As a well spent
day brings happy sleep,
so life well used
brings happy death.
-Leonardo da Vinci
“If I live the
life I’m given, I won’t be scared to die.”
Seth and Scott
Avett,
The
Once and Future Carpenter
August 6, 1986…
Over my protest she said, “Don’t come until I call you. There is
really nothing you can do.”
This was her way. In a crisis she always seemed calm, steady and
focused. She was my mother but when I
think about her character, the example she provided her children, the
consistent adherence to loving duty, she has taken on a bigger than life
persona in my mind and of little doubt continues to influence me on a
daily basis.
Dad was dying and there wasn’t much else for her to do other than
sit by his side, holding the man with whom she had shared life’s journey. While the circumstance was unique, it was not
her first end of life experience. Her
mother had died as they were preparing a meal in the kitchen of their home in
Toronto, and my father’s mother died of a heart attack while mum visited her in
the hospital. No, this was not her first
experience with death in the presence of a loved one, but it was the most heart
wrenching. The others had been quick and
unexpected…this was long and slow and difficult.
The call came at 4AM, August 7th, and by 4:30 with a bag
packed the previous evening, coffee, and a few snacks for the road, I was off
for the 13-hour drive from Jefferson City, Missouri to Alliance, Ohio. The trip was surreal as so many images
passed through my mind of the man with whom I would never speak or hug or kiss in
life again. He had stepped from the platform
to the train with a one-way ticket in hand from which there would be no return…the
ride, he had spent his entire adult life looking forward to, had finally
arrived.
My father’s death was not supposed to happen this way. In fact, it was expected many years earlier.
November 1963…
The phone rang around 7:30PM.
Usually when calls came after 7 at night they were for my dad…someone
ill, the unexpected death of a parishioner, a person needing some immediate
counseling. This evening, he had returned
to the church office for a little more work.
“Dreisinger’s residence” I said to the caller.
Dad was on the other end of the line.
“Ted, I want you to come to the office. I have a few things to talk to you about,”
“Tonight?” I said. “You mean
right now?”
“Yes,” he said with an odd timbre to his voice. “Right now.”
Backing up a bit…
Three weeks earlier, he had been in the hospital to remove a walnut
sized growth in his right buttocks. It
had begun as a small irritant, but got big enough that he and his doctor
thought it might be good to remove the thing.
The surgery was November 22, 1963…the day John Kennedy was assassinated. I had gone to the hospital to see how he
was recovering, and gave him the news of the President’s death. He had not heard. In spite of my father’s fear the Pope would
be running the United States Government, he liked the man…I was 16 years old.
A week later he went to Cleveland, for what I thought was a
ministerial conference with some colleagues with whom he had worked before bringing
the family to Fairmont, West Virginia. I
really did not pay too much attention…it wasn’t that unusual.
The office…
The church was about a mile away from home, so I put on a hat and
scarf, my coat, and headed out, responding to this curious request.
“Sit down,” he said matter-of-factly when I arrived. “You are my only son and I have a few things
to go over with you.”
In an instant, a sense of soberness descended like a heavy garment
stifling the room. In that moment of immediate intimacy, the walls felt
close…things slowed down…everything seemed a little out of focus. It was like suddenly my father and I were the
only two living creatures on the planet.
My heart beat faster and breathing became a bit labored. You know the feeling…something was coming and
it wasn’t good.
Gravity…that’s it. The
situation was grave!
My father went on to tell me the visit to Cleveland had actually
been to a cancer clinic. The growth
taken out of his buttocks turned out to be malignant and was a metastasis from
his pancreas…a death sentence!
With the sense of an out of body experience, everything shifted to
automatic pilot as my brain tried to understand what my father had just said. He went through his files with me…the
will…bank accounts…how I would need to help mother…plans to leave the city and
return to Canada after he was gone. I
was to say nothing to anyone. Mother
knew, but the girls did not…he would talk to them later. I was speechless!
A minister’s family is usually very protective about what goes on
within the home. These people are held
to unmercifully high standards because of the calling. The pressure often leads to one of two things,
the children become public embarrassments or the family pulls up the drawbridge
and fortifies one another, becoming closer. This situation was the latter. And so in the quietness of a family
gathering, my father told us all he was dying.
Life goes on…
Dad’s calendar over the next few weeks had been previously filled
and there was a lot for him to do.
One event was to preach for an ecumenical church service at the
Central Methodist Church. No one in the
community had any idea this vital and charismatic man was nearing the end of
his life. He was a master of protecting
his emotions and this situation was no exception.
My father was articulate and passionate from the pulpit, but he
viewed the weekly sermons as gifts from the Holy Spirit, providing him with as much, or more sustenance,
than anyone in the congregation received.
He felt Sunday mornings were a ‘living experience,’ and not just words
spoken from prepared text. Of
consequence, he never recorded his sermons…except and until this ecumenical
meeting at the Central Methodist Church.
My task was to set up a reel-to-reel tape recorder and capture, what the
family believed would be, the last time he would preach.
He began his prepared remarks by saying, “I am grateful to be here
today, amongst Christian believers, whose duty it is to be a shining light and
example for Christ in the World. If this
were to be the last sermon I were to preach,” he paused, looking at my mother,
“these are the things that I would say…”
He went on to express the importance of brotherhood, fairness, duty
and Christ’s mercy, challenging each person to be living ambassadors for Christ
in a world that so desperately needed Him.
My father never used the pulpit to fear monger or punish. He felt the Gospel message was to uplift, not
laden people with the burden of guilt…there was enough, probably too much of
that, in his opinion. That afternoon was
no exception. While no one but our family
knew the truth of the matter, everyone in the room was touched by the passion,
power and confidence of his words that day.
The unexpected…
Life has a way, however, of unfolding in the most unpredictable of
ways. As it turned out, my father did
not die. While he believed his life was
spared by a miracle, it is more probable the cancer’s origin was misdiagnosed.
He lived another 23 years, and though crippled by the unrelenting
and ever increasing grip of Parkinson’s disease for the last 13 years of his
life, he continued to be lifted by the Holy Spirit from the pulpit Sunday
mornings and minister to those for whom he had been called.
Time and gravity…
In the end, however, as it had always been, his life partner was
there at his side.
When he struggled in life she was there, and as the last breath of
air escaped his lips, yet once again it was she that brought him strength,
helping him up the final steps…escorting him home. It was her gift…an unspeakably intimate,
loving moment that was hers and hers alone to share – her “…duty…” for the man
she had so deeply loved.
To her, however, it was not a goodbye, but rather a small hiatus,
for he was waiting at the station on April 26th, 2006, when she
arrived, and I have little doubt it was a joyous reunion…for the scripture
says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave
unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh (Gen 2: 24).
And so it is written...
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