Words to Grow On

July 3, 2006

A Daughter’s Letter, July 4, 2005

JoAnn Shade

I stood at your bedside in the ICU, holding your swollen hand, my fingers begging yours for the slightest response.  Where are you, Dad?  Have you already left us?  “No change,” the nurses say, the only changes being which set of lips speaks those words.  At first we welcomed that message, as it meant that nothing had gone drastically wrong in the hours since the words had last been spoken, but now it is the third day post-surgery, and still no change.  The third day.

And it is Independence Day, too.  I am reminded, as the bottle-rockets squeal through the heavy air.  How I long for this to be an independence day for you, Dad.  You’ve cherished your independence, the spirit that kept you on your bike daily until the shattered hip robbed you of that at 79.  It’s the same spirit that found you on the banks of the Erie Canal as the cannon was fired at 5:30 a.m. every July 4th.  I so want for you to be able to be raised up with wings of eagles, instead of being tethered to the hospital bed by miles of tubing and a faceless machine forcing the breath of life into your body.

As I wait, I immerse myself in the stories of others, plowing through volume after volume of Reader’s Digest condensed books.  They are mind-numbing, and that keeps for awhile.  Yet even they won’t let me escape forever, as in one novel a beloved grandmother dies from a heart attack, and in another a young mother lies still and silent in the depths of a coma.  That’s the medical word for where you’re at, Dad.  I looked it up on the Internet (of course).  Twenty-first century culture may know it as a state of non-responsiveness, but I wonder if perhaps you are experiencing what the Celtic people call a thin space, a place where God comes near.  Richard Rohr uses the word “liminal,” a threshold of sorts.  Not purgatory, but instead a restful place, until it is time for you to enter fully your life eternal in the presence of the Lord Jesus.

Somehow, I don’t think you are going to beat back death this time.  The aneurysm’s threatened explosion grudgingly gave you an extra twenty years in its shadow.  A quiver-full of grandchildren, thousand of meals-on-wheels delivered, all of those Salvation Army kettles counted - full years for a man who loved and was loved in return.

Am I giving up on you, Dad?  Not at all.  But I saw the fear and the exhaustion in your eyes as you awaited surgery.  No, I’m simply waiting with you in thin space.  You give the slightest nod, and I’ll do everything in my power to coax and pray you back to this world.  But I am listening for the whisper of the Spirit, so that when it comes I can add my feeble breath to the beckoning that calls from the other side.

For that is what we believe.  “To be absent from the body,” Paul says, “is to be present with the Lord.”  You can leave your handicapped stickers and your hearing aids behind, for Jesus is waiting.  But hold on to your dessert fork - the best is yet to come.  See you in the morning.

Love,

JoAnn

By:         JoAnn Shade