Mourning The Loss of a Father
Editorial Note: These are some reflections on life with my dad and on the end of my dad’s life. My dad’s obituary gives a tidy tour of his life to put some of these reflections in context.
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Some of you don’t have many photos with your dad because he was always taking the pictures. In my case, my dad just didn’t like his picture taken and he was stubborn about it. That’s one thing about him I’ll strangely miss. He loved anchovies on his pizza. That’s another thing. Then there are a thousand ways we were alike. I like a tall glass of milk after mowing the lawn. Kristi says my body just wants the water in the milk. I don’t care. I love it. Like my dad did. Mustard on eggs. Humming. Grunting (sorry!). That’s all dad.
The Honey Badger of Men
There are many ways in which my dad might have died. He landed in the hospital in college with a case of pleurisy from a combination of working, studying, and partying without things like sleep. Hearing this would not surprise anyone who has known my dad at any stage of his life. There were the threats to his life when he had to terminate employees for theft. Dad was a master at finding them and terminating them, one explanation for his incredible control of shrink in his stores. Dad worked most of his life in retail management. 28 years for Woolworth then 15 for Family Dollar in St. Louis. This included nine moves in eleven years and then two more after that. Dad had an encyclopedic mind and probably a photographic memory that helped him make good judgments in people and for people. The word “legend” keeps coming up as I speak with his old friends and colleagues. He was great with numbers, but better with people. “The best boss I ever had” and “one of my best friends” are recurring themes.
There’s another way he should have died. I reached out recently to many of dad’s old buddies. I keep getting stories back about how dad would play and replay the same song on a juke box more than a dozen times. In one instance a man came over and said “is that your bike out there? If you play that song one more time you don’t want to know what I’ll do to you.” So dad played the song one more time. The man walked over. Dad stared him down, waved his hand to the bar, and called, “Waitress, waitress.” She came over. “Call the cops” That threw the man off. “What are you doing!?!” “I’m calling the cops so I don’t have to kill you.” I think in his own mind my dad lived as Dirty Harry. Quiet, in control, and unstoppable. He made the right judgment about this man and called his bluff.
Sometimes you don’t die but you feel like you’re dying inside.
The picture above is my favorite from the early years. We’re all together. And by “all” I mean, us, incuding dad and Tyler. My older brother, Tyler, was born with severe heart and brain defects. Tyler had a handful of surgeries in his first year and a half of life to address both, with good success. But in the process of brain surgery at a little over a year old Tyler got MRSA in the brain. Meningitis led to severe and permanent brain damage. I grew up with Tyler in the home and then at a nursing home as he entered his teenage years. For Drew and me, Tyler was Tyler. But for mom and dad, Tyler’s story and suffering was their own. But they made it through and so did their marriage.
They also made it through the loss of dad’s company, Woolworth. Another kind of death. Just as dad landed the job of his dreams, in the late nineties, dad was charged with letting go of managers and colleagues. Mom says he had nightmares for years of the faces of these people he loved as they heard the news that they lost their job. At the end of that road dad lost his. He never fully recovered from that loss. He was of a generation that was less transactional in its commitment to the companies they worked for. He and his buddies didn’t work “for” Woolworth. They built Woolworth. They were Woolworth. Woolworth took great care of our family. But it didn’t last. Dad worked for fifteen more years, then for Family Dollar. From all the notes I’m receiving, it’s clear he attacked that job with a great deal of energy and even more care for the success of the managers he built into.
Hearing loss involves many small deaths. A long day of skeet shooting without hearing protection led eventually to a life of isolation from friends and—in ways that became sadly normal—from family as well. Phone calls were difficult, so long distances relationships faded. Being in social settings with more than two people was difficult, so he wasn’t much with us at larger family gatherings. And for obvious reasons, making new friends didn’t come easy. He was something of a recluse in his later years.
But his hearing didn’t close him off where it counted most. He didn’t have his old friends or broader family around. But he had Janell. And he loved Janell!
Janell was my dad’s life. Marriage is a one-flesh union, after all.
