Near-Death Teaches Us Valuable Lessons

Near-Death Teaches Us Valuable Lessons

Khen Lim



Image source: Shutterstock

Even before my wife and I were married, we made the decision to live with my aged parents instead of finding our own home. With my elder brother living with his own family and working abroad, there was little chance of him being able to help in any real way. The best we could expect from him was a once-a-year visit, which for all intents and purposes, wouldn’t make much difference. 

My mother passed away in October 2015 and would have painfully missed the birth of my twin girls, which was a mere week later. By all accounts, Heather and Bridget were supposed to be born the day after she died in the same hospital and with that in mind, she fell short by a mere fifteen hours.

After my mother’s passing, my father’s health steadily declined. A year before she was diagnosed with duodenal cancer, he was pulled up for an abnormally high level of platelets in his blood. On further investigation, it was discovered with a persistent case of low haemoglobin count. 

Eventually then came the shocking news that he also had Stage III kidney failure. Apart from all of this, his heart was weak and his longstanding fight with diabetes and enlarged prostate all added up to more than any family could handle in addition to my mother’s cancer.

The fact that all these issues were intertwined also meant that my father’s cocktail of medication had to be very carefully juggled by a team of multiple specialists including a haematologist, nephrologist, cardiologist, urologist, gastroenterologist and a dietitian, and then, of late, we also added an orthopaedic specialist into the team since the compression on his L4-L5 vertebra was discovered a little more than a month ago following his struggle to even walk.

In the past four years alone, my parents were individually in and out of hospital so often that the nurses in the general wards and the oncology day centre, plus the front desk staff, the valet servicers, emergency room and café staff have all come to know us. And in all that time, they have been genuinely supportive and helpful with my aged parents.

The trial begins

On Monday, February 13 2017 at around five in the morning, my 88-year-old dad timidly knocked at our bedroom door and weakly called out my name. I rubbed my eyes and then squinted to see in the dark the clock at the nearby wall. Five? It’s way too early to go to the hospital for his periodic blood test. 

The night before, we agreed that we would leave home at eight in the morning since the blood test centre at the hospital only opens at half-past eight. This was the usual ritual every three weeks when my dad would do a blood test and then the following day, get his blood transfusion done. 

Unlike normal people with the red blood cell count at around 12-13 g/dL, my dad is anywhere from low 6 to anywhere around 7, which is seriously low and in need of frequent attention. This condition is due to the kidneys not functioning properly and the weak heart not pumping strongly enough. Other than that, there is a ‘leak’ somewhere in him that we just couldn’t figure out where or how.

Getting out of bed, I opened the door slightly – so not to unsettle the little twins – and dad told me he felt too sick to go for the blood test. Not knowing what to make out of this, I went to the dining room and sat down to speak to him. He was complaining that he had all the flu symptoms – joint pains et al – and was a little light in the head. Whatever it was though, he wasn’t too sure of how to describe it except that he just wasn’t feeling good at all. My wife and I told him to go lie down in his bed and just rest and we would reschedule the blood test (and transfusion) to another day soon.

I helped dad to his bedroom and gently laid him down to rest while I looked over him. We were debating whether to get our family physician to make a house call. Typically of him, he didn’t feel comfortable inconveniencing him to come to the house so early but then, our friend had long told us that he usually wakes up at five in the morning and so, coming over at this hour wasn’t a problem for him anyway. Having not resolved the issue, I sort of let it slide and cajoled my dad to just rest and not think too much about it.

But then that didn’t last long before all of a sudden, he complained to me that he couldn’t breathe properly. Looking at him struggle overpowered my own senses, making me feel completely helpless and useless. Seated down, I just looked at my dad and although I understood his predicament, I knew not what to do next. 

No Hollywood movie could help me deal with this. The only thing to do was to make that call to our physician friend and ask him to come over. There was no niceties anymore about waiting to see him at the clinic hours later. Not being able to breathe wasn’t exactly the same as having a headache, which could wait.

