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Dads I’ve Loved

Ministering to a family who has lost a child is always difficult, no matter what the circumstances are. After many years of observing families in the midst of this crisis, one thing that hasn’t changed much is that fathers often get shortchanged by caregivers. Usually the focus is on the mother, including the father’s focus. We are still conditioned in the “big boys don’t cry” mode.

But I will never forget one man’s passionate words as his tears streamed down: “I am not ashamed of my tears.” As a result, I have become something of an advocate for dads in crisis, paying them special attention, making sure they receive grief literature aimed at men, and making it a rule in my support group that each person speaks for him/herself and not allowing only the mother to speak for the couple.

Big Boys Do Cry
In the following stories, I want you to meet three of the dads who have caught my heart and taught me well about a father’s grief.

He is a sharp and savvy attorney who has the gift of being truly caring about his clients, a genuine advocate. He was in the heat of the battle, painting a moving word picture for the jury of how his client’s life had been profoundly changed since his accidental injury.

But for the first time ever in a trial, his focus began to blur, and the profound changes wrought in his own life by the sudden death of his teenaged daughter bled through onto his client’s picture. He gasped with the swiftness of it, as if a sharp knife had sliced silently through him. His eyes silvered with tears and he choked.

Recovering, he apologized to the jury, saying he was overtired.

But, oh, little girl! We know what the truth is: how you changed us by your coming and going, as much as if you had come and stayed.

He is a big policeman, blond, bleached and burned by the sun. His one-pound son fought valiantly to overcome his severe prematurity, but infection won that day. The big cop had to stand by with dangling hands and watch life slip away.

A few weeks later he was out in his yard, planting a tree. He spotted a baby squirrel that had fallen from its nest. He fetched a ladder and carefully replaced the squirrel, only to have the fuzzball drop out again. Twice more, he returned the squirrel to its nest, but somehow it just couldn’t stay put.

“Think I’ll take it to the vet and see if we can save it,” he said to his wife.

“Mark, it’s a squirrel.”

“Yeah, but....” But, the little squirrel died during the conversation.

He decided a grave was needed. He had to bury the tiny body he couldn’t keep alive. He dug. He dug a hole wide and deep. He dug a hole that would have held a calf. He wept as he dug, tears and sweat mingling on his face. He shouted as he dug, cursing in rage, frustration, helplessness.

The little squirrel was finally laid to rest, with a tree on top of him. Some part of Mark’s heart was laid to rest, too.

If you live anywhere near agriculture, you’ll recognize this young man. He wore a seed-corn cap and had a farmer’s tan. His fence-mending tools jingled from his belt. He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, and well-worn boots. He had come from a town of 300 into a medical center containing at least 1,000 people at any given moment. He had come eighty miles in an ambulance with his firstborn son straight out of the delivery room. His eyes were tortured.

Gently but directly, the doctor told him that baby Kevin was a broken baby, so broken in every part that there was no fixing him, no curing him, that even now he was dying — not suffering, but dying.
So he rocked his son, his tears dripping down on the soft blanket, the softer hair. He rocked him until all the red numbers were zeroes, all the green lines straight. After the difficult call to his wife, he sat staring at the rug between his boots, the bill of his cap shading his face from the harsh fluorescent light.

Finally he looked up. “Kevin lived for eight hours. Eight hours was his lifetime. And we spent every minute of it together.”

Well wrapped, Kevin was carried in his father’s arms to Grandpa’s car to travel the eighty miles back to where he began. They were still together.

Abba: Daddy
After generations of naming God King and Lord, a Son taught us to call God Abba, Daddy.

We cannot always feel Abba’s arms around us as we live and die and are carried back to where we began. We do not clearly hear Abba’s cries of anguish as we bury our love in graves. We long to feel Abba’s presence when, in the midst of our daily-ness, we are scored by memory.

But, like Kevin’s daddy, Abba is there, and we spend every minute of it together.

Linda Franciso Bets, an associate in ministry, works as a chaplain at Iowa Lutheran Hospital, Des Moines, Iowa.