Ashes

“This is probably going to be it guys.”

My mother’s text to my brother, sister, and me, we had been anticipating for at least a year, though what we couldn’t foresee was whether it would first concern our grandfather or grandmother. In their mid-90s and each declining steadily in different ways, it was impossible to tell whose body would be the first to fail. The early afternoon of May 7th, 2024, while seated in his living room recliner, my grandfather’s heart, subject to several attacks over his late but full life, began to struggle once more, this time, however, resisting any and all remedies. By the time the following day dawned, he would be unresponsive, my weak and frail grandmother doing her best to comfort him through her tears as his chest heaved violently and mechanically, the body doing its best to survive even in absence of consciousness.

After innumerable messages and calls as time slipped away, I would answer the final call from my mother 24 hours after it had begun. Relief commingled with grief choked in my throat, as I held back the bitter emotions when she spoke the long-expected yet unwelcome words.

“It’s over. He’s gone.”

My earliest memory of my maternal grandparents is a regrettable scene in which I brought my grandmother to tears. I’m not more than 3 or 4 years old and seated in her recliner in the room they long referred to as the “den.” Her chair is adjacent to the television at an angle plainly unsuited for comfortable viewing, an arrangement that implies little interest for her in what the box has to offer. The armrests of the recliner are fashioned of polished wood rather than cushioned upholstery. In my hand is a small, die-cast, jet airplane toy.

Why I did what I did next, I can’t excuse to anything other than idle, childish curiosity. Like a hammer driving a nail, I point the nose of the toy plane in my hand down and poke the surface of the armrest. Instantly, an indentation is left in the formerly smooth, glossy wood. The thought that I’ve permanently damaged something that belongs to someone else never crosses my impressionable toddler mind. Instead, there is only youthful interest. So, naturally, like a busy woodpecker, I drop the nose again and again and get to work, experimenting dutifully with the phenomenon of cause and effect. Before long, the armrest is blanketed with a sea of tiny depressions.

I don’t recall precisely what may have happened next, but what I do remember, accurate or not, is my grandfather trying his best to console my grandmother upon surveying the irreparable damage. Whether or not I was reprimanded, I can’t say. What is clear to me, though, is that this final scene is what made the deepest impact upon me. I could see my actions had made an emotional dent, so to speak, on an adult, no less, much like the physical dents left in the armrest. I learned an unexpected, more poignant lesson about causality; and I would consequently not make that particular mistake again.

Memories are curious things. I’m sure there was more to this one, and it’s likely my grandparents would have told it differently. But the details just described that have remained in my mind all these years, real or imagined, would seem to be most important and, moreover, critically formative in learning respect for the feelings of others. Fortunately, the tenor of this first memory is not representative of the vast collection I have of my grandparents or their personal history.

We all start with a name, and the oldest grandchild bears the distinct privilege of determining what new moniker grandparents will assume. You may argue that it’s parents who introduce them to the child and refer to them in one way or the other. This may be true. However, I would argue that no matter what you articulate, a child will pronounce whatever it is they think they hear. For my part, I heard “Meme” and “Papaw.” And so they are to this day.

The closing decade of their lives found them, as many in their 80s and 90s, having lost general interest in common things and common pursuits. The world was reduced, willingly, to their living space, a modest, single-level, duplex apartment a few short miles from my parents. Freedoms that our oldest children were beginning to enjoy had been in steady retreat for them. Time and frailty forced them to give ground days, months, and years at a pace until naught was left to them but to survey their past and make peace with it or take pleasure in it. I would contest the scales of their life tipped decidedly toward the latter.

James Raymond Tomlin and Frances Gladine Taylor were born in late Great Depression-era Arkansas. My grandfather grew up with a small army of siblings, an emotionally-distant mother, and an absent father. My grandmother enjoyed the company of her older sister and brother and her kindhearted mother, whom I had the privilege of knowing as “Nana.” My grandmother also grew up without the presence of a father — a fact for both of them not lost on me, a “stay-at-home” dad to kids who also have no relationship whatsoever with their own fathers. To say they did without modern comforts would be an understatement. Like many in their time, they learned to work hard for everything they earned, and, to my knowledge, they didn’t complain that they had to do so. The world was what it was. The reality prompts a pause both for myself and in consideration of the youth of today, many of whom, while worthy of admiration in some ways, are provided with a host of privileges that seem to be accompanied by a host of entitled behaviors. But I digress.

