Yoda’s Last Teaching

June 12, 2024

The face looks up at me, staring, unblinking. Is it looking at me or just looking? It’s hard to say.

I try to look back with attention. To hold that face and that stare in my gaze. To be present. My mind wanders. I think of food and the incoming guest arriving at our vacation rental. I need to contact her. I feel the pull of the phone like Frodo feels the pull of the Ring. I am no Zen master. I am and always have been easily distractible.

I do my best to hold this gaze, to present my face to this other face. I tell myself over and over that there is nothing more important I can do today than to be a face that looks back at this face.

The other face, I know, is searching for a face it knows, a face it loves, a face that loves it back. When such a face first appears, the face breaks into a smile or even a laugh. Often the smile is so big the eyes disappear.

But the face has a headband across it and under the headband an oxygen saturation sensor. A feeding tube goes into the nose. An oxygen mask covers the mouth. Joe is my father-in-law. He is 91 years old and he is dying.

He does not know he is dying in the way he knows that I am here or that he owns a Jeep. But in spite of his dementia, he seems to know it.

A week ago in the Emergency Department for a separate problem, he told me to go. He told me to get food. He told me to get rest. He told me he is fine.

Three days ago, I rushed him to the Emergency Department again, this time with pneumonia. Yesterday in the ICU, he told me to go. He told me to get food. He told me to get rest. He told me he is fine.

Today he doesn’t tell me to go.

I ask if it’s okay if I go get some food. He shakes his head vigorously to say no. He is troubled.

I ask if he is scared, and he shakes his head yes. I tell him I will stay as long as he needs. I tell him his daughter (my wife) and his son with his wife and kids, his grandchildren, have all just arrived in town. I tell him he will not be alone. I think to myself that what I really mean is that he will be alone at times, but he will not die alone. He calms down and eventually goes to sleep. He is stable, in no danger tonight. I go get something to eat and some sleep myself and leave him alone.

June 13, 2024, morning

Today, the family has come. He is surrounded. The fear of being alone, of dying alone, is gone. His good spirits return. He smiles. He laughs at jokes. He tells everyone to go get food and rest. He is unfailingly polite to the staff. They all describe him as sweet. He tells everyone — family, doctors, nurses, aides — that he is fine.

June 13, 2024, afternoon

We are alone again for a time while others are running errands and talking to doctors and taking care of the things that, in spite of all this, must be taken care of. He has new worries. He asks, “How is Mary?” She’s doing okay, I say. She has just had her own trip through the ICU and is early in her recovery process, but she is improving. A year ago, I would not have expected him to remember any of that, but through the recent crises he has risen to the occasion and clawed back a lot of his lost mental capacity. As he is dying, as his raspy voice is all but taken away by pneumonia, we are having our most coherent discussions in many years

“Can she walk?” Yes, with a walker, I say, though I know that for now it is only for short distances, but she is making progress.

“Is she independent?” This breaks my heart. I am honest. No, she isn’t. But I assure him that she is not being left alone. That her kids are watching out for her and will take care of her. She will not be alone.

This is what he really wants to know. He wants to know that she will be okay, that someone is watching out for her. Through all these years of dementia, caring for him has been a weight on her and he has sometimes been difficult and hard on her. It has not occurred to me that in his own way, he has never stopped watching over her and doing what he can to protect her. He wants to make sure someone will fulfill that duty when he is gone. Reassured that she will not be alone, he relaxes and falls back to sleep.

When Mary came home from rehab, only about a week earlier, I asked her to peel a potato for dinner. It would have been faster to do it myself. It was for her benefit, both to help her practice motor control and to help her feel like she had work and purpose. He told me that I should not make her peel the potato. She needs rest. I said it was good for her. Suddenly, a flash of his old temper, which has been absent for so long: “NO! It’s LAZY for you!!!” It was all I could do to keep from laughing, but it was sweet.

When younger and especially in his early dementia, his temper could flare and he could be stubborn as a mule. That’s all gone. For some months, he is unflaggingly good-natured. When they poke and prod trying to find a vein and leave his arm black and blue and swollen, he says, “Thank you.” When they adjust his blanket, he says, “Thank you.” When someone he hasn’t seen recently shows up, he goes wide-eyed and says, “Surprised to see you! Thank you for coming.” When that person comes back, he is not surprised. Despite his dementia, he remembers every visitor which, again, is something I would not have expected just some months ago.

He has been wonderful company the last few months on drives in the country and getting burgers or groceries. That was before he was dying. Or at least before he was dying so fast.

June 14, 2024

I call his sister on Facetime so he can see her and so she can say goodbye. She asks if he still believes in Jesus and he says yes. Then she starts a long prayer in Chinese and lectures him about his salvation. He falls asleep, but she keeps talking. My arm is getting tired holding the phone, but she keeps talking. He wakes back up and she keeps talking in Chinese punctuated often with “Amen” or “Okay?” He responds, “Okay.” When she finishes I tell the aide that his sister is a force of nature and once she starts talking, there’s no stopping her. He laughs hard at this. I say, “Am I right?” and he nods yes and laughs again.

Even in the Emergency Department and the ICU, he has been wonderful company. I was not prepared for this. I thought that in his final days, he would be weak and tired and in pain and misery. I did not expect him to be smiling, laughing at jokes about his sister, telling the doctors and nurses that he was “fine.” Above all, I did not expect him to be mentally sharper than six months ago. I expected that I would see him in pain and want him to be free of it. But he is mostly joyful and it is hard to want him to be free of that.

But he has pulled out his feeding tube now. He has refused permission to let them reinsert it. They had hoped some calories would help him fight off the pneumonia. Without them, he surely will die, they said. But it hasn’t been enough anyway and he has made his decision. He is right. We all know it. There is some relief that he, in the end, was able to make this decision. But it is sad, this jolly old man making this final decision.

