Twelve years ago, today

Twelve years ago, today June 30, 2015

 

The Los Angeles Temple
After my father joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the age of 59, my parents’ marriage was sealed here in the Los Angeles California Temple.
(Click to enlarge.)

 

My brother called me twelve years ago today.  In the early afternoon.

 

“Dad died,” he said, simply.  Trying, I’m sure, not to break down.

 

I was downstairs, working in my office.  “You’re kidding,” I said, stupidly.

 

I’ve thought about that a lot.  Why did I say that?  I don’t know.  It made no sense.  I guess I was in a kind of shock.

 

I walked upstairs, blurted the news out to my wife, got into the shower, turned it on, rested my head against the shower wall, and sobbed.

 

I’m Norwegian.  When I was younger, I never cried.  I actually worried about it; I wondered whether I lacked some gene, whether, when my parents died, I would look cold and uncaring.  When the time came, though, there was no cause for worry.  And I’ve become better at it over the past twenty years.  More opportunities for practice than I would have liked.

 

I was fortunate to have spent the previous three days, Friday through Sunday, down in California, most of the time in my father’s hospital room.  In fact, I’d just returned to Utah late the night before.  My brother and his wife had left for a weekend trip somewhere, and, as my Dad was in the hospital for some non-life-threatening issue that I can’t now recall, my brother (now himself gone) thought that maybe I might want to come down and spend a few days visiting with him.

 

I’ll always be grateful that I was able to do it, and for my brother’s inspiration.

 

Roughly seven years before, my father had suffered a stroke during a seemingly routine medical procedure.  It was totally unexpected.  So far as I’m aware, we have no family history of strokes.

 

He had been very active until then, both physically and mentally, but the stroke blunted his mind a bit — enough that he noticed it, and hated it — and completely deprived him of his sight.

 

It was catastrophic for him.  He felt useless, helpless.  He could no longer do most of the things that he had enjoyed.  He loved working in his yard, managing his investments, researching the history of his Scandinavian immigrant family (he was a late-adult convert to the Church), listening to Dodger games on the radio.  Only the last remained.

 

And I began to learn how to cry.

 

He was still fairly clear in conversation, though, and we spoke virtually every night by telephone.

 

However, when I visited him in the hospital that clarity was gone.  His memory was shot, and he was confused.

 

My sister-in-law tells me that she had visited with him just a day or two before I came down, and he was fine then.  So something had happened in the short interval between her departure and my arrival.  I don’t know what it was.  Perhaps it was just temporary, the result of medications.  Maybe he’d had another stroke.  I never managed to find anybody who could tell me.

 

Anyway, we had the same conversations, over and over again for three days.

 

“Do you know who I am, Dad?”

 

“Yes, you’re my brother Ernie.”

 

“No, Dad.  Ernie died in 1973.”

 

“Oh.”

 

That had been a fateful year for him.  Dad and his younger brother had been business partners for roughly a quarter of a century, golf buddies, very close.  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, prematurely, Ernie was gone.  My father began to withdraw from active involvement in his company.  And, when he and Mom came to pick me up in Switzerland at the end of my mission in 1974, he never really fully went back.  It just wasn’t the same.

 

“Was I in the military?” he asked me.

 

“Yes, Dad, you were in Patton’s Third Army.  A sergeant in the Eleventh Armored Division.”

 

“Hmmm.  What did I do for a living?”

 

“You were in construction.  You built things.  All over the greater Los Angeles area and, sometimes, even further away.”

 

“So I led a pretty good life?  I made a contribution?”

 

(He actually asked that.)

 

“Yes, Dad.  It’s been a really good life.”

 

I would leave him, late each night, and walk out to my car in the hospital’s parking lot.  I cried.  And I would pray, not that he be healed, but that this not go on any longer.  He wanted to be done.  He was tired.  He was frustrated.  He hated being pathetic.

 

One of the nurses told me that she’d asked him, “Well, Mr. Peterson, what seems to be the problem?”

 

“I’m just too damned old,” he answered.  “That’s the problem.”

 

My prayers were granted.  But that didn’t make the news hurt any less when it came.

 

How I loved him.

 

How I miss him.

 

How grateful I am for the promises of the Gospel.

 

Posted from Newport Beach, California

 

 


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