How My Dad Influenced My Life

May 28 was my dad’s 86th birthday. He had been on hospice for a few days, but he was awake and even mouthed along as we gathered in his room and sang Happy Birthday to him. Less than 18 hours later, he joined my mom in heaven, five weeks after she died on Good Friday.

At his funeral last week, I shared some thoughts about my dad and his influence in my life. Today, I’d love to share these same thoughts with you.

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My dad was hospitalized in January. He was in bad shape—his potassium was really low, he was severely dehydrated, he was basically skin and bones. I was there one day when the primary care doctor came by his room.

She saw him lying there, and I’m guessing she formed an impression about him based on what she saw. When she asked how he was doing, he said, “That depends on your nomenclature.”

I saw it in her face—she quickly realized that there was much more to the patient before her than she may have thought. I think that may have been the case a lot with my dad.

He drove old cars but had plenty of resources at the end of his life to care for both my mom and himself. He wrote both children’s stories and letters to the editor on controversial subjects. He enjoyed listening to hymns and the popular songs of his youth.

He earned a master’s degree from an Ivy League university but could teach Sunday school to kindergarteners and explain algebra word problems to his children in a way that we could understand. I still remember him teaching me how to understand physics by comparing electricity to water running through irrigation ditches.

And then there was the time my driver’s ed teacher was at his wit’s end trying to teach me to drive—so much so that he called my dad for help. I was so upset, but my dad was unruffled. He took me out to the country and made me get out of the family van to see that it was actually much farther from the shoulder than I thought. That was all I needed to start driving properly.

It was a matter of perspective that he helped me see. And this happened over and over in my life.

I remember sitting on the window seat in the family room at my childhood home right before I left for college. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, and I was scared to death. We talked about change, and he said he liked change, which was a foreign concept to me. Many years later, he clarified that he liked change when it was on his terms.

In our first few years of marriage, Randy and I were trying to decide how much to tithe—on the net or the gross. I asked my dad, hoping for some definitive answer, and all he said was, “It depends on how much you want God to bless you.”

When I’d ask him about the end times—about this or that theory of eschatology—he’d tell me what he thought, add that the Bible wasn’t definitive about it, and then conclude by saying, “The one thing I do know is that Jesus is coming back, and we need to be ready.”

And he really lived his life like that.

During a season when my world started turning dark for days at a time each month, I had another enlightening conversation with my dad. When you are going through something that you know is not going to last forever, he said, you have to put yourself on autopilot. Just do what you need to do and remember it will get better eventually.

When my girls were younger, I would come to him for advice about everything from improving messy handwriting to how were they were going to survive in this world that they were growing up in. “She’s gonna be all right,” he’d say. “She’s gonna be all right.”

My dad didn’t talk about himself much, but he was a wonderful listener. That’s probably one of the things that I loved the most about him. I felt like he really knew me, and perhaps that’s because he really listened.

It’s no secret that my dad was stubborn and would hold fast to opinions that sometimes drove us crazy. When we got frustrated at his lack of hearing ability, for example, he would say, “I can hear, I just can’t make out what they’re saying.”

And then there was the season when he was falling a lot—at a wedding, a church picnic, smack into the church front door. It was OK, though, because, as he would often say, “I know how to fall.”

All this aside, another one of the things I appreciated most about my dad was his sense of humor. He loved to laugh and didn’t take himself very seriously. Maybe that’s why he never held a grudge. He never took things personally. He never made things personal, either, even when he disagreed with you.

There are many ways I hope to emulate my dad, but these practices are all close to the top of the list.

During the last two years, I would drop by the nursing home almost every day—to visit my mom when my dad was also there visiting her, and then these last six months when my dad lived there too. I learned so much from watching him interact with all the people there. He learned their names and always wanted to know where they were from.

He never judged people on appearances, and he treated everyone with the same gracious kindness. As my mom’s Alzheimer’s became more advanced, his affection for her was steadfast. No matter who was around, he greeted her with a kiss on the lips every time he came. He spent hours sitting with her on the loveseat in her room, just being together.

When my mom was in critical condition in the burn unit at a Kansas City hospital two summers ago, the social worker would come in to talk about living wills or the doctor would share some discouraging prognosis. I heard my dad say several times, “I don’t know how you feel about these things, but we’re Christians, and we don’t believe that death is the end.”

He did it in such a gentle, unassuming way. By the time it was my turn to be in his seat, hearing sad news about either one of my parents or making end-of-life decisions for them, it just seemed natural to share what we believed about God’s sovereignty and timing, about how I was certain they would be going to heaven, about the assurance I had that I would see them again.

I wouldn’t have been able to speak like that had I not listened as my dad did it so many times before me.

There are so many other things I wish I could tell you about my dad and how much he means to me and my family. But I’ll just share one more thing.

My dad played football in high school and always enjoyed watching the Kansas City Chiefs. I remember when Joe Montana and Marcus Allen joined the Chiefs in 1993. My dad was convinced that, while the quarterback got all the hype, it was really the running back who made the biggest difference.

When Marcus Allen got the ball, spotted a hole in the defensive line and broke through for a big gain, my dad would throw back his head in laughter, point at the TV and exclaim excitedly, “Look at him go, look at him go!”

I don’t know how heaven works, how the great cloud of witnesses is set up. But I like to imagine my dad coming upon some kind of porthole to earth, maybe with my mom or his father, just in time to see one of us—a grandchild, a friend, one of his children—doing something noteworthy—taking a courageous stand, winning an actual race, making a good decision, achieving an important goal.

I imagine him grabbing my mom’s arm, throwing his head back in laughter, pointing at the scene before him and exclaiming, “Look at her go, look at her go!”

We won’t hear it again on this side of eternity, but I can’t wait to hear that laugh when I see him again in heaven.

♥ Lois

P.S. I’m linking up this week with Purposeful Faith, #TellHisStory, Let’s Have Coffee, Faith on Fire, Faith ‘n Friends and Grace & Truth.