It took another ten minutes or so for the physician to arrive and then it didn’t take long for his stethoscope to confirm with him that my dad had water in the lungs, which explained the difficulty at breathing. The instruction then was super-clear – get him to the hospital. Now. There was no dilly-dallying. I didn’t even have the opportunity to brush my teeth, comb my hair or shave. Like a bat scared out of his cave, we were out of the house, quickly headed for the hospital.

The trip to the hospital was a quiet one. I was nervous. Fear crept in and lurked under my skin. My thoughts were racing. And all I could do to stay glued to the front windshield was the need to get to the hospital in one piece and as urgently as I could make it. Once we arrived, we headed straight for the ER and got the emergency crew to ferry my dad in. 

It didn’t take long for the doctor there to confirm the same thing and then issue an urgent directive to get him to the ICU. When it normally took this hospital at least twenty minutes to do an admission, this one was done and dusted in less than ten. I knew then the sense of urgency that was required to attend to my dad’s condition.

I have not encountered this before and feeling muddled but anxious, I tried to cope with my feelings that were threatening to unravel anytime. I was on my own since my wife had to stay back with the sleepy twins. Unlike the usual times when my dad was warded, this one felt different because the issue of life and death seemed closer in my face. 

I tried to appear calm while making the required deposit payment at the front desk while I kept looking askance at the ER area where my dad was. And then I saw them wheeling my dad past the foyer to the elevator atrium, well before I could complete my payment transaction. The speed at which they were doing things caught me by surprise not because I was impressed by their efficiency but more because I was forced to understand that they were trying to save a life, my dad’s life.

I closed my eyes just for a moment to take everything in and try to understand where I was at that point in time. The trepidation I felt, I had to balance with a sense of exterior calmness. I couldn’t afford to go freaking out at the front desk. Thankfully, the admission procedures were completed once I had managed to sign a multitude of forms and paid the princely sum of deposit. I practically ran to the elevator and pressed ‘1’ for first floor where the ICU was.

When I reached the ICU, I saw my dad tied up to tubes and all sorts of signal lines, as they hooked him up to various monitors to check his condition while they administered him with powerful antibiotics and Lasix to coax his body to lose the excess fluids (oedema). 

Once my dad settled down a wee bit, he tried to talk but it was difficult to make out what he was attempting to say because he was wearing an oxygen mask. For most of the time, his speech was muddled but every now and then, I could make out parts of it. Even so, it appeared that dad was delusional. It seemed like he was losing his rational senses.

Very close shave

That was Monday last. Dad was at the hospital for a full week. After three days in ICU, he was transferred to an intermediate ward on another floor, signalling that he was out of critical danger. Still the pneumonia was very real, very threatening and no less lethal. Many of us were struggling to make that clear to dad. In his given mental state, it was presumptuous to think that he understood or even remembered what we explained to him. But the reality was completely different.

In the days he was at the hospital, the delusions continued apace. Even after his stint at the ICU, more normalised ward conditions didn’t seem to have helped him ebb and return to normalcy. He had strange stories laced with espionage, conspiracy and paranoia and all sorts of stuff that Ludlum would’ve been impressed by. You think Jason Bourne’s adventures were impressive? If only you were there to hear what dad had to say about his ‘exploits,’ which were all nothing but bunkum.

As it were, nobody knew with any real certainty what triggered the pneumonia but the likely theory was that because dad’s haemoglobin count was dangerously low (reportedly 5.3 g/dL at the ER, the lowest ever for him), the heart had to work as hard as possible, pumping as vigorously as it could to try to make up for the lack of red blood cells. But dad’s heart was already enlarged, old and very tired and the likelihood of failure was becoming increasingly real. 

As it happened, no matter how hard the heart worked, it couldn’t muster enough to plug the gap with the low cell count. Inevitably, it was too much. Miraculously the heart did not give up the ghost but then, it couldn’t do anything about stopping water from entering his lungs. Had the heart been stronger and worked better, this would not have happened. And once the water entered, dad began to wheeze and his chest heaved dramatically.