They eventually found one another in their late teens, he having influenced her religiously by taking her with him to church. Over the years, her faith became the stronger of the two. As I’ve mentioned before, unscheduled trips by my siblings or me to the bathroom at their home in the middle of the night often found my grandmother devotedly studying and praying while crouched ascetically on the carpeted floor of their front bedroom, a practice which began following the death of their son. In any event, they married only months after meeting and began what would become the longest marriage I’ve ever known personally, at an almost inconceivable 77 years.

My grandfather’s working life was a matter of pride, as I observed in the handful of times he took the intentional opportunity to share about his first job selling newspapers on street corners as a child still in single-digits. In time, after resettling in the Lone Star State, following a series of jobs, he completed his education as a trade electrician and spent the remainder of his working life with Dow Chemical in Freeport. I still remember weekdays, as a kid, Papaw arriving home promptly at 4:30, Meme dutifully having the table set and ready for what anyone else except for them would consider an early dinner.

“Dutiful” is the best description I could stamp firmly upon the character of my grandmother. Her life was spent, almost iconically in their time, in the devoted care of house and home. She never, in all her years, took on a professional occupation or expressed much of an interest in it. Any task she took on willingly was seldom reimbursed; money, for her, was no motivator. Arriving on Fridays for a weekend visit was a timed arrangement for our family due to her routinely volunteering her time at the local hospital, where, for years, she assisted patients moving from here to there or with various tasks seemingly beneath the responsibilities of paid staff.

Such was their life before my grandfather’s retirement. Following this, their lives remained active, maintaining one of several houses he and my grandmother owned and rented out, tending to their gardens, serving those with various needs at their church, or completing one of many woodworking projects in the shop he and my grandmother built in their backyard.

In short, as dull as it might read to young modern eyes, their life was not full of exceptional YOLO adventures worthy of Instagram or Facebook posts. They did not bury themselves in frenzied busyness, often mistaken today as the hallmark of a meaningful life, but in routine and deliberate occupation, understanding and accepting the purposes of their daily activity. Undistracted, uninterrupted habits of daily life afford moments of reflection that the digital noise of today drowns out, as I’ve often observed myself. My grandparents, however, lived in such regular, clockwork-like routines–disciplines, if you will–and have left me with an observed and admirable example to which I am compelled to return when life becomes too hurried even to hear one’s own thoughts. I have wondered that such careful, hasteless attention to their life and the lives of others was the profound effect of the most prominent milestone in their timeline: a sudden, heartbreaking death that preceded theirs by decades, a death not any sympathetic, caring soul would wish upon any parent.

He coasted into the oncoming lane, thinking the maneuver would allow him to avoid the car that had drifted into his just ahead. The other driver drifted back, however, and then once more as each responded in kind. They collided at the last second, too late to correct.

The police report took longer to read than the event itself, which was a theory, at best, since no witnesses were present. The drifting driver was drunk, and he would languish in the hospital for another week, his life ending ironically on the day my grandparents and mother were to celebrate when my uncle’s began. His life, however, ended instantly that night on the road.

I would never have the privilege of knowing my mother’s brother, who exists for me only in various stories and a few photographs. I’ve thought it odd that he should survive the many deadly perils of the Vietnam War as a marine only to meet his end at the hands of a careless driver once home, and this not long after his return. The best years of his life should have been yet to come, but it was not to be.

My mother had anticipated upon his return a relationship as adults better than that they had shared as children, which was often strained. My grandparents had to endure the tragedy of burying their child, a fate no parent would wish upon themselves or others. For each of them, the grief of the loss became what felt much like a physical affliction, lingering and painful, deep into the marrow. There would be no closure.

(Reprinted from “Hope,” published on July 26, 2022)

The birth of James “Jimmy” Raymond Tomlin, Jr., on August 9, 1949, transitioned my grandparents into the tumultuous experience of parenthood as the “happy days” of the 1950s got underway. Almost four years later, my mother entered the world on May 13, 1953, as their second and final child. I can still see in my mind’s eye hanging on the wall of my grandparents’ master bedroom the large, framed black-and-white portrait of the two of them together as children, happy and smiling, eyes fixed off-camera as if anticipating what lied ahead for each of them. The seemingly idyllic image would belie in a few short years a relationship fraught with tension as childhood gave way to adolescence.

