“Money?” said your wife of sixty-two years. You’d have been proud of her.
She held your hand then, clinging to the last of your warmth. For the longest time she didn’t say anything, just stared out the window. I asked what she was thinking, and she smiled. “I’d like to take one more stroll in the grass with him.” Wouldn’t we all? When they came to take you away, she simply said, “Thanks for all the years, sweetheart.”
I’d like to thank you too.
Thanks for hunting trips and fishing lessons. Thanks for majoring on the majors. And for a thousand timeless memories. Most of all, thanks for giving me a tiny glimpse of what God looks like.
Tonight I’ll lay flowers on your grave once again, and past the tears I’ll determine to keep that twinkle alive. To live so the preacher won’t have to lie at my funeral. As you cheer me on, all the way Home.
Our lives are shaped by those who love us.
JOHN POWELL
In seventeen years of writing I have not received anything like the avalanche of mail that descended after I wrote short versions of the previous two chapters for my “Laughing Matters” column. Letters showed up from around the world. Several were from self-described agnostics and atheists—one a childhood friend of mine. Amid generous expletives, he expressed how much he loved being in our home when he was a boy. “Your parents [bad word] loved me when no one else [even badder word] did,” the edited version would read.
At least a dozen came from those who had a product guaranteed to fix my Mom. I shall paraphrase what those letters looked like:
Dear Phil,
If you will sign up under me, I believe [enter amazing product here] is the answer to your mother’s problems. Since we accepted [enter astoundingly affordable product again] into our lives, we are different people. We have no friends now, but lots of money.
Sincerely,
[enter name here]
One suggested a fascinating therapy. “I manufacture quilts with Bible verses embroidered on them. When spread across their laps, these quilts bring Alzheimer’s patients back to us. They are only two hundred dollars each.”
Several informed me that it was my fault: “If you just had more faith, she would be healed.”
One recommended, “If you can just get her to drink more water every day, she’ll be fine.”
But mostly, as I pored over these letters, I was struck by peoples kindness and compassion. Jeanette Windle, a best-selling novelist, wrote: “Your mother had such an influence on my own life as a writer. I remember vividly being an eighteen-year-old missionary kid lost in the strange, cold country of Canada and reading Bernice Callaway’s literature. It gave me hope that one day I would write books too. The rest, of course, is history.”
Another author, Maxine Hancock, wrote, “Having just come through the stage you are now in, I know how hard it is: My father lost his mobility, my mother lost her mind, and we came pretty close to losing our sense of humor over the past six years. But both parents have now made it to the Crossing Over point. The losses of old age may be even harder when the contrast between what is and what was is so sharp.”
A ninety-one-year-old saint by the name of Delma Jackson told how God had used the story. “I read it many times and it began to dawn on me that while I have eagerly looked forward to going to heaven knowing I am a child of God, I have been in complete denial about this possibility of a slow good-bye.’ Gradually I began to embrace the fact that if it should come, God would be big enough for even this. The result? A wonderful work of revival is going on in my life. I have been reading His Word and praying that He would help me shine my light in the years I have left.”
Vera Tyler of London wrote, “My husband, Bill, died in December after ten years of suffering the increasing confusion and loneliness of Alzheimer’s. We watched him lose all memory of the years we spent serving with China Inland Mission, even though he could still speak Chinese. Much of life was forgotten, but he was still praising God and singing the old much-loved hymns. He remained a blessing by being his gracious, grateful self.”
Bertha Parker Thompson told me that her mother was the one who knelt with her when she was seven and helped guide her into the family of God. “She also read Winnie-the-Pooh. At eighty-six, she has no short-term memory and no logic. She lives on Pop-Tarts and milk, even though she’s a diabetic. But she still can sing all the hymns with all the verses. And she can still recite almost all of ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’! Still, we are truly blessed that of all the mothers we could have had, God loaned us to her.”
And Sharon McLver-DeBruyn, one of the gals who now refers to my mother as Mom, wrote, “I remember the time I asked my own sweet little mother what she thought about a problem and she replied, ‘I don’t know. You decide. You are the mother.’ It was such a privilege to be my mother’s mother as she faded away into that land where she will never grow old. Thank you for this lovely, sensitive reminder that family is so important and God’s grace is immeasurable.”
The novelist Margaret Lee Runbeck said, “A man leaves all kinds of footprints when he walks through life. Some you can see, like his children and his house. Others are invisible, like the prints he leaves across other people’s lives: the help he gives them and what he has said—his jokes, gossip that has hurt others, encouragement. A man doesn’t think about it, but everywhere he passes, he leaves some kind of mark.”
I once heard someone ask Mom which of her books she was most proud of. I leaned closer at the question, because she had written half a dozen, and I couldn’t wait to hear the answer.
“I have five books I’m still working on, and I’m most proud of them,” she grinned.
“Oh? And what are the titles?”
“Dave, Dan, Tim, Ruth, and little Philip,” she replied. “I hope I’m writing my best material into their lives.”
