So much death. It’s a heavy time. I know several people, close friends, who said goodbye to fathers last year. The existential shift is real.
I have now said goodbye to three Dads in my life. Actually, two were ‘goodbyes’ the other was more of a “wait, what?“
Or … maybe the moment of a father dying is always a ‘wait what?’.
Remember that wonderful commencement speech by Harvard Dean James Ryan. “‘Wait what?’ is at the heart of all understanding,” Ryan says.
When I got the phone call from my stepmother that my father had been killed in horrible car wreck, my understanding of life in the macro sense slammed into ‘wait, what’ mode. This was a shock to the system of my highly controlled life; no part of me would be the same. It’s been many years now. I still see his death as triggering an avalanche that altered the landscape of my world, because of the continuing impact of who he was to me. Good, bad, ugly and awesome.
All of our Father stories are unique: the dynamic of the relationship, the condition of our own heart, our identity as sons and daughters. Yet no matter how it occurs, when fathers die, our life is permanently altered from the impact of that moment.
On August 11, 2021 we said good bye to Ray Sammons, my husband’s father and my …. God Father. Not in the sense of a Catholic christening, but in the actual truth that Ray showed me what the love and faithfulness of God as Father looks like in real life. In this life.
I was north of 40 years old when I met Ray, still in the throes of processing my own fathers death. At this point the legacy of Fathers in my life had been men who lead duplicitous lives. Mistresses, booze, deceit were patterns for my mother in her father and her husband. I had been shaped by that legacy. Ray Sammons was a different kind of shock to my system. I had to overcome myself to realize the genuine, godly kind of love he was offering. (There was one other man who embodied this kind of love – for another chapter.)
I haven’t felt ready to write about Ray’s death yet. It’s taking time to process. This one is different; it feels holier — like an opportunity to realize a new understanding of life itself. Yes, Ray is still teaching.
But today he’s singing and dancing in heaven and hanging out with his heroes. He lived a long faithful life and he loved people relentlessly. In fact, Ray emulated the ‘wait, what’ concept in the most genuine way. He truly wanted to understand how people tick.
The question becomes this existence without him. How does my life reflect the difference he made? What do I do to purposefully live as though I know the things he desperately wanted me to know? I have the incredible blessing of Ray’s son as my husband — kind of it’s own ‘wait, what?’
As my generation gradually becomes the elders, we feel differently about our own lives. The dangling threads of our relationship with our fathers must find stability somehow in our own selves and our relationships with our children and our world. This is the moment when many of us encounter the real God of Life because no other truth makes sense — and our hearts recognize this truth. But there’s often muck.
So we face the muck and ponder the merry, and bravely own our story of growing, always asking ‘wait, what?’.
