MOM AND DAD

Some years before her final illness my mother said to me, "I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to miss out on all the things going on. Think about it. Men on the moon in my lifetime!" Yep, that was Mom. It was no surprise when the doctors diagnosed her with cancer of the esophagus and told her that she had three to five years to live, she replied, "You'd better do better than that." She had every intention of living to at least 80. After trying chemotherapy and radiation without positive result, she was anything but resigned to death. She wasn't afraid, just disgusted that she wasn't recovering. She intended to do a lot more living. She died a mere seven months after her diagnosis.

Both of my parents had a high school education. Neither of them would ever have thought about going beyond that. In my father's case, it would not have been allowed. It was only somewhat reluctantly that his parents consented to his attending high school. After all, it was the depression and anyone who was able bodied should be out earning money. It wouldn't have mattered. Less than two years after my father graduated from high school, World War II started, and he enlisted in the navy. Great Lakes first, then machinist school at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. (Dad would occasionally mention to people that he had been at the University of Kansas, never explaining why he was there.) Then Tampa, Key West, the Panama Canal, and the Philippines. End of the war and back to work again. That was so different from his father's experience. He never traveled more than 150 miles from the place he was born.

Dad wasn't alone in traveling to foreign places. My mother had spent the summer of 1937 in Romania with her family. I've wondered whether that experience added to my mother's interest about the things around her. She never made a formal study of anything, never took classes (except adult Bible Studies), but we were always going to museums, visiting the zoo, and so forth. Vacations were usually spent in a cabin in some forsaken part of Wisconsin fishing, but always with side trips to whatever Indian exhibit or abandoned lumber camp or old house might be in the vicinity.

My mother was the music lover. Big band was her favorite naturally Tommy Dorsey in particular, but also Jimmy Dorsey and Glen Miller. She also had some interest in classical music–classical piano at least. She hand sung in her high school chorus and played the accordion. There're two strange twists of fate here. I would eventually study piano with the same man who taught my mother accordion, and I would do my student-teaching at the same high school my mother attended and–yep–worked with the same teacher that had directed girls chorus in my mother's day.

My father appreciated music, but being tone-deaf couldn't sing. He could never make heads or tales out of classical music and would at times become quite disturbed that that was all I played or listened to. However, he had some interest in art and architecture. He didn't make a study of it and he certainly thought that most modern stuff was goofy, but I can remember him taking me to the Art Institute of Chicago and showing me Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. He carefully showed me how it was made up on thousands of little dots of paint laid next to each other. I also recall riding with him in the car in the suburbs one day when he pointed out a house that he passed each day on the way to work. "That's by Frank Lloyd Wright," he said.

I think the thing that really made my parent's interest in things clear to me was during my last year in seminary. The King Tut exhibit was coming to the Field Museum. There was to be a series of lectures on Egypt at the University of Chicago prior to the exhibit. I they were once a month for four months. So my parents would trek to the University Campus, near where I was living, we would have dinner together and then attend the lecture. I can't imagine any of my parents' friends doing anything like that. But my parents were different. They wanted to know about things.

I am exceedingly grateful for the way my parents exposed me to this fascinating world around us. Although I am often overcome by all the things I need to get done, I'm never bored. I am very much like my mother who couldn't understand how anyone could be bored with life.

I have seen people in their later years of life who have very limited interests. Some are focused entirely on what comes on TV next. They rapidly withdraw from everything until the withdraw from life itself. That wasn't my parents, especially not my mother. She left this life under protest, frustrated that her body was failing long before her mind was ready to let it go.

I know that some people believe the Christian should welcome death. I don't think I like that notion, at least not for myself. To be sure a Christian accepts death with trust in the Lord. But I don't like an approach to death–even by a Christian–that belittles the value of life. Why should God have created us in this earthly life if it weren't something good to be valued?

"I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to miss out on all the things going on." I hope I can have my mother's view of life until my journey in this world.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne