Close Encounters with Mostly Dysfunctional Relatives

Well, it’s time to pick up the continuing tale of some of my relatives. The term “relatives” is a word that, for the most part, describes people we didn’t choose. They’re just there. I don’t consider “relatives” the same as “family.”

I know I’ve already talked about my mother’s death, but I need to re-cap some things, for clarity’s sake. These were times that I crossed paths with the nuclear family I was born into, usually in similar fashion as that of a comet that passes near enough to the surface of Earth so that a child can wave at it.

*****

I’ve written about this before, but when Eric and I had been married about nine years and had two kids, Grandpa Ware decided to pay for a trip to California for our whole family. By that time, of course, Eric knew the whole story of what had happened with Grandpa and his inappropriate behavior towards me during the summer after my freshman year of high school. We had discussed all of that and kept no secrets between us. But I had also decided all that was water under the bridge and I had forgiven him. So we decided that a trip to the West Coast would be fun for our little daughters, who had never seen such a thing as a beach, not to mention Disneyland.

And yes, there was a time at the beach. Grandpa decided we all needed to go for a swim, and then he strongly suggested that Eric take the kids and go looking for shells. I wasn’t very comfortable about being left all alone with Grandpa, but Eric said he would not go far, and he would keep an eye on what was going on with us. It turned out that Grandpa had actually spent the money to fly us all to California because he specifically wanted to ask my forgiveness for what he’d done so long ago. So, I heard his confession and his apology. And it seemed heartfelt. 

“Of course I forgive you,” I told him, with a big smile. “I couldn’t have gone through life without having already done that long ago.”

Then Lisa broke her finger, out on Grandpa’s porch playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” with a lawn chair and Grandpa felt terrible about it, so he paid the bill at the (better) local hospital, where they wouldn’t have even let us in otherwise. But Grandpa and I felt reconciled. Life went on. 

*****

Not long after that, Dad dropped in unannounced, on the same day we were going to see Ronald Reagan at the Purdue Airport. We were all inside making a large pro-life sign to bring to the airport when he and Angela pulled up in their RV on the way to see Angela’s daughter in Michigan or Minnesota. He said he couldn’t stay anyway, but he had noticed on the map that we happened to be on the way to Angela’s daughter’s house, and he just needed to borrow our hose to fill up their water tank. 

These were the kinds of run-ins that felt the most annoying. Dad didn’t ever plan any trips in his RV to our house in those days, even though they had moved to Southern Indiana. We were an afterthought, and Angela didn’t get out of the RV. Finally, Dad began to come now and then to one of our events – a graduation, a wedding, etc. He never spent the night and sometimes Angela didn’t even come with him.  We never did figure out what was wrong with Angela, but there seemed to be some kind of competition going on -- his kids vs. her kids.

*****

One December, my mom decided to move to Indiana, so she and John showed up on our doorstep out of the blue. They had been living in Georgia and suddenly decided to head up north for a while. Probably John needed a job again, but Mom was always more hirable. She got a job at MBAH Insurance in Lafayette pretty quickly and they found a place to rent in West Lafayette. 

While it was nice that Mom could be in the vicinity for Christmas that year, she and John were Californians and did not adapt well. January was tough. John kept parking on the grass just before it snowed and couldn’t get the truch out without having it dug out of the mud and towed off the grass. Eric was always having to go rescue them.

Then, just when it seemed they were out of the woods because it was beginning to show signs of spring, Mom announced that she was leaving. Because of the woods. She said she was miserable because she was allergic to the flowering trees, so they packed up to move back to California. This was the reverse snowbird effect and we didn’t understand it. I wrote her a sad poem and gave it to her, telling her I had been excited to have her nearby … but was very sad to see her going away again. She was learning to love our little family: to rock a baby to sleep, to sing a duet with me at our church, or to teach a knitting class at the homeschool co-op. But she was determined to leave.

It wasn’t till later that I found out Mom had actually left because the workers at MBAH had had some kind of party, and overhearing the talk about it, she thought she was invited but wasn’t … so, feeling offended, she had quit her job. I guess Mom had inherited my “stupid gene,” the one you have growing up as a military dependent that gives you the tendency to solve relationship problems by moving somewhere else and leaving the old location with a raspberry. So now they were back on the road to California.

