It is only after the funeral, when fatigue washes over me, that I recognize the magnitude of what has happened. I have only been this tired four times in my life before, each time after having given every grain of emotional energy and physical endurance to birthing a human person into new life.

The fatigue tells me that attending to my father’s death is something of that magnitude. Only this time, I was only a midwife to a birthing, joining in a groaning travail known to all of creation...as my father was born again, again.

My father had been "born again" at age 19. All his long life, he loved to tell how he had started to attend meetings at the Gospel Hall in Calgary with his best friend, Walt Bennett. Convinced by the preaching of the Word that Jesus Christ had a legitimate claim on his life, he decided one Sunday that the next Sunday he would ask Jesus to be his personal Saviour.

All that long week he counted the cost-and the next Sunday, he stayed after the gospel preaching of the evening service at the Gospel Hall to give his life unreservedly to Jesus Christ.

"I didn’t jump over any fences or shout ‘Hallelujah,’" he would always explain, "but I had made a business deal with God: I had given Christ my life and accepted His offer of eternal life, and I knew that for me everything had changed. I had been born again."

Crossing over

Last summer, 70 years later, the outcome of that faith reached its climax at the point of his crossing over from one life to another. The process was as mysterious as his first "new birth," as much a matter of faith in God’s Word. This time, I was there.

Please don’t think it was easy, or pretty, although as dying goes I suppose it was basically routine. Emergency surgery on a depleted and aged body, complications, death.

It is, for me, the sightlessness of his eyes that is the strongest memory when I stop trying not to think about it. My sister, Marg, and I keep watch on each side of his bed: two middle-aged women made one by shared love and grief. We speak softly to him: "We’re here with you, Dad," we say. "You can go now-it’s time to go now. We bless you on your way, Dad. You can go home, Dad."

We cannot stop crying, and yet what we feel is as much joy as sadness.

I had cut short a trip in the United Kingdom when the surgeon asked Marg to call me to relay a message: "Tell your sister if she wants to see her dad before he dies, she’d better get on the plane now."

I do not think I need to see my Dad-we said goodbyes before I left Canada but I do feel I need to be with my sister, and to help our mother. I cancel everything and come home, across an ocean, across a continent.

It is only when we are delayed for four hours before taking the short flight from Calgary to Edmonton that I know why I have had to come home: not for them, but for me. My heart cries louder with each passing hour as we await take-off between encircling thunderstorms, "Oh Dad, I’m coming. Wait for me, Dad...I’m coming to see you home."

When at last we lift out of Calgary, I look through the beveled squares of the commuter plane windows at the white and blue stenciling of his beloved Rockies, and I say goodbye for him: goodbye, blue mountains; goodbye, summer green prairie, gold under the long fingers of the late afternoon sun; goodbye, beautiful, beautiful earth.

Let him go

Dad knows me immediately, and through the hallucinations the pain medication induces, he shapes the question, "Is there some cause for alarm?" I talk with the doctor about changing pain-control so Dad is more lucid; and when the almost-inevitable pneumonia develops, we ask for a family conference with the surgeon.

Please, we say, don’t treat the pneumonia. Let this be his last struggle. Let him go.

But, even then, how that shrunken body clings to life. We are with Dad as much as we can be. We stay, now, at a hostel provided by the Rotary club, half-way between the long-term care hospital where our mother is and the hospital where our dad lingers, two minutes from a call from nursing staff at either place.

Over the next few days, people keep coming in to say goodbye to Dad, to say thank you. Sometimes he squeezes a hand, knows who is there, mouths a comment, even prays for them. Sometimes he is too far away to know or respond.

My father and mother have lived, simply and hospitably, in a sequence of modest homes in Edmonton for more than 50 years. Yet the people who say goodbye are from around the globe, with names from Jones and Mathison to Oostra and Khan and Tran, and from four generations.

Walt Bennett, his boyhood chum and spiritual mentor, comes and sits awhile every day right down to the last one, when he says, simply, "Goodbye, Buddy. I’ll be seeing you."