The absence of one parent or another early in life would have an impact on anyone. Though I never recall my grandfather speaking at length about it, I know his father’s absence had to have informed his own style of parenting, which, unfortunately, was as a strict authoritarian. While my mother made it through, reluctantly, her older brother inherited their father’s stubborn resolve, which sustained a palpable, trauma-inducing tension, until my grandfather eventually ordered their son angrily out of the home, once and for all. Soon after, he would join the Marine Corps as an odd act of rebellion, but not until his recruiter issued his first order to him, once he was made aware his parents would not have offered their approval: “Call your mother and tell her what you’re doing.”

The news would devastate my grandmother. No parent wishes to send their child off to war, and Vietnam was the divisive conflict of the day that had claimed the lives of many young men. Such was her fear when they saw him once more before he shipped off to the East, where he was to serve as a forward observer.

I can only imagine what horrors he witnessed on his front-line assignment, which I’ve read from veteran accounts offered a relatively brief life-expectancy. Yet, somehow, he survived, and in 1971 was welcomed back home to return to civilian life. He would never share the details of his experiences, however, nor would he ever have the opportunity. His life would end abruptly on his way to work on a road outside of town just a week shy of his 22nd birthday.

Two moments following his passing permitted them a sense of closure to their grief and allowed them to press on with the business of living. My grandmother shared that she received a vision late one night. Stirring awake, she found her son’s form standing serenely near the end of their bed, and he conveyed to her that, not to worry, he was alright and would be alright. The simple message of comfort was all she needed to begin moving on, and so she did. It would reinforce her growing faith in God and would allow her to make peace with her son’s absence. My mother and her father had no such vision. Theirs, by contrast, was a silent, shared moment. While feelings remained raw, my mother entered their den one day to find her father sitting pensively in his recliner. She sat down next to him and, after a pause, allowed herself to weep for her lost sibling. As she leaned against him, he soon allowed his own repressed tears to flow. It was a rare, vulnerable moment for each of them that would connect them in a way they had not been until then.

“I’ve lived with a lot of regret over my brother,” my mother has said. Never were they afforded sufficient time or opportunity after his return to repair their relationship; nor were my grandparents. This reality informed how she related to her parents thereafter and is one of the reasons her children enjoyed as close a relationship as kids can have with their grandparents, who were altered as a result, and who I remember as kind, generous, and loving souls to the three of us. His death changed them all.

Backyard rides in the wheelbarrow, Friday nights watching television with popcorn and Diet Pepsi, visiting with them on their back patio during a rainstorm, eating Meme’s Jello and whipped cream out of bronze tins, helping Papaw with one of various projects in his shop or at one of his rent houses . . . I will remember many things about them. What I will remember best, however, will not be any of these as a child but a brief and special time I spent with them during my budding years as an adult.

In January of 2004, I relocated from DFW after completing my graduate degree to begin my life’s occupation as a public librarian. This brought me back to Houston, and just under an hour from their house in the blue-collar town of Angleton, where they had spent most of their adult life. They opened their home to me for the time it would take to find a place closer to work, and so I would live with them for a month until I landed in an apartment complex situated directly next to Space Center Houston in the suburb of Clear Lake.

For a brief time, my life would intertwine with their daily rhythms. Although I had every intention of pulling my own weight, hardly intending to mooch or take advantage of the arrangement, my grandmother could not help her homemaking habits during my stay. I would often return at the end of each workday to laundry clean and folded, accompanied by warm, homemade, chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen counter. Dinner would be ready as well, and rarely was I expected to lift a finger. The exception might be weekends, when my grandfather recruited me for a project or two—time and effort I was happy to offer in exchange. Standing on the cusp of the rest of my life, it doesn’t escape me that their own son, whose name I shared, once stood in a similar place years before. I don’t know if either of them made such an observation as well, but by all appearances, it was a second opportunity to send one of their own out into the world, this time with the confidence and assurance of a relationship at peace with them, and vice versa, come what may.

I made regular, weekend visits after that month and for several years following, until foresight and aging suggested that they relocate closer to my parents in DFW so that they could look after them as they anticipated their closing years. And close, they did. As I write, it has been a single week since my grandfather’s passing, and my grandmother is sure to follow in due time, though much of her careworn demeanor has ebbed in the last several days, no doubt from the calm of knowing she no longer has to worry about her partner.