A few years later, they moved to Alaska. They had been on a cruise, paid for by some insurance money from an auto accident, and fell in love with Ketchikan, where it always rained and the chances were good that you would never be sunburned. But they missed the family. So when the opportunity came up, Mom begged Grandpa Ware for an “advance” on her inheritance, and then talked us all into flying to Alaska for Rennie’s second wedding, out on the beach. It was to be a family reunion. The Haley family was supposed to sing a song or something. Chris was just a baby and hadn’t learned how to sing yet (another year and he could have done it!) but the girls and I sang a trio of “Morning Is Broken” with an accompaniment tape by the Second Chapter of Acts.

Fishing in Ketchikan -- Me with Chris, John, and Rennie’s son Joey

It worked out okay at first, being there with Mom and John, Rennie and Dan. Rennie married some guy whose name I cannot remember but he was a photographer or something. Her son Joey was well-behaved, but her daughter Gina terrorized Emily in the back seat of a car while we were going somewhere together. And then Dan came unglued because I had brought my favorite pro-life shirt with me – the Statue of Liberty holding a preborn baby. Mom was crying because we were yelling at each other, and she asked me why I had done this to my brother. What was I thinking? I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong – it was just my favorite shirt. 

Unfortunately, the marriage Rennie embarked upon that weekend didn’t last long, either.

Another time, Mom found some money, and she and John left Ketchikan to come for a visit. She wanted to celebrate Christmas while she was in Indiana, even though it was actually Halloween. She brought gifts and had us decorate the tree and make a Christmas dinner. When the trick-or-treaters knocked on the door, we opened it and yelled “MERRY CHRISTMAS!!” which very much confused them.

But John wanted to go fishing while he was in the area and couldn’t get a fishing license. He loudly badmouthed Indiana, using foul language, and talked about how much he hated the whole state. That produced in me a quiet anger – like a pot coming to a simmer just before it boils. Without turning around from what I was doing on the computer, I asked through clenched teeth, “WHY, then, did you even come to Indiana if you hate our state so badly?” 

The answer probably was related to the insurance company party, but he avoided answering, laughed, and patted me on the head with his big paw, making some crack about short people. For the record, I detest being patted on the head like a child. In fact, I would have hated it when I was a child, too. I asked him to stop but he only did it all the more and I exploded and smacked him. My mom was pleased to take her husband and leave the next day.

*****

Grandpa drove out from California to visit us in Burrows once. We weren’t home when he arrived, so, since he always had his tool box with him in his truck, he took the opportunity to tighten our front door knob. 

There are always attempts to lump people together into categories. Today it’s Blacks, Asians, and White Supremacists. Back then, there was a popular tool mentioned on the radio program “Focus on the Family” that showed people could be categorized by their personalities as Lions, Beavers, Otters, or Golden Retrievers, and I was pretty fascinated by that idea back then. Studying the lists of character traits, I was pretty sure Grandpa was a Beaver – careful, precise, and planned. I was pretty sure I was, at least.

Grandpa had fun with our burgeoning family and for some reason, we went with him to Fort Wayne, to the mall there. I really can’t remember why, but I think it had something to do with a Disney store.

But he also noticed that our toilet was running slow, so he decided to take it out and replace it with a new toilet at his expense. He found out when he removed the toilet that it was a stray crochet hook that had clogged the drain, and now that he had smashed the old toilet to find the crochet hook, we definitely needed the new one.

So he bought one, and I watched him install it. Some of my readers may remember the way our house used to look and how the steps to the basement were in the bathroom, just opposite the toilet. Grandpa had to install this new toilet with his body stretched out on the basement steps – a little uncomfortable, to be sure. I watched him put down a ring of a blue gelatinous substance and then I saw him lift the toilet and put it down, smack dab across the blue mass. Nope, not a beaver, must be a lion! And he said I should have stopped him.

When Grandpa left to return to California, it was early in the morning with a withered apple that was the only fruit we had left, while I was making homemade English muffins galore, for the family breakfast. 

But the hardest part of his visit was that he thought I still “loved” him. I think his mind was already going, but after everyone else had gone to bed, Grandpa tried to catch me and kiss me. 

“C’mon over here now and kiss me. You know you want to!” he said. But I was always able to side-step his approaches and remind him that I was married. And of course, so was he.

After that, Grandpa just decided that he wanted to help us with our house payments. He said he was helping everybody else, so he wanted to help us too.

*****

When Lisa was 16, she heard about the castle that Calvary Chapel owned in Austria, that they’d turned into a conference center. She heard that members of the Calvary’s could go there and volunteer. You just had to come up with the funds to buy a plane ticket to get there. 