One evening near the end, my father is clear enough to be able to talk with me through the "evening shift."

"I think I’ll be going home to the Lord tonight," he says.

I nod. "Maybe you will, Dad." I think: is he asking me to have someone to come in and pray with him? So I ask, "Is that all right?"

"Why, of course!" he replies without hesitation, surprised that I should ask such a question. It is well with his soul.

The staff puts a cot in the room for us as we take turns staying overnight, close enough to be at Dad’s side when he speaks or calls out, but able to get a bit of sleep. We sing, those nights, quietly, the old hymns and choruses he used to sing or whistle. When he is conscious, Dad mouths the words along with us: "Oh, that will be / glory for me…" and "Face to face with Christ my Saviour…" Sometimes he smiles as the notes fade into the twilight around us.

Last night

The last night of his life it is my turn to sleep on the cot, to be the physical presence of love and family in his room. After a couple of days when he was either unresponsive or unable to make himself understood, there is a small miracle: I can, that last night, understand everything he says.

"I’m here with you, Dad," I say, and he murmurs-"Still here, sweetheart?" We sleep in little fits and starts, both coughing in the dry air, a sort of secret conversation of throat clearings and coughs.

At about two in the morning, Dad is suddenly awake. "Oh," he cries out, "I’m so cold."

This is it, I think.

I ask for a warmed blanket and the night nurses bring it and pack it carefully in around him. The warmth spreads through him and we sleep again.

At about four he begins to whimper like a child. Like a little hurt puppy. This time the nurses and I are just able to understand him: "My right leg is hurting almost unbearably."

Much more than competent, the nurses are wonderfully gentle and kind. They usher me out of the room, suggesting I go for coffee. The first light of the day is streaking the sky with mauve as they turn him, make him comfortable, sedate him again, and sit with him until he is quiet again.

By the next morning, he no longer responds. His hand is relaxed and unflexed, the grip gone. Near supper time, Marg and I can see that his breathing has changed, becoming more shallow. Now just the minute-to-minute reality of the last hour of our Dad’s life, the rasping of his breathing. In and out. In and out.

We ask Marg’s husband to read from Dad’s Bible the passage we choose: "The time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."

We sing, then, too, through our tears, the hymn that best spoke the love that had sustained our father from his first encounter with Jesus, and would sustain him, and us now: "My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine…"

I will love thee in life,
I will love thee in death;
And praise thee as long
as thou lendest me breath;
And say, when the death dew
lies cold on my brow
If ever I loved thee, my Jesus ‘tis now.

And then she shut his eyes

His breathing grew shallower still, more quiet. Just little sips of air. Marg and her husband went to get our little mother and a nurse came in, quietly and gravely, to shut the oxygen off. The breathing became even quieter. Our niece, Teresa, had taken Marg’s place across the bed from me. Together, she and I watched the last, ever more widely spaced breaths.

For one moment, he raised his head from his pillow and, as though he were gathering all of life’s light up into one last gaze, his eyes focused, intent and piercing in one last look-not at us, but at some point beyond us, and then he lay back. Teresa, an experienced nurse, showed me where to watch the pulse flutter, like a moth under the skin at the side of his neck, until it stilled. And then she shut his eyes.

Dimly enough, yet somehow surely, I realized that the same love my dad had responded to in the gospel invitation in his youth was the love in which, and into which, he died. As the apostle Paul puts it, "I am convinced that neither death nor life...will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8: 38, 39).

The new birth my dad experienced in his late teens was just the beginning of something; the day he died, I believe its promise was fulfilled and he received "the end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul" (1 Peter 1:8,9).

In dying, I believe my father was delivered into the full presence of the One, whom, having not seen, he had loved.

And so, seeping up through the fatigue and the sense of huge loss, there was for me, as there had been at other birthings, "joy unspeakable and full of glory." My dad had been born again, again.

Maxine Hancock is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver. An occasional contributor to ChristianWeek, she is a well known Canadian author, broadcaster and speaker.