Normally here I try and write about history, philosophy, politics, and religion with something of a professional air, putting the academic training and skills I’ve had to produce work where every claim is backed by cited information from a variety of credible sources. But that isn’t going to be the case in this one. Today’s article is a bit more personal. In the past few months serious personal tragedies have struck my life and the lives of my friends and family. One series of events particularly stood out to me.
You see, my father died.
But he wasn’t the only one. A friend of mine recently also lost his father, who died merely weeks after my father did. They both died of similar illnesses – systemic cancer that ravaged their body beyond the ability of present-day science to repair. But it isn’t their cause of death that is meaningful. What is meaningful is how people reacted to their deaths. What about the way they lived their lives elicited the reactions their deaths had and what this can teach us about the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Fathership of God – this is what I find to be so instructive. In their lives and in their deaths, we can see the quiet but profound impact that living the Gospel can have not only in the life of the disciple but on all those around him or her.
This may be the tale of two deaths, but it is also the tale of two lives – one of tragedy, one of victory, and the hope to be found in Christ for us all.
My Father
I have a lot of complicated feelings about my father. I can’t really remember what I felt about him when I was young. That I loved him seems like an obvious assumption. The one or two pictures which have survived the decades of moves, floods, and fires show me happily in his arms, though we almost look like strangers with how much I almost exclusively take after my mother’s side of the family. The earliest memory I really have of him is learning to ride a red bike.
Growing up in rural America the small set of apartments that my paternal grandmother lived in were nice but the road that led to them was half paved and half gravel. We were out on the empty road and my father had his hand on the bike seat, telling me he wouldn’t let go even as he urged me to go faster. This was my first real time riding a bike without training wheels. At some point he let go and at first I didn’t realize. I was caught up in the exultation of going fast. I didn’t realize that even with his height, he was 6’3 with very long legs, it probably wasn’t easy to stay with me. But suddenly I realized that I no longer felt him over my shoulder and I looked back. He wasn’t there, but I could see him at what seemed like a long distance behind me, urging me on. Then my bike wobbled, I wasn’t watching where I was going after all. I had hit something and I crashed. Hard on the gravel. This was the first time I can remember that my father’s outright lies caused me pain.
I wish I could say it was the last.
My father was an alcoholic. By my mother’s account he wasn’t always that way. He always drank alcohol, but it was only years into their marriage that the alcoholism developed and then only slowly over time as he began to spend more time drinking with his friends than at home with his family. I don’t know for certain. Such gradients of addiction are beyond me. I was too young. However long it took, by my eighth birthday my father was an alcoholic. This I know for a fact because of two events that stand out so clearly as I think of my past.
The first is the case of my Super NES. I had gotten it a few years earlier and loved it. I had loved video games since I had used to play Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. with a neighbor friend when I was five. We had been too poor then to afford a Nintendo for our home. My father, who, being unable to read or write, and seemingly unwilling to learn either, was a menial farmhand. He never brought in much money. My mother never graduated from college, but she had received training in a trade that allowed her to be the primary breadwinner in our family. Somehow, by hook or by crook, most likely by meticulous saving over an extended period of time, she had gotten the money together to get me the Super NES when it came out. But the specter of poverty was never far from our door in my childhood and it soon came back to haunt us.
In this case my mother came to me and explained a simple and stark truth: We didn’t have enough food to eat and didn’t have the money to buy anymore. So she asked me to make a big boy decision. Would I let her pawn my SNES in order to get the money to buy food? I don’t remember much indecisiveness. How could I say no? We and my younger siblings needed to eat. So the next day she went to work and my father was supposed to pawn the gaming console and go buy food. Well, he pawned the SNES alright. But he didn’t buy food. By the time he stumbled home that night he had been rip-roaring drunk for hours and spent most of the money he had gotten.
My mother was furious. I remember the yelling and the screaming. I remember by Uncle Andy pulling me and my siblings out of the trailer. I remember the weight that fell on my chest when I remarked that at least my dad didn’t hit my mom and my incredulous uncle asking me exactly what I thought was happening right now. I remember being cold. Soon after, my mother took us children and walked out the door, never to return.
This doesn’t mean my father immediately became a nonentity in my life. He was around, but that never meant much. He never did anything. He never provided for us. He never gave mom much in the way of child support. He just continued to sleep around and get drunk, working just enough to give him a place to crash, scraps to eat, and the ability to feed his habit. Most of the time he was around he was already a few sheets in the wind or on his way there. Which brings me to my second memory.
Once my mother asked him to watch us kids while she had something she had to do. He promised that he wouldn’t drink alcohol while he was with us and he was sober when he arrived. After my mother left though he walked down to a nearby store, bought some beer, came back, and started to drink. He eventually passed out watching TV and I put the younger kids to bed. The clearest part of this memory is what happened when he woke up. He sat up, declared that he needed to “take a piss,” and began stumbling around the living room.