My mom had a great idea for that, and it was to have Lisa come to Alaska to work first, in a salmon processing plant, to earn the money to go to the Castle. In Alaska, working in the salmon cannery was akin to de-tasseling corn, which is where all our local Hoosier kids could earn summer money. She only needed to borrow the money to get there, and then she would be rolling in dough and able to pay back the debt, still making enough to travel to Austria.

So Hopeful Lisa set out to do that. But she was unprepared for the strong stench of the fish and found she was unable to handle the work. Mom helped her locate another job at a clothing store / gift shop that the cruise ship tourists frequented. Mom was excited about the idea that they wanted Lisa to dress in a fancy period costume, but upon questioning her, I found out that in Ketchikan’s history, the only women who lived there were those who rented their bodies to service the lonely loggers. I decided that frilly dresses with long feathers and fishnet hose were not suitable for our daughter and told Mom to instruct the store that she was NOT to dress in their period costumes. 

I thought I had dodged a bullet, but there was more, and that was related to us by her anxious fiance’, who had spent much time on the phone with her. Here’s what Lisa wrote about her experience recently:

I mentioned this in my post about when my mother died, a couple weeks ago.  At this point, I am very glad I am not related to John anymore. 

*****

I’m not sure what brought it on, but at one point, Dan decided he wanted to be a friend. Dan has one important problem – he talks too much and too fast. If you try to have a phone conversation, you quickly find out soon that it’s going to be one-sided. So, I listened to him telling me things I never knew before, like how he had spent Grandpa’s inheritance money so unwisely, on starting a business venture selling meth. It ended with himself and his (third) wife in a drug rehab facility, recovering from an overdose that nearly killed them. He was now convinced that he could be a wonderful inspirational speaker at schools, telling his story about how he had almost died and so you should stay away from meth.

Of course, I saw two flaws in his thinking. First, my brother wanted to divert the actual blame for his nearly dying to Grandpa, because it was obviously Grandpa’s fault for giving him so much money in the first place. And second, he wanted to inspire but refused to talk about the One who actually had the answers. So, Dan was unable to confess that he had sinned, and unable to point the way to Jesus, who could forgive sin. In fact, he wouldn’t talk about the things that mattered at all. In fact, he would get really really annoyed if I tried to talk about those things. Mostly, he did tell me about the fantastic properties of oven bags in cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.

There were quite a few kids in our house by that time and Chris was about 14. And, coincidentally, we were pastoring Calvary Chapel Carroll County, which happened to make me a pastor’s wife, which happened to be something I would want to talk about, but not something my fast-talking relative wanted to talk about. And beyond that, Chris was our worship leader. Dan wanted to talk to him, but we had already told Chris about my unbelieving relative, and so he was wary of what Dan might say. And Dan sensed that, and then he blamed me for conditioning Chris to hate him. It would have been difficult for them to be close pals, regardless of what I told him. When you exclude all subjects that matter, all that is left to you is … oven bags.

Eventually, he decided it wasn’t worth it to talk to me because I kept bringing up church and the Bible for some reason. My grandpa could no longer travel so I just called him regularly. And I called my mom, who kept me updated on how many times my brother and sister had gotten married and what Rennie’s last name was now. I mused that it was Mom who “kept the family together,” because she could somehow talk to Dan, who could talk to Rennie, and then she could talk to me, and I could talk to my dad. It was a weird relationship between the five of us, who used to be a whole family.

*****

One year, Dan called out of the blue to tell me that Grandpa had propositioned Rennie, and what should we do about it? I got the facts of the case, how he had talked to Rennie somehow, and he had asked her to go to a hotel room with him.

I told Dan and Rennie about my experience back in California with Grandpa, and how he had sexually assaulted me. And it angered me that he was still doing that kind of thing, into his 80s now. What was wrong with the man!? Rennie told me that she’d had some kind of encounter with him back then, too, and that was the first time I knew anything more than what happened to me. Dan wanted him castrated. The meaning of Dan’s name is “judge,” and he’s always been rather judgey – just not at all merciful.

So I called Grandpa to confront him. I ended up with Grandma on the line and told her everything. She said, “Well, honey, I didn’t know about what happened to you, but now your grandpa has that Old Timer’s disease, and he’s a little crazy. He probably didn’t know what he was doing, and I don’t think he meant anything by it.”

