan. I just couldn’t believe that after all I’d been through I was going to die in a fire. I didn’t even have a working cell phone to call for help or to phone in my last goodbyes! After a while, an airport employee saw me and, when I explained my predicament, told me, “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a false alarm anyway.”

Okay. God still had plans for me.

After my return from Michigan, my mother arrived in Jackson Hole to help care for me and to help my husband care for our children. The day after her arrival, we discovered that my stepfather, like my father several weeks earlier, had just been admitted to his local hospital with a case of pneumonia. This was not George’s first bout of pneumonia, as he had a form of myelodysplasia, which is a blood disorder that frequently results in pneumonia. Remarkably, my father’s pneumonia was caused by a similar blood disorder; something he had been living with but had kept secret until his final hospitalization. I spoke with George’s physician, who reassured me that my stepfather appeared to be
responding well to the antibiotics, so we should not be overly concerned.