CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter…
[Because it’s Father’s
Day, a repost from 4-24-12]
About two years before he
died, at age 96, when I was an old man of 68 myself, my father called me on the
telephone. He was crying, a very unusual activity for that extremely tough and
totally independent man.
“Are you the one who was
born in Ohio?” he asked in a breaking voice.
I acknowledged that I was.
My sisters and brother were born in Indiana.
“I hate to tell you this,”
he choked out, “but you’re not really my child…”
My first reaction was to
think: If I’m the one who is not your
child, how come I’m the one who takes care of you all the time instead of your non-bastard children? [1]
Then I felt guilty because
it was really my wife, Helen, who did the bulk of the caring for him. By the
time I had gotten that settled in my mind, he had choked up and could not talk
anymore and hung up.
He never said anything
about it again. Neither did I, at least to him. I told Helen and our daughters,
though.
After Helen stopped
laughing, she said, “That’s so ridiculous. Just look at you and your brother
and father together. Except for the height difference, you’re three peas in a
pod.”
I never said anything to
him about it, never asked him about it, both because it was a tearful subject
for him, and because Helen and I agreed that it must have been some sort of
old-age forgetfulness or crossing of brain wires, maybe something he had picked
up from somewhere else and mistakenly incorporated into his own memories. I
also figured that it was his subject to raise, not mine.
There was just one problem
with the “One of those old age memory-dementia things” theory. It was the one
and only time that Dad ever exhibited an “old age-dementia” problem. Up until
the day he died, both before and after that call, he was very sharp mentally.
So what was going on when
he called that day? Probably nothing that had anything to do with me, something
internal to him. From time to time, though, when I remember that my mother
always insisted that I was named for her brother, John Hubert Pond, instead of
my father, John Francis McFarland, or something reminds me of Dad--I hear the
birds sing, or look at a garden, or at a piece of furniture he made--I wonder…
The memory of that
telephone call does not haunt me. Sometimes, though, I recall my mother
explaining that I was the least favorite child because I was the only one Dad
had actually seen born, in that era before fathers were routinely in delivery
rooms. I know that seeing a birth would probably jaundice my view of a kid,
too.
There is no question that
he was my father and I his son, in all the ways that really count, but could it
be that…
If so, do I really need to
know? No.
I didn’t need to know the
day he called, either. If there were something about his relationship to me, or
to my mother, then deceased, that was bothering him, it would have been best
for him to talk to someone outside the family about it, or just to be as quiet
about it as he had been for all his other years.
The task of our last years
is what Erik Erikson called Final
Integrity vs Despair. We think back over our lives and ask, “Was it okay to
be me?” To be able to say yes,
sometimes we have to acknowledge mistakes. Sometimes we have broken
relationships that we need to mend to make life whole.
Sometimes, though, honesty
becomes a breaker instead of a healer. I spoke recently with a man whose wife
confessed transgressions to him just as she was dying. There was no time to
process it together before she was gone. It took him a long time to get over
it.
As we try to put things
right in winter, there is a good tendency to try to be honest, to tell the
truth about the past. Sometimes, though, it is best to tell that truth where
only we, the tellers, and God, can hear it. The deciding rule should be, Does telling this not only make me feel
right about my life, but does it also benefit the ones who hear, or does it
hurt them?
If I hurt someone as I try
for final integrity, it will lead instead to despair. Sometimes, integrity is
just keeping your mouth shut.
Once, when I was 2 or 3,
Dad ran away. It was the Great Depression. He didn’t have a job. He couldn’t
support his family. We lived with his parents and several siblings. It was too
much. Many young men left home and wife and children during the Great
Depression under those circumstances. He had gotten a lot of miles away when,
he told Mother, who told me many years later, he saw a little boy playing in a
yard. “He looked like Johnny,” he said. He turned around and started back.
Maybe he thought I wasn’t
really his child, but I was the reason he came home.
John
Robert McFarland
johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com
I
tweet as yooper1721.
Thanks for sharing John.
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