07/06/2025
How do some people know they’re going to die soon?
My father knew.
One day in August 2023, he unexpectedly announced to his friends over morning coffee that he would be dead by the following week.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” they scoffed. “You’re not even sick!”
Four days later, my younger sister phoned, urging me to come home.
“Dad’s ill and claims he’s dying!” she said.
I wasn’t surprised.
Six years earlier, my chain-smoking alcoholic father had triple bypass surgery, followed by multiple TIA’s—“mini-strokes”.
Unable to quit his addictions, he never fully recovered.
For six years, I felt death in his presence—it was so palpable, it often seemed like there was three of us in the room.
But all that time, my father remained asleep to death’s patient presence.
Until one day, he woke up.
He woke up to reality as it was, not as he desired it to be.
“I’m dying,” he told me the day I arrived home.
“I know,” I said.
My father and I spoke at length about how he wanted to die.
“Quickly, and at home,” he insisted.
But the Great Mystery of life had other ideas.
My father had underestimated the spiritual steps required to die a good—conscious—death. His predicted expiry date was off by 11 weeks.
During those final months, I watched him do something incredible—something I never would have believed anyone capable of, had I not witnessed it myself.
He did something that challenged my professional, therapeutic understanding of the transformation process—something that, to this day, still leaves me in awe.
I watched the most toxic man I knew transform.
I watched him enter the existential void of hell, do battle with the inner demons he’d spent his life avoiding, and emerge the other side—victorious, and undeniably transcendent.
It was the most intense, unimaginably brutal, and complete transformation I’ve ever witnessed. He suffered immensely—but he was transfigured.
At the end, lying in a stark hospital bed after trying to drink himself to death, he was luminous.