I tried to guide him to our bathroom, but he was took drunk to even recognize me. Instead he stood in the corner, urinated all over it and then went and collapsed back onto the couch. And me? well, someone had to clean that up before it stained the carpet. I realized then that my father, for whatever good nature he had while sober – and he was good natured, he would give you the shirt off his back and the last dollar from his wallet when clearheaded – was too broken beyond repair. It was this night that the desperate hope that every child of divorced parents secretly harbors, that they would get back together again, died within me. How could I want to damn my mother to living with this shattered, ramshackle wreck of a man?
I wasn’t much older than this when I last saw my father. I was fifteen when my family moved away from Missouri. My mother was moving to be closer to her family who could give her support as she rebuilt her life and provide a better standard of living for us. The last time I talked to him was Christmas the year before I put in my mission papers. He promised to come see me graduate. Another lie. After that I didn’t bother trying to contact him again and he never tried to call me.
The years passed.
For awhile I was hurt. I was upset. I was angry. But eventually all that passed. I’m still not completely healed. Anytime my spouse and I get into a serious argument it triggers my deeply seated abandonment issues and I have something like the bastard child of an anxiety attack and a panic attack. But the vitriol is gone. It is hard to stay angry at someone who you haven’t seen in over half your lifetime. I had mostly consigned him to my past. Then I got the call earlier this year.
He was dying.
How did I feel? Well, for the most part I didn’t. I didn’t want to talk with him. Not out of some desire to twist the knife in him one last time. I didn’t rush to his bed side because I was overcome with rage. I didn’t attend his funeral out of a desire to snub him one last time. I simply had nothing to say and no desire to see him. His physical expiration was only confirming to be reality what had long been true metaphorically. My father had long been dead to me for literally decades already. How could he have been anything else?
He hadn’t been my father since he had completely abdicated his role in my life and the lives of my siblings. He was just some man, some stranger, dying as we all must eventually. I was glad that he had his sisters to be with him in his last days so he didn’t die alone. But I had no special feelings, aches, or tears to shed for him. By this point even my youngest brother, who had never really knew our father since my brother had been a mere baby when my mother had left him, had no desire to go see our dying father and meet him because my brother had long made peace with the truth that he had no father. Honestly, if anything, my father’s death was a relief as now I could finally do the temple work to seal my family together.
So the old man died.
In silence.
Alone.
In the dark.
And few, if anyone, attended his funeral.
My Friend’s Father
At one point in my early 20s, I came pretty close to being homeless. I was crashing on the floor at my cousin’s place. I had a job, but it was going to take time to get back on my feet and I wanted to save money to go to college. I was looking around for a relatively low price cost of living arrangement when some friends at church explained to me that I could come and live with them. I had already been over their home plenty of times and had a good relationship with their parents who, upon learning of my circumstances, offered me the use of a living space they had in their backyard. It was a little one room work space with its own attached toilet that could be converted into a living space. I had my own bookcase, a small refrigerator, an electric eye, and a toaster oven. In other words, everything I could need, and only for $250 a month. Given where I was living at the time that was a steal.
Now, it could have ended there, bit it didn’t. They had me into their home every day. We watched movies together, played games together, I was frequently invited to meals. I was essentially adopted into the family. In all this my friend’s father and mother, Steve and Amy, welcomed me into their home and their lives with nothing but joy. They even helped me when I was sick, nursing me back to health. It was from this vantage point that I got to see Steve in action. He was very serious about his faith, his family, his friends, and his work. In all of these things he worked hard and faithfully.
He carried himself with honor, had a keen mind, a will ready to learn, and a spirit humble enough to learn from those of us easily half his age. He served where he could, magnified his callings, and sought diligently to live his faith and follow the Savior as best he could. To many it would certainly seem like he lived an “unremarkable” life. But that is because they never saw the way his actions touched the hearts of his family, his friends, his loved ones, even complete strangers, making their lives better for having just been near him. He had the hands of a carpenter, the mind of a scientist, and the heart of a poet.
When the family announced that he was dying, it was shocking. He was still remarkably young, with everyone assuming he still had at least another decade and a half of life left. But the cancer, which had started in his spine, spread quickly to all his vital organs. Treatment was fruitless. The best that could be done was to try and make his pain as little as possible as he slowly lost his battle against Death. In the end he was surrounded by those he loved. And while the attendance to his funeral was artificially limited due to the Covid-19 mitigation procedures of the state he was living in, the room was still packed and even more were watching online as it was streaming. All of his children spoke and had nothing but stories of wisdom and love to tell about their father and his guidance of their lives. He was loved and mourned and praised by those inside his family and out. He will be missed.
Lessons Learned
President Spencer W. Kimball once taught:
May I remind all of us that if we will live the gospel and follow the counsel of the leaders of the Church, we will be blessed to avoid many of the problems that plague the world. The Lord knows the challenges we face. If we keep his commandments, we will be entitled to the wisdom and blessings of heaven in solving them.
A Deep Commitment to the Principles of Welfare Service
Some may look on my father with compassion. A broken man from a broken home carrying on broken ways. And while that is true, and it deserves our compassion, it is still no excuse. Knowing better and not doing better, being content to wallow in your flaws instead of rising above them for those you love, is a choice made again and again each day. When you willingly choose the path of self-destruction it is no shock to anyone that you end up destroyed.