During the final hours, as my grandfather’s body struggled to capture air and he slipped into unconsciousness, she never left his side, pained tremendously at his body’s struggle to hang on, shedding all of her tears here at the last. “You go on ahead,” she would tell him, “but not too fast, because I’ll be right behind you.”

“Guys, I don’t know if I can do this.” My mother kept us updated via text, my brother, sister, and I each with our own families, unable to make the trek up to be present as it transpired. My parents’ final calling in life before retiring was as hospice caregivers, so they were no stranger to death and dying, having attended the waning moments of many, many strangers. My mother’s words, however, were very telling, indicative of how much more painful it is when it involves someone about whom you care very deeply. The process of dying is often unpleasant. The very end can be a peaceful moment, but until that point, the body often fights aggressively, almost clumsily, to stay alive. They asked us to pray that it would end soon for his own sake, and so we did.

As he struggled, I chose, I suppose as a means of honoring him, to engage in an activity he thoroughly enjoyed in life, and in which he seemed to be proud that I had taken an interest. I stepped into the garage and continued working on an oak end table I was building for my wife, its partner having been completed a couple of weeks before. I made my final cuts and fastened the side and top panels patiently and deliberately into place, much as he would have, as I thought about the number of times I had assisted him in the backyard just outside of his shop. One of the last builds I helped him with was a bookshelf, which he constructed for me, and which, incidentally, happened to be made of oak as well. I still have it and will never dispose of it, likely passing it down to my kids before my time is up.

Shortly thereafter, my mother made the call I had long been expecting. It was over.

The day before, I had just picked up our youngest from school when my mother called to share an update. It came in through the van’s speaker, so my son heard it all. After we ended the call, he asked to know what it was about, and I told him that Papaw, whom he had met only a handful of times, was dying. Shortly after his questions ceased, it became unusually quiet as we neared home. As I glanced back at him, silent tears streamed down his cheeks. In spite of his lack of a close relationship with my grandfather, the reality of his imminent death struck a chord, and he wept for him. I did my best to comfort him, but little helped soothe his grief, and it would be several hours before he was consoled.

The following day, again on the drive home from school, I shared with him that Papaw had passed a couple of hours earlier. While still expressing sadness upon hearing the news, his grief expressed the day before was enough to provide him with emotional closure, and so I used it instead as an opportunity to discuss what it all meant, where we, as Christians, believe Papaw was now, and what it meant to be a Christian. Much of it he had heard many times before both in church and in his private school, so he was no stranger to the gospel message, which we had also shared with him personally in the past in an effort to plant a seed.

“Whenever you’re ready to make that decision, buddy, you just let mom and I know,” I said, just as I had on a few different occasions in the past. Whether or not I expected him to respond, I couldn’t say, but I left it there with him. After a brief pause, he decidedly looked at me and said, “Can we do that now?”

We had not yet exited the van and sat parked in the driveway. I called my wife down from upstairs where she was working from home, asking her to meet us where we remained in our seats. And right there, on the very day my grandfather breathed his last, our son began his life anew.

By the time he had said his prayer of confession and acceptance, my grandfather’s body was on its way to its terminal destination, where its form would be reduced to ashes prior to burial, delayed until my grandmother would eventually join him. As I considered the wonder of death and life realized within hours of each, I couldn’t help but think of the ancient, mythical phoenix, a storied creature that, at its own end. consumed itself in flame, leaving naught but a pile of ashes, only to have another miraculously reborn from the same ashes.

I have my own sense of the legacy my grandparents have left behind, just as my siblings each have theirs. Our son’s decision that afternoon, however, left each of us with a shared sense of his legacy of faith. Of all of the ups and downs experienced in parenting, few equal the unique and special joy of having your children willingly accept your chosen faith as their own; even more so for children not born to you, whose personal history began with years of which you were not a part.

Theirs was not a life that others might consider exciting or worthy of popular attention. The vain, ambitious teenagers among us might even classify it as somewhat boring. They did not travel the world, make a million dollars, accumulate thousands of social media followers, nor attain widespread fame. Yet, they meant more to me than almost anyone I could name in the almost 50 years that I’ve been alive, and this simply for their calm and steady dedication to their responsibilities, their faith, and their relationships. Despite a few bumps in the road and imperfections of character, on the whole, they lived and loved what mattered.

