by John Creasey
I drive the car a little way into a nearby field. He opens the door and gathers two or three heads of wheat, rolling them in his hands, as farmers have done for centuries, to tell the ripeness of the grain. I have seen him do this so often, it causes me to smile. “Not quite ready yet,” he says. “Maybe two or three weeks unless it warms up some.”
We drive on a few miles further out into the country to a location he wants to see for reasons still unknown to me, and then he is okay, ready to go home.
The next day, we drive with Mom and Dad to Wenatchee, from where Dixie and I will leave for California. I get out of the car, lean back in, and give Dad a long hug.
“I love you, son,” he says, a tear in his eyes.
“I love you, too, Dad.”
And that’s it. A farmer and his son say goodbye. A few days later he is gone. I make a mental note of the fact that it is the first time I can ever remember him saying those words to me.
“I love you, son.”
But never for an instant in my entire life did I doubt it. He was old school. His parents came to America from the old country of Denmark. If you show love no one needs to wonder. Still, I treasure the memory of hearing the words that expressed what I have felt all of my life.
Six years later, it is my mother. She has sold the farm and moved to Wenatchee. She visits us in California two or three times each year and we love having her with us. During these times she takes over household duties, including meals. I bring her to staff meetings with me and she and Dixie go shopping in San Francisco to get her wardrobe changes. We are all so good for each other, but especially Mom and Dixie. They each mentor the other in different ways, and have for as many years as they have been family. And now she is gone.
Eighteen days after my mother, and two thousand miles away, it is Dixie’s mother. A massive heart attack. Now both have been suddenly taken from us. On our way home from the funeral in Tulsa we talk about our church family. What must they be thinking? Every time we turn around of late it seems something bad is happening. But it isn’t over yet.
Not long after, our children, always a bright light in our lives, are the next to suffer pain. Satan knows how to attack at our greatest vulnerability. For us it is our children. Our grandson, Kristian Andrew, is born prematurely, weighing only two pounds and living a mere thirteen days. His mother is with him, holding his tiny hand, every day. Hundreds gather with us outdoors at the cemetery in saying this latest goodbye. It is also a hard season for our son as his young marriage ends in divorce.
It is difficult when bad things happen to you.
Harder when it happens to those you love.
This is one of our darkest seasons as one loss piles upon another. All within ninety days. We know our children are hurt, angry, heartbroken. Tearing away in relationships of their own, and from us as well.
The following summer of 1985, Dixie and I fly to Europe on our first sabbatical. For ten weeks we wander through the cities and countrysides of western Europe, as well as several days in Russian-controlled East Germany. It takes considerable time, but we are finally able to break through the emotional trauma of our lives and feel once more that things are going to be okay.
We return to our work in Dublin and for the next ten years continue serving as senior pastor and pastor to women and adult Christian education, respectively, at Valley Christian Center. We conduct marriage enrichment seminars in our church and throughout the Western states. There will be more growth, more challenges, more staff and family difficulties, a 49-acre property acquisition and raw land development, several building programs, more stress. Eventually, Dixie retires from her staff role, continuing to train and mentor her successor.
She and I take long walks early each morning during which times the conversation often turns to the future. Our children are at the center of our thoughts. They are both struggling. We are absorbed with grieving over their losses and ours. Life is not a yellow brick road. Not anymore. Not for them or for us.
There follow periods of parent/child estrangement. The close relationships we had nurtured through a lifetime seem to have vanished. We have no one to talk to but each other and the counselor who tries to help with insights as to what is happening in our lives. Dixie sees the toll life and ministry is taking. What used to be exciting and fun isn’t anymore. And so on our long morning walks the conversation shifts to what life may be like for us after Valley Christian Center.
One morning I see Dixie reading her Bible and ask what portion she is in. She looks up with sadness in her eyes and says, “Job.” I nod and say, “Me, too.” I have grown to believe one understands Job best when read at a feeling level instead of a theological level. You have to feel Job to understand Job.
And so, in the summer of 1994, I make my way to Turkey for three weeks to research the novel, Pursuit, that I am currently writing. Before leaving, I meet with the church board and submit to them my formal letter of resignation, allowing for a four-month interval of time until I step away from my leadership role. Dixie and a group of travelers from our church meet me in Athens. We continue on together, leading an educational tour through the Greek Isles and Israel.
On the week following our return, thoroughly spent and emotionally exhausted, I resign my leadership role as senior pastor. The following year we move to Palm Desert, California.
18
Full Circle
The breath of God, the Holy Spirit, breathes “life” into my being. Lord, I’m grateful for your very breath that gives me life. It’s like the continual breathing of your Spirit into my needy life. Breathe on me breath of life. Fill all my being with you! The gentle breeze that moves through the branches of the trees outside my window reminds me to breathe in the life-giving breath of God. ~ DLT, June 2014
We think we will be here forever. After months of searching places where we might go to live following our lifetime in Dublin, we settle into our desert home and begin making new friends. We love our new home. It is the first time we’ve ever chosen to live anywhere without it being related to our work. We are like bottles bobbing on the water, pressure free. Our daughter and granddaughter, Katy, also live nearby.
