Full Reversal, Part 4

This vulnerable man I write of was, obviously, not always this way. Quite the contrary, Dad was on the other end of the spectrum when I was growing up and even into my college years.

We were raised in an Epsicopal household. That is, my mother took us to church on Sundays. We also would have an advent wreath that we would gather around at Christmastime. But that was about it. I remember seeing my father in worship when I was little, but after we moved a couple of times, the memories of my father being in a church were almost non-existent. Also never brought up with Dad were conversations dealing with Jesus, God or faith. My father’s spirit was so lost that he got up right after I had been confirmed, choosing to leave the sanctuary before the rest of the service concluded. My father viewed most people who went to church as “pagan.”

But then Mom died of lung cancer in the spring of 1979. It was a crushing blow to our family, and it nearly killed my then 54-year-old father. He shook his fists in anger at God and swore he’d show Him a thing or two. Well, guess who won that smackdown?

Slightly more than a year after Mom died, Dad met Sally, a divorcee who was devout in her faith in Jesus and active in her Southern Baptist congregation in Memphis. It was through her example of strong faith that God opened my father’s eyes. I recently told Sally that, with God’s help, she had saved Dad, just as if she had pulled him from a burning house or a raging sea. “Really?” she said. “Oh yes,” I told her. He would’ve been dead a long time ago, consumed by all the bitterness and anger he had inside.

I still remember Dad calling me at my first job out of college to say he had started going to church and truly believed in Jesus’ life, ministry, resurrection and promise. I pulled the phone away from my ear, looked at it and thought, “OK, where is my father and what have you done with him?”

To think that Dad could come to believe, truly believe, in God, Jesus and the promise of salvation is, well, humbling. As Jesus told the no-longer-possessed man, “Return home and tell how much God has done for you.” As my father joyfully says today, God did much for Dad, and his spirit was transformed through God’s grace.

As my family enters this new phase with Dad, all of us pray that God’s grace will see us through. I know many people are praying for him, and all of us are grateful for that. But praying is as much for the person asking for God’s help as it is for whom the help is sought. Be mindful that God truly does answer prayers, but the outcome is not always the answer we think it should be. Whenever I pray, I always ask, finally, that whatever the outcome, please help me find the strength to deal with the final result.

Full Reversal, Part 3

One of my Dad’s characteristics when we were growing up was his emotional distance. Sure, we’d see him laugh and, oh boy, get annoyed or angry. But the first time I saw my father cry was when I was 21, and he told us that Mom’s lung cancer surgery did not go well. I remember how shocked I was that he was even capable of crying. He always seemed to have those spigots disconnected. Maybe he didn’t have tear ducts, I thought, thinking he was impossible to read.

Now, more than 30 years later, staying in that assisted living/nursing home facility, my Dad is an open book.

My first full day there with him, I saw my father cry more than in the previous 52 years of my life. Dad cried when my step-sister and I finally got him to realize he didn’t have to have a job. Dad cried when he talked to my brother. Dad cried when Sally and another step-sister, Sara, came to see him.

Dad confessed that when he saw his father cry a lot near the end of his life, he didn’t think much of it. “I thought it was so weak,” Dad said. “No, Dad,” I said. “It’s a sign of strength that you can let your emotions go. You have to let 'em go.”

The letting go was important because it showed everyone a side of him they doubt existed. Before she left for home, my sister Barb had told him, “You’ve been like a pineapple. All prickly and rough on the outside, but real sweet on the inside.” I kept driving home the importance of people seeing that sweet side a lot more than the prickly side. Anne and Sara both said they had never seen this tender side of him. “He’s like a lost little boy,” said Sara with tears in her eyes.

I think it goes back to my father’s childhood. He grew up in rural Arkansas during the Great Depression and had two parents who were not the warmest people in the world. His father – 44 when Dad was born – lost, then gained back, all he had three times in his life. His mother was a school teacher and principal who didn’t show him a lot of affection. Dad was shipped off to a school in Memphis when he was 13 by parents who wanted to give him a good education, but forgot about the emotional needs of an adolescent. Consequently, Dad formed an emotional wall around himself, rarely letting anyone in. Of course my mother, then Sally were able to scale that wall, and while he didn’t show it a lot, my siblings and I knew we were allowed inside the wall, too. But no one was inside the wall all the time; not us, not Mom and not Sally.