None of us need a world of strangers to love us in order to matter. Only a few, even one, I would argue, is enough. They mattered to me, and that’s enough.

I will miss them.

Hope

“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” – Romans 12:12

He rose feebly from his elevating recliner and shuffled deliberately out the back door with the help of his walker, in spite of my insistence that my daughter and I could handle it. You don’t argue with your 91-year-old grandfather, however, especially one as headstrong as mine. While visiting my parents for a few days in the DFW area one summer, my oldest and I found a moment one afternoon to drive to my grandparents’ house and retrieve a lawnmower they no longer could use due, of course, to their age, and she and I were happy to load it ourselves into the van to transport it to my parents’ place a brief 5-minutes away; if not, that is, for his resolve first to teach me a thing or two.

As if my years of practical experience with this simple machine counted for naught, he scooted hastily out the back door and into the driveway, released his grip on the walker, grabbed the handlebar of the mower with his left hand, and with awkward elderly aggression repeatedly yanked the pullstring with his right in order to demonstrate for my benefit how to start the motor. I gave up on my insistence and resigned myself to the likelihood that my teenage daughter was about to suffer the indelible trauma of Papaw cranking a lawnmower and collapsing violently and fatally to the pavement from overexertion. To my surprise, it started, he survived, and I thanked him for the unnecessary lesson as he shuffled back inside.

I have little desire to live to 100, as many do. Maybe I’ll sing a different tune the closer it approaches, but from my vantage point on the timeline, old age is no picnic. We all think we want a long life, but what I suspect is what we actually want is to put off the reaper for as long as possible. Though we all have our beliefs about it, death is largely an unknown, and the unknown is a source of fear for us all, especially those of us with little faith. The Bard put it best: “But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?”

In any event, my grandparents, now 93, find scant strength or energy to do much more than gingerly transition from one seat to another inside their modest home, and this very seldom. Trips outside of the house are rare, and for good reason. The world is built for a pace that often exhausts even me; how much more so for them, exceeding the capabilities of both their minds and bodies.

It would seem an accomplishment to have reached their age. The only fact as impressive might be the number of years they have been together: 75. Their marriage has nearly outlived the CDC’s researched average life expectancy of most Americans, which they plot at 78 years, give or take. A few months ago, they celebrated this milestone in their own quiet and understated way, satisfied with a fried chicken dinner with my parents, my wife and I, and our youngest. No gifts were requested or exchanged. There is nothing on God’s green earth nor among man’s manufactured creations they either want or need any longer other than a good meal and the company of family. They have both given and taken much of what one is able to of life and have exhausted their interest in the common wants and pursuits of younger men and women who have many years stretched ahead of them.

Our visit in celebration of their anniversary concluded on Saturday, and we left the following Sunday morning. My wife and I and our son began the 4-hour trek back to Houston, departing bright and early in order to pick up our daughters, who had spent the weekend at a church youth retreat. Timing ourselves to arrive at noon, we grabbed on the way out of town our son’s favorite sugar-saturated breakfast — donuts and chocolate milk — and were on our way.

Scarcely an hour into the drive, my wife’s phone rang. She answered familiarly, though I could only guess at who was on the other end. The comfortable greeting segued jarringly into an expressively ambiguous “What?!” as I wondered at both who might have died and who was thoughtful enough to share the tragic news. Instead, she turned to me and exclaimed with unabashed delight that our oldest was calling from church to tell us she was getting baptized that morning during the service. She had made a “confession of faith in Christ,” as we Baptists like to call it, and was performing her first act of obedience as a new Christian.

We all bear hopes for our children as they mature, some of them very specific and unique. For parents such as my wife and I, our Christian faith is an inseparable aspect of our identity, in no small part due to our parents’ influence, both of whom were ministers. The decision our oldest made that weekend remained at the top of our list of hopes for her and her siblings from day one, even more so as adoptive parents, considering we often feel as if we’re making up for lost time in their early upbringing. The relief, satisfaction, and joy of learning that they have independently embraced your faith, making it their own, cannot be understated. There are few decisions they will make in life that will have a greater impact on how they will choose both to see the world and to act upon it, a world that increasingly pushes faith to the margins or dismisses it altogether.