Our sojourn in the desert is at first recovery time, emotional, physical, and spiritual. We need to renew our lives following the years in which we have given our best effort and complete energy to the people and the development of the church and Christian schools, counseling center, and television work. Too much perhaps. And so we turn to repairing our family and our own lives as well.
6 Mom and Michele were never far apart.
This period in our sacred journey is a time to help Michele and Katy restore relationship with one another and with us. I spend many 100+ degree days in the afternoon sun watching our granddaughter become the slugger on her softball team. Her batting average makes her one of the best in the valley, boys or girls. Game times are followed with a stop at Carl’s Jr., refilling her depleted energy with a cheeseburger and coke, and then a swim in the pool until Mom gets off work. Building relationships. Providing a safety net that spells family for a young teenager caught up in a dysfunctional world not of her own choosing.
Dixie is the real key in this time of renewal and restoration. Stephen has remarried and is living in Savannah, Georgia. Their relationship with us is made more difficult by distance. Michele is closer geographically and this affords time for her and Mom to walk and talk on picturesque sidewalks and golf course pathways. It is an essential time for Mom to be the mom, to come alongside our daughter who had been hurt on so many different levels.
In 1997, I finish a book with a writing partner who lives in Oklahoma City. We are together in San Diego for one day to address the necessary final edits and other required changes. I return home and the following day, feel a bit under the weather. Nevertheless, our friends, John and Betty, drive us to the Palm Springs airport and say goodbye.
We board a plan
e bound for Boston where we plan to launch a New England exploration for a large home needing a lot of work (that would be son Stephen) with an ultimate goal of opening a commercial bed and breakfast (that would be daughter Michele) for tourists and others who want a weekend getaway. One that would also be suitable for pastors and spouses needing a place to rest and renew during the weekdays. It seems like a noble idea and a way to involve our whole family in a project together.
However, when we land in Denver, I am removed from the plane by EMTs, placed in an ambulance and am unconscious before we get away from the airport. I am rushed to Denver University Hospital, arriving with a temperature over 105 degrees. When I regain consciousness, I am on an ER cool bed while medical staff try their best to lower my temperature.
Meanwhile, Dixie is left alone at the airport to recover our luggage and find a taxi into the city. The eventual diagnosis is E-coli bacteria throughout my entire system. That night I continue to worsen and am transferred to ICU, where I remain for the next seven days. A late night surgery is performed, but to no avail. After all that can be done appears to have been done, doctors encourage Dixie to call the children to come, if they want to see their father alive one last time.
Every doctor and nurse in the hospital who knows how to pray is praying for me. Friends back home, our former church family, people everywhere who know us, pray. As a last resort, I agree to receive an experimental drug not yet on the market. For seven days, Dixie and friends from our former church who live in Denver, stay at my side. Then suddenly, on Day 7, after doctors say there is nothing more they can do, the fever breaks. Three days later and twenty pounds lighter, I am helped onto an airplane and return to Palm Desert and home.
While recovering at home, Dixie comes into the bedroom with coffee and toast. Smiling she leans down, brushing her cheek against mine and says sweetly, “So, what do you think we’ve learned from all this?” It is a question for which she is famous around the family dinner table after times of stress or on special holidays.
To which I reply, “There is only one thing I know for certain. I don’t think we’re supposed to go to Boston!” And we don’t.
The opportunity to “come full circle” begins with a suggestion in the summer of 1998 to consider joining a pastoral staff in the locale in which we had lived before coming to California. Initially I say no. I have never been part of anyone else’s church staff and am not interested in starting now. But months later, after much prayer and several interview visits, we agree to leave our home in the desert and return to the Northwest. We have been away for twenty-eight years.
It is hard for me to believe, but I am now a member of the pastoral staff of Westminster Chapel of Bellevue Washington, a nondenominational church in which I have never attended a worship service or heard the pastor preach, until the one in which Dixie and I are introduced.
My initial assignment is to lead in pastoral care. Eventually I am asked to serve as the church’s first executive pastor. We have been here about a year when Dixie is asked to fill in the women’s ministry department until a new leader can be selected. It is not long until a recognition of her calling and capable leadership is recognized. She continues filling in for six more years as Westminster’s minister to women. Once again we are both extremely busy.
Our home today is located in what I call the urban rugged cities of Seattle/Bellevue, surrounded as they are by the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, and separated by a large body of water known as Lake Washington. We live on the Eastside, in downtown Bellevue. The driving distance around the lake shortened for commuters by two engineering marvels, the I-90 and SR 520 floating bridges.
It is Wednesday when we leave our Bellevue apartment and “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” passing through the all-electronic Good to Go! toll area. At the same time, we “give to God what belongs to God,” by indulging in scenes of deep blue water and green trees, pleasure boats and endless traffic. We gaze at the beauty of snow-capped Mount Rainier, tall and majestic in the distance, and for a few brief minutes do a floating bridge version of “walking on the water” before entering downtown Seattle.
