By Kimberly Nichols
He called it The Death Tour 2001 and I was another in a string of guests who had stopped their normal lives to travel to the Midwest to spend some time with him before he died. He knew it was coming. Half a year prior to his exit, after he started to fall down exhausted in the normal course of each day, he called my sister and me to tell us he had cancer. We instantly set weekly appointments to speak on the phone and catch up on the details of our lives as if suddenly it were very important.
My father and I had been relative strangers for many years: when I was 12, he’d moved halfway across the United States with his new wife, a toddler, and another baby on the way. Now, at 28, I was spiraling outward into a life of my own. Oftentimes I would stand in the shower and cry alone, where no one could hear me, missing the man who had been my closest friend pre-puberty. On our newly revived weekly phone calls, we would tiptoe awkwardly around the gap in my heart where he had been, and then had not been, and focus instead on things like who I was dating, how my ten-year-old daughter was doing, and what kind of artwork I was currently making. I would hear my words stumble out to him, caught in a slew of taffy-tongued replies that always sounded hard like bricks thudding on a wooden floor. On our last call he told me I had better hurry if I ever wanted to see him again. I hopped on a red-eye flight to Minnesota with my daughter who he’d only seen twice in her decade’s worth of life.
Death lends a strange pink pall to a person’s hurt locker. When you see a man you’ve loved since birth standing in front of you with a baseball sized tumor sticking out of his throat you forget the anger you’ve buried inside and, instead, all that happens is a rushing flood of good memories from when you were tight-knit and in love. My encyclopedic brain was bursting with viewfinder-like slides of a childhood: me hunched down in his drag car illegally while he raced, or on the back of his motorcycle going up and down the concrete ditches of Southern California, or the hours we would spend making mixed tapes from the Saturday morning hit music radio countdowns, and the way we loved watching the cartoon Spiderman because we were both equipped with the same quippy and sarcastic sense of humor that Spidey would throw out in a narrative monologue as he scaled tall buildings with his miraculously webbed appendages.
We didn’t talk much the first 24 hours of my two-day visit. Instead, I learned that death made the dying do unpredictable things like unapologetically wearing mismatched socks or throwing plates of food in the trash can when you are not looking so they can falsely lead you to believe they are still strong enough to stomach sustenance. It was probably better that way because words didn’t seem to mean anything anymore. I reverted to age ten and lay on my father’s lap while we watched NASCAR racing for eight hours straight. I knew he was going to be gone soon when he told me at multiple points in the day that my dead grandfather was sitting on the couch alongside us, waiting to take him to the other side.
I didn’t find it strange that my father was sensing dead people. As a dabbler in metaphysics with a solid meditation practice, I was well versed in the idea that our souls remain souls with or without our bodies. I believed that the physical plane was a manmade manifestation and that our closed third eyes had created an ignorance of our inherent, molecular-level connection to the unseen, the unknowable, or what some deem God. So waving hello to an invisible grandfather on the end of my father’s couch was not that hard to reconcile in my mind.
Before flying home, my daughter and I found a dead and broken butterfly on my father’s sidewalk—small and fragile as a piece of crepe paper in bright hues of orange and brown. We tucked it into a small, plastic eyeglass case and brought it back to California with us. I will never forget the look in my father’s eyes as I was leaving: huge pools of perfectly matched, stark, naked fear.
Loved ones of the dying also tend to act differently near death, but the common denominator seems to be that we act out in all sorts of erratic ways. Death threw a wrench into my normal behavior – it’s semi-impossible to go through your days when an energetic cord of love that huge is about to be yanked from your existence and you know that any second now you are going to lose someone forever and that it’s going to ache. For my daughter, stepsister and stepbrother it had meant sneaking out at midnight during our visit and toilet papering the house next door. For me it meant getting way too drunk on margaritas after work with my best gay guy friends for seven days straight, after which I had the most incredible experience of my life.
It was day eight since we’d come back from the Midwest and my very patient boyfriend was acting as cook, chauffeur and housekeeper for my daughter and me. I informed him that evening that I was done with my chaos spree. We held a very nice meditation together for my father and then as my boyfriend went into the office to do some work, my daughter and I performed a ritual of our own. We found the butterfly that we had retrieved from my father’s sidewalk and placed it in the middle of the living room floor. We then turned off the lights, put on some music, and danced for a few hours. My daughter said the most poignant thing to me as I tucked her into bed that evening. She told me that butterflies signified transformation and that our dance around its golden carcass represented our assistance in helping my dad pass over gracefully. I went to bed with soft tears streaming down my face and I didn’t stop them, preferring to feel the wet rub of my pillow against my skin as I sank into my dreams.
At two in the morning I was jolted awake as I lingered somewhere near my bedroom ceiling. I was no longer in my body. I looked down upon the clock on my nightstand (with eyes I did not have) to note the time. I felt myself as being a pure and simple presence but noticed that my body was still down below me in bed where I was sleeping on my tear-soaked pillow next to my snoring boyfriend. It felt like the sound of being alone in a dark night with nothing but the crickets croaking out a soliloquy of suspended time. I was pure consciousness, made of nothing but knowingness. I was free of skin, flesh and bones. I wasn’t dreaming, but if I were, I couldn’t have pinched myself. I looked out the sliding glass door into my back yard and saw a deer poking around the window, its nose rubbing against the ground—an animal that in no way, shape, or form would have ever appeared at my home in the desert.
In that moment, I felt the most overwhelming sense of peace that has ever fallen upon me. I knew in that very instant that everything was going to be all right. There was no doubt in my mind that I was eternally safe, taken care of, and need not ever have another problem in the world for the rest of my days. There was no thought pattern to dissuade me from knowing this; I simply knew. It was a feeling that I had never before felt in my life and that to this day I have never been quite able to recreate. It was as if I had slipped into the real world, the one behind our thoughts and words, where everything intrinsically made sense. I knew I could lose all my money, all my friends, and be lying face down in a ditch somewhere with the only remaining thing that could possibly happen to me being death – and that somehow that wouldn’t be so bad after all. I stopped being afraid.
The next morning, I learned that my father had passed in the night. Two weeks later, I discovered that a deer, in ancient German folklore, is the animal that arrives to walk a human being through the veil between life and death.