On the other hand, when you choose the Gospel path the outcome is extremely different. You may not avoid all of life’s problems, but you will avoid most of the worst problems in life simply because most of them are elective. Avoid those problems – alcoholism, drug abuse, broken homes, unwanted/unplanned/out of wedlock children, the list continues – and your life will be free of a great deal of suffering, have a great deal more joy in it, and you will be better able to care for your loved ones and serve those around you.
A small example: Depending on where he or she lives the average cigarette smoker will spend anywhere from $2,292 to $3,895 per year. Over their lifetimes they will incur around $1.4 million dollars in extra costs from paying for their habit and by paying for the medical problems caused by their habit. I ask you, how much more good could you do in your life and in the lives of those around you if you had an extra $3,000 a year or an extra million dollars? I know the answer – you could do a great deal. My life and the my father’s life would have been totally different if my father had decided to never touch a drop of alcohol – and all for the better.
So here is one lesson I learned from both these men: We have enough flaws in life. There is zero sense in making ourselves intentionally weaker. It will only cause us and all around us pain and misery.
I learned a lot about being a father from these two men. The primary role of a person’s life is their role as a parent. For a man that means his career and everything else revolves around his wife and his children. A father builds up his children, teaching them the truths and wisdom he knows that will enable them to become their own person. The most obvious lessons I learned from my own father was what not to do. Quite often I would, and still do, ask myself what my own father would have done in any given parental situation and then I do the exact opposite. This method has yet to lead me astray.
Likewise, I see how Steve led his family. He worked hard for his family. He loved them dearly. He expected a lot from them. He gave them the freedom to grow and love what they wanted. He taught them to love Christ and study the scriptures as well as the words of the modern prophets. He was kind and charitable and served the Lord in any capacity that he could. And as trials, tribulations, and hardships reared their heads his family came together to weather the storm as a unit. Living the Gospel touched all their lives and radiated out from them to bless the lives of those many around them. His example of what being a good father was imparted to me wisdom that I am still using in raising my children.
Here then is a second lesson I learned from both these men: The greatest anchor in life, the one that allows us to whether the storms of life while still exploring its infinite possibilities, is Jesus Christ. The greatest rudder in our lives is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Without them we will be driven to and fro’ across the seas of life until we are broken upon the rocks, reefs, and shores of mortality. With them we will be able to not only direct our own lives, but to provide guidance for those other sailors lost at sea.
Finally, being without a father of my own I sought one. Some great men I met in my life temporarily served such a purpose. But the greatest Father I found was in God. Coming to know that I have a True Father who loves me and seeks to bless me has been one of the greatest, most powerful, most transformative truths I have ever learned. I am a literal Child of God. He is the Father of My Spirit. I am His Child. All people are His Children, literally. This knowledge has changed not only how I see myself, but the entire world. The Lord’s words to Enoch in Moses 7:32-33 completely revolutionized how I have looked at politics, religion, war, nationality, race, culture – in short, everything:
Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency; and unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood
God’s fatherhood is universal and so is His love. That means no matter the color of your skin, the nation you live in, the language you speak, the god(s) you worship, or what you have ever done, you are my brother, my sister, my kin in spirit and blood. You hold within you the seeds of divinity, exaltation, and godhood. You are beautiful, glorious, and wonderful. God knows it, for you are His, and he weeps when we harm one another. (See Moses 7:29-31) He sends His prophets, His apostles, His revelations, His direction, and ultimately His Firstborn Son, Jesus Christ, to teach us everything that He can to get us to love one another, to dispense with hatred, anger, self-righteousness, wrath, ruin, pride, and delusion, to come together in One Kingdom, under One King, to serve One Lord, that we may avoid some of the greatest evils and pains of life and create a society of peace and goodness. Instead of listening and obeying we invent reasons – money, politics, nations, and creeds chief among them – to hate our own blood and to justify slaying our own kin. We draw up our imaginary lines on paper and make up our meaningless rules in books to justify our love of stuff over our brothers and sisters and then use these fictions to legitimize violence against another – to justify beating, caging, even killing each other. We love things and hate our own blood.
No wonder God weeps.
It makes me weep, too.
I pray my father finds peace on the other side of the veil. I look forward to being sealed to my mother and father in the temple soon. Not because I’m particularly eager to be sealed to him, but because I will finally be able to be sealed to my mother and siblings.
You know, it is funny. She never divorced my father. He never divorced her. Not according to the law anyway. I asked her why once. She told me, “I couldn’t bear to do that to him. I left him because of you kids, not because I wanted to.” I was too young then to really understand what she meant and by the time I was old enough to be mature enough to ask her what she meant and understand her answer it was too late. She had already died. Now I think I know, somewhat.
I think she always loved the part of my father that she had married before he became an alcoholic. I hope she and that part of him can be reunited on the other side and find something to love in one another once more or find themselves able to love the beauty within them that was obscured by so much pain, suffering, and sin in this life.
And, who knows.
By the time it comes time for me to cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees at the end of life’s path maybe I’ll get to meet my father again, for the first time.