Closing the book

The day we found out about Daddy's cancer, I was working. Like normal, I bustling about, head down, plowing through. I can't remember the exact chain of events, but I'm pretty sure I was rude to Mama during at least one phone call that day.  I know Mama called and told me the doctors had found a spot on Daddy's lung and 3 on his brain. In hope/fear I assumed that they were fatty masses or something along those lines. I definitely didn't let the 'c' word enter into my mind.

Later in the day, on the phone with Mama again, I asked "they're just masses, right?" To which she replied "No David."

I quickly made some excuse to get off the phone. I stepped out of my office, across the hall, and locked myself in the bathroom. I went as far away from the door as possible, and completely broke down. Right there at work. Which to me, previously, would have been mortifying.

I gathered myself, made sure no one could tell what I'd been doing, and went back to work, as nothing had happened. It's what he would have wanted.

                                                                                                                                                                   

And I think that's the last story about Daddy's battle with cancer for awhile.

Sure there are many more things I could talk about. Like the first day I saw him after the diagnosis and we didn't talk about his cancer. About the last words we passed. The dream I had about him after his mind started going.  My feeling that he waited for us to get moved in and mostly unpacked before he let go of this mortal coil.

But for now, I'm done. I've said enough. I've had closure and made my peace. In fact, I had done so before I started the blog. I spent several nights writing things down, just so that I could get them out of my head and heart.

He'll come up again, I'm sure. This blog is mostly about my life experiences and opinions and our parents inform those to large degree. I hope that the sharing of my experience has helped some of you. And really, anyone who wants to talk/email/text, etc about dealing with loss, I'm open for it.

Where do we go from here?

Note: This was original written before I decided to start this blog. I am presenting it in the original form, so the timing is a little off. But its best unchanged. Thanks
                                                                                                                                                                        


What would Daddy want from me now that he's gone? Odd question? Sure it is. Now a full eight months and two days he's been gone and this is the first time it has crossed my mind. Maybe it's the question that helps me move on. And I think that's what Daddy would want. For me to move on. He certainly would not want me to just quit on his account. In his way, he was always trying to move me forward, to make me better.

I can imagine Daddy, knowing that Jessica and I are expecting our little girl, almost unable to contain himself. Point of fact, he probably is bragging all over heaven that his baby boy is about to be a daddy. I imagine over there there he is different, but no so different. Having shucked off the conceits of this world, having no longer the feeling that he should be overly reserved with his emotions.

But back to the question.

He would want me to keep plugging along, doing the best I can; learning, growing. Becoming more of the man that he had a hand in raising.

Daddy never said he was proud of me. Not to me at least. But there came a point in which somehow, I knew.

After he became too sick to take care of things, I took care of things. Mama and Daddy's washing me stopped working.  Mama tried to check it out but couldn't physically move things about. Daddy told her to call me because "David's pretty good at figuring things out."

That said more to be than one thousand "I love you"s or "I'm proud of you son"s ever could have. Daddy came from the old line where those things weren't said between fathers and sons.

I think that if God allowed Daddy a few minutes just to give me some advice, he would say this:

"Keep going. Keep moving. Keep working. You know what you need to do. You've always been pretty good at figuring things out."

Epic Fail

Failure: noun, act or instance of proving unsuccessful; lack of success
                     person or thing that proves unsuccessful

Well there's the dictionary definition for you. Glad that's out of the way.

How do you define failure? Are you a failure? "Are you worthless?" to quote one Brian Eldridge. Who gets to determine success and failure?

So: third in the class, scored in the top five percent on the ACT, voted most likely to succeed, full ride to Troy State University.

College Dropout.

Failure.

Or at least, so I thought for several years.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist (though if you looked at my desk, either at work or at home, you might think otherwise). So much so that I've become self conscious writing this blog, an endeavor I only started out of a desire to write, not necessarily to garner attention. Growing up I didn't think I mattered unless I was perfect, unless I was at the top. When they announced the honor court, and I saw that I was third, I didn't call my parents. Didn't even mention for a few weeks. Because I wasn't first. And that wasn't good enough.

I can't really say what happened in college. I truly don't know. No drugs, no booze, no wild (or any other kind) women, no parties. Somewhere along the way, everything fell apart mentally. Depression? Maybe, not really sure, especially since I didn't believe in depression. But did anyone know? Nope, because I couldn't let the facade drop. Not until it was too late and too obvious and I was quitting school.

