How My Dad Got to Heaven

My father, Allan Nash, was a walking contradiction in an Oxxford three-piece suit.

Born a poor boy as one of 10 children in rural Paris, Tennessee, Pop was a high school dropout, but an intellectual in the guise of a real estate agent and appraiser. He rose at five each morning to read poetry and social essays, and to make a list of the words he wanted to research.

He was also fairly obsessed with death. He regularly read William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”and set his stereo to blast out Faure’s “Requium in D Minor” (often associated with the Roman Catholic Mass for the dead). If he ever retired, he said, he planned to become a funeral director. “Death is just a part of life,” he’d shrug.

So while he nearly celebrated the end of life, this lapsed Mormon (he left the church at 17, to the great consternation of his father), was iffy about the existence of God. At least for a while.

Sometimes, when my mother would beg him to go to church with her (they were charter members of their Methodist church), he would say he had no need to go, that he and God were on good terms. But as late as two weeks before he passed on at the age of 88 1/2 from metastatic rectal cancer, he told me that he wasn’t sure he believed in God, and certainly not in an afterlife.

The afterlife — that was the biggie. He thought the idea of heaven was hokum.

“No thinking person can really believe there’s a place you go with streets paved with gold,” he insisted. “But I suppose it’s a useful tool for social order, to keep people in line, and from doing worse things to each other than they already do.”

When he received his diagnosis, he denied the reality, even though his internist told him the cancer had spread.

When his body began to break down in ways that signaled impending death, he went back into the hospital for one more day. “Am I going to get to go home tonight?” he asked the nurse. Pop went home that night, but not to the house he had cherished for 42 years.

Pop went home that night, but not to the house he had cherished for 42 years.

I stayed with him until the end. At times, speechless, he focused on unseen visitors on the back wall. His eyes told me they were angels, or perhaps long-dead family members, there to help him cross over. Several times, when his eyes were elsewhere, he said to someone not seemingly in the room, “I’m ready.” Or, “Ready, Freddy.” Then he’d snap out of it and turn directly to me. “I’m sorry,” he’d say. “I have to go.”

“I know, Pop. It’s OK.”

Finally, that night, just after my cousins came to say goodbye, he began wafting in and out of consciousness. He looked so wild-eyed, as if he’d already had a glimpse of the next world, that I had to ask: “Pop, where are you?”

“I’m in heaven,” he answered. His voice was weak but clear.

Stunned, I thought perhaps I had misheard. I turned to my cousins. “Did he say … ?”

They nodded yes. My father was in no shape to joke, and he was too principled a man to placate me. Still, because of our discussions, I asked again, “Pop, did you say, ‘I’m in heaven?'”

It took him a few moments, but he said yes, he was.

Not long after, in the small hours of July 14, 2005, he was gone. I closed his eyes and cradled his face as the nurse recorded the time of death.

When I was a tow-haired child, the start of the summer brought veiled anticipation. My birthday is August 16, and each year I knew my father would either give me an extraordinary gift (I once got a real Coke machine) or nothing. (Mom took up the slack.) The summer he died, I was suddenly nine again. “No present this birthday,” I told myself.

But I was wrong. My father saved the best for last.

The man who gave me life assured me of everlasting life. It doesn’t get more beautiful than that.

I have faith that when I round the last bend in the river, Pop will be standing there on the shore, wearing his three-piece suit, and waving a brushed gray fedora to guide me home.