As ecstatic as we were to hear the news, we pled with her to wait until the following Sunday when we could attend along with her grandparents. Moreover, I asked her for the privilege of baptizing her myself, still technically a licensed minister, though I did not pursue it as a career as I once had planned. She gladly agreed, and we ended the call. Though the decision was her own, my wife and I in silence and welling tears took each other’s hand, a knowing gesture expressing a sense and gratitude that we are, after all, having an impact upon them.

Though the role of parenting never truly ends, Paul’s exhortation to his Roman readers centuries ago — “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” —seemed fitting for where we found ourselves up to the moment she shared the news. It’s an ideal verse for parenting in general, as it is for the life of faith. And as much as I could retrieve my college toolbox of rusty hermeneutical implements to plumb its meaning, I find ample clarity on the surface to see through to its depths.

“Be joyful in hope”

“Are you okay?”

I heard this question from my wife more times than I can count during the first year of our marriage. The fact is, I hail from a family whose emotions are generally subdued. We’d make great poker players, if only for our lack of facial ticks or cues (though I am told I have made a recent habit of talking to myself). Wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, as the expression goes, is just as risky emotionally as it is physiologically for my ilk. Not so with her kin. As couples do, we learned a few things about one another once we were under the same roof, one of many about how we do/don’t express our feelings. My answer to her question was typically that I was fine, which was true, but after a month or so of this, it left me with the impression that one of the implications of our marital vows was that I turn cartwheels across the living room if I were even moderately pleased in the moment.

While I am generally “fine,” it might surprise those with whom I’m acquainted that if there is a yin and yang in every relationship, it is I who bears the honorific of “sourpuss.” I lean towards the negative end of the spectrum in our partnership, though, perhaps, not to the extreme. With only moderate influence, my confidence may be sapped and feelings tipped easily to the pavement by the difficulty of the moment, especially when it regards the frequent ups and downs in the lives of one’s children. My wife, by contrast, is characteristically optimistic and positive about life and all that it presents. It is one of her many attractive qualities as well as a reason, I would argue, I often hear another loaded string of words from her that instantly elevates my anxiety: “I have an idea.” Such ideas as hers, furthermore, tend not to be small in stature and carry the expectation that I find a way happily to get on board. They are big and bold, and this, I believe, because she is “joyful in hope,” as Paul wrote. She generally expects the best of wherever she focuses her efforts, and even if such expectations are dashed, she merely picks herself up and moves on to the next idea.

While we both agreed to it and believe (on most days) we were called to it, parenting by way of adoption was one of these big ideas. If I had thought the 1-2 years of training was hard, I was in for a shock once the kids were placed. “They have no idea what they’re getting into,” my mother expressed to my siblings, each already in the thick of parenting for several years. Prior to parenting, the endpoint of my various “hopes” often landed at the end of the week, month, or year; in other words, at a distant point in the future. The phrase, “take it a day at a time,” however, took on startlingly new meaning with kids. The object of my hopes shrunk temporally — Let’s see if we can make it to bedtime without incident. Currently, we are finding ourselves in the thick of the teen and preteen years.

I will admit, though, that I have felt little joy in hope, as Paul encourages, even in the smaller day-to-day portions. The fact that he does encourage it, however, indicates that we have a choice. How hard a choice it is to make. We hope especially for big change and progress in our kids, but it is often slow in coming, if or when it does.

When I lowered and raised our oldest in the cold water that morning at church, I felt a hope fulfilled. It was easy to find joy in that moment, and, not to mention, to wish that I had chosen to be joyful in my hope until then. My mother was recently asked what advice she would offer her younger self given the opportunity. “Don’t worry so much.” Likewise with hope and the attitude we choose towards it. As much a high it was in that moment with her in the baptistry, there would be a down just around the corner, to be certain. Such is life with children.

“Be joyful in hope,” Paul says. Choose joy as you wait, as he segues into the manner in which we should do so under unfavorable circumstances.

“[be] patient in affliction”

I would never have the privilege of knowing my mother’s brother, who exists for me only in various stories and a few photographs. I’ve thought it odd that he should survive the many deadly perils of the Vietnam war as a marine only to meet his end at the hands of a careless driver once home, and this not long after his return. The best years of his life should have been yet to come, but it was not to be.

The “affliction” my grandparents were forced to endure patiently following his death was not for a hope that he would return to life but the absence of an answer to the overwhelming sorrow they would feel in their remaining days, months, and years. They would live in the unexpected reality of an unshared life with their only son. How does one ever overcome such an affliction?

