All summer we went regularly and faithfully to the hospital once or twice a week. There was nothing we could do but sit there, and look at Father and tell him things which he could not answer. But he understood what we said.
In fact, if he could not talk, there were other things he could still do. One day I found his bed covered with little sheets of blue note-paper on which he had been drawing. And the drawings were real drawings. But they were unlike anything he had ever done before--pictures of little, irate Byzantine-looking saints with beards and great halos.
Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul. It was a great soul, large, full of natural charity. He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all.
Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. And my father was in a fight with his tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great. And I think God was already weighing out to him the weight of reality that was to be his reward, for he certainly believed far more than any theologians would require of a man to hold explicitly as "necessity of means" and so he was eligible for this reward, and his struggle was authentic, and not wasted or lost or thrown away.
I truly believe, as Thomas Merton does, that affliction and suffering strip away everything extraneous, leaving a person's true self shining through. If a person is sick of heart or soul, that sickness will become amplified and darker. If a person shines with light and joy, that light and joy will become blinding.
This morning, when I got up to get ready for work around 5 a.m., I checked my phone for messages, as I do every day. There was a voicemail from my sister. She had called around 1:30 a.m. I have to admit that I was filled with a little dread. Messages left in early morning hours never contain good news. Good news can wait for the light of day. Bad news comes in the shadows of night.
It was about my uncle. My dad's youngest sibling. A tall, quiet man whose voice was a deep, low rumble. I never saw him open his mouth in anger. When he spoke, it was always to express kindness and love. And he had a spark in his eye, as if he was always on the verge of telling a joke. He was, simply, one of the best men I've ever known in my life.
And he was an artist. Later in his life, he began to paint oil landscapes. Self-taught, he would work in his basement studio, creating emerald skies and mustard forests. He never sold any of his paintings. Instead, he gave them away as gifts. My wife and I received one on our wedding day. A seascape of purple, with a crashing wave. Art, for him, wasn't about making money. It was about filling the world with more beauty and more love.
My uncle and my aunt would make a pilgrimage to the Upper Peninsula every year, usually in the fall. They would rent a cabin on a lake sometimes, and my uncle would bring his paints and canvases. And their visits were filled with laughter and, for me, nostalgia, remembering Christmases and backyard barbecues from my childhood.
A couple years ago, my uncle suffered a stroke. He ended up in a nursing home for rehabilitation, and then he was able to return home. But I never saw him after his stroke. I know he struggled. Yet, I have no doubt that he still had that spark in his eye, that untold joke sitting in his mind. I don't know if he was able to paint or sketch, but I'm sure that he still filled the world with beauty.
My uncle passed away last night or early this morning. Peacefully. Surrounded by people who loved him.
And tonight, Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of his uncle's life.
I shared the poem below on Memorial Day this year. I'm sharing it again tonight, because it is rooted in my uncle's spirit . . .
Something Better
by: Martin Achatz
I want something better for my kids,
The way all parents want their offspring
To attend college, law or medical
School. Do something extraordinary.
We scrub toilets, paint walls, deep-fry potatoes
For thirty or forty years, put everything
On hold until we're sure our daughters
Can study veterinary medicine, our sons
Learn to x-ray broken vertebrae, tibias,
Clavicles. My uncle drove to the GM plant
For over thirty-five years before he received
His pension, then began to paint oil landscapes
Of places he’d dreamed about in rush hour
Traffic on I-75, places full of waves,
Evergreens the color of Chinese jade,
Places he knew he'd never see,
All so his daughter could study,
Become an engineer at Ford.
I don’t want my children to teach
College English part-time, work
Eleven-hour days in an office,
Scribble poems on napkins, lunch bags,
Margins of graded essays, dreaming
Always of a time when those words,
Cut and polished and set in lines of gold,
Will buy vacations to Stockholm or Rome,
Ballet lessons and birthday parties
In hot air balloons. I want my kids
To know a life better than mine,
Even if it means I eat bologna
With cheese every day, pretending
My cut of lunch meat is somehow
Superior to the one my father ate
At work for over fifty years.
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