Final earthly days and Feb. 18, 2015

What a life-changing week the past seven days have been. God has and continues to teach me so much. Now that I’m mercifully feeling a little more rested, I’d like to share some more details of what happened, and also some reflections as I solidify them in my own mind. I’ll do a series of posts to cover all of what I’d like to share. Thank you for continuing to read this blog. May God be glorified even more.

Sunday, Feb. 15, was Daniel’s last good day of responsiveness. His hemoglobin dipped into the sixties according to Monday’s blood test (normal is 135) and so I was working on getting him another transfusion for his energy and alertness. But the doctor was never there when I was.

Anyways, the kids and I visited him on Sunday and had a relatively good visit. While he was of course very sleepy, he still laid his hand on Josiah’s shoulder and hugged him for a good long while, with Josiah soaking it in. After Kezia finished her snacks sitting with Daddy, she asked me if she could hug Daddy. She got on all fours on his bed and laid her head on his stomach as she has done a few times before. So special. That was the last time they got to see him before Heaven.

Monday and Tuesday were days of a lot of sleeping for Daniel. He had a lot of trouble trying to get alert enough to answer any questions. Sometimes, no answer came at all. He was just too tired. The med he needed finally came in and good friends of ours picked it up for me Tuesday evening. It’s amazing how the Lord provided the med even though it would turn out that Daniel wouldn’t need it. I spent my last evening with him once again by his bedside, praying, listening to a sermon, and holding his hand.

In his sleep, Daniel’s hands would start fiddling with his trache mask or his dressings, and then I would gently remind him, “Daniel, you shouldn’t take off your dressing.” His hands would become still and then he would slowly lower them as he came to himself, his eyes still closed. This had been a pretty common occurrence those last several days.

And so, the life-changing phone call. At 3:29am Wednesday, I got the call from one of his nurses, Sarah. She said she was so sorry but that Daniel had passed. Having just woken up in a start, while I had heard her it was so surreal I asked her to repeat herself. She did. My heart and mind were overwhelmed with the answer God had now given me. I asked her what happened and she told me. She asked if I needed a cab ride, etc. and I said I didn’t, that I had friends on-call. She asked if I needed anything else, and I said, “I just need to pray.”

Getting off the phone, I poured out my heart to God, both overwhelmed with the deep sorrow of losing him, but also with the unspeakable joy knowing that Daniel was face to face with his Lord and Saviour. Finally! I grieved that God’s answer wasn’t a wonderful miracle of healing in this world, but I praised Him for the assurance that Daniel was fully healed and whole and utterly happy in the presence of Jesus. The comfort of that time in prayer was profound.

Still, I was in shock at the finality of that simple phone call. After I prayed, I called my friend who had volunteered to be on-call, “Hi, Kim. I got the call.” While I waited for her and her husband to arrive, I continued to pour out my heart to God, still in that shocked place between broken-heartedness and joy. Grief and hope. Profound pain and intimate worship. When they arrived, we prayed in my kitchen. I ended with, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Kim’s husband stayed at my house while Kim drove me. We got to the hospital sometime after four. I spoke with Daniel’s two nurses shortly, and then I went in to see his body. I was struck with the obviousness that he wasn’t there anymore. It was just his shell. I placed my hand on his forehead (still a little warm) and prayed aloud, worshipping God once again.

After a while, I talked with the nurses more about what happened: around 3am, in his sleep, Daniel’s hands took off his dressings. Only this time, they also started taking off the tumour itself. This caused an unstoppable bleed. On their rounds, the nurses found the bleed in progress and estimate it had been going for about eight minutes by that time. He was sleeping through all of this. They held his hands until he passed away. They said he was completely relaxed and peaceful. What a mercy. And I’m so glad they were there with him.

As an aside, I think it is so obvious that God took Daniel home in His perfect timing. Daniel slept through it all, and yet the Lord allowed and even directed his hands to cause the bleed that would cause him to step into eternity. The cancer didn’t kill him. He didn’t suffer through the trauma of suffocating. I believe it’s as if God said it’s time to take off this earthly shell and enter into My rest.

As the early morning went on, key friends and family were informed, with several coming to the hospital. The news quickly spread. There were quiet conversations by Daniel’s bedside, prayers for peace and comfort for us who are left, and many hot blankets offered to me by the nurses. The rest of the morning was mostly spent in the ward “quiet room,” where I talked with those who came to help and support me. We discussed next steps (while I tried to choke down some breakfast), and started arranging details for the services as the morning went on. Thank you to all the friends and pastors who came to help.

After spending some final time alone in Daniel’s room by his still body, praying and praising God, I once again appreciated how obvious it was that his soul was with the Lord. Still, there was nothing easy about it. Praise God for the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

Later that morning, friends of mine and I reconvened at Timberline to plan Daniel’s services. Not having really thought about it before, I decided that I wanted the graveside and the memorial to be on separate days. Not only for the kids’ sake because it would be a very long day, but more so for the very different purposes of the services. The first more focused on saying goodbye to his earthly body, and the second a celebration of a life well-lived for Christ. I didn’t want one or the other to distract from the importance of being fully present in both. I didn’t want to have to force myself to switch gears and just go through the motions.

Of course, with the timeframe that we had (Friday and Saturday services), which was because several key people were going away, we had a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. Thank you to so many of you who helped make the wonderful services happen, and arrange all the details. While I still needed to do a fair amount, it would have been impossible without the wonderful service of so many.

After lunch, I took a walk around the ranch to clear my head and continued to pray and reflect on God’s truth. I spent a few hours up at the campfire ring, riding emotional waves of pain, joy, sadness, hope, grief, and comfort. Thank you to so many of you for your messages and comments on Facebook. I read many of them while up there and thanked God for how He had worked in my beloved husband’s life.

 

Once home, (there had been babysitting all this time between several people), I sat down with Josiah to tell him what had happened. I started by saying, “Remember in our Jesus storybooks how Jesus is a real Person, even though we can’t see Him? Well, Daddy has gone to be with Jesus now, and even though we can’t see him or visit him anymore, he is living with Jesus. And guess what! He is so happy! And we’ll get to see him again when God calls us home, but we don’t know when that will be.”

We had several conversations over the next few days (and still are) about what that means. I made sure he knew he could share his emotions with me as well as his questions. Since then, I’ve just been very open and accepting of Josiah’s childish logic and am helping him to make sense of it as much as a four year old can grasp. He’s doing okay. Kezia, being just barely two, doesn’t have much of an idea of what this means, but I still tell her very simply that Daddy is with Jesus, that he loved her so much, and that he is so happy!

Later that evening, a few friends came over to drop something off and we talked, and another friend came over to help me write the eulogy for the memorial bulletin. Heading to bed, I once again immersed my mind in God’s Word listening to rich sermons. It was a long, life-changing day. Praise God for giving me strength.