A Lesson Learned From My Dad’s Gift of Grace

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It’s lonely to walk a road almost no one among your acquaintance is walking or has ever walked. Easy to resent thoughtless words and actions that grate on your frayed nerves and plunge daggers into your empty heart. But my dad once walked a road I didn’t understand, and the gift of grace I believe he extended me and my ignorance taught me I’m in no position to withhold that gift from anyone else.

This year, July 3 falls on a Sunday. It fell on a Sunday seventeen years ago, too. My dad died on a Sunday. Six weeks earlier, I told a close friend I didn’t think he would die, and not until action was taken Saturday morning to bring my sisters home from a church youth trip did I believe otherwise.

What was I thinking those days I had to help him into bed, while I awkwardly cradled him, one hand behind his back and one arm under his knees to help swing onto the mattress the legs he was too weak to lift? Where was my sense of reality when I took him for a long drive one day and my mom sent the commode just in case?

Maybe it would have kicked in if we’d had to use it.

In truth, though, I think it already had. I wasn’t as clueless as I’ve accused myself of being every time I look back on that summer. Maybe a little clueless—I was fifteen. But my head wasn’t completely in the sand. I knew he was sick, and I knew firsthand that people as sick as him died.

Why didn’t I think he would?

Because until July 2, I believe I was holding out for a miracle.

2-1/2 Years of Cancer

I remember exactly where I was standing when my mom told me my dad was going in for surgery. The news must have been disconcerting because aren’t those the times you remember vivid details? I can say the same thing about 9/11.

But was it the tumor in his lung that concerned me, or—?

“Will he be home for Christmas?” I asked.

“Probably not,” my mom said.

Thirteen-year-olds know about Christmas. They don’t know about cancer. At least, this one didn’t. Not enough to be worried, anyway.

Four days later, my dad said goodbye to the tumor and his whole left lung, and three days after that, he came home. Just in time for our traditional Christmas Eve candlelight dinner. It was a miracle. Home for Christmas, after all.

And life went on.

About three weeks later, my grandpa—my dad’s dad—died. He was 84. His life was long and good, and his death was fair.

That May, my best friend’s mother died of breast cancer. She was 52. Her life was good, but much too short. Her death was not fair, and it was my first real taste of how much it could hurt.

But I don’t think it ever crossed my mind that my dad might follow her. That if cancer could take her, it could take him. He didn’t have cancer. He had a tumor that was gone now. Aside from the way his left shoulder sagged over the space his lung once filled, he was back to normal in my ignorant eyes, like nothing had happened.

Life went on.

December rolled around again, and one year after his surgery, to the day, he was back at the hospital. I was told as I left for my high school chorus concert that they suspected appendicitis, so while disappointed my parents weren’t in attendance to hear us sing our repertoire of Christmas songs, I wasn’t too anxious.

They returned that night to report cancer. This time in the liver.

I broke down. I understood the repercussions now. Cancer killed people.

I didn’t want it to take my dad, but my friend hadn’t wanted it to take her mom, either. We don’t always get what we want.

My dad spent that Christmas Eve dinner in a recliner while we sat around the table. Not much changed from the year before.

But life went on.

There was a dimension to my dad’s experience I couldn’t explain if I tried, mostly because to this day I don’t fully understand all that went on, but whatever the case, he never underwent chemo. Many, many, many prayers went up, and over the next year and a half I settled into a tentative conviction he would be healed. I think I lived as though the prayed for miracle had already happened, not realizing that until it did happen, he was still living in a dying body, with all the pain and frustrating weakness that came with it.

When You Don’t Know You Need a Gift of Grace

My dad loved music. He played the saxophone, learned some clarinet, sang, whistled. Was there a bit of harmonica in there, too? I think so. And glass bottles. So, it’s no stretch to say he enjoyed it when we played the piano.

One night, he came to the living room while I was playing, laid on the floor like he often did for a nap on a Sunday afternoon, and said, “Keep playing, Heather. Soothe my weary soul.”

I suppose I thought that’s what I was doing every time I played during those last weeks of his life, but looking back, I wonder how much time he spent willing me to stop from his bed down the hall.

It was said at his funeral that he always appreciated my sister’s playing because she had such a gentle touch.

I did not have a gentle touch.

Maybe I did sometimes. I think I was playing hymns the night he brought his weary soul into the living room. But most of the time, loud and fast was how I liked it. And life was going on, remember? So, I played how I liked it, the way I’d play if cancer wasn’t a thing, and believed deep down in my well of good intentions that it made my dad feel better. It didn’t occur to me that in his condition, my style might be more torture than balm.