When I finally got him on the line, I had him in tears. Then I asked Rennie, on his behalf, to give him a call so he could apologize. And I gave Rennie and Dan a quick lesson on forgiveness.

But Rennie and Dan decide to hate me because I was on Grandpa’s side. 

*****

Years later, I had a letter from someone in my distant past. I’ve written about him before, and I think of him as my “real brother,” Mike. He asked about Dan and Rennie because he remembered them from when he knew me a long time ago. So, we investigated that. Mike even paid to look them up online and find out where they lived now.

After unsuccessfully attempting to reconnect with Dan and Rennie, I unsubscribed from the relationship, or they did. And I have since decided that these were not really my true family. They are merely relatives. 

Family is there for you, and cares for you, and you care for them. First and foremost is my husband.  Beyond that, I have family within the Body of Christ whom I would trust with my life. My dad is still there and enjoys my visits far more than he used to, and my Uncle Sam is still around. 

Mike and his family are there, as well as my kids and their families, and Eric’s in-laws and their families. I even hooked up with my mom’s half-sister Judy at one point, and we don’t talk very often, but I know how I could get a hold of her if I needed to. She’s doing very well, living with her husband of many years, on a ranch in Wyoming. 

But I could also name several friends over the years, who have stood with me, who care, who might even come to my funeral someday, if that’s any gauge of a long-term relationship. These are people who are not just my family today, but those with whom I also intend to spend eternity, those whom I will see on the way up to meet Jesus in the clouds in the not-too distant future.

What more could I ask? When Job’s sons and their wives were wiped out during Job’s time of affliction, God was already planning to replace them and to restore all of Job’s wealth and his goods besides. He has replaced my estranged family with a multitude.

God reminds me in His Word, though, that even though some of these not-very-close relatives would rather just walk away and pretend they never knew me, and that I also feel the same way about others, it is not my privilege to harbor unforgiveness in my heart, nor to hate them with some kind of righteous indignation.  Yep, like it or not, the Apostle John writes:

“He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.”

I John 2:9

“But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”

I John 2:11

“Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.”

I John 3:5

“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”

I John 4:20

So, I continue to pray for these people, and I pray for forgiveness whenever I find myself feeling the urge to call down fire from Heaven.  It really is not fitting.  Someday, all will be put to rights.  But this is the age of Grace.

Others.

If you’ve been around either the Calvary Chapel movement or the Salvation Army, you should know the story by now of the one-word telegram sent by General William Booth to his Salvation Army officers, to be read at a convention he was unable to attend. Because the cost of telegrams was computed by the number of words, he found that he could only afford one word, and as he thought about how he could encourage the men in their mission, the one word “Others” came to mind. That was the text of his telegram, to which he signed his name.

That telegram was legendary, and you sometimes see the word “Others.” appear by itself – just one word on a bumper sticker on the car in front of you. By that you know the driver of the car has been at a conference that featured Gayle Erwin, of Servant Quarters, a Calvary Chapel ministry. He always has those on hand wherever he speaks. We’ve had them on our cars, too, until the weathering from rain and sun causes them to peel off. Or, today, that would be snow.

The view from behind, of a car belonging to one of our daughters

Earlier, in my post about “Margie’s Proverbs,” I shared something I had written about “others,” and how my perspective on others gives you a hint about who is the center of my universe. A quick glance at this post will give you an idea of whether I am living in a state of egocentricity.

Also, the New Testament is full of Jesus’ “theology,” (Gayle calls it the “Jesus style”) such as where He told the rich young ruler who wanted to inherit eternal life that he was almost there, but he needed to sell all he had and give it to the poor. That was partly for himself, because his riches had come to be his god, but also, just think of all the poor who would have benefited by a little generosity!  Oh!  Maybe his riches weren’t meant for him to keep in the first place!

In another place, Jesus encountered a lawyer who already understood that the second great commandment was to love his neighbor as himself, but wanted to justify himself by finding a loophole: “But just who is my neighbor?” That’s when Jesus clarified by telling him the story of the Good Samaritan. Oh! You mean God wants me to love … them too?

Yes, in this case, Jesus wanted the Jewish lawyer to be like the Samaritan, to put aside class differences, to see a suffering, bleeding, destitute human being and commence picking him up, letting him ride on his own animal, taking him to place where he could spend the night, dressing his wounds, providing food and clothing, and checking up on him later. Sounds messy!

So this is familiar territory, for sure. We are not to live for ourselves, but for others. The question is usually “how,” but let’s just talk a bit about “why.”