In the post-event, his specialist told us that dad was ‘not too far off’ from critical danger. That’s doctor-speak for close to death. Even in my numbed brain, I understood that clearly. I knew how having our physician friend come to the house was the miracle story that needed to be told. I also knew then that God’s hand had been at work to guide my dad past his danger and through to a new lease of life. I knew and understood His love and I embrace the truth that He is a wonderful God who do things we sometimes fail to thank Him for.

When we brought my dad home on Sunday, February 19, he was clearly relieved but then in all his warded days in hospital, that relief was always evident except that this time, it was somewhat different. He sat down quietly and meekly asked me if I could say grace at every mealtime from now onwards. 

Taken aback by his request, I knew in all my humbleness that dad was deeply thankful for the second stab at life that God has given him. I gave up saying grace at mealtimes a few years ago because nobody seemed to be interested but this time, it wasn’t me but dad who wanted it.

I understood from God that this was a good moment to do some spiritual sharing. My dad came to Christ mainly because my mom wanted to surrender her life to the Lord after her cancer operation a little more than two years ago. While my mom had her own personal experience with God and a testimony to share later, my dad didn’t. 

I’ve always believed that one cannot forever live through other people’s miracles because ultimately, they’re not yours and therefore, the personal sense of relevance isn’t there. My dad has been a nominal Christian in all the two plus years since because of many factors; chiefly, his depression following mom’s death, his natural sense of negativity and by way of habit over the many decades prior to Christianity. It just wasn’t his style and although I’d never asked him, my guess is that he hardly reads Scripture.

You could say that my dad was at his most vulnerable, sitting there and feeling humbled, standing in God’s shadow, realising that he was face to face with mortality. But being at his most vulnerable also meant that he was more prepared than at any time to listen to good spiritual advice. It was a long time coming. 

Many of us have been praying for such a moment for my dad to bear a humble listening ear. And although many of us would have been sceptical that such a moment would come to past, God plainly defied us and brought it to our doorstep right now.

Though not as stoic as my late mom, dad makes up for that by being a very intelligent man. Not only his academic success laid clear proof to that but also the way he carried himself at work. He was a bacteriologist by qualification but when he was in his late thirties, he was persuaded by my maternal grandfather to join his property development business. 

Many might find such a career switch intimidating but my dad took to it like water off a duck’s back. He was instrumental in bringing success to my grandfather’s business. He was also the very reason people extol on the quality of the houses he built over the decades. Till today, they speak voluminously of dad’s attention to detail and the dedication he showed to all his customers.

But then success and intelligence can also weigh a person down. In the case of my father, it became a burden to know too much and soon, he was constantly looking for the ‘silver bullet’ for his diabetes and whatever other medical condition he found himself in. 

Together with my mom, he would read everything on the latest miracle cure, and religiously pursued their stock investments in fear that they might run out of money. My father’s overpowering sense of cautiousness became an irritant because it constantly bordered on paranoia.

In addition to all this, mom’s passing took a serious toll on my dad who till today, would become tearful anytime anyone mentioned her affectionately to him. More than one person, including his senior specialist at the hospital suggested that dementia could also have crept in.

All of this made things very difficult not just for my dad but for my wife and I. With year-old twins to look after as well, often issues at home became incredibly unbearable. The loneliness we all felt at having to face these issues with no one else in the family to fall back on could cause either my wife or I to experience periodic meltdowns. 

We had a few very close friends – including our family physician – to confide in but nothing compared to having family to help manage such a difficult – and often unmanageable – problem. And the worst part in all of this was for anyone to come by and impart vacuous anecdotal advice and conduct insensitive counselling as to how we should better handle matters.

