Remembering Dad

On Faith and Hope

I think I'll try to write again...

Every day I look for signs of my father. It has become a kind of game I play in the wee hours of the night when the ache sets in. I type his name into Google, hoping to find some sign of life, or rather, more signs of the lives he touched. When I discover a new entry to his obituary guest book, or a comment from a former student or player on our high school memorial wall in Facebook, my heart leaps as tears swell up. I yearn to know more, but mostly, I yearn to reach out and to touch him.

My father died on November 2, 2009. There's not a day that passes, hardly an hour that passes that I don't think of him. I constantly look at pictures and view the few videos I have of him, listening intently for that booming voice. I still struggle with memories of dad's last week on this earth in Meriter Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. But finally other memories have begun to win out, even pre-cancer ones. I can hear his knock on my bedroom door as a kid, and his call to get up, "Rise and shine. You're burning day light." I can also hear the clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen as he unloaded the dishwasher in the morning before most of the family was awake. I remember wishing him a Merry Christmas on Christmas morning last year and giving him a big kiss on the cheek. And I remember plenty more.

The first few weeks and even months after he passed I felt alone, perhaps even abandoned. My heart echoed the expression of grief aptly described by C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed, which he wrote following the death of his beloved wife Joy. Like Lewis, I, too, felt as if a door had been slammed in my face.

"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?"

I'm glad those dark days seem to be behind me. My heart continues to ache, and it seems it always will, but I feel the Lord's presence in a real and tangible way, His loving embrace. Yes, I do.

Although I may never know the answers to so many questions -- why mantle cell lymphoma, why my dad, why now at the age of 69 -- somehow it is okay. It's not the story I would have written, but I will trust in the story that God has written.