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but to Your name give glory, because of Your mercy, because of Your truth. ~Ps. 115:1

This is the verse that caught my eye this morning. It is notable for what it does not say. It does not say, “O Lord, give glory to Your Name because You are the Creator of the Universe,” or “ … because You are so huge and powerful,” or “ … because You are Perfect and Pure and Holy,” or even “ … because You are the Ultimate Just Judge and King of all that has ever been and ever will be …”

No. It says that we don’t deserve any of the glory, God gets it all, because of His mercy and because of His truth.

It is mercy that defines our God.

Just after this verse, Psalm 115 talks about the dumb idols made by men’s hands, who have physical features of men but can’t do anything. They just sit there. Compare that to our compassionate God, who is all of the above, but is defined by Mercy. 

“Why should the Gentiles say, ‘So where is their God?’

But our God is in heaven; He does whatever He pleases.

Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands.

They have mouths, but they do not speak; Eyes they have, but they do not see;

They have ears, but they do not hear; Noses they have, but they do not smell;

They have hands, but they do not handle; Feet they have, but they do not walk; Nor do they mutter through their throat.

Those who make them are like them; So is everyone who trusts in them.

~Psalm 115:2-8

We become like that which (or Whom) we worship.

When I took an ACT (or maybe it was the SAT) test to get into college, back in the 70s, there was a section on career assessment. So much of it had to do with how I viewed people. But back then, I felt a little hostile towards people. They had wronged me, hurt my feelings, said bad things about me, didn’t understand me. So when asked on this test what kind of situation I preferred, I always answered that I would rather not be with people. Unsurprisingly, really, that resulted in a graph that showed I was unfit for any job whatsoever. There are no jobs on the planet that require no interactions with other members of the human race. That was pretty sad, really!  So much potential, but no possibilities.

God had a lot of work to do to drag me away from the worship of Me, to the worship of Him. What’s more, to the believer in Jesus Christ, God is our Father. He is someone we want to be like. And just how can we be merciful like our Father, without others to whom we can show mercy?

Now here’s a trap I had fallen into, and I’m going to put up some cones around it so that others going down this path won’t fall in too.

It’s called “Percentile.” What happens in your head when you take a test and find out you have scored a 99th percentile in something? You know it means that 98% of all humans are not as smart as you are. It means that it’s easy to look at others and say, “I am SOOOooo much smarter than you are!” But why, oh Christian, did God give you those talents and abilities in the first place!? Think about it!

And the answer is: He gave you resources to help your fellow man. When you serve the God who defines Himself with Mercy, you should be using whatever He has given you to improve the lives of others, to lift them up, to encourage them, to bring them to The Father too. 

What’s more, if you’re paying attention, there may be something in others that can also enrich your own life. But if you spend all your time polishing your fingernails upon your chest, you will only be thinking of that 99th percentile stuff, and forgetting that all the rest of them are created in God’s image too. And you will miss out on what God wanted you to learn from them.

When I was in sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Clark, was exasperated because so many of my classmates weren’t applying themselves. She huffed and puffed about that one day. “Some of you in this class,” she said, “have great potential. There’s even one of you who has the IQ of a genius. But you’re not acting like it!” All heads turned to glance at me.

“And it’s not Margie!” she declared. Whereupon some sheepish young genius must’ve been ashamed of his or her laziness and maybe went on to greatness … I don’t really know. To me, well, that brought me down a notch for a while, and I blushed in my seat. 

The contrast in Psalm 115 between the God of Mercy, the true and living God – and the gods fashioned by men, cold, unloving, unfeeling, dead, and essentially useless – is a stark one. 

Here’s another passage where God reveals his full name. In context, it is just before God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. The second time. After Moses had thrown down the first ones in a fit of rage directed at those stupid people and broken the stone tablets written by the finger of God.

“Now the LORD descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD.

And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth,

keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation.”

~Exodus 34:5-7

Mercy and Truth. If I’m going to be like my Father, I need to be merciful. I believe, as our founding fathers said, that “All men are created equal.” But I need to keep examining myself to be sure I’m acting on that belief.

Now, back to that Good Samaritan story.  What did Jesus tell the lawyer in conclusion?  And what is He telling you and me?

“‘So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?’

