My father’s hospice nurse arrived. She has “her chair” right next to Dad’s. She asks questions, to gauge things, how did he sleep, how often did he awake, did he wake because of pain…
There is a war going on inside his body between good cells and bad cells. He’s got an antique body, it’s taxed and tired and some of his answers are slow and off point, but she is patient and respectful and it is all I can do not to go to the chair where she sits and bow before it.
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It’s one, two, three, four, down her list…and about the time that she mentions that she’d like to measure his stomach (to measure the growth of the tumor) she asks him, “What is your favorite song?” and he thinks longer than usual, and then announces, Amazing Grace.
My mother has been dead a while. Her piano has been unplayed even longer.
The hospice nurse finishes her questions and then sits at my mother’s piano and begins playing for her patient, my father.
He sits next to her on the piano bench. He closes his eyes and goes away to all those layers of life before this one.
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My father grew up 1930’s rural poor. The community celebrated security. Two milk cows were twice as good as one. Owning land was so much better than being a sharecropper, even if you stuffed newspaper in your boots until the crop sold.
His grandfather was a go-getter. His father was a go-getter. He was raised to go ‘n get, and somehow, some way, he made his life become something else, a life of go-giving…
He dropped things-that-can’t-wait to go marry people and go bury people.
He gave his time, his emotions, his counsel, his sleep, his days off, his I’d-rather-be-doings to people that God so loved the world for…
He gave for free. He worked for free. He was free.
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I, his child, even now, I wonder if I see it.
My father spent his life pouring. He was a watering can, he was a sprinkler. He never complained about getting empty, but I can’t imagine how he found his refueling…
We kids were a drain, his wife was a drain, and Out There were all those people that didn’t know about All Those Other People, who were one-at-a-timing taking from the little he had…
And yet, he never went dry.
He was an unclenched hand. He was a wide funnel.
I have 57-year-old eyes. Many of those years were spent with curious focus on my father’s choices. When I was a young adult my father looked like a chump. Now, with These Eyes, I see a great investor, a man who has laid up treasure in heaven.
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We didn’t know anything about hospice.
We had a bad start, with a bad first impression. That happened on a Saturday.
On Monday the phone rings. It’s my sister, who is reporting goose bumps.
My sister got a phone call, from a preacher’s daughter, who is now a hospice nurse, who’d heard about my father at church that last Sunday and wanted to be The One.
She meets my father, grabs his hands in hers, and tells him, “It is going to be such an honor to care for you.”
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I see, I see, I see.
Forget money. Forget accumulating. Forget stuff. Forget getting.
The wealth is in the giving.
The wealth is in the faith.
The wealth is in handing your life back to the giver of life, and saying, Father Knows Best.
We’re early in this dying stuff. What is the value, I ask myself, of my father’s no regrets? How do you measure a clean conscience?
I stand apart and watch what God has joined together…my dying father and his appointed hospice nurse, two givers, called for High Duty, where one walks the other to the edge of life…
Folks, I am in High Church. What an honor to have this seat on the front pew!
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This edition of Uncle P’s Bedtime Stories is brought to you by Eighty-one, which wishes you a sincere heart, a wise mind, and the good sense of angels.
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