Thankful That the Center Held
I have seen the end, and in the end, the center holds.
Dad was breathing every six seconds or so, Victorian novels had prepared me for the rattle, no book for the sound. Dad, dear old Dad, Daddy, the guy we could ask because he would know, struggled mightily for air.
I did not know what to say. I still do not know what to say, but one thing I said caused his eye to brighten a last time: “Dad. Your work is done. We will take care of Mom and everything else that is left to do. You can go now.”
Or something like this. And the spirit left his body. Dad could only not live, I think, when he knew all was well as it could be. This last term, in his own troubles, he gave me very wise advice and steadied me, but he was done.
The holiday came.
Over the last little bit, a very short time counted in days, Dad began to say he wanted to go be with Jesus. He loved living, his family, and his work, so this was as final as any doctor’s outlook. The spirit was no longer willing and the flesh was very weak.
This gentleman, this rock, was finally worn out.
As young men, my brother and I had tried to list his faults, his sins of commission, and came up with nothing. We went to Mom and she smiled her Socratic smile and said: “Frustrating, isn’t it?” I once asked Dad’s mother, Granny, if he had ever lied and she said: “Not that I know of.”
And not that I know of either.
Dad was not ambitious, did not long for greatness, and yet he achieved greatness. Lewis Dayton Reynolds was steady, reliable, puckish, loyal, and honest. He had little or no vanity. Born legally blind in a culture that encouraged my Papaw and Granny to send him to a home for the blind, they refused and raised him in the local public schools best they could. He managed to become the first of our family in three hundred years to graduate high school, college, and graduate school. His only accommodation was his own father reading to him in college when he could not see well enough to read.
He graduated Magna Cum Laude.
He never put up his diplomas and so I just learned that he made the national freshman honor society in university. Honors did not move him, but the Holy Spirit always could trust him.
He could be counted on, because he did not want anything but the truth and in faith, he saw that Truth. He faced his doubts, but he never wavered in his love of the truth. He got the job done when others wanted to talk about doing something: loyally, calmly, as unmoved as the grand West Virginia hills he loved.
My brother pointed out that dreadful and beautiful day (June 26) when he died that now he can see. His blindness is done.
He can see perfectly now, this man who could see better than the rest of us even impaired. The spirit was insightful even when the flesh was weak.
Dad’s last advice to me was “Be thankful. I am thankful.” This kindness was tempered by resolve. He also told me in one last bit of correction: “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
OK Dad.
Dad was kind, but never nice. He was merciful, but not a softy, because goodness and truth mattered to him. Dad for over eighty-seven years had battled institutional racism, stubborn boards, and intellectual atrophy. He always was looking for God and so kept pursuing the truth right into the Orthodox Church. . . giving up the ordination he prized to do so.
He was a great man, a central man. Dayton Reynolds, Sub-Deacon Elias, loved truth tempered with mercy.
I was there at the end and the center held. He was the man he had been to the end, if a bit more querulous!
So now those of us who feel unfit must move to the center. We must endure his going hence, because we would not keep him as he was in the end. His work was done. Our own is beginning as those who can not be moved save by the Spirit of Truth.
We are thankful that the dead will live again. We are thankful that his work continues in the school and colleges he prayed over with great faith and gave wise advice to the last year of his life. We are thankful that center held.
We ask for God’s grace to endure our own time at the center with living in truth tempered by mercy.
I will do as I can Dad. Thankful for you. Pray for me.
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