And he said, ‘He who showed mercy on him.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

~Luke 10:36-37

“Dear Father in Heaven, I have failed so many times at being as merciful as You are! I am so glad You’ve given me several decades to get this right, or at least to do better. But I am in constant need of Your prompting, to remember that You are God and I am not.

“Remake us all into Your image, not just in the structure of our humanity, but in the tenderheartedness of Your Holy Spirit. Help us to be merciful to our fellow man.

“In the name of Jesus, Amen.”

Death of a Parent

My mother at an “Old Fashioned Day” at her church, 1986.

In approaching this subject, even writing the title, I find it hard to breathe. The loss of a parent is that profound. 

My mother, Margaret Lee Ware Atanacio Elliott, died in a hospital far from me in Ketchikan, Alaska, in June of 2008, about a month before our older son Chris was married the first time. The wedding was not a problem that hindered me from attending the funeral, since unlike the two previous weddings, my role as mother of the groom was small. 

The cash to buy a plane ticket was not there, but Grandpa Ware volunteered the money so I could go, saying he was too old to travel anymore and he wanted me to represent him at the funeral of his only daughter. 

My mom (center) with her dad Lee Roy Jr. (below),

along with his second wife, Pearl (R) and her daughter Jackie (L)

I departed from the Indianapolis Airport on the Fourth of July, and stayed at my mom’s house for about a week.

It’s impossible, it seems, to have a funeral without controversy of some kind, and my mom’s funeral was no exception. The hardest part was when my brother Dan wanted me to petition Grandpa for money so he could go to the funeral too. He wanted to speak at the funeral and tell how Mom had taught him to be a free thinker…

Mom had been pretty ill for a long time when she died. 

It stunned me when we got back from Hawaii, to find out Mom had taken up smoking. She had never done that before I left home, but she and Dan picked me up from the airport when I landed in California, and Dan gave her a light. Seeing the two of them smoking in the front seat befuddled my senses. I knew Dan was a smoker, but Mom? What had happened? I cried somewhat quietly in the back seat, and surprised by my emotional reaction, Mom explained that she’d had cancer, and the only advice the doctor gave her, for control of the nausea that accompanied chemo treatments, was “Well, smoking sometimes helps.” So she took up smoking at 40 years old. Of course, she hadn’t told me about the cancer either. She said she didn’t want me to worry about it. I probably don’t have to elaborate on my response to that bit of news.

There were other things in Mom’s health history that my kids should know if they’re filling out New Patient Information forms in a doctor’s office. Mom had diverticulitis, hypoglycemia that led to diabetes, and another bout of cancer later on. Mom and John didn’t stick with a good diabetic diet, though, and both were obese. The routine in Ketchikan was to spend most of the day with the window blinds closed, watching TV. The sheer number of VHS videos in their home (mostly pirated) was formidable. John had taken the time and energy to categorize all of the videos in a simple file system on a hand-held gadget so he could find the room and shelf where each of his videos was stored. This was their major interest.

More recently, though, Mom had suffered a stroke. I knew it was bad when one day she sent me an email with gibberish. She just couldn’t type anymore. It came out wrong, like all the keys were in the wrong place. She said, in badly spelled sentences, that every time she tried to go back and fix things, it still wasn’t fixed. And that was the end of the communication. Mom was unable to think clearly enough to put sentences together. 

This was well before all the various ways to video chat, a concept reserved at the time for cartoons like The Jetsons and some sci-fi movies. And when you live in Indiana and she lives in Alaska, when phone calls are only one-way with only one person doing all the talking (me), and when there is nothing in writing ever, it’s very hard to keep in touch. 

Eventually, Mom, my once-active, intelligent, beautiful mother, was put in long-term care, and her husband visited her daily and played card games with her. (I don’t know – Old Maid?) We could only keep tabs on her through her husband, and what little information he provided. I tried to tell Dan that we needed to be friends with John, but he wanted to file a police report and accuse John of elder abuse. I never did figure out why he felt that, but somehow he thought their house was too messy and germy.

Once we talked to her pastor, who guilt tripped us because we had not come to Alaska to visit. But we were trying to raise a passel of kids on a shoestring budget, and a trip of that magnitude was simply not possible. Besides, Mom had decided to move up north on her own years ago, not really thinking about how far she would be from her kids and grandkids. What could we do?

In the end, Mom died when a heart valve burst. She died alone. She lived too far away from all her kids, and her husband was drunk at home when he got the call, with no way to drive to the hospital.