Sharing God’s lessons

So as dad sat down vulnerably, possibly looking for affirmation of God’s grace, it was time for me to be sensitive, empathetic and spiritually relevant. This was as good a time as any to do God’s work and do it well but it requires careful consideration and the right choice of words. This was not the I-told-you-so denigrating moment but more like a God-really-loves-you opportunity. 

Knowing my dad was now coming to terms with his near-death experience, I closed my eyes for that few seconds and sought God to use me in the fullest of His intent so that he might experience the impact. My prayer was that at this crossroad, dad would choose the right path and follow God in faith and leave behind his life of worries, sleeplessness, fear and obsession. It was of course a long shot but if anyone could make it happen, it can only be God.

Many of us in our lives take things easy until we come to a point of no-return, that moment of complete vulnerability and that time when we stare at life, realising that it could be pulled like a carpet right under our watch. Many people who come down with deadly – or incurable – diseases would take control of their lives and try everything they hear was the ‘right miracle cure.’ 

Two things happen here – either one runs out of money or exhausts all ideas. Or both. In many other cases, the person might become tired of all the false promises but in all of these, the crux is that people have come to realise that under their control, a lot of other issues emerge such as undue stress, misplaced trust (amounting to deception) and despair. And in the meantime, faith wears thin to the point that ultimately, they understand nothing has worked.

For so many years, my father has spent an incredible lot of money trusting people telling him of amazing elixirs, neglecting to understand the conspiracy of multi-level marketing deceptions and empty promises. 

Dad has an old friend from his work days who still continues to push to him his non-scientific quick-fix baloney without understanding that his specialists have his medical condition under proper control. And if my wife and I hadn’t intervened continuously – and looked villainous in the process – it’s hard to tell what so-called miraculous cures dad would be taking while his bank account empties in all the unnecessary tomfoolery.

I certainly believe there are many people out there who are like my father – susceptible to all sorts of marketing brouhaha, constantly looking for the nirvana drug while in the meantime, worrying at every opportunity. Being a young Christian, my dad has struggled to come to terms with how God invites us to place our trust in Him and to release ourselves from our worldly burdens. The psalmist in Psalm 55:22 says:

“Give your burdens to the Lord and He will take care of you. He will not permit the godly to slip and fall.” (NLT)

In almost similar vein, Peter in his first letter wrote (1 Pet 5:7):

“Cast all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you.” (NLT)

My personal favourite is echoed in Jesus’ words recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew 11:28-30, where He says the following:

“Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” (NLT)

To cease worrying by letting ‘someone’ else do it for us is one of the hardest things for a Christian to do. To have faith is one thing but to truly demonstrate it by literally trusting God with our lives is quite a different matter altogether. If we’re struggling to cope with this ourselves, what hope does a young Christian like my dad has in fulfilling this part of his faith? 

But in my years of trials and tribulations carrying my cross, learning to place my trust in God often proved to be the biggest and most important investment I have made on my own life. In virtually everything I had to do on a big scale or where I realise the uncertainty of my own hand, leaning to God and erring to His decision-making by relinquishing my own control has consistently bore me positive results that I never thought were possible but there they were – inexplicable, yes, but real.

Many Christians cannot understand that worrying about worldly concerns is often deadlier than the worst diseases because it takes us away from fully understanding the power of faith. To trust God means to lose hold over our concerns, to make way for Christ to shoulder the burden for us and in the process, to walk away and use our lives to do something more purposeful and positive so that the glory of the Lord’s light may shine. 

The ultimate point of giving up on our worries is so that we are not weighed down because anxieties cause us to defocus from our relationship with Christ. Instead we find ourselves willingly burying our heads in matters that we should walk away from.