It was mortifying to me. Going from being someone who so much expectation was upon, who had so much potential, to, in my mind, nothing. I tried to avoid most people I had grown up with, mostly because I was afraid of 'hey did ya hear about David Hall? Flipped out, dropped out of college, and now he stocks shelves at a retail store"

But I'm not a failure.

Do any of you know what my dream was growing up? It wasn't being a brain surgeon or a lawyer or an astrophysicist or a teacher or a football coach.

My dream was no bigger than this: to have a family to love and to be able to take care of that family.

One of the great problems in this nation is that we define ourselves by our careers. We are our occupations. Fireman. Policeman. Teacher. Politician. Thief. (oops repeated myself).

Success or failure is defined by how far we can advance in our chosen profession, how adeptly we can scale the corporate ladder.

Shouldn't success be determined by how good I can be as a human being? How I treat my fellow man? How I love my family, friends, and even those who are outside of my circle?

Or this: we should be defined as who God says we are to Him.

It took me far too long to find this secret to success. And I don't think I would have if I had not "failed" in the traditional sense.

So I didn't graduate college. So I worked my way up in a retail establishment. So I left said establishment to work for a uniform company (and its amazing how much I have to explain what that is.) And now I manage about 40 people. All these things mean little. Sure, it pays the bills and puts food on our table. This is neither success or failure; it is a means to an end. My success is that my wife knows I love her. That my friends know I'd bend over backwards for them. That my baby girl will know that her daddy loves her. And that God values me enough to send his only begotten Son to this earth. That His son would live a spotless life and die a cruel death for my sins.

Again, I'm not a failure.

And I'll bet that neither are you.

What's your greatest fear?

My parents were what was considered "old" for having children when I was born. I have a few friends whose parents were in the same boat. Although now in this country we don't consider 38  THAT old for having kids, unless of course its the first one. But mama and daddy weren't rookies as they already had my sisters, 15 and 13 years older than me respectively.

Growing up, I didn't fully perceive this. I've always been comfortable around older people, and I suppose that comes from growing up always around older people. As I grew older, I realized that my parents were not as close in age to my friends parents. Mostly, they had grown up with my friends grandparents!

This realization fed into my fears.

For what ever reason, and I don't know, possibly everyone has this fear growing up, I always feared losing my parents. Parents are our templates, our guides, the models upon which we shape ourselves. Also, our sources of stability and love. I feared losing them more than anything. My perception that my parents were older basically made me to believe that I could lose that at any time. I feared that they would never see me graduate high school, get married, have kids.

I especially feared losing Daddy.

Now don't misunderstand me. I love my mother dearly. Fathers and sons have a different bond. John Eldredge says that every man has a wound, and most often that wound is created by a man's father. And that only the father can heal that wound.  I don't truly know if that is the case for everyone, or even in my case.  I do know that I always wanted Daddy to be proud of me.

Daddy was Superman, even when we didn't get along all that well at times during my teens. He was going through things that I couldn't understand (losing a job because it was sent overseas), and I was a teenager. Nuff said. But if he was Superman, then age was his kryptonite.

I watched him through back surgery, a heart attack, and an aneurysm surgery. His mortality weighed upon me more and more. That said, God was watching him. The only reason his heart attack wasn't worse was that he effectively had a natural bypass. New vessels grew around a calcified artery and reconnected the blood flow. The only reason his aneurysm was found was that the x-ray tech ran the scan in the wrong spot, and a doctor happened to walk by and see it on the x-ray. He survived a surgery that a very high percentage of people do not survive. But through all this, I knew God was watching.

I was not prepared for cancer, and there will be a later post dealing directly with some of those feelings.

Suffice to say for now, this diagnosis was me and my fear, finally staring each other eye to eye. I wasn't sure I'd make it, nor was I sure I wanted to go on without Daddy. And for now, let's just say there were a lot of dark days.

Remember I said God was watching?

Daddy passed on January 24, 2011, at home.

Before they took him, Mama's pastor wanted us to gather around Daddy and have a word of prayer. As he prayed, God spoke to my heart. He said to me "I've taken care of you and you have not been destroyed this. I sustained you. I held you. I kept you going. You've stared fear down and not been torn to pieces."
Quite possibly, I was having one of the greatest and one of the worst moments of my life simultaneously. I shed tears, not for my father, but tears of joy that God had taken care of me. And I had assurance that one day, I would see Daddy again.