When Dan told me he wanted Grandpa to fund his trip, all I could remember were those times when Dan told me in no uncertain terms how much he hated Grandpa and where all his money could go. Once, when we were actually on speaking terms, he had told me that the small amount of inheritance money Grandpa had given out while Dan was still in high school – $5,000 to each of his descendents – had been invested in the necessary supplies to start a meth lab business, so he blamed Grandpa for the drug overdose that nearly killed him and his wife and landed him in a drug rehab facility. Naturally, it was not possible for me to put in a good word for him with Grandpa. I told Dan to call him himself. And that didn’t work. Grandma Pearl told him they couldn’t afford to send him too.

Because of Grandpa’s contribution to my trip, I spent a few days packing and making plans to go to Alaska for the funeral, including chore charts and lesson plans for the entire week for our kids’ homeschooling. The Fourth of July is actually a good date to get a flight. Unfortunately, though, once we were up in the air, it was terrifying to see what the passenger in the seat next to me was doing for entertainment. I couldn’t hear the DVD, since the earbuds were re-directing the sound, but glancing over, I saw a short murder scene on her screen. 

And I wept through that flight, as I focused on the clouds below.

I stayed with Mom’s husband John, at their house. There was so much pain there! He had a bear collection and she had cats. Besides the live cats and the thick mat of cat hair on the sofa where I slept, there were small cat figurines from her collection everywhere (mostly found at Leonard’s Antiques), caked with the dust of many years. In the living room, there was a familiar table – the carved coffee table our family had brought home from the Philippines, with the glass long gone and a leg or two badly nailed into place. On the walls, there were the paint-by-numbers cockatoo pictures Mom had painted when I was about five. And there was the cuckoo clock, long gone silent.

I looked through her “stuff.” John was anxious to get rid of her jewelry collection for sure so I sorted it and brought home what I thought I could use or give away – as much as I could fit in my baggage. I found the Tennessee Ernie Ford Christmas record and asked if I could have that one as it was precious to me. And I located the ceramic nativity set Mom had created during our stay at Travis AFB. I told John I wanted that shipped to me – carefully packed and shipped. And I would foot the bill for the postage.

I found out things I didn’t want to know, and I found out things I did want to know. There was a huge stack of papers next to her printer, where Mom had printed every email she ever got from me. She stopped when she ran out of ink. She didn’t know she was out of ink. She only knew she “couldn’t get the emails off the computer anymore.” I don’t know why she printed them for sure. Either she didn’t know how to scroll through a long letter or she just wanted to keep copies of my writings to read again someday.

I made a list of things to do while I was there. (What would I do without my lists?) John gave me the option of seeing my mom’s body at the morgue, but said that because she was being cremated, she didn’t look so good. I winced squeamishly, and decided not to put that on my list.

I had to write something for the memorial service. But, first I had to excavate their computer, figure out how to turn it on and get the word processor going, and buy some ink! I threw out the dead plants. John showed me my mom’s favorite restaurant, with the view of the bay and the eagles, and I bought him a nice seafood dinner. We found some pictures to use at the funeral, and some memorabilia, such as her certificate of graduation from the nurse’s aid training she finally completed to realize her life’s dream. I found Mom’s Black Hills gold ring and put it on. I picked out some jewelry for each of our daughters and Lisa’s daughters and put them in little bags.  Here’s a picture from a Career Leadership School:

And I met the pastor. Ah yes, he was the one we’d contacted a while back, who had chided us for not coming to visit Mom. It hadn’t done any good to tell him that we lived a long way away, we had a lot of mouths to feed, and plane tickets to Alaska are not cheap. Or that she was the one who had moved there on a whim, far from all family, because she and John had spent some insurance money they’d collected from an auto accident, on an Alaskan cruise, and decided they had to relocate. 

But we also didn’t tell him that the other main reason we hadn’t even let our kids come to work a summer job in Ketchikan, as Mom would have liked, was that because when we did it the first and only time with Lisa, John had been attempting to inappropriately touch her during her stay -- thank God that He didn't allow it! – which triggered all the painful memories of my own childhood again and gave me semi-murderous feelings towards him. I felt mostly reconciled with John over time, but only because he lived so far away and I never saw him. And Lisa, looking back on the experience, has recently written about being a survivor of sexual abuse.

