Resting Open is Not for Sissies

Some might call it coincidence, others "synchronicity." Maybe even the Holy Spirit. One thing is for sure, it happens. Things come together. For a reason, even if the reason is not always crystal clear in the moment.

Here I am cleaning out the dresser of my life, feeling grateful for the opportunity Lent gives me to pause, thinking I am working toward something that looks like both physical and mental space to create things, to work on ideas. Instead I watch one parent succumb to congestive heart failure and another parent face-to-face with an existential crisis.

They were married over 71 years and fell in love on their first date in 1937. As a survivor of two marriages/divorces, I feel like I am in the Mars Rover trying to decipher what life looks like on that planet. There is no way I can really get it. Their time sweeps from the Roaring Twenties through the the Great Depression, is marked forever by World War II. They have seen first party line and private line telephones come in, then direct dialing in the early 1950s, and now push-button and mobile phones that are as good as computers. They lived through the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, the onslaught of technology. They saw a world rocked by terrorism. Their time together included rearing three children who gave them a normal ration of grief but whose achievements and children made them proud and happy. And they suffered every parent's worst nightmare, losing a child before his time.


Not exactly what I had in mind when I embraced Lent, but how grateful I am now for the clean dresser, the resting open, feeling if not strong at least nimble enough to respond. Every day delivers a new set of challenges, from the mundane and even ridiculous to the Big Questions of Life.

As the trustee for my dad's will, I am finding a whole lot of paperwork is involved. Faceless institutions have unique procedures for closing out a person's account at life's end. Who knew they cared?  Plus, Dad did not leave a tidy desk. Everything Mom ever feared about Dad's paper management is true. And it's also true that if she had her sight, things would be different. Just sayin.' The fact is they were a pair like many pairs, made up of a saver and a thrower.

The good side of this is finding the treasure trove my dad saved, including menus from their honeymoon to Chicago in 1941, where you could get a Delmonico steak at a swank ballroom restaurant for $2.95. There are photos and a championship ring from his semi-pro baseball career, his Pilot Log from World War II and what appears to be every single typed order he was ever issued. He wrote detailed accounts of key bombing missions over the Philippines and life on the base deep in the Pacific. On one mission where his plane came under potentially mortal fire, he acknowledges that he thought to himself that it was a helluva place to die. Happily for our family, his plane limped back to base that day and he eventually came home to live a full life and to die knowing he was loved dearly and that we all thought he was a hero.

Resting open is not for sissies. You never know what might come up. But no matter what arises there is some element in it for which I can be grateful. This one is easy. I am simply and profoundly grateful for my dad.