MY DADDY
Those of you who know me or who have read Encouraging Words for a while, knew that it was coming, just as I did.
On July 17th my beloved father died. For the first few days I felt an odd mixture of disorientation and relief. He suffered so horribly for what seemed like so long. Now the numbness has worn off and the true grieving has begun its slow and irrepressible journey. Some days I feel quite normal. I go to my little church, stamp out brush fires, work up Bible studies, find passion to preach, hold my people’s hands, and make sure to thank them for everything. In short I am a pastor. Other days I am a fatherless child and I sit after work on my sofa and watch Monk reruns and cannot follow the plot. Such is life and such is loss. At every moment, though, when I feel its truth and especially when I do not, I cling to my heartfelt belief that we do not grieve as those who have no hope.
I pray for you, my readers each day. I know that many of you are experiencing losses of all shapes and sizes. Your courage to reach out and meet your lives with all that that may mean inspires me. How do I know that you are doing that when I do not know who you are? I know because you would not have come to this site and read these words if you were not valiantly finding your way.
I had the opportunity to preach the eulogy at my father’s funeral and I share those words with you now. It was a hard thing to do, but ultimately a comfort. Perhaps the Holy Spirit can use this experience of mine to comfort you as well. That is my prayer.
Reflections on My Father’s Life…July 21, 2008
“I am grateful to Fred (my mother’s priest) for inviting me to say a few words today about my father. In order to ground my reflections, I have chosen to read a passage from Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth. It is a passage that I have never used at a funeral before, but one that many of you have heard many times at weddings.
To understand this well loved text, it is important to understand a little about the situation in the church in Corinth at the time. Corinth is my favorite of the New Testament churches because it was such a mess. They fought about everything, what worship forms were acceptable, for example. They fought about issues of gender, about sex and about money. Sound familiar? They were even known to drag one another out of worship, by the hair, into open-air court and file charges against one another for one small infraction or another. I wouldn’t have wanted to argue those cases on the merits in front of my father, I can tell you that.
When Paul was trying to deal with these folks he recognized that the only hope for them, as is the only hope for us, is love.
Listen as I read the Word of God: I Corinthians 13.
In these last few months as my mother and I, and so many of you standing with us, have faced the brutally slow and painful death of my father, I have found my mind swamped with memories..moving images, shaky snapshots, like an old silent movie on a rickety reel, just skipping across my minds eye one after another in no temporal sequence.
They are not memories of my father’s legal life. I never saw him argue a case, never saw him bang a gavel, never met ‘the cold eyed DA’ as the New York Times (or one of those big and far away papers) once called him during the Viola Liuzzo trial.
I never saw him in his Navy uniform, never knew him as a member of the University of Alabama golf team, didn’t know him as a colleague or a friend.
My memories are different….my little snapshot of his life is a small one, but a precious one.
Last week in my prayer group at my new church, one of the members asked me, “What is Judge Gamble’s first name?”
Before I could even think, I said, “Daddy.”
So it is the Daddy memories that I can share with you today.
In one Daddy memory, I am 5, or so, and on his shoulders watching the Billy Bowlegs festival in Fort Walton Beach Florida, complete with pirate ships and peg legs. (I think maybe Jean and Bruce were there as well.)
In another memory, at age 7 or so, I see him teaching me to fox trot with my little feet on his shoes as he waited for Mama to finish getting ready for a dinner out.
In another, maybe 6 months ago, I see me crawling up next to him in bed, putting my head on his skin and bones shoulder…he was so diminished, erased really, like a tiny cotton top marmoset in a too large cage, his spirit somehow swinging from rib to rib and back again…I remember putting my head on that shoulder and telling him that he never let me down once.
I remember Daddy coming into my room each night when I was growing up to say my bedtime prayers and cupping his large hands over my small ones in that wonderful universal prayer tent and teaching me, “Our father, who art in heaven…”
I remember the tears in his eyes the first time he heard me preach.