Now with the walls down, Dad is vulnerable to all that surrounds him. Like Sara said, he truly is like a lost little boy, one who needs his parents. Those parents are younger than he is, but they love him dearly and will help guide him through uncharted waters.

Full Reversal, Part 2

Big sister Barb had greeted me as I walked into the assisted living/nursing home facility. She had been there nearly a week already, watching Dad slip between lucidity and la-la land. It had taken a toll on her. “It’s just so hard,” she had confessed. “I’m worn out.”

Part of the problem was CAT scans had revealed that Dad had had a series of mini-strokes over the last several years. Taken individually, these strokes were barely noticeable, easily dismissed as the effects of aging on a man in his 80s. But cumulatively, they had sapped Dad of physical and emotional energy and dulled his sharp mind.

Add that to his episode of dizziness and nausea nearly two weeks earlier, and the result is an 84-year-old man getting up in the middle of the night, wandering the hospital halls in his birthday suit, trying to tell the nurses that people were stealing things from the hospital and putting them in their cars; or that he was seeing whales swim by his bed; or that he was in Minneapolis, when actually he was in Nashville.

Still, he had improved enough in those first few days to be transferred from the hospital to the assisted living/nursing home facility. After seeing Dad in his room, Barb and I took him outside to enjoy the beautiful autumn afternoon in middle Tennessee. Dad’s conversation with us was clear and funny as we reminisced about the past.

But then he looked at me and said, in a very serious tone, “Mark, I’ve got to find a new job. I lost my job last week, and I need to find work.” Dad had retired 15 years ago, but he was worried about his dear wife, Sally, having to sleep on the street.

My sister and I exchanged glances as if to say, “Here we go again.” We let him ramble for a while, then changed the subject. It’s odd how a past anxiety can mix with current stress and uncertainty to produce a very real, but ungrounded, fear.

That anxiety crept up again the next day, when my step-sister, Anne, was visiting. God bless her because Anne listened to that for a minute, then told Dad, “You’re going down one of those little bunny trails again.” It was a perfect response, and I followed that by telling Dad that he had been retired for quite a while, and he had a nice home and plenty of money.

“But what about that house in Little Rock that has all that furniture? We need to get that out of there,” Dad said. Anne and I patiently explained to him that he didn’t have a house in Little Rock, that he and Sally had moved from another city in Arkansas six years ago. Any extra furniture had been sold, so everything was fine. “Really?” he said. “Sure enough,” I answered.

Once again, the children became the parents and the parent the child.

Full Reversal, Part 1

My dad and I share a common bond, one that has, inexplicably, run through my family for the last 100 years. My father, his half brother, his father and I all lost our first wives at an early age. Some may call it a curse, but I consider it a source of strength in times of trouble. Certainly, it has drawn my father and I closer through the knowledge of a journey into the fires of mourning and grief.

He hugged me tight 13 years ago as my wife lay dying at Duke University Medical Center and said, choking back tears, “I sure wish I could take this blow for you.” I gazed at him and said, “Sorry, Dad. It just doesn’t work that way.”

Since that time, there has been an unshakable link between us. We know the depths of each other’s heart, realizing that a monumental loss can be followed by cataclysmic personal change which leads to a new, fulfilling chapter of life. While that link is strong, our roles were always familiar: He was the father, I was the son.

But now, that has changed. It’s changed for my sisters and brother, too, as we watch Dad, 84, begin to slip into the wisps of old age and fog of infirmity.

This came to a head in the past two weeks as Dad was hospitalized with severe nausea and vertigo. He began to hallucinate and dream, the walls crumbling between imagination and reality. It appears as if he had been taking his medicines only sporadically, if at all, and this probably had caused his spiral downward.

As I walked in to visit him in the assisted living/nursing home facility last week, I was greeted not by the strong, somewhat emotionally distant figure I had grown up with, but by a man who had been stripped of his emotional armor. From his bed, he burst into tears as he greeted me. “Well, hey big guy.” Dad said. “I’ve really had a big fall.”

It was as if my son had scraped his knee and had come running to me in tears. “I know you’ve had, Dad,” I said as I hugged him and gently kissed him on the forehead. “It’s OK. Everything will be OK.”