I first met Terry when I first ‘met the family’ of my husband to be. He came down the stairs, eager to see me, but hiding the eagerness under a veil of sleepiness. He was a big man, and for some reason, I was repulsed by him. He seemed messy; he was informal to the point of it being embarrassing. I made the internal judgement that he was ugly, but that I’d try to like him.
I last saw Terry six days before his death. He was eager to see us, but again hiding it, under a very real veil of morphine. He was messy again; but I was crying, and I didn’t think he was ugly. I wanted to wash his face and comb his hair, but he said he would do it as it would give him something to do. That made me cry more, silent tears of pity and grief- because I couldn’t imagine he could wash or comb anything with his swollen, shaking, gangrened hands. As we prepared to go, he opened his eyes and mouth to whisper, “’Bye sweetie” and I cupped his cheek in my hands and leaned over to kiss him on his rough cheek. I never saw or spoke with him again, because on the next Saturday, without anyone but a nurse, he quietly passed away.
Terry reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Grey for some reason. He’d started out as a handsome, talented youth who made it to the Pros in football; a man who’d married a lovely young bride and fathered three handsome, talented children, taught school and loved it, played golf as much as he wanted, gardened in the large yard of his nice home, and watched TV in his den in the evenings.
But there was an ugliness, hidden under the surface. His marriage was a battlefield, replete with well-placed and coveted mines to hurt the other. His oldest son has a difficult time relating well to his family; his beautiful daughter had almost died from drugs; and he saw his youngest son, my husband, as a moral, bible-beating wet-blanket whom he did not know at all, and whom he mocked. Now, assuredly, not all of this was Terry’s fault; but it was his response to the responsibility of a father which seemed a fault with horrible consequences. It seems to me now that he was a damaged man, a man frightened of being responsible for other people’s lives and happiness. I think he loved them deep inside, and so thought that if he ran away, into activity or inside the TV, that he would do less damage. The wife and children had tried, in various unhealthy ways, to get his love- or at least his real attention. I think Terry survived the fear-producing situation by running from it in a myriad of ingenious ways: games of any kind; a blasting TV even at mealtime; furiously growing every kind of shrub, tree, flower and herb possible (which required many hours outside); and pouring his heart into the students and collegues at his school, instead of actively and toughly loving his family. All of this activity, this running, from the realities of life, gradually took its toll on the look of him. He looked mussed and sweaty, heavy jowled and stressed. There was no peace in the lines furrowing their way to permanence on his face.
In the years that I knew him, I went through the possibilities for the reason for this running, this hidden grotesqueness. Evil? Possessed? Once we tried putting Holy Water in his hamburger. He did jump up right after eating it and charge out of the room. My husband, my mother-in-law and I looked at eachother, and then sheepishly realized that he always did that. Mentally unstable? I walked out into the garden one fall day and found a large circle of plastic decoy ducks, lopey on their runners, like ice skates left to dry. Going inside, I announced very solemnly to my mother-in-law that she could stop being angry and just have pity, because he was crazy and maybe needed care. She laughed kind of forlornly and informed me that he was just creative. I then began to see, just a little bit, the real man inside Terry. He was creative, he was quirky, and had an absurdist sense of humor, which my husband inherited, and which I loved. There was the boot with dirt and flowers peeking out from the tongue at the top; there was the ingenious little golf course in the garden; there was the collection of cool old bar signs, the wacky B movies. . Alright, then. Was he just mean? Or selfish to the point of missing the whole point of life?
At this point in my relationship, if you could call it that, with Terry, I struggled with the temptation to think that it would be better if he were not there, even dead, because there was so much dysfunction and pain, so much anger and hate running in the veins of the family life, that I just wanted it to be over. I now look back with shame on that, because I missed the point as much as he had missed the point. The point is to love. To love where there is no love, to hope where there is darkness, to kiss the repulsive and so to begin, with God’s grace to transform it with love. Only then can you begin to see the truth about a person’s worth, his worth to the God who died a horrifying and grotesque death for him.
