Daddy

Looked After

| Marie Griffith

I lingered too long with my coffee yesterday morning. I planned an Independence Day run in my favorite park but didn’t start as early as intended. Orange cones already lined the street into the park to guide the throngs of firework watchers showing up to stake their claim to the best spots. I maneuvered my car through some of the cones to park in my usual space.

My run started better than expected and I felt good despite the heat. There were more people out and about at the park. Biking, walking, running, or preparing for their picnics. I ran through neighborhoods, around the school, then back to the park.

My run still felt okay but I was hot. I ran on the edge of a parking lot when I nodded to an older gentlemen driving a golf cart. He stopped the cart and motioned to me. I noticed he wore a cap with the park name on it. I wondered if he was an employee.

I walked to the cart and the man asked how long I’d been running. I answered him, then he asked how far I had to go. I told him, “three more miles to reach my goal.”

I must have looked overheated and thirsty. He handed me an ice cold water bottle from his cooler and told me to take it with me. Then he told me to take it slow. I opened the water bottle and drank fast. He looked concerned. I thanked him and turned to walk away. He said, “wait I’m not finished yet.”

He spread a small towel in his lap, filled the middle of it with handfuls of ice, and pulled the corners of the towel up around the ice. He put the “ice bag” behind his neck, on top of his head, under his chin, on his wrists and told me to do the same to cool off. I stood there with the bag behind my neck as he told me to be careful. He warned me of the heat again and I had a fleeting sense of familiarity.

He mentioned how he planned to celebrate later with his family and beamed when he talked about his grand children.

I thanked him again, reached to shake his hand, and asked his name. His eyes brightened, he shook my hand, told me his name, then asked mine.

Before he drove away, he said, “Marie, glad to know you.”

It wasn’t until this morning I discerned the familiarity.

The man on the golf cart reminded me of my father. Not his appearance, but the things he said and how he said them. His makeshift ice bag and demonstration of its most effective use. His going above and beyond in his care about such a small thing as me being too hot.

It was Dad who saw to our wounds when we were stung by yellow jackets or scraped our knees. He did the mean stuff. He dabbed our cuts with iodine or squeezed our splinters to the surface to pull them out with tweezers, and told us to stop whining about it.

As he aged, his care became more tender. More advice and prayers than tending wounds. Moving things or fixing broken ones. Letting us borrow what was his and always helping when he saw a need. Sometimes he helped before I knew I needed help.

Dad looked after us.

I finished my run. I took the man’s advice and slowed down, and it may be the reason I finished. I think it was another one of those times I needed help and didn’t know it.

 

Photo by Arleen wiese on Unsplash

 

They Won

| Marie Griffith

This is the kind of story that never gets old.

Daddy knew he needed to make a change.

To get better.

To save his life and ours.

He moved all of us to a whole new life in another state. Far away from the drinking binges and the fighting and the rehab centers that didn’t work. Far away from what happened and what was……..to something good and better.

The convoy to our fresh start rolled out one early summer morning in 1982. As a preteen I was probably less annoyed than most kids my age would have been. I knew I’d miss my friends but I was ready for something better. The hope of a calmer life, a different house, and a new school filled my heart. Moving day was a good day.

My sisters and I weren’t the only ones at a new school. Part of Dad’s new life included seminary and he began the night courses eagerly. He took careful notes in class and squeezed study time in when he could.

I can’t remember the day or the month or the season, but before the end of the first year Dad started drinking again.

Mom was devastated. She never told me that, but I know. Dad was too. When you’re a kid you have no idea what your parents are going through. Then you grow up and endure your own heartaches and one day, without meaning to, you feel the pain of your mom’s fear or the torment of your dad’s struggle with alcohol.

For the next decade Daddy lost the battle with alcohol over and over and over again.

Ten years.

Ten more years of the chaos and violence. Ten more years of tears and sorrow. Regretting the move, resenting the losses. Ten more years of emergency room visits and halfway houses. Ten more years of job changes and the financial strain and moving from house to house.

I’m sure Daddy remembered the day he took his last drink. He may have counted the days but he never told us. After about a year of him not drinking……we realized he wasn’t drinking. Then it was two years, then five. Ten years sober, then 20 years.

Daddy was sober for almost 23 years when he passed away in 2014.

Twenty three years of healing and restored relationships. Twenty three years of good memories. Twenty three years of the sweetest grace.

They won. Daddy and Mom pressed through and marched on. They fought the good fight and fought with each other. They messed up but moved forward. There were days they wanted to but they didn’t give up.

The long view is what got them through. The good days helped them see beyond the bad ones. When everything was falling apart they believed it could all come together. Love does that. It sees longer and deeper and wider. So my parents kept going. One day at a time. And they won.

