Facing death was last lesson Pop taught

Jeff Kaley

WAURIKA — With Father’s Day coming up, a couple readers asked that I run a column that first appeared in 2005 in The Duncan Banner and in 2007 the WND. I couldn’t refuse.

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Sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, holding my father’s hand as the last breath of life crossed his lips, a million memories passed through my mind in a nanosecond.

I was fortunate to share nearly 54 of Vaughn Kaley’s 75 years on the planet, and at the moment of death, those years seemed compressed into an eye blink, a final sigh and a lingering thought: Oh, Pop, I hope death is as kind this time as it was the first time.

You see, the afternoon of March 1, 2005 was not the first time Dad glimpsed what’s on the other side — it was just the time he stayed there.

Twenty-four years before, my father suffered a massive heart attack. It was the day the medical term “myocardial infarction” entered the family lexicon and Dad’s heart became an over-riding factor in the lives of my mother, my brother and I.

That day in 1981, three-quarters of his heart was severely damaged, and he actually experienced death while lying on an operating table at Crawford Memorial Hospital in Robinson, Ill. Only the persistent work of a doctor named Mike Elliott, who kept “hitting” Dad with the defibrillator paddles until he regained consciousness, kept Vaughn Kaley alive that day.

A couple years later, Pop had reestablished his life. There were many changes, of course. He scaled back his workload as a senior vice president at a local bank, and moved to the background in some of the civic, political and religious organizations in which he’d been a leader.

But he also resumed many activities, and he recaptured the personality that made him such a beloved figure in our family and in that little corn and oil town in the Wabash River Valley.

(It’s a heady realization when you grasp that because of the lives they’ve led, both of your parents are “beloved.”)

For a long time after the heart attack, I resisted the urge to ask Pop about his near-death experience. I wasn’t sure how he’d would react.

But one July afternoon in 1983, I had to know. So, while we sat on the back porch at his home, both reading a newspaper, the question slipped out: “Pop, what was it like the day you died? Can you remember dying?”

A look of serenity I’d never seen before came to my father’s face. He lowered the sports section he was reading, gave me a warm smile and said, “You know, son, I’ll never be afraid of death again.”

In the next few moments, Dad gave me a glimpse of what he’d experienced while dying.

“There was no bright light at the end of a tunnel,” he said. “I didn’t have an ‘out-of-body’ experience; I wasn’t hovering above the operating table, watching what was going on below. Nothing like that.

“I didn’t see the face of Jesus, didn’t hear the singing of angels or any heavenly voice ‘calling me home.’ Other people may experience that, but I didn’t.”

So, Pop, what did you feel? What was out there?

Dad’s grin grew wider and a far-away look came to his eyes. “It was just such an amazing feeling of peace,” he said. “I’ve never experienced such peacefulness in my life. It’s almost unexplainable.

“I remember thinking: If this is how death feels, what are we so worried about? If this feeling of peace is how it’s going to be, I’ll never be afraid of death again.

“It was wonderful.”

Two decades later, as Vaughn Kaley drew his final breath and we who loved him so deeply began to mourn and comfort one another, I found strength in the memory of that conversation.

The serenity Dad described explained why, after months of physical agony caused by cancer, hardening of the arteries and a heart that just couldn’t cope any longer, on that day my father smiled as he met death.

“If this feeling of peace is how it’s going to be, I’ll never be afraid of death again.”

Of the thousands of lessons Pop passed along during a meaningful life, that is the greatest of them all.

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