I found my mother’s Key Club pin from high school, which was interesting, but I found the real key to her heart when I located her Wordless Book. It had some moisture damage, but all the pages were there, and it was fitting for a visual tribute. In the end, my mom was herself wordless. Sometimes in those one-way phone conversations, she would start to say a sentence in response to some bit of news I’d shared. “That reminds me of the time that … “ And then she’d stop. Sometimes I’d play Twenty Questions with her for a bit, trying to guess what time she was talking about, A few times, I could get it right. Bingo! But usually, she just said, “no … “ in a rather dejected way.

But that Wordless Book formed the basis of my keynote address at the funeral. There are only five colored pages in a Wordless Book. The colors can also be represented by a Gospel Glove, which my mom tried to use in the Sunday School at the Navy Chapel we used to attend at Los Alamitos, but which plan was overruled by the chaplain, who said parents needed to teach children that stuff at home. (She subsequently left the chapel.)

My mother taught me the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as she taught many children in Sunday School and VBS all her life. She didn’t use the Wordless Book at the time, but I know that was on her heart, and I said so in that eulogy. I will never see those people in Ketchikan again, but if there were even one or two who heard my words that day and learned about salvation in Jesus, it was worth the trip for me to deliver them.

The pages are:

• Green, to represent the perfect world God created.

• Black, to represent sin, which crept into God’s perfect world through Adam and Eve, and which still plagues us today.

• Red, to represent the blood of Jesus Christ, His sacrifice to save those people who would come to believe in Him.

• White, to represent how clean we are, washed in the Blood, when Jesus takes away all our sins.

• And Gold, to represent Heaven, where lies the promise of eternal life with God for those who believe in Jesus and receive Him into their hearts.

There were some other things in my eulogy, about how she had affected the lives of others in a positive way. The Black Hills gold ring had its own story, about how Mom had inspired a Senior Girl Scout troop in Arizona to take a cross-country trip in two vehicles and visit Girl Scout National Headquarters in New York (which was actually closed the day we went to see it because it was a Saturday). The one souvenir Mom really wanted from the trip was just a little bit of Black Hills gold when we went through South Dakota, nothing much. When the Girl Scouts found out that “Mrs. A” was crying because she couldn’t afford even the smallest souvenir, they pooled their resources and surprised her with the ring, to show her how much they loved her. That made her cry even more!

My mother’s Black Hills gold ring

These memories were all news to the people at the memorial service, because none of them knew of anything earlier than my mother’s life with John. My brother had wanted to come and tell everybody how our mom had encouraged him to be a free thinker, but … he wasn’t there, so instead they heard the Gospel. Mom was not a perfect individual, but she’s in Heaven, waiting for me. And I have hung onto those things she taught me with all my might, because they have proven to be true.

Mom was cremated and her ashes were put in some kind of box that John drove around with in the trunk of his car for a while before he did something with it. Later on, after I was back in Indiana, John fed the ashes to the fishes at a little stream that led to the ocean. 

Apparently, failing to help Dan get to Alaska was fatal for our relationship, so Dan and Rennie had their own private memorial service in Oregon and then utterly disowned me. 

I did finally threaten John enough so that he succeeded in packing up my mother’s nativity set and getting the box to the post office. (The first time we sent money, he spent it on someone else.) 

And the fact that he got “tipsy” every night so he “could sleep better,” did not endear him to me. The last night I was there, he was “tipsy” enough to be belligerent, saying that my mom was supposed to live longer and he thought when he married her that she came with some kind of warranty. He also blamed me vehemently for not sending our other kids to Alaska, so that my mother was sad when she died. Needless to say, I was very glad to leave Alaska behind. Eventually, he moved or something, with no forwarding address.

On the flight back home, I was distressed and crying because the TSA agent had held up the entire flight, scanning all the little bags of bath soap Mom had made in adult daycare and checking for explosives, as well as all the jewelry I had packed. 

A fellow believer in the next seat kept glancing over at me, brought out his Bible, and finally started a conversation. I smiled through my tears at his timid but sincere efforts to help me, told him yes, I knew the Gospel well, and in fact I was a pastor’s wife! … but I had just lost my mother. He was relieved and we had some good conversation then. He pointed at the little white teddy bear with an “I Love You, Mom” heart, that I had positioned in the seat pocket ahead of me, and said, 

“Everyone who loses a parent is five years old.”

And that was me.

Mom, maybe you know how much I miss you, but I know I will see you again! It will probably be at a wedding.  And the way things are going in the world today, maybe it will be sooner, rather than later.  

Mom with my sister Rennie and me at her vow renewal ceremony at Luke AFB, 1972