However if we can free ourselves from the shackles of our worldly problems, we will experience that rare sense of lightness that can only come from Christ’s assurance. To unshackle ourselves and lighten our load, we only need to pray. In our prayer, commune with God. Tell Him everything you need to in order to free yourself of your travails. The more you do this, the more you will distance yourself from everything that has been weighing you down. In his letter to the church in Philippi, Paul said (Ph 4:6-7):

“Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” (NLT)

I remember almost fourteen years ago shortly after purchasing my car new, I took to the interstate one early morning to fetch a friend from the airport. Hardly forty kilometres on the highway, I had inexplicable car problems. The rubber seal holding the front windshield threatened to come off the groove but that wasn’t all. Amazingly, the car’s central door locking also began to malfunction. As I disabled the locking, the system would instantly lock all the doors instead. It didn’t matter how many times I tried, all the doors would secure, threatening to lock me in. 

What made me even more worried was that the panel of power window buttons on the driver’s door had become very hot to touch, leading me to suspect that perhaps something was seriously overheating. As the morning weather began to drizzle, I stopped by an interstate gas station just to gather my thoughts and decide what my next step was.

The brutal truth was that I had no idea what to do next other than to thump the rubber seal back into the groove using the handle of a screwdriver – not a very scientific solution but that was all I came up with! Frankly I was bamboozled by all that was happening to a brand-spanking new car. Without any feasible solution at hand, I got back into the car and drove away. 

As I merged with the interstate and got on with my trip, I thought to myself that it wouldn’t hurt to have a ‘chat’ with God. And that was exactly what I did. I had a dialogue with the Lord while I was driving. Not only did this take me off my very real problems but I ended up chatting with Him all the way until I reached the airport more than two and a half hours later.

When I got down from the car parking lot, I suddenly realised three things. Firstly the rubber seal didn’t come off for the whole journey after the gas station stop. Secondly the button panel didn’t heat up anymore. And thirdly, the central locking worked like a charm. 

For a few seconds, I just stared at my car, stunned into silence at what I had just discovered. It then came to my mind that, when I decided to cease worrying and instead talked to God, everything worked as faith would have it. The only thing left to do at that point was to “thank Him for all He has done” (Ph 4:6b, NLT).

It also made me understand that casting our problems to the Lord requires us to be unafraid and unworried. We are to believe wholly that God is not only always there to help us but will ever willingly take up our problems. All we ever need to do is to turn our trust into ‘fearless faith.’ 

Give our problems to the Lord but give it without an iota of fear in our hearts. What that takes out of us is the seriousness of our intent. When we ask Him to help, really let Him help. Don’t just say it but mean it literally. The prophet Isaiah in 41:13, tells us about being fearless in God, saying:

“For I, the Lord your God, will hold your right hand, saying to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” (NLT)

“Fear not, I will help you,” tells us irrevocably that when we seek His hand, He will neither move nor turn away. God will take every opportunity we give Him to help us only because He loves us so wholesomely. He takes moments like this to prove to us that as our Creator, He cherishes our lives and honours the trust we show in Him. All we have to do is to raise our right hand and let Him hold it. Then hear Him say to you, “Fear not, I will help you.”

In two years, my dad will become a nonagenarian. Shortly after my twins were born in 2015, my dad said that he wished to live ‘another ten years’ just to see them grow up. At the age of 88, that’s a challenge none of us honestly know the outcome. We have no guarantees because the key to life and death is in God’s hands. What we do know though is that the sooner we learn to trust God, the more fruitful the years we have to live with and the happier we will be.

Like my dad, let us turn to God in all things good or bad, happy or sad. Know in our hearts that through Christ who loves us, all of us are welcomed and that His is an unbreakable promise that assures us that He will help in our times of need:

“So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive His mercy and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” (Heb 4:16, NLT)

Of all the joys we experience in the world, the greatest is to know God, to behold Him and to love Him unreservedly. When we surrender our problems entirely to God, He will orchestrate everything to do with our pain and sorrow and trials so that we may experience even greater joy in Him (Rom 8:18, 2 Cor 4:17). So let us all see reason and seize the opportunity to set our hearts unto Christ. Let His Word show us His glorious love and the grandeur of His majesty and grace. Let us be awed into submission!