Thoughts of my Father…

My father was dying. The call from my brother left no doubt of that. As I sat contemplating it, I could not truly say how I felt about it. It was true over the last few years we had grown closer. Before cancer had taken most of the life out of him, we had talked on the phone every few weeks. You know, just regular conversations. Mainly about construction work and what projects I was working on. Dad always wanted to hear about the rough and tumble stuff. But also, because we were living in Salt Lake City, Utah at the time and doing genealogical research on my wife’s family, I had asked him to send me some basic info about our family so I could look into it. The results had fascinated him. I guess you could say we were becoming father and son again. It had not always been that way.

After my mother passed away in 1973, Dad had gone to pieces. For him that looked like months of drinking to a point of suicidal thoughts and actions. Many a night I would receive a call I dreaded, my father slurring threatening words about the gun he had in his hand. I would drive the 10 miles of back roads to his cabin out past National Mine, Michigan just to find him passed out in his chair. Gun laying in his lap. I did everything to get that gun from him. But it was almost like he had a sixth sense. Whenever I would reach for it, he would awaken. No wrestling the gun away from my 270-pound father. It could not go on and it didn’t.

One day he announced a trip to Chicago. This meant leaving the restaurant for a short period in my care. We owned a family restaurant at the time in Ishpeming, Michigan. I figured I could handle working construction during the day and taking care of opening and closing the place for a short while, we had good people working for us. But the short trip lasted months and for a kid like myself, not even 20 years old, things were getting stressful. Then my world changed again. My dad was getting married, and to someone we all knew, my sister’s mother-in-law. I won’t even get into what kind of strain that put-on family relationships.

As for me, I felt almost a relieve. Dad returned home with his new wife and took back control of the restaurant. That was ok until I was told that I no longer would be part owner of the place. My name had been added after the death of my mother and now my name was being removed to be replaced by dad’s new wife. I have to tell you it hurt. For over a year I believed I  had held him up and kept the restaurant from going under, without so much as a hand shake, now I was out. Things went from bad to worse from there. Until by the time I moved south to work on a nuke plant my dad and I barely spoke to one another. And for years it went like that.

My life became a complex of moves and confusion. Alcohol, the family curse, began to take its toll on me. My father’s life changed too. The restaurant was sold eventually and soon he was settled into a community near Orlando, Florida. We saw each other briefly during the years I lived in California when he came out to visit family. We didn’t speak much. I really did not think of him as my father anymore.

Yet along the way, I became a father myself and I was a good one for a short period of time. I would think I will be a better dad than my old man. But the truth came, and it hurt, I was not. I could not do what he had. Through the struggle of raising not one but four kids and struggling with his addictions somehow, he held it together. No, he wasn’t a real-life version of ‘Father Knows Best’ but knowing first hand the demons he wrestled with,  I began to see, my father did a pretty good job. And in those bi-weekly talks we had, I wanted to ask him how.

I was blessed to visit him in Florida with my brother and sister during his extended fight with colon cancer. We finally did have those talks and he tried to assure me one day I would find the strength to conquer my demons. Looking at him then, the once bigger than life man, who had eroded to a skeletal figure. It hurt to see him. But under his fear being near death I saw he had a certain peace. I was also blessed by my siblings who packed dad’s household up and moved it to California in his last days. My sister nursing him and loving a man she also struggled to find peace with. And on his very last day, my brother had a friend of his fly to St George, Utah from San Diego and back just so I could be at his bedside when he died. Can I ever thank him enough? I will let all you answer that.

Dad died in 1995. I was still buried in my own addictions and he did not live to know me as a saved man. But as with my mom, who died so long ago, I believe I will see him in the kingdom. He made his peace with the Father, as I have and along with so many other will be there on that glorious day when: “. the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). What a day that will be! Remember you dad and mom today, those folks who raised you, biological or not, maybe whisper a word of thanks!

Thank you, Raymond Thomas Weston, I know you are now sleeping in Christ waiting his soon coming. I will see you then!

Blessings
John
4/17/19

Author: John

Christian blogger