I can’t imagine how one could ever arrive at peace after such a devastating loss. What good is patience if my child will never return in this life? One either wallows in bitterness, or allows the years and one’s faith to reward patience instead with one’s grief. I am happy to say they opted for the latter, finding other joys in life while preserving in gratitude the memory of their son.

I still have my children, and, hence, hope for my patience with the “afflictions,” if you will, that they bring home. If my grandparents were able to move past a grief that threatened to drown them, surely I can find the patience to deal with the day-to-day.

“[be] faithful in prayer.”

My grandparents’ home was modest by today’s standards, but it sufficed, and it was a safe and comfortable place we enjoyed visiting during our childhood. We learned to love and cherish what we saw and experienced there. The backyard garden full of vegetables, my grandfather’s workshop walls lined with all manner of tools, a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies cooling on a sheet of wax paper in the kitchen — all became welcome and familiar sights as the years wore on. But it wasn’t only the daylight hours in their home that left an impression on me.

Rising in the middle of the night, a step or two was all it took to traverse from the guest bedroom for a quick trip to the bathroom. At the end of the short hallway was another bedroom, though used as such only when all three of us siblings were visiting. Without fail, if the time was right, I would catch a glimpse of our grandmother crouched on the floor, Bible spread in front of her, studying and praying. This, we learned, was her private routine each and every night. Well after midnight and into the earliest hours, she would rise from bed and take advantage of the stillness and silence to study and to pray for all those she cherished. I never learned how long she spent up in this posture before returning to bed, but what was certain is that she was faithful in this practice for all the times I spent in their home.

I wonder if this verse ever crossed my grandmother’s mind in the midst of her despair at losing her only son, a pain — an affliction — that would never fully be alleviated. There is no pill to swallow that would restore the loss. One learns to live with it and, in their case, lean on the words, even if it is a circumstance for which there will be no change. How one could chose to remain faithful in prayer rather than bitterness is beyond me, but she did, habitually rising for an intermission in slumber to pray.

I also wonder that the reason God has allowed her to live as long as she has is because he knows me and mine still require the faithful prayers of spiritual stalwarts such as her. God knows I allow myself far too many distractions to practice this discipline as well as her. Then again, it’s difficult to find many nowadays who do. I’m thankful, nonetheless, that I have one in my bloodline who has never failed to continue praying for me. I can only hope to live up to the example she has set.

Yes, hope. Seated behind each of these admonitions from Paul is, I believe hope. Without it, I have no motivation to be joyful, no cause to be patient with my troubles, no reason to pray faithfully. Hope is a foundational Christian virtue, and I find I need more than a heavy dose of it, especially with the bad news and negativity circling us daily in the world out there.

But it’s often more a choice rather than a feeling, especially for those of us not engaged in the conscious practice of choosing it. The more any attitude is chosen, the more readily it becomes our nature.

My grandmother had no hope of ever seeing her son again in this life after that fateful night. There was seemingly nothing left in which to hope for him and every reason to cease caring about a cruel and unfair world in which all your hopes, in her case for her child, evaporate in an instant. And yet, she somehow managed to continue to try and live out this verse day after day in the first and earliest hours of each and every day.

That, I realize, was because she learned not to center her hope in her child and his future but in the one to whom she was offering her prayer.

I admit to despairing from time to time over my inability to maintain good personal habits, in the behaviors my kids may or may not exhibit, or in the pitiful state of the world at large. But it occurs to me, considering my grandmother, that the reason may lie in the fact that my faith, my hope, may be misplaced. No wonder I remain disappointed.

My grandmother has never instructed me to rise in the middle of the night to pray. This has been her discipline, not mine. But, unbeknownst to her, I’ve observed it enough to admire it gratefully, not just in the knowledge that I have been and remain one of the subjects of her prayers, but in the example of unwavering hope such a secret practice she has unwittingly left as a legacy to me. It is joyful hope that prompts her to rise, patiently and selflessly sacrificing time that could be spent in sleep, faithfully offering her prayers. I’m not sure to this day she knew I was watching, but I was.

Would that I would learn to demonstrate hope through such steadfast discipline, and that my children, perhaps my grandchildren, would be left an example of hope that would likewise sustain them in the lives they have yet to lead.