Into the Unknown

Roger V Gilbert, Jr 1945 - 2026

“Why is it so hungry?!” The look he gave me was demanding an answer.

Maybe he meant the cancer. Two months earlier, he had been admitted to hospital for pain, pain more intense than his COPD diagnosis or the arthritis in his back could account for. Rather quickly we learned that his troubles breathing had little to do with obstructed lungs and more to do with the cancer that had spread from his right lung into the pleural cavity, effectively making it untreatable.

Or maybe he was witnessing his own body.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him.

He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. We had just moved him into hospice and they were still working on getting the meds right to make him comfortable. It could have been a drug addled brain trying to make sense of it all.

“Yes!”

Although the hospice food couldn’t really be considered comfort care, and he preferred the fast food that Simon and Brittany, my little brother and his girlfriend, brought him.

Three months. From flying out to Toronto to pack up Roger and only the things that would fit into his new apartment a 10 minute walk from us, to his final three weeks in hospice. This is just me trying to make sense of the whirlwind that became 2026.

In retrospect, my father had been declining for a while, but it seemed like the kinds of things that come with age. I had been seeing Roger regularly until the beginning of 2024 which was the beginning of my mother’s decline. She passed in early 2025 and soon after that we escaped back to Canada to put some distance between ourselves and the chaos developing in the U.S. All of us kids had begun to realize that a three-story apartment was untenable given the new normal for Roger and that we needed another solution.

My visit in March, precipitated by a panicked call from Roger, resulted in him saying he was ready to move to Vancouver Island to be with us. We started planning for a multi-generational household once we found a property to buy. That was also the week he went on oxygen because of the COPD diagnosis.

For the next month we bantered about when to move him. Wait until we found a place later in the year so he wouldn’t have to move twice. See if a single story apartment came available before we bought. Still moving twice tho.

Then I was overtaken by this desire, more like a need, to get him right away. Almost in a panic I booked one-way tickets for Scott and I and in the intervening week found him a place to live, booked movers and rented the truck.

The next two weeks are a blur. Four days to pack the essentials, donate or throw out the rest, and then ten days in the jump seat of a fifteen-foot U-Haul.

He was in his new apartment for two weeks before we had to take him to the ER because of the pain in his back.

The next three weeks are more like a chasm in my memory.

I don’t get sick. But I didn’t want to go into that hospital room anymore, so my body took it out of my hands, I got sick enough that I couldn’t get out of bed for a week.

By mid-June we knew the cancer was terminal.

The oncologist would be surprised if he was alive by the end of the year.

My father and I are two stubborn know-it-alls. My uncle once told me that I come from a long line of fucking know-it-alls. But Rog and I had worked out, over the years, how to have a conversation without constantly bumping heads.

I had been so looking forward to having that around. To sharing life with him since I hadn’t lived with him since I was 12.

But once he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he walked into a field we rarely talked about.

“Do you think I am too immature for you to talk to me about your Shamanic practice?”

The question caught me off guard.

Twenty years earlier, at my grandmother’s funeral, I had seen my grandfather for what I realized was probably the last time. I had withheld from him that I had gone back to the Catholic Church because, frankly, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Standing there I suddenly got how petty that was and told him I sang with one of the best Catholic choirs in the U.S.

And here I was again.

I had withheld my spirituality, this time from my dad.

I laughed. “Not at all. I stopped talking to you about my spirituality when you laughed at my epiphany about the Holy Spirit. It’s kind of like how you stopped sharing your relationships with me when I joked about how you only had a shelf life of twelve years when it came to relationships.”

“Ten years, actually,” he said, smiling wryly.

Death workers, especially people who spend time with people at the threshold, talk about the End of Life Experience as a time when a dying person begins to think on and experience their mortality.

My conversations with my dad were suddenly going to be about life and death. I told him I would share anything he wanted to hear about my shamanic practice.

He asked me to take him on as my student.