I cannot remember now when I began to love, and found the point. Perhaps it was when I realized that he was creative; or the day I looked out and saw him letting the dog kiss his face and just smiling and smiling; or the loneliness I began to see, the anguish at an argument with my husband; or the for-no-reason present of boys’ pajamas we received in the mail (we had two girls at the time), with a small note, “Love, Granddad”.
I began to see someone who had missed the point, the point of loving, partly because he didn’t know how, or was too frightened for some reason. I began to see the complexity of the person, and the complexity of the situation he was in, which can only be seen through love- through charity, a gift of God, and then cannot ever be seen as clearly as God sees. So I began to try and talk, to listen, to call and talk to him just for him, not just in passing. I began to tell him I loved him and to tell him that my husband loved him, too. I began to see I was pouring water down into an empty well. How much time I’d wasted in looking for the reason the well was empty instead of just pouring the much-needed water and leaving the mysterious to God.
As his body began to give out, I realized that he was being shown mercy by being forced to stay with his family, forced to need our care. He was slowly humiliated, and became more and more physically grotesque, reality banging at his door in so many hard ways. But to my eyes, now bettered by love, he became lovelier. He also became nicer, to all of us, and complained really quite little in light of the physical and emotional anguish brought on by a death sentence in a rotting body. I began to hear things he said differently, too. I noticed small details which only someone who loves can see, like the effort he made to thank me for helping them pack for their new home; the pain of leaving his beloved garden; and the child-like need to stay with us, his world now, when he knew deep down that he was dying.
A week before his death, I was driving with two grey friars, Franciscans, to the hospital to see Terry. I was trying to do everything I could for him, because I loved him and wanted mostly for him to have a happy death, in friendship with God. My friend and director, Fr. Sylvester, was one of the grey friars in the car with me. I told him about Terry’s life, and mostly that I felt he had an immense drive, out of fears, to deceive himself about reality. I was afraid for his soul, and wanted him to have a chance for a good confession. Looking very medieval with his hood up around his face, Fr. Sylvester recited the rosary with me, and invoked many saints. I felt we were going into a battle.
Terry was happy to see us, but he was very groggy and in and out of sleep. Fr. Sylvester started talking to him, and Brother Giuseppe and I waited in the hall. When we came back in, I saw Terry’s eyes, they were alight like yellow fires, like a child’s in front of the Christmas tree as it is lit. He reached out his hand to me, in joy, I thought, and great affection. I held his hand and stroked his hair, tufted up like black and grey tumbleweeds. I can’t remember what we said, but I remember Fr. Sylvester giving him a rosary. That rosary stayed on that bed, wrapped around a sidebar, and it must have been there the minute he died, as it now hangs on his wife’s headboard, and she says the rosary with it now. I see that with God-given eyes of love. What wonders you behold, what small beauties which tell a tale which is often so different from what is obvious. When we forget love, we are blind, but we think we see, which is an even deeper blindness.
Also on Terry the instant of death was a brown scapular. It stayed on him, and I pray, it was like a chain of love, drawing him on to God’s love, friendship and mercy, through the gentle hand of Our Lady.
Looking back over the seven or eight years I knew my father-in-law, I only wish I had judged less, listened to other’s talk less about him, and asked God earlier to help me love him. Although I began praying for him from almost the first time I met him, I prayed as an objective observer, or a pitying acquaintance; I should have asked God to help me to love, and started pouring the water of love into his empty well as I was praying. Without love, I venture to say, my prayers were worthless; and I probably played a part in hindering his chance for heaven. So, Terry, your memoriam for me, in my life, is one of conviction: Conviction to love, to pour myself out in love, only with God’s grace, in the dark and the deep, the empty and the ugly. And perhaps I myself will be cleaned and filled through doing it, because I am a deep, dark, empty and ugly well too; only through God, through Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ are we made whole. He deigns to let us assist Him in loving each other, and this is the most important task of our lives, next to loving Him.
May you reach God’s embrace, Theodore James- and may I meet you again there, some fine day.
