Continuum

Back in my office (Starbucks) in Gloucester, Virginia.
Yesterday we held services for my Dad, who passed away the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.  My brain won't do the math to give the date.
It was 6:30 p.m. on the dot when his spirit left.  I had been staying in the Hospice with him since the Saturday before.  Sitting there at the foot of his bed watching him breath for three and a half days.  He was in a great deal of pain from a bad fall that put him there.  At ninety-five, a person really can't fall.  Especially if they are over six foot tall.
When you have lived close to a century, floors are especially hard.
He did everything.  Raised as a child during the Great Depression on a dirt poor hard scrabble dirt farm in the high desert of Utah.  A place where nothing grows unless you damn near pull it out of the ground.  He also served with high valor during a World War.  Married and remained married to the same woman for nearly seventy years.  Is survived by three children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
When my oldest son had Dad's first great-grandchild, he said, "It's not so much I think about being a great-grandfather, but being the father of a grandfather really does stick in my mind."

And his passing was peaceful.

When I first received word that he had fallen and due to his age and state of health, he was not expected to be able to pull out of it, I was truly crushed.  Hours of intense weeping in the company of my wife, who also loved him dearly.  Everything, reality seemed to stop - on hold until I got my plane tickets and got to his bedside.
One of my niece's sons picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Dad's hospice room.  As soon as I walked into his room, he knew I was there.  Some may find it odd, but as soon as I saw him, was in his presence, much of my intense grief left me.  Something about the thought of him passing without my being there, was worse than actually being there.

He seemed to have an aura of serenity and gratitude that I had come.

For the first two days he was quite aware.  He spoke with many of his grandchildren on the phone and my brother in Australia.  He was always such a tough dude, for a while we all thought he might pull out of it.  After all he had twice before.

Every year after ... oh ... say eighty (or so) seems to be like five or six when a person is younger though.  The difference between ninety-four and ninety-five, I think, is more like ten years than one year.  Jeez, he had had cancer and recovered so many times, I don't even remember how many.  For the last twenty years he was always being treated for cancer of one sort or another.

I am not a religious person.  None of the major faiths ever actually made sense to me.  I did try, really tried.  The whole logic was missing something.  Still is.  That is another topic.  And yet there is something that says to me this physical life is just not all that there is.  It keeps coming back to me, if matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how can a human awareness, a mind, just be created or destroyed.

So whether his sentient being was with us just after his last breath or not may be suspect to some, but I felt he was there.  Still do.  I feel my mother presence in the same way, though it's been some three years since she died.  I cannot balance (?) the concept of life in the physical body as being one thing.  It has nothing to do with there being a God, or prophets, or scriptures, or morality being based on some arbitrary set of rules written by men and women.

Odd?  It seems scientific to me that awareness is universal and timeless - infinite in all directions.  That every once in a while all the elements required to bring a physical life, as we think of say - human - just co-aless and congeal.  The elements themselves that make up a new body generate enough energy - and it all must be exact and precise - to produce awareness within the life form.

How is this any different from two highly flammable gases combining under similarly required precision to produce a compound all earthly life forms require to maintain those lives?  And some compounds, like water, seem (according to most scientific data we posses) remains as water throughout the infinite universe.  It can be boiled, frozen, fractured in all kinds of ways and poof it reforms as water.

It might be highly polluted, but we have exactly the same amount of water on this planet as we did when the surface, the mantel, solidified.  Exactly, down to the molecule.

So is my father, is the loved ones, of any person or persons gone because their bodies are nonfunctional as far as we can determine?  I don't think so.