Four months passed. Jessica (my wife) and I found out that she was pregnant, something we had prayed for years to happen. She went to the doctor, they did a test to confirm. And then gave a projected due date. I was at work, closing up shop, when Jessica sent me a text, telling me the due date.

January 24, 2012. One year from the date of Daddy's death.

I had to grab the wall to keep from hitting the floor, as my knees buckled and my eyes filled with tears.
And again, that voice spoke to me. This was his stamp, showing me.

"I told you I had this under control."

Geneva County High Football

And of course it's something as simple and mundane as a high school football game that gets me thinking. Not to disparage high school football, but in the grand scheme, there are much more important things.

But not when you're a teenager. Especially from a small town. If only our worlds stayed so small and simple.

I considered how little has changed; just like we were, to the kids today, Friday nights in the fall are still what it's all about. The game, the social scene at the game, and what's going on afterwards. (As you can imagine, when I go to games, I do far less gridiron watching than I do people watching.)

People grow up, find their lives, get wrapped up in the duties of life, the hurts, the pains, the joys. And maybe the great thing about small town high school football is that for a few hours, you're right back there. Right back to your roots, among people you've always known (at least a few). And you get to pretend that right there, at that game, on that night, that's all that matters.

Maybe I've just become sentimental. As far as I know, I don't own a pair of rose colored glasses.

After we left the game, I started thinking of how much I liked growing up with the people I grew up with. No, really! A few of you need to pick up your jaw or perhaps reorient yourself in your chair. I know I didn't express that back then. Distance brings perspective.

We grew up pretty good folks.

I'm now finding it hard to choose the right words to express what I'm feeling. Moving on then.....

I shouldn't tell anyone this but.....

For several years after high school, I had this recurring dream. Somehow, there was a loophole in the high school eligibility rules, and i had one game left that I could play in. Of course the coach wanted me back for one game! Funny, the coach was always Larry Lee. In my final dream about this, just before game time, I go to coach and say "it's not right or fair for me, a grown man, to be play against these kids. Thanks but no thanks." I hear Brett Favre has a similar dream.

Back to what I was feeling....

It's shameful that we don't/can't truly appreciate our school days and the people we grow up with in the midst of the experience. Such a small bubble of time that means so much. An experience that we can only recreate in small packets of time as we run into one another.

I didn't get to know everyone very well, and I take the blame for that. I'm sure at times I came off as arrogant and a bit of jerk. I was masking doubt and fear and insecurity. Not making excuses, just saying.

Since those days, my relationships have changed. Some folks I wasn't close with, I've gotten to know better. Some folks I plain didn't like I'm now friends with. Sadly, some who I was great friends with I barely know any more. Lots of folks, well, life just gets in the way and we haven't/don't see each other. Except maybe on Facebook.

I seem to be losing my point.....

Anyway, I would not trade the days at GeCoHi for anything.

And I wouldn't trade a single person I grew up with.

Pretend

I miss a great many things. Sitting in the back yard. Talking about things that mattered, things that didn't matter. The intricacies of lawnmower repair. Listening to old (so old that I'm not sure it could be called classic) country music. Stories of old cars that didn't start and then having to get a mule to pull the car back to the top of the hill to try to crank the car again. Making fun of various relatives. Setting each other up to make jokes. (speaking of which..... One time we were at my great aunt's house cutting grass. Now Aunt Gladys was about 83  at the time, and still tried to garden and had walked out to her garden which was about 200 yards from her house. And she wasn't a small lady. Anyway, she asked me to let the tailgate down on my truck and drive her back to the house, which I did. Later, I said to Daddy "you know, the book says not to drive with the tailgate down without a load on it" to which he replied "oh it had a load on it".  But I digress.)

Mostly, I just miss Daddy.

Things have been tough lately at work. Many times when I used to have bad days/weeks/months of work, I would call Daddy. Would I talk about work problems? Sometimes, but most times, we'd just talk. Nothing in particular, but just talking with him for awhile would ease my mind and lighten my heart and I could continue on.

After Daddy was diagnose with cancer, I found it hard to talk to him. Not that I didn't want to talk, but everything seemed so mundane. My father was quite literally daily fighting for his life. What else really mattered?

