“Saying good-bye to
things which have meaning in
your mind, but not your
life, is a good thing!
Keeping those things
that bring
both is a blessing”
- Anonymous
Downsizing is time consuming, and if you carry even the
vestiges of a hoarding gene, extremely stressful. While I am uncertain I feel a compulsion to
keep things, I sometimes wonder what should go and what should remain.
You now the saying, “Reduce what you have…decrease what you
want.” In this decade of my life, and in
particular with this move, I have been trying very hard to incorporate that
wise saying.
In the process of the move, one makes decisions about what
to keep and what to pitch on the front end, and also on the back end as the
‘settling in’ takes place.
The unexpected…
The card slipped out of the file folder I had been sorting
through in the office of our new home.
It was one of those birthday cards you get for the
appropriate gender of child – in my case it was to a ‘son.’ The outside was a brightly colored cartoon
drawing of flowers in the foreground, a field of vertical light yellow and
green furrows just behind the garden, several fully shaped trees of the same
colors at the end of the field, set with a blue sky in the background. The Header said, “FOR OUR SON On His
Birthday” In my father’s hand between
the words “…OUR…” and “...SON...” was a moderately readable, “only.”
The inside was dated, May 31st, 1974…the card would arrive
twelve June, the date of my birth.
The inside text:
Your birthday
brings back memories
So warm – so full of
fun –
That our hearts are
brimming over
With good wishes for
you, Son!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
MANY HAPPY RETURNS
It was signed in the same hand, “Deepest love in Christ,
Mother and Dad.”
Most greeting cards put their standard message on the right
panel, leaving the left side either empty, or small graphic of some sort. This one brought some of the flowers from the
front to the left panel for continuity…a nice touch.
Pretty standard stuff one might say…thoughtful...sent early
so that it would arrive on time. Yeah,
pretty standard…except there was nothing typical about this card.
On the left panel just under those lovely flowers was this
note in my father’s hand,
“Dear Ted,” the faltering hand wrote with his favorite ink
pen. “We gave you to Christ on your 1st birthday and he has given
you back to us. Our cup is full and
running over. Dad and Mother”
The exceptional nature of this card is it came from my
father…he had picked it out…hand written the note…something he NEVER did. Writing even these short words legibly would
have been an agonizingly slow and difficult of process and reading these words
struck my heart with the unexpected accuracy of a sniper waiting patiently in
his nest for the unsuspecting target to emerge in his sights.
Dad had been in the throes of Parkinson Disease for several
years by now, and it had already taken much from him. He was a proud man and did all he could to
mask the symptoms in public and from the pulpit, as he fought the beast with
everything he had.
By now the disease had taken his body and most of his
‘hand.’ Truth be told, his pen to paper
had never been very clear…or at least to me in years after I learned to read
cursive writing. It seemed the longer he
worked in his life, the more illegible his writing became. He could read it, but that was about it.
If I were to broadly categorize my father, it would be that
he was a fighter, a man, I am uncertain that had the word ‘failure’ in his
vocabulary. He would have denied it was Parkinson’s and
would, of little doubt, have believed he could overcome these stress induced
tremors…it would just take discipline and time.
The prison he found himself in, however, as hard as he tried to find
escape, had been locked shut, the combination thrown away, the walls slowly and
inexorably encroaching inch by inch until they would eventually crush him.
There was another inmate in this prison. It was my mother. She knew the private struggle, the
depression, the anger and stress as she saw this man lose his physical
capacities through the ever tightening strangle hold of this devastating
disease. What she didn’t realize, in the
beginning, was how it would ensnare her time and energies, slowly engulfing
them both for the next decade as she cared for him and he slipped away.
As I read these words, I felt a tear slip from my eye. She would have told him, “Ed, let me take
care of the card to Teddy. I always do
it.” I can almost hear his voice, “Fan,
I want to do this…I need to do this…just let me do this, ‘PLEASE!’” He loved this woman, but sometimes he had to
put his foot down. The “…please…” would NOT have been pleading, but
rather in the kind of knowing impatience that comes from living with someone
you know too well. I had come back from
the war alive when he had been terrified I would not. He would write this card damn it, and that
was all there was to it.
On many levels, these few handwritten words were a labor of
love…one he would NOT be denied.
He was sixty-one when he struggled to put these words to paper,
five years younger than I am as I sit behind this keyboard.
In these moments of reflection, many images of my father
flashed through my mind…some made me smile, others touched me deeply. Fathers that loved their sons can do that,
you know. I wondered what he might think
if he were to have seen my journey, since he boarded the flight of no return…who
knows, maybe he has.
In my heart I found myself composing these few words,
“Dear Dad, Thank you for giving me back to Christ on my
first birthday. Thank you for giving me life and for trusting that God would keep me
in His hand. I want you to know, He
has. While I am uncertain exactly how
this will transpire, I look forward to seeing and feeling both mother and
you once again. As I think of the table you set for
the life of your ‘only’ son, I am grateful beyond this brief expression, for it
is my cup that “…is full and running over.”
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