A Milestone

With my birthday earlier this month, I have officially surpassed my dad's age. He died in 1988, when I was 17, and it's an interesting mental exercise to consider all that he missed. He never used a seat belt in a car, and I doubt he was ever on a computer. When he used a telephone, it was the one with the long, curly cord in the kitchen. He was the football coach who sent the kid with the concussion back into the game after a ten-minute rest, because that's what everyone did back then.

He missed a lot of the world's changes, but he also missed a lot of regular life. He wasn't there when his mom died of cancer a few years later. (He was an only child, so that one fell to me.) He didn't see my high school or college graduations; in fact, he had no idea I would go to college in California. He missed both of his kids' weddings, never meeting the people we would marry. He missed out on six of the coolest grandkids ever. I'm not sure he would have known what to do with all my girls, but maybe he would have become a soccer enthusiast and enjoyed watching them as much as his grandsons. Would they have called him Grandad like we called his father, or maybe Pops, or just Coach like everyone else? It's hard for me to imagine.

When it comes up--and it rarely does--people sometimes say, "It must have been so hard to lose your dad at such a young age." While there's never a good time to lose a parent, for me, 17 might have been the best time. I was such a self-centered teenager that his 18-month cancer fight took a back seat to my own teenage angst. Yes, dad is dying, but what about the prom? He died the week after school got out, junior year. I got to skip all my finals and was pretty happy about that, even as my dad fought for his life in the hospital. If I'm honest, I sheepishly admit that the prevailing thought in my mind the day of his funeral was that some of the hunky football players would be there and might just be compelled to hug me in the receiving line.

I did do the hard work of death--put in my time at hospitals, learned from the hospice nurse how to check the catheter and hold the heat lamp up to the wet and oozing bed sores. I saw things I wish I hadn't and did things I didn't know I could do. I had a few breakdowns and a few mild epiphanies, but mostly I remained detached and insulated in my own teenage world. High school has a way of buffering kids from the grown-up world, or at least it used to.

In the past couple years, I've watched a few of my friends lose a parent. It's quite a different story when you're in your 40s. They had the benefit of more years with their parent, but I imagine that makes the loss feel greater and the pain more acute. Adults who lose parents have to be so adult. Arrangements have to be made and details attended to. Bills have to be paid and surviving parents looked after. They're also just so much more aware, so burdened by the suffering, and even perhaps apprehensive about their own mortality. They also have to walk through it with their own children, helping their kids work through their own emotions while modeling for them what healthy grief looks like. I managed to avoid all of that.

There's no good time for death, which is why it's such a good thing that God takes it totally out of our hands (except for suicide, but we're not going there). I would not have chosen to lose my dad as a teenager, and surely he would not have chosen to leave this world at 44, but I don't have to strain at all to see how God did indeed work it out for my good, just as Romans 8:28 promises. A man who once seemed fierce and terrifying to me became lovable, tender even, as he lay dying in that hospital bed in the back room of our trailer house. For a little while, I felt like he valued me--not because I had the highest GPA or the fastest time in the 100, but because he needed me and maybe even enjoyed me. Those things may not have happened if I'd been an adult living away from home. The money I received from his public education retirement account paid for two years at a ridiculously expensive Christian college that changed the course of my life and made me the person I am today. That definitely wouldn't have happened if he had lived.

And maybe, when I'm mindful of it, I treasure each day with my own kids a bit more because of what I know he missed out on. These days seem a little less burdensome and a little more like a gift.