Even if the noise didn’t bother him, the way I got wrapped up in it must have. He kept a whistle by his bed. Anytime he needed something, he’d blow it. It was easier than calling out. Happily pounding away at the keys, that whistle would sluggishly register in my head, and when it did, so would the fact that he’d already blown it once. Or twice. He probably learned to blow it five minutes in advance because that’s how long it took me to remember he was there.

Yeah, I knew he was sick, but I had no comprehension of its toll. If I had any idea how big a gift of grace my insensitivities called for…

But you don’t know what you don’t know.

A Gift of Grace for Inadequacies

Memories are finicky. Either you remember all the good or you remember all the bad, and whichever you remember, it’s probably a little exaggerated. In all honesty, I wasn’t home alone with my dad very often, and 90% of the unforgivable neglect I hold over my head probably only happened once or twice. I don’t think I was an undependable nuisance regularly.

If what I did was all I felt bad about, maybe I could cut myself some slack.

But then there’s everything I didn’t know how to do.

Why was I playing the piano instead of sitting with him? Doing puzzles instead of keeping him company? Reading to myself in the living room instead of reading to him by his bed? Why did he even need that whistle? Why wasn’t I checking on his needs before he had to ask?

First, because someone else was usually there to do all that. And I let them because, second, I didn’t like seeing my dad like that.

I wasn’t comfortable being a caretaker, especially to someone who had always been so strong and who, at 52, should have still been strong.

My sister came every night to rub his feet. I think that soothed him more than almost anything else. When she went out of town for a few days, she asked me to fill in for her. I did it once, and it took a silly amount of–what? courage?–just to come to his room and offer. I could do it if he asked, but I didn’t know how to reach out on my own.

The Friday before he died, he did ask. My uncle was supposed to come over, and my dad asked me to rub his feet until he got there. He was late, and what should have only been about a fifteen minute foot rub turned into two hours. I was willing, but I watched the clock the whole time. Uncle Tom, where are you?

If I’d known my dad would be dead in less than thirty-six hours, would I have cherished those two hours more? I don’t know because even when it finally hit home he was going to die–maybe especially when it hit home, I kept my distance. Made myself scarce when he was taken to the hospital Friday night–that whole two hours, I had no idea he was slowly bleeding to death. I made sure I was elsewhere when he came home to die the next morning, and while others went in and out of his room that whole long day, I didn’t go near it.

That two-hour foot rub was the last time I saw him alive.

I didn’t know how to be there. I didn’t want to be there. And I don’t know how many times I’ve told my dad in the years since, “I’m so sorry.”

But what I’ve blamed myself for, I don’t think he does. If I saw him today, I think he’d tell me, “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

Passing on the Gift of Grace

My dad’s battle was pretty obvious–or should have been, and still I had no idea what he was going through. When your battle doesn’t display external evidence–no emaciated body, no inability to get out of bed, no need for a blood transfusion–it’s even harder to see and understand.

No one would have gone up to my dad in his bed and slapped him across the face, yet that’s how it feels when I’m at a gathering and I overhear a man tell his wife, “Well, should we round up the kids?” and she says with a sigh, “Do we have to?”

Do you know what I would give to have kids to round up?!

Maybe not, because they never had to wait this long to have them.

But do I know what the toll of motherhood feels like that prompts such a statement?

No. I don’t. Would I be impervious to the frustrations of crying babies and squabbling toddlers and messes I can’t ever seem to get cleaned up just because I waited longer than most to experience them? I doubt it.

Most, if not all, the face slaps I’ve experienced were unintentional, the givers completely unaware how their words stung. Through no fault of their own. They just didn’t know. Most of the time, there’s plenty I don’t know about their experience, either. And since I’ve unknowingly doled out my own share of hurts, on more people than just my dad, no doubt, this pot has no room to call any kettles black.

Really, it all comes down to this:

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn’t behoove any of us to speak evil of the rest of us.

Edgar Cayce

We’re all here by the grace of God just trying to do the best we can. Sometimes we step on each other in the process. We probably step on God even more. And yet his Son still died for us, his grace always extended to anyone who will take it.

There’s much we don’t know we don’t know, and we may never know it unless we’re willing to know, which isn’t always easy. Coming face to face with your faults and inadequacies is uncomfortable, even painful. But “redemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah; for he is full of grace and truth. Behold, he offereth himself a sacrifice for sin, to answer the ends of the law, unto all those who have a broken heart and a contrite spirit.”

Receive his grace. Then give it to someone else.

Thank you, Dad, for teaching me such an important lesson by example. I love you as much as I miss you!

Scripture References

• 2 Nephi 2:6-7