Prayer and Grief

My dear father suffered a stroke about eight years ago. Though he recovered initially, he lost ground after a while and slowly began to retreat from the world and from us. He would say in frustration, "I feel as though my head is not screwed on right." He would say to Mom, "What's happening to me?" I would see him in his easy chair, with nothing to do any more--no pumps to install, no fruit to harvest, no washing machines to fix, no children or grandchildren (usually) around to love him up, just an empty life. Empty eyes. He forgot my name, though I like to believe he never forgot my face.

Last year, a day after Thanksgiving, my siblings helped him into the car and drove him to a nursing home. Though he had lost a lot of his ability to verbalize any complete thought, he did say, as they were wheeling him out of the house, "I have lost everything."

He endured a month of loneliness and deteriorating helath, until we found a marvelous six-bed private home run by Connie, an exceptional caregiver of Philippine heritage. She cared for Dad for seven months. He could have died there a happy man.

But he became too much work for her, and my mother had to move him to a lower-quality residential home, where he immediately developed infections and life-threatening bedsores. I saw him cry out in fear to three nurses who were trying to turn him, "I love you all!" Poor man, hoping to appease those whom he thought were attacking him. I took him to the hospital, where they fought his infections for three weeks and then released him to a better nursing home.

The physical care at this home was excellent. But there was no one to touch him in a loving way, to hold his hand, to rub his shoulders, to sing "Heavenly Sunshine" and "Blest the Man Who Fears Jehovah." All of us children had scattered across the country, taking his grandchildren with us. There was only Mom, at 87 still driving the freeway every day to feed Dad lunch, to remind him that she was his wife, and to cry when she came back home.

When I flew out to visit in September, Dad--who usually could hardly put a thought together--said when he saw me, "Can we go? Take me away. Anywhere, anywhere but here." When I could not answer, he turned his face away and would not look at or talk to me. I saw more clearly that at the end of his life, he was enduring a killing loneliness and a slow death among strangers.

I couldn't stand it. This was not the kingdom of God for my dad. Other people could put their parents into a nursing home and leave them, but this for my father was not right. It was not right.

With my mother's blessing, I laid plans to leave my home and fmaily in Michigan and become my dad's live-in caregiver at my mother's home for several months, until a suitable person could be found from our community to take my place.

I was going to fly out next week, after Thanksgiving, to take Dad home. To prepare a place for him. To let his parched spirit soak in some love.

Last Tuesday, my mom called me to let me know that God had beaten me to the punch. Through the doorway of death my dad found his long home, one better prepared for him than the little bedroom we were going to move him into.

At visitation, seeing his tired body laid out in the casket, I experienced terrible grief. I relived the darkness of the nights in his room, alone, endless nights, long and empty days, the awareness of neglect. Why had I not acted sooner? Why had I waited so long to respond to his pain and the indignity and loneliness of the last five months of his life?

It still hurts. I cry as I write this. But I am coming to hear, through the blessed dialogue of prayer, the voices of my father and my Father. Their voices offer a balance, a counterpoint, to the voices of accusation and longing and regret that goad my grief. Their voices explain to me that, although the desert is a horrible and lonely place, that it can be endured, and that it can become a place of springs. My brother preached the funeral sermon from Isaiah 35:



The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them,
and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose;
it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice,
even with joy and singing....

The tongue of the dumb shall sing;
for waters shall burst forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert.
The parched land shall become a pool,
and the thirsty land springs of water.

My father suffered, and it should not have happened. But his suffering stopped. He is more alive now than perhaps in his strongest moments as my father, pulling a pump by hand, dancing with us children on his workboots, or praying over us the Lord's Prayer. He is stepping in the pools of water. He is no longer dumb, but speaks. He is speaking to One he loves.

I am glad that the One he loves also speaks to me. That voice brings pools of water in the midst of my own desert.

Paul J. Van Dyken, Sr.

1920-2009