Practice with saying goodbye

Yesterday I got a series of emails and phone calls from my mom. Her father, age 94, is very ill and we are going to Vancouver today to see him and to say goodbye.

Zeyds (affectionate family nickname for him based on a modification of the Yiddish word for "grandfather") has been an iconic figure throughout my life. Growing up in Vancouver as part of the secular Jewish community we spent a lot of time with my cousins and grandparents not just for holidays but also for community events and the at-the-time dreaded "Saturday school" at what is now the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture where we learned about Yiddish, history, food, and social justice.

I don't have many memories of childhood but do have a lot of memories of Zeyds. He had a small boat and we spent a lot of time on it fishing, which thinking back on it was perhaps my first experience of just sitting. There is a picture of me as a baby standing on the fish gutting deck in diapers with Zeyds' fish hanging beside me -- the fish is bigger than I was, a very good day for him.

Later in life when I transitioned from female to male, my mom's first reaction when I told her I was planning to take hormones and have surgery was that I couldn't tell her father, that it'd kill him. She eventually broke the news to him and he told my mom to get over herself and start using my new name. When I next saw him he said he was so excited to finally have a grandson and couldn't wait to show me the funnel he'd rigged in his basement workshop so he could pee standing up at the sink without having to go upstairs to the bathroom.

He also kept me honest politically. Even when I was a messed up teenager far more concerned about boys and being liked than anything else, he would ask me what was new with the class struggle and expect me to have an intelligent answer, to care about what was going on in the world and to remember what was important beyond self concerns. In his basement was a hidden stash of classic communist literature that he had hidden away for many years after the red scares of the 50s. Some years ago when I was studying Chinese medicine he gave me one of those books, a biography of Norman Bethune written by Chinese comrades. It was spotted with mold from all those years in his basement and the spine was held together with scotch tape and eventually I said goodbye to the book.

Now I am going to Vancouver to say goodbye to Zeyds. This moment is not at all unexpected. Having had many people in my life die the reality that we all die is ever present. And at age 94, having suffered a lot in the last year from dementia and physical pain in some ways it feels overdue for him.

Still it is really hard to mentally and emotionally stay in the present moment. Anticipating the time later today of saying goodbye, the mind alternatively comes up with all sorts of fantasies about what that moment and the future without him will be like, and memories of the past. There are complicated family dynamics, and complicated dynamics with the care home staff being divided about my family's instructions to provide non-invasive palliative care rather than invasive treatments to try to cure the infection that is damaging his urinary tract. In all this although there is genuine concern for him there is also a lot of self concern. I am losing my grandfather. I am losing someone who completely loved and accepted me. I am angry that he's dying in a care home and not in the home he lived in for 60+ years, where his wife died. I'm dreading dealing with my parents' grief and the rest of the family. It's a lot about me and my wants and losses and wishes and preferences, the way I feel the world should be unfolding to suit how I think things should happen.

So, my practice today will be to just be with him and my family and continuously let go with each out breath. To know where I am and what is happening in this moment, to experience this moment fully rather than missing it because my mind is caught up in future and past. When the moment does come to say goodbye, to say it fully.

“Be reminded that this great matter of birth and death is of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes us by like an arrow and opportunity is lost. Each of us must strive to awaken. Don’t squander your life.”