The Rev. George Hemingway looks fondly at photographs of his parents, George and Margaret Hemingway. The vicar of St. Michael/San Miguel was appointed “attorney in fact for health care,” in advance directives his parents signed before they died.

When the father of the Rev. George Hemingway, vicar of St. Michael/San Miguel, Newberg, died of congestive heart failure at age 80 in 1996, he had made clear exactly how he wanted to be remembered. George Danforth Hemingway had spent his working life in the Navy as an officer and aeronautical engineer. He was the consummate Navy man.

“My father had his officer’s uniform pressed and his shoes polished, waiting in the closet for the time when he would be laid out,” remembers Hemingway. While the day came sooner than Hemingway expected, the fact that his father had chosen his clothes and signed an advance directive that included a “Do Not Resuscitate” order (DNR) left no ambiguity in his final hours and no unnecessary, unwanted measures to save his life.

When Hemingway’s mother, Margaret Roberta Chadwick Purcell Hardman Hemingway, was diagnosed with melanoma in 1985, his father had already had a stroke. Both Hemingways called in their eldest son and told them that they wanted him to have “durable power of attorney” in healthcare matters which they would specify in separate advance directives — one for his mother and one for his father. His mother died in 1990, at age 73.

“I interviewed each of them separately and took notes on what they wanted and what they didn’t want in terms of care if they became unable to make decisions for themselves,” explains Hemingway. “I signed and dated my notes and had my parents do the same.” When Hemingway’s parents asked him also to be the executor of their wills, Hemingway told them it could be a conflict of interest if he was also their attorney for health-care matters. His eldest sister became executor.

Two of his four siblings balked a bit, says Hemingway, when their father signed the DNR and asked that it be posted in his home. But they had to come to accept their father’s decision, he adds.

In the end, the DNR was carried out: On the day his father died, Hemingway was supposed to meet his father and his father’s live-in nurse at the elder Hemingway’s cardiologist’s office. After he’d been there for 45 minutes, the younger Hemingway drove over to his father’s house, to find him and the nurse strapped into their seatbelts in the car in front of the house.  As George turned to talk with the nurse, his father died. “While it was awful that he died, he didn’t have to be put through invasive and futile life-saving measures. Because of the DNR, the nurse didn’t have to call an ambulance.”

Hemingway immediately called his father’s pastor, and the two clergy gently lifted the older man into a wheelchair and brought him into the house, laid him out, and dressed him in his elegant Navy uniform. For the son, it was “an enormous relief to see him that way — he was a Navy man first and foremost.”

“The Do Not Resuscitate was a great help to our family, to me as the attorney in fact for health care, and to the medical personnel who cared for my father,” says Hemingway. “We didn’t have to agonize over decisions or try to decipher what he might have wanted. It was all there, down to the uniform and the shoes.

“At a deeper level,” Hemingway continues, “Advance Directives posit the idea that good stewardship of resources requires Christians to treat their bodies as gifts of finite duration and to trust that God will provide for all our needs for eternity. By having an Advance Directive in place, one is a good steward of his or her body, acceding to God’s given order that there is a time to live and a time to die.”

George Hemingway co-officiated at this father’s funeral. All the pallbearers were Navy men. He was cremated and his ashes spread over the Pacific Ocean — just as he had wished.