Though I have been privileged to share platforms with some of the greatest orators on Earth, it was my father’s words lived out before me that shaped my life far more than any preacher. Though my bookshelves are filled with several thousand volumes of the finest books on faith, it is the life of my mother, a simple farm girl from Ontario, Canada, that has shown me what it means to walk with Christ, how to lean on Him for strength, how to share His joy with others, all the way Home. I thank God for two very human parents who wrote their stories across my life, who taught me early what really mattered. May God give us all strength and wisdom to walk in their steps.
The hand of Jesus is the hand which rules our times.
He regulates our life clock. Christ is for us and Christ is in us.
My times are in His hand.
E. PAXTON HOOD
A long about the time I conspired to lay this book to rest, my mother sat bolt upright in her hospital bed one evening, smiled widely at me, and asked, “What day is it? Where’s Ramona?” It was like we were in a Sandra Bullock movie and she’d just wakened from a deep coma. I was shocked. Mom, talking in complete sentences.
Thinking it too good to be true, I held up one hand and asked, “How many fingers?”
She laughed. “Seven,” she said. “Call a doctor.”
Pulling a chair close, I leaned forward as she regaled me with stories long forgotten, naming names I hadn’t heard in years. I phoned my brother Dan with the news. “She’s even brighter than I,” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he joked.
When I told Mom what he had said, she began laughing and hadn’t the energy to stop.
Nurses arrived to see if they should give her CPR, and she introduced them to me one by one, without even looking at their nametags. When they left, she whispered, “How much money do I have?”
I told her.
She grinned like she was a child again and was about to dip a schoolmate’s pigtails in an inkwell. “Let’s give it away,” she said.
Months have passed. The blanket near her bed is just a blanket now, no longer her baby. The Bible on her night table lies open; gone is the dust.
I am married; no longer am I stealing her money. She grieves her husband’s death at times, knowing exactly when it happened, how many months ago, how many days.
Some nights I find her sitting at an old wooden table, writing notes in shaky handwriting—notes to friends and family, encouraging them with a story or a verse from Scripture. “God takes care of me,” she often says. “The nurses…they pray with me.” And they do. Sometimes I catch them. One whispered, “I’m a Christian. Your mother is such a blessing.”
I asked Mom what she would like, seeing as I hadn’t given away all her money quite yet.
“I don’t know,” she said, frowning like she was working on a math equation.
“What about a TV?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Nah. The best years of my life I spent without one.” Then her eyes lit up. “Shoes,” she said. “I need some shoes.”
The next day we decked her in her finest, wedged her into a wheelchair, and went out looking for some. I wish you could have seen her leaving the store with a shoebox on her lap. Her eyes danced, like a four-year-old who has just pulled the wrapping off a Christmas gift she didn’t dare dream of receiving.
“Thank you,” she kept saying. “Thank you.”
I suppose it is the one solitary characteristic that has most endearedher to her children through the years: thanksgiving. This spirit of thanksgiving ensures that several visitors crouch by her bed each day. Thanksgiving helps her focus not on what is missing but what remains. Not on what has taken place but what is yet to come.
Thankful people seem to remember blessings and forget troubles. They are quicker to accept than to analyze, to compliment than to criticize. Helen Keller thanked God for her handicaps. “Through them,” she wrote, “I have found myself, my work, and my God.”
I don’t know too many people who have more to gripe about than Mom. She has broken both hips in separate falls, lost her husband and her hearing and her freedom, yet she cannot find time in her schedule to gripe. It’s like she has stepped back a little farther than most of us, seeing the bigger picture, thinking not on what is wrong but on what God is making right. Grateful people don’t think less of themselves; they think of themselves less often.
“What are you thankful for today?” I sometimes ask her.
“Oh, so much,” she invariably says. “You. And food. I’m getting fat, you know. The food is much too good here. I’m so fat I don’t have a lap. I have laps.”
I guess my mother needs so little, but she needs that little so much. She needs my weekly visits and prayers. She needs updates from her grandchildren and Dad’s favorite dog to sit on her laps. She needs a good-night kiss and a kind word and a reminder of the hope we share: the hope of heaven.
These last few years have certainly given me a celestial whiff, a divine desire to count my days, to make the days count. To form each and every decision in light of eternity, mindful that our lives pass quickly but decisions made here last forever.
Thinking on Mom’s life, I have found myself saying a more profound prayer than “Help!” the last few days. It is “Thanks.”
Thank You, Lord, that the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Thank You that You are the God with a history of making all things new, of filling us with hope and joy. And thanks for allowing Your children the last laugh. Verses from Mom’s favorite book now open on her night table say it best:
We know that God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to himself…. That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!… For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever. (2 Corinthians 4:14, 16-18, NLT)
NOTES
1. Tim Stafford, As Our Years Increase (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1989), 17.
2. T. J. Matthews, Brady E. Hamilton, “American Women Are Waiting to Begin Families,” http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/02news/ameriwomen.htm (accessed July 29, 2007).