“What do you think happens after you die?” I asked him.

“Nothing.”

There wasn’t much hesitation. But later he told me he was scared.

“It’s like I’m walking into a dark room, and there might be things in there.”

That stayed with me.

Nothing. And yet there might be things in there.

Before we knew how we were going to care for him as the cancer progressed, I asked Roger if he wanted to have a psychedelic journey. Mushrooms had taken me to that threshold many times and had long ago lifted my own fear of death.

He was an enthusiastic yes.

We just needed to work out how and when. I was unwilling to do it in the chaos of the hospital.

Around that time I sat in ceremony myself and asked my mushroom allies to show me what it might be like for someone with a materialist understanding of the world to confront death.

It was terrifying.

Roger had told me he was terrified. But feeling even my own version of that terror helped me understand some of the anguish I had been seeing in him.

There is a particular horror, I think, in approaching the edge of everything you understand and believing that beyond it there is nothing.

Or worse, maybe, discovering that you don’t actually know.

The forever that was apparently only two weeks, as we tried to figure out how to give Roger the best possible care right up to the end, somehow ended with him being admitted to hospice.

The first night I talked with the hospice doctor, she asked me if I thought Roger might benefit from a psychedelic journey to ease his fear.

Of all the hospices. Of all the doctors.

I don’t believe in coincidences. Looking back at what drew me to this particular place on this particular island, I wonder if this hospice was part of what had been calling me here.

We had a week to prepare. Before the psychedelic journey, I drummed for him and guided him in a shamanic journey to find his power animal. I have never had anyone not experience something in this kind of journey. I didn’t know what Roger would make of it, but I didn’t think “nothing” would show up for him.

During the journey, he smiled. Afterwards he said it was fun. “I went places, talking places, and the being I met wanted to talk to me about kindness.”

We never got to do the psychedelic journey.

His dying began taking him somewhere before we could.

I don’t know if what followed was medication, delirium, the changes of a dying brain, the End of Life Experience, some movement of consciousness I don’t understand, or some combination of all of those things.

I know only what he said. And what he said became stranger and stranger.

“Get off my legs, I’m not going to lie for you.”

“Simulation, the structures are all wrong.”

“Hector! Don’t go.”

“Do we need to watch this again?”

“That’s what it is, a place.”

“Follow those signs, what does it say?”

“I need a shower badly.”

At first I kept trying to understand the content.

Who was Hector?

What structures?

Watch what again?

What place?

What signs?

But these weren’t conversations taking place entirely in the room anymore. Roger seemed to be moving between whatever was happening around his hospice bed and something I couldn’t see.

Friday through Monday he stopped eating and became mostly non-responsive. His voice changed. I could no longer easily understand him. I thought we were losing him.

Simon was upset that I wasn’t bringing him the kinds of food that he would eat. But Roger was disappearing from food, from water, from the rhythms we understood.

That Sunday I have pictures of him talking with Joe. He doesn’t look engaged in them, but when Joe talked into his ear Roger smiled and talked back. He had done the same with Judy earlier in the day.

And then on Tuesday he came back.

He was lucid. He was parched. He was hungry.

We used the chairlift to get him into the big wheelchair and I took him outside.

It was lovely. And I was completely conflicted.

Was he actually actively dying?

Was this the rally?

Was it the medication?

He had become so anxious and would try to climb out of bed and had almost fallen, and the hospice staff had tried so many medications to calm him and keep him comfortable.

Were they helping?

Were they doing more harm?

I didn’t know.

But being outside with him was so sweet.

Then wheeling him back into his room I bumped the footrest against the door jamb. He reared up and grimaced at me.

“I am so sorry.”

“Not sorry enough! I don’t use these feet any more and you hurt me!”

“I am so sorry.”

“Not sorry enough, not sorry enough.”

By the time we got him back into bed he was agitated and demanding water. He hadn’t drunk any for four days, so we had to go slowly. Against the advice of the nurses I wanted to give him the straw.