It wasn’t always easy to tell. He was not an affectionate person, at least in the typical fashion. Dad often channeled his inner Ralph from The Honeymooners. It was quite a sight and mostly an act, though not always. But if mom left the room, especially these last few months, dad talked about her:
Dad to me: “I’ve got a hell of a wife, don’t I? Snatched her up from all kinds of guys who wanted her. What woman would have moved all over the country trying to live like we did?”
Dad to my brother, Drew: “You probably already know this, but you have the best mom in the world. They don’t come like her.”
They were married 53 years. Death brings the end of a marriage too. I’ll miss their marriage as much as I’ll miss my dad.
Admiration and Ache
I admire my father. I hope you sense that. But I have also ached to know my dad better and for my dad to know the Lord. Not an uncommon longing, at least that first part. Regarding the second part, without knowing much about him other than his name, you have prayed for my dad to know Jesus.
Take heart: I believe the Lord was kind to answer both of my prayers and yours in these past months.
Mid-way through my sabbatical this summer I got the news: my dad’s body was full of cancer.
As you may know, I’ve been darting back and forth from Greenville to St. Louis to be with dad and mom. Dad was undergoing chemo. We had some nice talks on the back deck. He shared some stories from his life with me and a few kind words. We thought we might have months and maybe over a year. But then dad fell in the night and broke his hip. He was stuck in a door holding himself up for hours until mom found him. He swore he’d never ride in an ambulance, but he conceded. Dad wouldn’t return home for two weeks, then only for two days on hospice until he died. Much sooner than we expected. Those weeks in the hospital were difficult and undignifying.
One of you prayed often that the Lord would send Christians to my dad. He did that. One kind nurse prayed for my dad as he struggled, “Lord, help John.” A pastor from my home church here stopped by twice. Dad was sleeping, but he left a note each time. “Keith is a good man,” dad said. He always liked a man that did his job well. Keith has been at that church around the corner for over thirty years—a testament to longevity. Dad’s last doctor was a believer.
It was the Lord’s mercy that we could all be together at home with dad (on hospice) and holding him when he died. Circumstances could have been quite different (at a hospital alone, one of us across the country or else in town running an errand, or dad unconscious). Dad seemed aware that he was about to die. He was clearly fading. Yet it seemed clear he knew we were there. All very subtle and strained—he cried a few tears, something I had never seen dad do. He called out to Janell. She got to his side with me, along with my brother. Then, moments later, after brief intermittent breathing, dad breathed his last. I haven’t been up close in this way to a loved one. It was at the same time dreadful and precious, a horror and an honor to be there with him. It is not a place I ever wanted to be yet there was no place I would rather have been. We consider those moments a gift from God. We buried dad in Michigan this past Saturday alongside my brother, Tyler.
An older friend recently wrote me, “Grief never dissipates. It accumulates. With each death of a loved one, grief over the deaths of loved ones from years earlier makes another visit.” That sounds right to me, even good. I don’t want to forget my father such that I can’t feel his loss.
The Lord’s Mercy
It was the Lord’s mercy, as well, that dad had an early warning concerning death. That is a bitter gift, but a gift, nonetheless. He had a few other bitter warnings. Dad’s brother died in February and one of his sisters died in July.
I have written and spoken to my father for years about the Lord. In a way that fits my dad’s personality, he seemed to show that the seed of the Word had taken.
Remember that guy at the bar with a stone face who called the waitress over? That’s not the guy mom was talking about in this short exchange a month or two back:
“I bought a walker for dad”
“Oh dad won’t like that.”
“Well actually, he was glad for it. He is in the mode of knowing he needs help.”
In the last months of dad’s life, several of us had an encounter with dad in which he started off into a little reflection on the eternality of God. “What I don’t understand is how there could be a being that had no beginning. I understand something that has a beginning. But no beginning?”
He wasn’t fighting the thought. He wasn’t mocking the religious. He had at times. In this case, he assumed it was true that God was from forever and for forever, the ground of all existence. And in his own way he was seeing himself in perspective. Smaller and smaller. Created, not the boss of himself or the world. I got this little speech spontaneously while watching some show with dad, probably The Greatest Catch or Blue Bloods. I brought the topic up on another visit and he started into the speech again. Drew got it while sitting on the deck with dad. Drew asked, “what do you think about when you’re out here at night?” “I look through that hole in the trees at that star.” Then he started talking again about God.
