“Dad fell this morning at his office,” my brother’s message told me on my voice mail. “He cut his head and couldn’t get up from the floor without help. They think he might have had a little stroke.”
Ever since our 86-year-old father had visited us two months earlier, I had been expecting such a call.
My heart had ached as I watched his suddenly tottery movements during that visit. Overnight, it seemed, he had become an “old” man.
For almost 70 years Dad had labored tirelessly as a gospel preacher and an educator of preachers and church leaders. He still preached two Sundays a month and was trying still to maintain some semblance of office hours, despite the increasing demands of my stepmother’s failing health.
With a fierceness born of fear that he was about to lose his independent lifestyle, my father rebuffed any hint we dared to offer that he might need medical attention for new physical deficits we noticed.
He had been gracious to a fault, sensible past the point of good sense all of his days. But about the time he turned 80 my sweet-spirited father developed a stubborn streak all of us were surprised by.
Tenaciously he resisted our efforts to guide his medical and financial affairs. He would manage his own money, thank you. Why in the world did we kids think we needed to sit in on his doctor appointments? So what that he couldn’t hear half the doctor’s instructions? “No help wanted,” became his clear and frequent message to his offspring. “I can handle this job all by myself.”
But he couldn’t. Not any more than his parents and grandparents before him could.
So our family played out one of the most universal dramas known to humanity. Slowly, but inexorably, we children became the parent, and our wise, always capable father—regardless of his stalwart resistance—became our dependent.
Strange, isn’t it, that “honor your father and mother” once meant doing what they told us to? Until one day it meant telling them what to do.
Five days after his fall my father died. And all the independence and dignity he had begrudgingly surrendered on earth were restored to him a hundredfold as he entered the Gates of glory.