Prologue

Prologue:

Daddy went into the dementia ward January 5, 2009.

It’s the first time we’ve ever been able to see him alone,” David said. “He always had a woman in between.”

Black and white pictures of our early childhood depict a time ripped away from us like a lion tears the throat out of a zebra. As innocent children with no fears for tomorrow, we didn’t worry when we fell down. We simply got up, grinned up at the camera, and kept on going. Then, suddenly we hit bottom, only we didn’t know we had hit bottom.

With Dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we started losing him again. We never got to grieve the past and now the present was closing in to crush us again.

Mom’s decision to divorce Daddy turned life on its end for my brother and me. We didn’t want it, but we had no voice in the matter. None of us knew at the time there could be no turning back.

No parents are perfect.

It was easy for me to stay mad at Mom, and, for the most part, I did that for a long time. There just comes a time when you have to let it go. If you don’t, the anger and the resentment turn to bitterness, and life is not worth living in that state.

In many ways we didn’t do too badly, having survived our parents’ divorce and Mom’s alcoholism. People have to go through lots worse things than that today. But I find that no matter what the circumstances, it helps to talk about it. When something on the inside of you connects with something on the inside of somebody else, something like an explosion takes place, or a synapse forming.

You can only run away from pain for so long. At some point it calls your name, maybe for the last time before despair grabs hold of you and pulls you down into its stranglehold forever. Nobody wants to go there.

I want to talk to people that I may never see in the circle on a Friday night and talk about what happened and what I have learned from it.

I guess everybody knows Mom had a drinking problem. Since she became disabled, the thought had occurred to me that maybe she was right after all when she said she never had a drinking problem. Until I talked to the woman who was Dad’s secretary for 14 years.

“I knew she had a drinking problem,” she said. Of course, Topeka is just a big small town. So I’m sure everybody in town probably knew, though I never really thought about it until now. She said Mom came to visit Dad at Shadow Wood Office Park. That would have been in the ’80s. Sometime between Anne and Peggy, maybe.

“She was probably lonely, and she needed money,” she said. I never knew Mom went to see Dad at Shadow Wood Office Park, did you?

After the divorce, I could not call it childhood anymore, except for going to the farm. Along with Dad, divorce stole most of my childhood memories, and then alcohol stole Mom. Because, for whatever reason, Dad decided to stray and Mom decided to divorce him, our life split into two parts: before and after the divorce. Before the divorce, things seemed pretty good; afterwards all the bad stuff happened.

 I believe divorce also stole Dad from himself. I believe it broke him and cut short who he could have become and what he could have accomplished. I believe the divorce had a similar effect on Mom, and on you and on me. If this were the whole story, it would be very depressing. But there is another side.

After he died, I discovered what I believe Dad meant to impart to us, even though choices he made along with events beyond his control contributed to the apparent destruction of such a legacy. In the process of writing all this down, I have stumbled upon what I call it the Job 1:21 principle:

“The Lord gave. The Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” The words of Job after he lost everything. Notice, though, what he did before he said that. The verse before that says he tore his robe and shaved his head and fell to the ground and worshiped. In the tearing of his robe and shaving of his head there would seem to be an expression of his grief or at least of strong emotion. The falling to the ground and worshiping, well, that tells me he knew where the source of his redemption was. I personally fall rather short of that response in most instances, and I am sorry to say grieving my parents’ divorce was no exception.

There is really no restoring of lives destroyed by divorce, only the re-creation of different ones. Left to our own devices, we create lives that are even more complicated, more confusing and, as in my case, more erratic than the previous ones. A spiritual solution was the only recourse for me. Something or Someone had to step in and stop this crazy train from flying off the track.

Mom and Dad’s divorce changed the course of our lives. Instead of being, respectively, the first born daughter and the first born son in an intact family, we became what was known as at the time products of a broken home. 

The divorce defined both of our lives forever, and even though we shared a lot of it, I know you and I went through our own private hells. As children, we did not have the resources to support one another. Instead we struggled for our own survival.

I know that after the divorce and before I was saved, I was angry, sad, confused, and lost; and now. I say I am recovering from codependency and anger. But Someone – a power greater than myself – has given me a sense of gratitude, the desire to face the future with hope and the courage to step up out of the rubble of disappointment.

I know that I would not have been able to do this the power of the Holy Spirit living inside of me. Most amazing of all to me is to think that had things not turned out the way they did, I might never have known God at all. That thought makes all the trouble worthwhile.

The most liberating truth of all to me is this one:

I deserve nothing; therefore, I can be grateful for everything.