The afternoon is taken up with Dixie prepping for and accepting another CT scan with IV contrast, as doctors continue to update their patient’s status. We are informed that the “automated exposure control and statistical iterative reconstruction techniques substantially lowered patient radiation dose.” This is meant to be reassuring? Actually, it’s okay. It’s the least of our concerns right now. The outcome is what is important to us. Another blood draw follows to ensure white cell counts are responding to last week’s booster shots.
On Thursday, we meet with the always pleasant, always thorough, always late, Dr. Gabriela Chiorean. The CT scan report states the patient is “status post Whipple without evidence for local recurrence.” Dr. Chiorean explains that the liver lesions seen previously are no longer visualized, indicating they were indeed infections that have responded to treatment. They are not cancer. There is, however, a new area of hyper-enhancement noted in a different location in the liver. They are not sure what this new discovery might suggest, but another round of antibiotics is prescribed. Short-term follow-up imaging to exclude subtle metastasis is also recommended. Bottom line on this day, no new pulmonary nodule can be seen and there is no evidence of new distant metastatic disease. Another victory? One is never quite sure.
Following our time with Dr. Chiorean, we go to F5, where Dixie is readied for her third chemo infusion of Gemcitabine. To help offset the nausea side-effects Dixie has been experiencing, an anti-nausea drug is given before the infusion. And an additional prescription to take home. At last we arrive home at 5:30, where we are welcomed by Margaret, a dear friend who has been patiently waiting in the visitors’ area with a homemade berry pie no less. A pleasant intermission in a not so perfect day.
Next week, Dixie has drawn a bye week, as the Seattle Seahawks would call it. In sports it’s a week when the team doesn’t have a game scheduled and can give bruised and banged up bodies a rest. She needs this big time for her own body, still recovering from surgery and the effects of chemotherapy. It is a hard time but we are grateful for what we are learning.
19
Farewell for Awhile
It is always harder to be left behind than to be the one to go . . .
~ Brock Thoene, Shiloh Autumn
Sunday 11 May. In 2008 I accepted the position of president/executive director of CASA 50+ Network, a ministry targeting pastors and lay leaders of church ministries for people in life’s second half, one in which I have been involved as a guest speaker, editor and writer since 1998.
Now, six years later, Dixie and I are about to be separated once more by thousands of miles of land and seas. One of the projects we developed over the past year is happening right now. “A Journey with the Apostles: Exploring Turkey & Greece,” is an inspirational and educational program that follows the ministries of Paul and John, both saints and part of our spiritual heritage in the truest sense. Today we say goodbye at SeaTac International as I join others gathering at airports in Seattle, San Francisco and Dallas, ready for their journeys into the modern/ancient world of Christianity’s earliest beginnings.
I leave with mixed emotions huddled in the corners of my heart. It is good to do this on several levels, yet bittersweet, for this is a journey Dixie and I planned to make together. She has been looking forward to it and I miss her already, even before our plane has left the ground. She remains behind with many friends surrounding her in my absence, good medical care, and she has our daughter, Michele.
While Stephen was with us for a week before returning to Hong Kong, he and Michele had opportunity to spend quality time together. Geographic distance is always an issue where he is concerned. For a while, emotional distance broke down lines of communication as well. Intentional effort on their parts and ours have restored these bonds. Now, among the many things brothe
rs/sisters share with each other, they have their “where are our parents tonight” conversations, replacing the “where are our children” conversations of an era gone by. Our children’s parents have always been hard for them to keep track of.
Stephen and family have lived in distant places all their married lives. Michele has somehow managed to stay geographically close to us throughout. Having one of our children nearby has been a gift to us. She and Dixie enjoy a mother-daughter closeness, having developed a deep and healthy bond that has survived and thrived through the years, in times both good and bad.
Dixie and I discussed the timing of this particular travel event. While I had canceled a teaching assignment in Russia in March, along with other responsibilities, our long-standing commitment to so many on this journey into Turkey and Greece was one we agreed we must honor. In a way, this is also mine and Mark’s gift to Michele and her mom. Two weeks for them to live and laugh and play with just each other. Making memories. Mark decides to go with me rather than camp out at home alone. I’m thinking this is a good thing as the plane lifts off and banks to the north and east. At least it is my rationalization. Still, I miss her already.
I was really lonesome today. As a matter of fact, I still am. It seems like every day it gets a little harder. Not harder to wait for you, but harder to keep my mind off you until I get so lonesome I am miserable. However, I can truthfully say that I would rather be lonesome and miserable waiting for you than not to have you at all. At least I know you will be here sooner or later. Sooner I hope. I was thinking the other day how completely happy and contented I am. I even feel closer to God. Maybe it’s because we’ve both prayed so earnestly for God’s perfect will that he has given me the very best there is in you. ~ DLT letter, June 25 1955