Perhaps my earliest clear memory of him was on a crisp autumn afternoon as I sat in his lap on the back porch listening on the old radio to Alabama play somebody, cream somebody, back in the day when all was right with God’s world. I remember him wrapping my fingers around a red and white shaker and moving it rhythmically back and forth. “Roll Tide,” he taught me, over and over like teaching a puppy to sit up. I was a big child before I knew that Roll Tide were not the last two words of the national anthem!
The memories just come up, unbidden, swirl like dry leaves in a cool wind. Wading through them is like walking in a riptide. Any of you, which I know is most of you, who have ever felt grief, will understand that feeling.
All of that, those memories and more, along side the house he was born in, the red clay hills and rolling greenness of the south, the crepe myrtles and mimosas, all of that is a part of my birthright, in this place, in this family. All of it is precious and some how durable and fills me with surpassing gratitude.
I am especially grateful to Daddy for so many things, his love and support of me obviously, unwavering and undiluted.
I am grateful especially for the spiritual legacy he left me, particularly for one moment that had a profound effect on me.
About 6 years ago, I had surgery to repair some disc damage in my neck that I sustained in an automobile accident. The surgery was routine. Many of you have had it as well.
But a complication developed after surgery. I developed a bleed that cut off my respiration and I had to have additional emergency surgery to repair the problem. When I first started struggling to breathe, I called the nurses station for help. They came, casually, with asthma treatments but I knew my lungs well enough to know that was not the problem. As things got worse I felt that drowning panic that is so common with those who struggle to breathe. Just before I lost consciousness, I heard one of the nurses say, “We are losing her. Call the code.”
Later, I came home to recuperate for several weeks. It was a difficult recuperation, not just physically, but emotionally. That code calling moment was truly awful. I felt no peace, no presence of God. No good-looking angel in a pink jacket came to hold my hand. It was just a void, a huge blackness filled with terror. And that was not at all what I expected. It was not at all what many who have had similar experiences had described to me. And I had a downright crisis of faith. I was furious with God and could not understand why I had been left alone in that moment. I even wondered if I would ever be able to preach with conviction again.
Well, as I recovered, I stewed and ruminated on this something awful. I was more afraid of living with the memory of hope’s absence that I was of death itself. Well, finally, one evening Daddy came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed.
“What’s the matter, Klunk?” he asked.
And in a stumbling, childlike, angry, insulted way, I told him the whole thing. He listened without interrupting until I fell silent in my indignation.
Then he said, “Well, Klunk, what makes you think you are better than Jesus?”
Well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but that was not it! I was truly ticked off then. “What do you mean?” I huffed.
“Well,” he said. “In my Bible (bless his little Baptist self) I seem to recall when Jesus was dying on the cross he felt abandoned too. He did not feel God’s presence and cried out, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
In that moment it was like heaven opened up inside me again. There was that flooding sense of sweet presence and a huge gratitude that somehow I had experienced in a small way something of what Jesus had experienced.
“Maybe,” Daddy said. “Maybe that is just part of it. Maybe the hard is just part of it.”
It surely was a part of it for him these last weeks…a grinding and grueling thing his death was. And yet for people of faith, sharing that experience of death also means that we share Jesus’ other experience, the experience of resurrection to new life. Such is my faith, a legacy I owe in no small part to my father, for such was his faith, too.
You know, when a great love dies, it both changes everything and changes nothing. I feel my father’s love and support as tangibly today as ever and at the same time I feel in some way cut off from a source. But if we learn nothing else from our faith, it is that death cannot contain, corral or in any way harness love. A cross could not do it. A tomb could not do it…not that one 2000 years ago, and not this one we contemplate today.
There is so much we do not know…so much about life and death that we do not understand. We see, as Paul says, through a mirror dimly but one day we will see face to face. I am grateful that for my father, today is that one day.
My last conversation with Daddy was much like they all became in the last year or so. Mama and I had talked and then Daddy got on the phone and asked, “When you coming?”
“As soon as I can, Daddy.”
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said. “I love you, Pet” he finished.
And with that all was said.
I can just hear that conversation today as well, from some great green golf course in heaven…I can just hear Daddy say, “When you comin’? Not too soon. But I’ll be waiting. I love you, Pet, sooo much.”
“And these three things abide, faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.”
Yours in Christ,
