The Peripatetic Preacher Goes to Visit His Brother in Louisville, GA

Just about a year ago, we, Diana and I, went to see my older brother in Louisville, GA, a tiny burg not far from the South Carolina border in deepest rural America. For many, a visit to a sibling is a fairly regular occurrence, but it has not been so for the two of us for many reasons. Bob is 5 years older than I, and five years, when one is growing up, is an eternity. He went to High School when I was in the fourth grade; he graduated from High School when I was in the eighth grade. You get the picture. Our lives barely intersected. And then there were our twin brothers, six years younger than I, and hence eleven years younger than Bob. We in fact had three families in our home, and each one of us is a quite different human being.

Well, Bob and I are actually quite a bit alike in some things. We both prized education, both completing PhD’s, he in political science and I in Hebrew Bible. We both taught in colleges, he for ten years in Franklin College in Indiana, and I for a total of thirty-six years in two places of higher education. After a time a way from education, Bob went back to teach High School for some years in the town where he now lives as a retired educator. One rather significant difference is that Bob has been married three times, while I have had only one marriage, now of 48 years. However, Bob’s third wife was the central reason for our visit to Louisville. Pat had been very ill, and her health problems had begun to mount.

She and Bob had been married, I think, for seventeen years, and had been quite happy. Pat was a deeply religious woman, raised a Baptist, but after her own retirement, attending school to become a United Methodist pastor. She accomplished that goal, and was quickly assigned as pastor to the very church where they both lived, in Louisville, GA. She served that church well and faithfully until she had some recurring problems with her walking, problems compounded by a fall, compounded by a terrible misdiagnosis of Parkinson’s disease that led to a drug-induced coma, and on and on. After well over a year, she is now coming back to some sort of normalcy, though she recently had to have a spinal fusion to aid her recovery from the other problems. She has, in short, seen far more than her share of the inside of hospital rooms and rehab centers!

When one lives in a small town in rural America, one is often some distance from specialized care physicians. In their case, about 40 miles separated them from the kind of help they needed to move Pat back to health. And that meant that Bob, who is 76 years old, and fortunately in good health, was on the highway to Savannah again and again and again…, caring for his ailing wife. And because they are hardly rich people, it was necessary for him to drive that 80 miles regularly to see her, not being able to afford long hotel stays, to buoy her flagging spirits, to advocate for her when the doctors got it dreadfully wrong, to force her, with love, to get up and walk, to move those arms and legs, to listen to the PT’s, and to take seriously the need to eat and sleep and exercise each and every day.

By the time Diana and I got to Louisville, Pat was back in the small local rehab hospital, and she was once again lively and cogent. Bob said she had made great

progress, and he should know, because he had been with her every day for months witnessing that progress. And now comes the reason for this essay in my record of visits in our diverse world. I saw my brother in that tiny hospital as I had never before seen him. He was a superb, a wonderful, a magnificent caretaker for his ailing wife, and was so obviously madly in love with her that he was nothing less than an inspiration to me, one who had spent a good bit of time in hospital rooms in his pastoral work long ago, and some weeks with my own wife during her recovery from a major back surgery. But what I had done was peanuts compared to what my brother had done and was still doing with his wife. To see them laughing with one another, to witness them touching one another with tenderness, to hear them banter back and forth, was to see nothing less than the spirit of God alive in that room. It is rare to see two people who define what a caring union can be. “In sickness and in health” came to mind, as this time, Bob’s third time, he was allowed to live up to those easily spoken but not so easily fulfilled words said at many a wedding, and no doubt said at theirs.

I would never have thought that my older brother could teach me much of anything. He was always the one who dated the most beautiful and charming girls, while I was so fearful of women that the woman I married had to ask me out for our first date! He seemed so comfortable with himself, and I was always questioning my place in life. He seemed so grown up, and I seems like I would never grow up, and in some ways, I haven’t. But after my 2017 trip to Louisville, I discovered that Bob had something to teach me about compassion and caring and love. So, thanks, Bro, for the lesson. I only hope when my time comes to be a compassionate human being, and I am sure it will, that I can be half the person that you have shown yourself to be. It is a lesson all of us need to learn in a world so desperately in need of what you appear to have in abundance.