This is a poem written about five years after my father’s death. It was a death that affected me on many levels. Our relationship over the years went through many changes reflecting inner work being done both to us and by us. At the time my Dad passed we had come to a place of relative peace. He created many problems in our family of seven children as we grew up in a suburb south of Boston in the 60’s and 70’s. My siblings were still trying to come to grips with some of the emotional trauma he had subjected them to, however I had reached a place of acceptance and had released much of my anger towards him. His process of dying did much to bring to completion that forgiveness.

My father was lying in his hospital bed in Brighton Medical Center. This hospital was a small community hospital which 3 years previously was known as The Osteopathic Hospital of Maine. He had been admitted a few days earlier suffering from an episode of congestive heart failure. I was sitting at the foot of his bed on a Sunday evening. The hospital was very quiet, it was about an hour after regular visiting hours. Much of the nursing staff knew me as I had spent a great deal of time during my Osteopathic training walking these hallways on one clinical rotation or another, therefore I was permitted a certain leeway in my visiting time. Dad was to be discharged the next morning as his condition had dramatically improved. He had long suffered from a painful neuropathy of his legs because of years of poorly controlled diabetes and was complaining that his legs were quite uncomfortable as he was lying there. His left leg was really bothering him, so I offered to help alleviate the pain with some gentle Osteopathic Manipulation.

Laying my hands on his painful left leg, it felt cool and the muscles were quite tense. After a few moments palpating the leg to get a better sense of the reason for the tissue tension and coolness of the skin,  I tuned into the relationship of the leg to the rest of his body. Osteopathy at its core stresses body unity. In fact our founder A. T. Still M.D., stated that each in each individual is a complete synthesis of body, mind, spirit. Sitting at my father’s side, quietly sensing the respiratory movement expressing itself in the leg, my father’s whole body began to soften and relax. This softening allowed a fuller expression of these movements in his leg. This respiratory movement can be felt throughout the body, and the legs will externally rotate with inhalation and internally rotate with exhalation. One of the intentions in an osteopathic treatment is to help the body to achieve a state we call neutral. In this state the autonomic nervous system comes to balance. In future writings we will further explore this neutral state. This state produces palpable changes which can be detected by one trained to sense it. As my father’s body settled nicely into this state he drifted off into a gentle sleep, lightly snoring as he did so. Allowing my attention to expand to include the wholeness of my slumbering father, discernible changes in his body’s tissues became quite evident. I could feel his breathing slow and deepen. His nervous system began to reach out and express its vital forces into the painful leg. Pulses felt behind the knee and top of the foot became stronger, warming the leg and restoring a nice pink tone to the skin. These changes were evidence of the healing forces at work. When the health begins to reassert its potency in the treatment often the practitioner can feel the benefit in themselves and will undergo a calming of their being. This augmented my receptive state and I began to be aware of other information coming into my awareness.

My father, without words being said, began to communicate with me. I could identify his deep feeling of loneliness, and his grief for the trauma he had caused his family. He was racked with fear that he would always be alone. It was a profound sense of isolation experienced all the way to the core of his being. This loneliness engendered in him a deep angst that caused him to have a Death Grip on his life. His apprehension was fueled by a deep belief that if he died in this state his soul would be abandoned by the Divine.

Simply by being witness to his fear and loneliness in a state of receptivity without any judgement allowed this ‘Other Breath’ to enter into his whole system. A feeling of fluidity entered his nervous system, which before felt rigid. This Breath moved freely through his whole being and simply by entering him he knew he was not alone. In fact he knew he was loved. This knowledge allowed him to let go of his dark sense of fear and by doing so it he relinquished an anger which had been produced by the perceived wrongs his father had done to him. This anger went on for generations, from father to son. I could feel this in my essence, as if these wrongs were recorded in my DNA. The simple act of witnessing without judgement created the conditions for something else, a deep loving Presence to enter in. It breathed a Deep Peace into me, redeeming all that had transpired in my ancestry.

My father had slept through this whole event. I quietly left the room around ten pm. And drove the thirty minute ride home lost in thought. My family was sleeping when I arrived home. Slipping into bed, I quickly fell into a deep sleep. I was awakened after an hour at 12:30am by my phone ringing. In a fog I heard….I am sorry Dr. Curtin but your father passed away, peacefully in his sleep just a short time ago.

My first thought was, Oh my God I killed my father.  Over time I came to view it differently.  When he let go of his fear of dying alone he released his death grip on life and peacefully left his pain filled physical  existence behind. This came to bring peace to me and further healed the remaining wounds from some of the hurts I experienced in our relationship. Nowadays when I think of my father a tenderness comes into my heart.