Sure, we tried to make small talk, pretend things were normal. But that's all it was.

Pretend.

Wounds

Why does the sinner sin? One who has never come to the saving grace and knowledge of Christ sins because they literally have to. They are bound with sin. The sin nature fully in place; this is the natural course of life. Birds fly, fish swim, sinners sin.

Why do Christians sin? A much deeper question, but with a similar answer. That which is unregenerated in man takes over, allowing the old man to rise.

But really, we need to look at the underlying causes for things.

Better questions, or more pertinent, could be "why does the addict use?" or "why does the drunkard drink?" or even "why does the glutton over eat?"

I'm afraid all lead to the same answer. We all want to be numb.

The idea my seem radical or even absurd, but it's true. We all carry some wound in life, or some care or some  burden. All of us, no one is exempt. Wounds can come in many forms: emotional, spiritual, psychological. Could be anything; financial troubles, self doubt, fear, worry for family. The list is endless. The path to sin is lined with the cares of temporal existence.

When we receive a physical would, we tend to it immediately. We cover it, hide it, try to keep it clean, try to heal it. If the pain is great enough, we take something to stop the pain. We want it healed or numbed immediately. 

True wounds, those to the soul, are a bit different. There is no easy balm or bandage for a broken heart. By broken heart, I don't necessarily mean that which comes from parting from a loved companion, though I don't altogether exclude it. Brokenheartedness refers back to the aforementioned wound (or burden) to the soul.

Still, we want our wounds mended immediately. We do not wish to endure one moment of anguish, or sadness, or loss, or brokenheartedness. None of us, sinner and saved alike.

So what do we do? We look for a spiritual Novocaine to numb us by reaching for the things of this life.

Be it booze or drugs or food or wealth or power or success or friends or possessions, we look for a panacea for our pain. As we dabble in these things, we may say we like the high we get. But really, the high means little. Not feeling low is the key. We want to be distracted, we want to not think, to not feel, to not deal with the reality of our situation. Again, sinner and saint alike.

Sadly, Christians often make themselves liars in times of distress. We preach, teach, and talk of strength and joy and peace from Jesus. When crisis hits, where are these things? Sure, we may pray. We may 'give it to the Lord'. But do we really do that?  And do we continue in prayer? Mostly, we say we give it up while holding ever more tightly because we know what giving it up means. We have to expend faith to believe, which, often, we were already in short supply of before the crisis. And what do we do when God doesn't answer in our expected time frame? Do we continue in prayer and faith? Mostly, no.  We reach for something of this world almost as readily as we reach for the pill bottle when a headache strikes.

We throw ourselves into work, into the social scenes, into our families, and sometimes we throw ourselves back into the same mirey pit Jesus saved us from.

No one likes pain. No one truly desires it. But as Christians we believe that God will not put more on us than we can bear. We must question then 'what purpose is this crisis or wound serving?' What is it working in me?

And not just in me, but what does God want others to see through this?

Sometimes God allows a wound to remain. He wants us to keep tending it, to keep coming before Him, to continually to Him.

Once a physical wound is healed, we pay that area no more attention.

This is also true spiritually.

An intro...

A hearty "hello" and "how are ya?" to anyone with the fortune/misfortune to be encountering my first true attempt at blogging. Obviously I don't know what I'm doing, revealing my inner thoughts to the potential millions (and millions if you smell what the rock is cooking) people on the internet. So what's the point? Thanks for asking!

The last year and half to two years have been crazy, to say the least. And saying that, I suppose my point is that I'm going to share some of the craziness to inform, uplift, help. Or maybe just it's my process in dealing with things at this point.

Those of you who grew up with me hopefully will find a different person than you knew. I've changed in many ways. The things I will publish to this blog will be parts of me that I normally would not let people see, unless they were extremely close to me.

By the way, I ramble.

So to outline the crazy last two years:

I witnessed and was close to the downward slide of a marriage and eventual divorce of a dear friend.

Jessica and I changed churches.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer and passed away.

We bought a house. 

We are now awaiting the birth of our first child.

Much of what I post may relate back to Daddy. Possibly there will be some quasi-sermons. Hopefully there will be some fun and I hope that someone finds something in my ramblings that they can latch on to and grow from.

Aiming high? Yep, but why not?