The last time Daddy and Mom were face to face and held each others’ hands they weren’t thinking of the hard years. They were thankful for the moment and all the years that got them there.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

Restart

Storms

| Marie Griffith

It was unseasonably warm last night. The air was heavy and the sky dark because the moon and stars couldn’t shine through the thick clouds. The wind was wild and the rain came fast and hard. Then it calmed and the rain drops were big and slow.

The news and sirens told us there were tornado warnings but I could feel it in the air before they told us anything. I wasn’t scared when I went to bed last night but I woke up several times because the thunder was loud and the wind was making the trees hit against the house and the barn was creaking.

The sounds of the storm and the strange low way the thunder rolled reminded me of one night when I was a little girl…maybe ten years old.

I remember Daddy sitting in the doorway on the steps that led to the carport. The screen door was propped open and all the windows were opened too.

Daddy was watching the weather. He said he could feel it in his bones that it would be really bad weather. Probably tornadoes.

He sat there lifting his cigarette to his mouth and taking a deep draw so that the tip of it turned bright orange. The smoke came out of his mouth fast. He rested his hands on his knees then clasped them together while holding the cigarette. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth for another draw. Over and over again until there was no more tobacco to burn. He threw the cigarette down onto the concrete of the carport then stepped on it. Then he bent forward to comfort the dog. Bojo stayed at Dad’s feet even closer when there was a storm.

The rain wasn’t heavy but the big trees all around our house were moving wildly because of the wind. Then the rain and the wind stopped and it was calm. The lightning flickered across the sky and the thunder rumbled deep and long and far off.

But I wasn’t scared.

Daddy was watching the weather.

 

 

Unusual

Quitting

| Marie Griffith

The sound of the doorbell startled me. When I opened the door the man asked for Wayne. Before I answered him, the man asked if I knew him. He had a familiar smile but his face was aged and different. And the voice……..the voice was familiar too. For the next few seconds my brain tried to match a name with the kind face and his recognizable voice.

Before I could make the match he told me who he was. I was glad to see him and especially happy that he came by to see Daddy.

Daddy would have been thrilled for the visit. The man was shocked and saddened to hear that Wayne, my dad, had passed away. After he gave his condolences, we caught up.

It was a strange mixture of emotions…….remembering what was, learning what is, and trying to summarize thirty years of life in thirty minutes or so.

Then he asked the most amazing question. “Did your dad ever stop drinking?”

Oh how I wish he’d have known the man that Dad had become. The gracious man that cared for Mom so tenderly while working his job from his home office. The man that overflowed with generosity…….with his time and resources. The man that forgave so easily because he knew he’d been forgiven so much.

Daddy stopped drinking in 1990 or so. Never took another drink.

He quit to save his life.

His quitting saved our lives.

And who knows what else his quitting did. Whatever it did, it was good and right.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.          

                            1 Corinthians 15:10

Names

Memory

| Marie Griffith

I’ve been sorting through moments. The kind caught with a camera. And we all know what happens when you sort through photographs. You look and you remember. Memories flood your heart and mind and you keep looking through the photos and you keep remembering and you smile and laugh and want others to look at them with you.

Then there are the photos that you’ve never seen before of people you loved and that loved you. You see these moments and you wonder then you learn something about the people in the photos.

Another feeling comes when you look, really look, at these moments gone long ago. It’s a strange strong feeling. And it’s a new one to me. It has some yearning in it, mixed with a little sadness and some happiness……..restlessness too.

But it’s good to remember because as Frederick Buechner wrote, “…even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead.”

My favorite photos are the ones I’ve never seen. The photos of people and places and happenings before I was born.image

Like this school picture of my dad from 1956. He was 14. His dad died when he was 14. I don’t know if this picture was taken before or after his father died.

Or this picture of my mom with two of her five sisters. She is the tallest one. Mom had two brothers also. She was the baby of her family and she was a daddy’s girl.

Or the one of Mom and Dad on a beach somewhere. That’s Mom in a green bikini! I never knew Mom wore a bikini but Dad always wore a hat.

They’d lived a lot of life before I was here. They had the same experiences common to all of us. Joy and pain. Sorrow and regret. Infatuation, rejection, hope and despair. Friendship and betrayal. Fear and love and faith.image

Then I became part of their story and they lived more life and we had more joy and pain. Regret, fear and sorrow. Faith, hope and love.

Now they are part of my story.

“Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill, taught us things”.    Frederick Buechner

A Discover Challenge post:The Things We Leave Behind.

Traditional

The Dark

| Marie Griffith

Seven months after Daddy died, so did Mom.

Dad’s sickness then death was sudden but Mom had been ready for a while. Mom was tired of fighting for breath and she wanted to die. She wasn’t scared of dying, only of suffocating.