Perhaps the Lord was bringing my father low for a purpose:
For thus says the One who is high and lifted up,
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:
“I dwell in the high and holy place,
and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly,
and to revive the heart of the contrite. —Isaiah 57:15
Multiple times this past year, mom reports that dad told her that he prayed every day. That he thanked God for her, prayed about Tyler, and prayed for the forgiveness of his sins. It’s one thing to speak of forgiveness for sins in the abstract. It’s another thing to speak this way to the spouse against whom many of your sins were committed.
In this, dad acknowledged several truths: that he was in fact a sinner, that his sins were ultimately against God, that we need forgiveness from God, and that God stands ready to forgive.
That report from mom matches a heart that has considered the things he has heard about Jesus many times. Not the man who said once to me, “God could never forgive me. You don’t know what I have done.” Dad would not have had a developed Christology or soteriology. But maybe my dad understood God’s readiness to forgive our sins because of what he heard about how God sent his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
Larry, my former pastor here in St. Louis, encouraged me: “His tender heart toward the Lord as you described it is a great sign of working from God when I consider how little faith the thief on the cross expressed to Jesus on the day of his death, I realize that Jesus can save the one who calls upon his name. I have rarely seen someone confessing their sins as your father apparently did in his last hours who was not a believer in Christ. Those are not normally the acts of someone who is lost. He is in the hands of merciful God.” I might have encouraged you similarly at different times. But even pastors need pastors to shine some light into the dark for them. If he’s right, that would explain why my dad sweetened toward my mom this past year, showed forebearance with a difficult person, and said he hopes a nurse forgives him after he spoke too much of his mind recently.
The Lord is merciful, and he knows. We trust him.
There and Back Again
It is difficult to imagine Drew and me caring for and leading our churches as we do apart from dad’s fathering. He cheered on our pursuit of ministry, though I’m sure he didn’t see it coming. But dad saw something coming. He was determined that Drew and I would be reliable, resiliant, and ready to lead.
He introduced me to a nurse two weeks ago this way: “That’s my son. He’s a black belt. He got off the bus one day and got beat up. I asked if he fought back. He said no. The next day we put him in karate.” Dad was proud of decisions like that. He made many of them for our good—usually swift, often consequential. Your preacher is the sum of many impressions and the Lord’s grace. But much of that grace was through my father. I knew it already, but he confirmied it on meeting Kristi: “Kristi is a good girl. I can see it in her eyes. You should marry her.” He was a good judge of character. These are the kinds of memories we’ve been sitting on these last days in thankfulness for dad.
We’ve also been giving thanks to God for you.
Thank you for praying for dad, some of you for many years. Based on your reports, my dad’s soul was under spiritual seige. I wrote to encourage you with your part in my dad’s story. But I also wanted you to know something of my dad. Thanks for reading.
I’m in St. Louis now riding out the grief with my mother. Mom is still saying, “We’re selling the car,” or “our house.” She hesitates for a moment after doing so, I can tell. The pronouns will adjust with time. I keep wanting to text dad something. As we get used to dad no longer being here, I have been pondering this thought: I no longer have a dad. I had a dad.
We’re both getting used to new sounds in a quieter house. And we’re both figuring out our way forward with our main character gone from the scene. A partner for mom. A dad for us boys. A grandpa for my kids.
Drew and I are both pastors, five hours and eleven hour drives away respectively. We’re tag-teaming taking care of mom. We have months ahead of us to help her in the way we should. I’ll be back in the pulpit soon and preaching most of that time, as usual. But I might be more touch-and-go than you’re used to.
I’m sure this little account brings up some hard memories for you, or even some memories you wish you had. And perhaps some sweet memories as well.
That’s part of why I wrote. For me, for you, and for us. I’ve walked with many of you though grief. More than that, you’ve walked with one another through grief. Thanks for walking patiently with me through mine.