They still have him on an IV drip of dextrose that is keeping his blood sugar up. When the blood sugar drops, he gets drowsy. The nurse practitioner who is caring for him says that when they withdraw the dextrose, he will go unconscious from hypoglycemia within a few hours and die. It is 10pm and we ask that they wait until morning so the family who has already gone home to sleep can say goodbye.

June 15, 2024

Theresa goes early and I arrive somewhat later with Mary. When the last bag of dextrose runs out, they do not replace it.

He has been so sweet and so polite. He has endeared himself to the staff. To the best of his ability, he has been kind to them. They, in return, have been kinder than you could ever hope that strangers would be in a setting like this.

They know that keeping track of the weather is his hobby, pleasure and obsession. He has always liked to sit and look out the window and just watch the weather unfold. Now that the fight for life is over and they do not need to monitor him constantly, they remove all the extra equipment from his room and turn the bed so he can look out the window on a beautiful sunlit summer day.

His last hours are good. The family is there.

Around 11:30am, when Mary says she is tired but doesn’t want to go home, he tells her to get in bed with him and nap. We pull him far to one side to make room for her. He smiles and flashes an OK sign. She climbs in next to him and falls asleep. He smiles and points at her to say, “Look, she’s sleeping. Shhh.” He is smiling just short of a laugh. Then he too falls asleep. When he wakes up and she wakes up and gets out of bed, I ask if it was nice to snuggle with his wife. He shakes his head yes, smiles and says, “Nice.” He has just a couple of conscious hours left on planet earth.

As his blood sugar drops he gets sleepy and goes between sleeping and awake, then just sleeping. The last times he opens his eyes they are glassy and don’t seem to be looking at anything or seeing anything.

In the mid-afternoon, he simply goes unconscious and stays that way, his breathing getting more and more ragged. Eventually, he develops Cheyne-Stokes breathing, a pause and then several breaths, a pause then several breaths. At first he pauses for 20 seconds every couple of minutes, but the ratio changes until he is breathing for 20 seconds and pausing for 20 seconds.

Just before 9pm he changes to single agonistic breaths. And after some minutes of this, maybe 5, maybe 10, he takes a breath then pauses and never takes another breath. It is 8:55pm on June 15, 2024.

I had taken to thinking of him as some cross between Bilbo and Yoda. Like Bilbo, he is the kindly old man of Eleventy-One (actually just 91) who enjoys a drive around the Shire (well, the countryside surrounding Rochester, MN, anyway). A couple months back, he was sitting on the couch just staring. I asked him what he was doing and, terse as Yoda, he said, “Not doing. Thinking.” It felt like a fitting companion to, “Try not! Do, or do not. There is no try.”

I kept thinking and keep thinking about, “Not doing. Thinking.” I kept thinking about the Ring in my pocket. I kept thinking about how angry I would get, before the hospitalization, during the move from his house into a senior living facility, when I would walk in to see his face contorting in anxiety and my sister-in-law sitting across the room deeply engaged in her phone for hour after hour after hour, unable to simply be present with her father. But then I kept thinking of myself, staring at the face, trying to be there, but ever feeling the pull of the Ring on my mind. I was unsettled. It is a difference in degree, not in kind. Like Frodo, whether the Ring is in front of my face or secreted away in a pocket, in quiet moments I feel its pull.

In 1983, I decided not to become a software engineer because I didn’t want to spend my life looking at screens and yet, somehow, it has come to this. At a certain point, I just remove all the “infinite apps” from my phone, that is any app that allows you to look at it forever. Principally that means the web browser for me. For people who get a lot of email, it might mean the email app, but I have spent years working to reduce the email flow and I get few emails each day. For others it means social media apps, but I have never had those on my phone. But the Ring still calls to me just by virtue of having a web browser and with it access to vast amounts of the world’s information, misinformation and disinformation.

I have noticed, in my effort to be the face that looks back, that whenever I have a question, I want to break that gaze and look up the answer. I realize that this behavior, relatively “normal” in 2024, is nevertheless aberrant in the grand scheme of human history, properly reserved for reference librarians. It is a textbook example of the basic health issue where metrics that are in the “normal” range are not necessarily in the “healthy” range. My sister-in-law is an outlier in her screen addiction and it’s easy to say that much screen time is too much screen time. But my smartphone use, which falls within the normal 2024 range and which most people would consider well short of addiction, is by definition, far far far outside the healthy range for most humans who have ever lived, which of course was zero. I could see this in my mother-in-laws ability to simply sit, a basic human skill for millennia that now seems like a superpower on the rare occasions you see it deployed in actual practice today.

July 2, 2024

It’s a couple weeks on now as I write this, a couple weeks since Yoda has passed, a couple weeks since removing the infinite apps from my phone. I realize that my “look that up” reflex has diminished, but is certainly not gone. It is ingrained in me from long before I had a phone. I was always the person who pulled a dictionary or encyclopedia off the shelf in the middle of a conversation. The Ring just made all that worse. Most of these things that I look up don’t matter and I forget them soon anyway. Nevertheless, I still feel the pull of the Ring. The finite apps have their own pull too. Have I gotten a Signal message from Theresa?

It is hard work, this work of “Not Doing. Thinking.” I feel vaguely that I was once good at it. I feel that once upon a time, it was almost effortless.

Doing takes many forms – digging a ditch, writing an essay, but mostly these days, looking something up, reading my RSS feed, responding to an email. My life is often made better by all that doing, but I cannot escape that we are in a world where there is a lot of doing when all that is called for on so many occasions is thinking and being present.

This was Yoda’s last teaching.