We surrounded her as she lay on her bed at home when she ran out of breath. And that’s what it was like. No gasping. No struggling. No fear. Her breathing slowed…..a gradual peaceful stilling of her chest……….then her breath was no more.

Mom was gone. Mom and Dad were gone.

We sat in the same room at the same funeral home with the same young funeral director as we had 7 months earlier and I thought about how nothing was how I thought it would be.

Nothing.

But I thought about it as if I was looking on, separated from all of it somehow. Everything was muted……..kind of dulled………what I heard, what I said, what I saw, what I felt.

In between the deaths of my parents my marriage took another hit. We had been struggling for a while. It was already so fragile and I was really scared this time. A real kind of scared.

Maybe that was the last time I’d felt anything full-strength. Maybe a part of my heart shut down. Maybe the Zoloft was doing what it was supposed to do.

As I sat there with my sisters around that table choosing the hymns to be played at Mom’s funeral service I remembered comments Mom and Dad made. Some of them to me. Some to others about me.image

Mom and Dad had noticed my fading. My distance. I wasn’t myself and they were worried. I told them over and over that I was fine. I think I thought I was fine. I think I thought everything would be fine. But they saw what I couldn’t see.

The thing about fading is that it happens slowly. So slowly you don’t feel it or see it. It goes unnoticed at first. Then the heaviness gets heavier. The darkness gets a little darker. And you get used to walking around in the dark.

And I kept doing what I knew to do. What I had to do. Because the world doesn’t stop when your marriage is crumbling or when your Dad gets sick and when you just need time to think about things and feel things and mourn things. The world doesn’t stop.

Then it was heavier and darker and I was tired. The kind of tired that goes into my bones. I woke up ready for each day to be over.

As we reviewed the order of the funeral service, the words of one of the hymns came to mind:

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed

Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee
How great thou art, How great thou art
Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

 

And I wanted my soul to sing again. I wanted to wonder again at all that God has made.

I’d not lost all hope. There was still some in there.

Because I knew……I know that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places.

How great you are God, my Savior God to Thee, How great you are!

 

In response to the Daily Post’s Faded.

 

 

 

 

 

Groundwork

| Marie Griffith

imageWe have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.                          Wendell Berry

The beauty that surrounds my home today is the result of my parents’ hard work.

When I was a little girl we had a plain yard. Grass to mow. An apple tree and lots of pine trees in the back. We had a vegetable garden too. But no landscaping. No mulch or fancy stones or yard ornaments. My parents didn’t have the money or time for landscaping until all of us moved out of the house.

Then that’s where they spent most of their time and a lot of their money. A new yard project was underway constantly. Dad was the do-it-yourself master at anything and the yard was no exception. They planted flowers and trees and mulched and sprayed and laid sod and added stepping stones and edgers. They were proud of their yard but mostly enjoyed sharing it with others.

imageA Fourth of July barbecue, an Easter egg hunt, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and Labor Day too. Anytime was a good time to get together and sit in the yard.

My daughter told me last week, “I love how Grandpa planted so many flowers.”

Me too.

We get to experience the bounty of their hard work in the dirt. Their groundwork makes the beauty possible.

Not only in the yard around the house. But in my heart and my memories. In my personality and my character. In who I am.

They did the hard work of teaching us, correcting us and showing us and loving us. They laid the foundation. And it wasn’t easy. And they didn’t do it well sometimes.

They were fighting some tough battles while trying to raise a family. Some we know about. Others we never will. Hardships and addictions and anger and fighting and lying and job losses and lots of bad things happened.

But good things did too. Really good things. Like working together in the yard. Christmases. Playing cards at the dining room table. Sitting on the porch watching thunderstorms.

And apologies and forgiveness and perseverance and love. And all the other good things that come with those.

All of it is groundwork. The good they did, the mistakes they made, the life they lived in front of us.

And we get to experience the bounty of their hard work in the dirt. Their groundwork makes the beauty possible.

 
Story

Mama

| Marie Griffith

Mom’s wait was over one year ago today. Her last breath left her while all of us were gathered around her at home, holding her hands, telling her we love her, crying because we knew we’d miss her, but rejoicing that her fight for breath was finished.

One of my favorite memories of Mom is when I was a teenager living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She, my younger sister and I were at Eastgate Mall and she wanted to eat a sandwich at Glen Gene’s deli.  We sat down to eat our sandwiches and we talked and laughed. She listened mostly. I don’t remember the words said or what I was wearing or the taste of the sandwich. I remember the deli wasn’t crowded. I remember her happy and smiling and there. And I remember the song that played while sitting in those yellow seats at Glen Gene’s deli that day.  The song was, “True” by Spandau Ballet.

