#10 - November 21, 2010

by James Baker

Dad & me

I’m having a hard time remembering the details, but I think his last coherent utterance was about the Aggies.  Dad was happy they were doing well.  He liked the new quarterback.  I agreed.  I told him if he didn’t quit talking, the nurse was going to make me leave, that he needed his rest.  Standing next to his bed 12 hours later, holding his hand, watching him gulp for air, I scoured my past searching for anything new – some undiscovered treasure that I could hold on to as I watched a man die.

James Wallace Baker lived for nearly 80 years; through the Great Depression and WWII, through two marriages before my mom, through the death of his first son who died as a toddler, through nearly two decades of alcoholism that chewed up relationships and jobs alike, and through my childhood that was riddled with conflict and chaos.

I hesitate to even mention these things, for fear I’ll be accused of trampling my father’s grave.  But I believe there is no honor in reducing a life on this earth to a handful of warm & fuzzies.  Whenever I hear a man eulogized as if he were the lovechild of Paul Bunyan and Snow White, I think to myself, “Really?  Why are we so afraid to pay proper homage by being honest about who this person really was?”  We love to speak of redeeming qualities, but redeemed from what? 

The truth is, my dad had his warts, but he ended his life well.  He was blessed with an uncommon self-deprecating humor and endearing humility.  He adored my mother, never once speaking poorly of her. He wasn’t shy about how proud he was of all his kids, and he always made my wife feel like a movie star.  He believed in God.  He prayed daily.  And he had made great efforts over the last 20 years to restore our relationship.

Unfortunately, I have spent far too much of my own life refusing that restoration, and it cost me intimacy with my father that I’ll never recover.  I am ashamed to say that, until recently, I did not fear my father’s death.  I feared I wouldn’t care.  By the grace of God, I’m no longer hostage to those resentments, and I’m living a new storyline.  The jaded, unforgiving, ‘nobody gets me or understands the depths of my pain’ character had gotten pretty annoying – at least to me.

Standing at the foot of his deathbed, that definitive memory remained elusive, and all I could muster was a few good-natured scenes:  playing airband together at the opening sequence of the 70’s sitcom, Maude; or walking in from school, and seeing a penny stuck to his forehead (always an unspoken contest…a win for me meant that I wouldn’t acknowledge the oddity of coin stuck to his head before it would fall; he must’ve sweat glue, because in 18 years I never won – not once); or even taking turns jumping off the diving board at the lavish Ramada Inn motel pool in San Antonio, practically a mecca for our family during every middle-class summer vacation.  These were all pleasant.  Great, in fact.  But not weighty enough to give me context for this man’s life.

I stared at the vitals on his monitor as his heart rate went from 90, to 65, to 40 beats per minute.  I think he squeezed my hand.  He took another couple of breaths, and then….nothing.  Those few minutes have both plagued me and provided me with some strange fondness.  A fondness, I suppose, because I was privileged to be in the presence of my father as he left this earth, 9:20 am on November 21^st – my birthday, no less.

As the doctor turned off the monitor and informed us, “He is dead”, I collapsed in a chair, buried my head in my arms and wept like I’ve never wept before.  My wife clutched my neck, sobbing.  My mom stood looking at her best friend of 44 years and holding his still-warm hand, tears streaming but with a slight smile.  No one said anything for a long time, because, what do you say?  After everyone left, I leaned over, kissed his forehead, and was struck with a realization.  I had been looking for a quintessential memory, but what I got was far more profound.  Not a specific time, but the very thing that was threaded through all those times. 

God had unexpectedly given me the greatest birthday present I’ll ever receive.  The reminder that I, indeed, loved my father.