March 3, 2025
When I think of my Dad, I think of stories.
There’s the book kind, like The Night Before Christmas he read aloud to us each year when we were little, or books of his childhood like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan stories, or books like Louis L’Amour western novels he passed on to my husband Doug, or any sports books he saved for his friend Ted. His bookshelves are overflowing, a practice I have inherited from my Father.
Then there are funny stories—like the jokes he would tell. I remember one he told around the family dinner table decades ago with the punchline, “Pardon me Roy, is that the cat that ate your new shoes?”, or the off-color joke he told a new pastor the first time they met, or the one he told my freshly married husband as we headed into the sanctuary at 3rd church about balls of steel. He loved pulling pranks, too. Just months ago, Gary the hospice nurse listened to his lungs for the first time. As he was listening, he couldn’t hear sounds of breathing. Gary started to get worried, holding his own breath while listening—until he happened to glance at my dad’s face and see the edges of his mouth curling up. “Are you messing with me, Jack?” Gary asked. To which Dad smirked and released his own breath.
There are defiant stories—like the tale of when a teacher scolded him for not caring more about his spelling skills. Dad responded with, “I’ll just have a secretary for that,” which later, he did. When anyone gave him a hard time about smoking—he would say, “I can quit anytime—I just don’t want to!” and that was true. He defied health expectations many times. This last year when he started hospice, they estimated he had maybe two more months to live. He proclaimed, “I’m going to live another year.” and he did.
There are Dad’s generous stories. A former youth pastor went back to seminary while he was working at Dad’s church and bumped into my dad at a Christian bookstore. “What books are you buying?”, Dad asked. The youth pastor responded that he was trying to decide which books to buy to help him get his degree. My Dad carried them all to the counter and paid for them right then and there.
He was very generous to us kids. When I was a stay-at-home mom with two young kids, finances were tight. More than once, Mom and Dad would happen to drop by with a case of diapers from Sam’s Club. He loved to spoil his grandkids with hugs, kisses, ice cream, Chuckie Cheese, and gifts. Going out to dinner with him, you knew that if you tried to pick up the tab, he would get upset—because giving gifts was a way he showed his love. If he knew you enjoyed a particular something, he would keep his eyes open for it to give you—like the Janis Joplin CDs for Wendy at Top Dog or Phish albums for a waitress turned friend of Doug’s and mine.
There are stories of him being a good friend. In this last year when I would restock antiques in his booths, people would come out of the woodwork to tell me tales of Dad helping them through difficult times. The owner of one of the antique places shared with me how Dad would sit and talk with her and her husband while they redid the upstairs and encourage them in their business. Another man told me when his wife died of cancer, Dad was there for him b/c he listened to, grieved with, and shared his own stories of losing the love of his life.
You can’t talk about Dad’s life without faith stories. He had the gift of faith—a strong, anchoring certainty in the good news of Jesus, never seeming to have any doubts when difficult things happened. It was a black and white faith—telling me if I was struggling with something, “You’ve just got to believe!” While sometimes that was challenging for me, I also knew that was true to who he was. Dad built faith practices into life’s routines. He made sure we went to church twice on Sundays. On a few occasions when we wanted to skip night church, Mom and Dad allowed it if we planned our own church service—so we did. We always read the Bible after supper—Dad making sure we were listening by asking us what the last word read was, and when we caught onto that tactic, he asked what the first word was instead. Sometimes during that time, we sang songs. Once, Dad requested the music version of the Lord’s Prayer. We didn’t know it, so he taught it to us. He read 4 devotionals faithfully every morning. This last year, he asked his caregivers to read them aloud, one of them sharing with us she called it her Sunday morning church with Jack.
He was faithful in praying for people. In fact, shortly before Dad died, I was sitting next to him with one hand on his chest and the other one holding his Bible. I found a thank you card in there from a woman whose husband had died of cancer years before. Her husband, the note said, began as a business associate of my dad’s and became his friend. Dad had written out a prayer and mailed it to him. As he read and reread it, it deeply encouraged and strengthened him on his journey. After he died, she kept it in her Bible and continued to read it frequently over the years since. She closed the letter saying one day she would pass it on to her son.
In Dad’s last moments on this earth, I found another prayer he had written tucked into the pages of his Bible. In it, Dad had written out the words to Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus. I close here with that, some of the last words he heard before he went eternally home:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.