He almost choked. I turned it back over to the nurse.

As the nurse and I were talking Roger yelled, “Get me some real medical care!” The nurse left the room to diffuse the situation.

“Fucking bitch,” he said after her.

Then: “Get me a stainless steel bucket and torture devices!”

“Is that a past life? Or a revenge fantasy?”

“Exactly that.”

“They are trying to kill me.”

“They are not trying to kill you. You are dying though.”

Everything until then had been said with his eyes closed. At that he opened both eyes. The look he gave me was hatred.

“Dude. I am a smart ass. You raised me that way.”

A little later:

“Where is my cake?”

Since I had just eaten his cake, I told him. “I ate it.”

Then: “Don’t fuck with my paranoia!”

“You have paranoia?”

“Yes. I’m paranoid of her.” He pointed at the nurse.

“I’m paranoid of her.” He pointed at me.

It took about thirty minutes for the medication to calm and sedate him. But I left traumatized. I did not want to come back again, nor did I want to remember him like that.

And writing this now, I understand something about my mother’s death that I didn’t understand then. My daughters had seen this kind of behavior directed at them before we even knew anything was going on with my mom.

She had never shown that side to me. I didn’t understand why they had withdrawn from her. I do now.

The next day Cam came into town to say goodbye to his grandfather.

He had no idea what had happened the day before. He was delighted when I suggested we watch the England-Argentina semi-final match before going over. And then we drove to hospice.

Roger was sleeping. We sat there for the longest time.

“Shall we try to wake him up?”

I was terrified. But sure.

When he woke, he was different.

He was thrilled to see Cameron, although at first he thought Cam was Jack.

“Where’d Jack go?”

He had taken in neither food nor water for about a week. When he first tried to speak we couldn’t understand him. We gave him enough water to wet his mouth and gradually the words came back.

And the conversations were the best that day.

We called Judy and put the phone to his ear. When she started talking, he thought she was Mary and began telling her that he had been time traveling. She didn’t stay on the phone long.

I asked him if it was Mither or Mary Earl. He said they had both smushed together.

And that it was strange.

He remembered being tortured. But now he didn’t think anyone there had done it.

Something had shifted. Not necessarily into clarity. Not back into the world we shared. But the terror was no longer everything. Then he started telling me what was happening to him.

His ears were changing. He wished I could hear what he was hearing now. So we could compare.

I asked if his eyes were changing too. Yes. He pointed toward the window. There was a blue lady outside.

He told me he was more centered now. He was ready to go upstairs. He kept grabbing my hand, kissing it, telling me it was time to go upstairs.

This man who had told me there was nothing.

This man who had been terrified of walking into a dark room because there might be things in there.

Now his ears were changing.

His eyes were changing.

There was a blue lady outside the window.

He had traveled through torture and paranoia and broken structures and places and signs and people who weren't there and people who had somehow become other people.

And now: “Everyone in the instrument is an instrument.”

I have no idea what that means. I want to pretend that I do.

Maybe none of this tells us anything about death. Maybe it tells us everything.

What I know is that Roger seemed to be encountering something, and he was doing what Roger always did when he encountered something he didn’t understand.

He was trying to figure it the fuck out.

He was comparing. Testing. Reporting back.

The structures are all wrong.

That’s what it is, a place.

Do we need to watch this again?

Follow those signs.

My ears are changing.

Do your eyes change too?

There is a blue lady outside.

I am more centered now.

It’s time to go upstairs.

He was so loving that day. I curled up in bed beside him and sang for him and cried. At one point he looked at me and winked the way he does.

I will remember that forever. I hope.

Later Cam told me it was weird seeing me as a daughter, not a mother.

Mishal told me about another conversation with Roger. She had been giving him water. He asked her how she knew to do that.

“I work here,” she said.

Roger considered this. “That’s creepy.”