So true
Funny how it seems
Always in time, but never in line for dreams
Head over heels when toe to toe
This is the sound of my soul
This is the sound 

“Always in time, but never in line for dreams…..”  Mom didn’t speak of the dreams she had for her life. She didn’t talk about how she thought her life would turn out. I wonder if it was what she thought or hoped it would be.

She loved Daddy and her quartet of daughters. She loved her home and the town she lived in. She was a woman of courage and she didn’t give up. She stayed in a hard marriage that turned into 51 years.

Mom was a hard worker and taught us to do the same. Anyone who ever tasted her cooking praised her work in the kitchen. She was a list-maker to the very end and funny, too. She had us laughing even in the last days.

She loved reminiscing and in the last year of her life she shared treasured memories with us as often as we would sit and listen.

She commented on one of my posts called “51” about a year before she left us and several months before Daddy passed.

Marie,

Thank you for the beautiful words you put together for Wayne and I. I do believe our four beautiful and wonderful daughters had so very much to do with us making the marriage work. Not only our girls, but our friends and families that were praying for us through all the difficult times. Ultimately, it was God and his love that got us through the rough times. Also, I knew Wayne was a godly person and did not want the life we were living with the drinking problem. I knew that one day he would ask God to remove the desire for drinking away from his mind, body and heart. God answered that prayer and today we continue trusing in God and his promises. Thanks to our four daughters for what they have given to us, their love and trust and our ten grandchildren.

Love,

Mom

Each time she spoke of her life she was thankful.

To God…..for us…..for Daddy….for her other family…… and her wonderful friends.  She was thankful for everything. She praised God.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord.      Psalm 150:6 

I think she was in line for dreams and hers came true.

Next

| Marie Griffith

It’s been a little while since my last Live Like it Matters Challenge. The challenges were initially a weekly feature posted on Wednesdays but lately I’ve issued them on different days and not weekly. I will continue to issue the challenges randomly for now.

My challenge to you today is to think about the next person, then act accordingly. You probably already do this. Like when you take your empty grocery cart to the corral, you’re thinking of the guy who will park his shiny new car in the parking lot AND the clerk who has to gather the carts to take them into the store.

My dad was the most excellent Next One Thinker I’ve known and actually inspired this challenge.  More than a year past his death and one of his small acts of “nextness” was appreciated by my husband the other day. The screws to the flat screen TV mount were taped to the bottom of the TV just in case the NEXT person wanted to mount it to a wall. Some would have thrown the screws away. Dad didn’t because he was thinking of the next person. The way Dad kept up with his tools, and his finances….the way he installed anything with extra safety measures…..the way he left us notes about where he kept documents….the way he taught us to be generous with our time and resources……all because he was thinking of the next person.

Be-Type-Of-Person-You-Want-To-Meet
Photo credit: Shutterstock

Another way you already think of the next person – I HOPE YOU DO THIS – is when you replace the empty toilet paper roll.  Do one even better and when the roll is almost empty, put a new roll close by so no one is caught without enough TP.

You’re a Next One Thinker when you don’t put the milk jug in the refrigerator if there’s only enough milk left to soak one corn flake. Why? Because the next person has no need for one teaspoon of milk. You do the better thing by using the milk, drinking it, or even pouring it down the drain, but you do not put the milk jug back in the refrigerator.

The next person is blessed by you thinking of them and doesn’t even know it. But they surely know it if you don’t think of them.

We’ve all experienced the frustration of someone NOT thinking of the next person. You’ve been sitting on the toilet when you realized there’s not enough toilet paper or worse, no toilet paper.  Or poured yourself a big bowl of Cocoa Puffs and reached into the fridge for the milk jug and discovered there’s not enough there for a mouse. And you think, “Why did someone do this?  How selfish and cruel?”

Don’t be selfish and cruel!  Think of the next person.  Jesus said it best, “Do to others as you would have them do to you”.

There are thousands of ways to think of the next person. At home, in your job, at the grocery store, the bank or school. Even in traffic. Yes, traffic. Let someone merge!  Don’t flip them off and/or make a scowling disapproving face.

Refill the copier with paper. Take good notes for a fellow student that’s absent because of the flu. Clean off your table before you leave Taco Bell. Load the dishwasher so that the dishes get as clean as possible. Take the weird flavored Greek yogurt back to the dairy aisle that you decided you didn’t want. Clean up your popcorn and candy wrapper mess before you leave the theater.

Think of the next person. We tend to forget how much it matters to do the small, kind, extra things.  IT MATTERS.  A lot.

But here’s the thing:  you will probably never hear a thank you for it.

Do it anyway.

3 When you do things, do not let selfishness or pride be your guide. Instead, be humble and give more honor to others than to yourselves. 4 Do not be interested only in your own life, but be interested in the lives of others.
Philippians 2: 3-4 NCV