3. U.S. Census Bureau, “Facts for Features,” http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/006560.html (accessed July 29, 2007).
4. CDC Press Release, “American Women Waiting to Have Families,” http://library.adoption.com/parenting-and-families/american-women-waiting-to-begin-families/article/8200/l.html (accessed July 29, 2007).
5. “Sandwich Generation,” Fairlady magazine, December 2006, http://www.women24.com/Fairlady/Display/FLYArticle/0,,806_l 1671,00.html (accessed July 29, 2007).
6. Equality and Human Rights Web site, http://www.eoc.org.uk/Default.aspx?page=15440 (accessed July 29, 2007).
7. Charles R. Swindoll, Growing Wise in Family Life (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Press, 1988), 152.
8. Ann Rowe Seaman, America’s Most Hated Woman (Continuum, 2005), 149.
9. I do not have this watch any longer. The watch I wear I got from my grandfather on his deathbed. For twenty bucks, plus tax.
10. Figures are from the Office of National Statistics. (I kid you not. I researched this. You can too!) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=353216&in_page_id=1879 (accessed 10/12/2007)
11. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York, Harper & Row, 1972), 2.
12. Cheri Fuller, When Couples Pray: The Little Known Secret to Lifelong Happiness in Marriage (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2001), 12.
13. Cynthia Crossen, “Americans Have It All (But All Isn’t Enough),” The Wall Street Journal, September 20 1996.
14. “Marriage Brings Wealth, Divorce Steals It” by LiveScience staff posted at, http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060118_wealth_marriage.html (accessed October 4, 2007).
15. “Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy,” Time magazine, March 2007, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599714,00.html (accessed October 10, 2007).
16. Okay, she was not my wife until later, she was my girlfriend…at least, I was hoping she would be.
17. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_J._Harris (accessed July 29, 2007).
18. “65 Year Old Woman in India Gives Birth,” FuturePundit, April 9, 2003, http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001124.html (accessed October 4, 2007). The case is made all the more remarkable by the fact that the average life expectancy for a female in India is sixty-three.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without a doubt, this has been the most difficult writing project of my life, and the one I have savored the most. It’s nice to live long enough to be nostalgic, but sometimes it hurts. I was startled by the potency of these memories and almost abandoned this project seventy-six times. Along came Ramona who said I could do it, prayed for me each day, and served me lip-smacking lasagna whenever I asked. Behind every good man is a surprised woman. Thanks for your companionship these twenty-five years. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, minus the time I compared your soup to cardboard. I’ve said it before: If I knew it would have been this good, I’d have asked you to marry me in third grade.
My editor, Steffany Woolsey, was so encouraging that I have already requested that she and her husband reside next to us in the nursing home beginning in 2041.
The staff at Multnomah was way too kind to me. I sure hope they keep it up.
Thanks to my faithful soldiers of prayer. And the hundreds who filled out my Middle Ages survey. To those who included their names: Your secrets are safe with me.
My high school English teacher, Mr. Al Bienert, looked past my glaring faults and encouraged me. I doubt I’d be writing were it not for him. Al passed away the day I completed this manuscript. He took me to hockey games when I was a student, thus being the only teacher in world history who wanted to spend time with me outside the classroom and therefore my favorite. Mr. Bienert taught me that it’s okay to be a kid all your life. I miss him.
I am enormously grateful to my siblings fo
r journeying through this book with me. Only once or twice did we squabble over methods, and once or twice they were right.
God has allowed me to surpass my legal limit in friends, each of whom used more of their shoulders than their mouths during the last few years. I am blessed to know each one, and humbled by several when we golf.
Thanks also to my children, two guys and a girl who travel with me, pray with me, and allow me to write about them. Perhaps they keep thinking I’ll strike it rich. With kids like these, I already have. Come home anytime. Moms making lasagna.
All praise and honor to my Savior Jesus Christ, who loved me and gave Himself for me. A lifetime is far too short to sing Your praise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Callaway is president of Laugh Again Ministries, an award-winning humorist, best-selling author, and the only one we know who broke his nose dropping barbells in ninth grade. About a hundred times a year, Callaway brings his humor with a message to corporations, conferences, and churches. Phil is the author of Laughing Matters, It’s Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens, and Parenting: Don’t Try This At Home, and his writings have been translated into languages like Spanish, Polish, Chinese, and English—one of which he speaks fluently. His five-part video series, The Big Picture, has been viewed in eighty thousand churches worldwide. Phil is married to his high school sweetheart, Ramona. They live in Canada. For more information on Phil’s other books, CDs, DVDs, or speaking ministry, visit www.laughagain.org or write Laugh and Learn, P.O. Box 4576, Three Hills, AB TOM 2N0.
Phil is editor of Servant magazine, an award-winning magazine read in 101 countries. A ministry of Prairie Bible College, Servant is full of insightful interviews with well-known Christians, helpful articles, world news, and Phil’s trademark humor. For a complimentary one-year subscription, please call 1-800-221-8532, or write:
Servant Magazine
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