Looking Back Part 2 - Sparing Rabbits and Other Life Lessons

Originally written
Tuesday, August 7, 2007

As I sit next to him now, I ache for him. I ache for him to be whole. I ache for him to stay. But I ache for his ultimate peace.

I can only imagine the twisting in the Lord's gut when he had to send Adam and Eve from his sight. He knew it would feel like this for us every time one of us has to die.

Most of the time this doesn't even seem real. Today I thought to myself, what in the world will life look like in a week, a month, a year. I just can't imagine life without him in it - as I know is true for every person who has ever gone through this.

I went digging for pictures today of daddy that I would somehow like to use at the funeral and found one I wanted to tell you about.

There is a picture of daddy standing in front of a very large, but very homemade tent-like structure next to his house. I got so tickled as I remembered the story to go along with the picture. It captures the heart of my dad.

Daddy was discussing with a friend the problem he was having with some pesky rabbits that were having a field day eating his new green beans.
His friend thought he had just the solution.
"Tommy, why don't you just get your gun and shoot them? That'll keep them away."

Now remember my dad was a WWII vet and lived on a farm all his life, but his response was a tender, "Well, they don't eat that much."

And so his solution was to relocate the green bean plants closer to the house and enclose them in net. That way both rabbits and green beans were spared an untimely death.

That is a classic story of my dad - not just that as manly as he was he had great compassion on these rabbits, but that he went to great lengths to find a way to make it work. I admire that greatly about him. What seems foolish to others made perfect sense to him if it meant everyone won.

I suppose to some this past year may have seemed foolish. Why put him through open heart surgery, months of recovery, turning your life upside down, inside out just to have him die from the same things he "should have" died from a-year-and-a-half ago? And maybe all this running back and forth to dialysis, working so hard to create a life for him here seemed like "postponing the inevitable" but maybe, like daddy and his rabbits, it just seemed worth it.

Foolish or not, something was gained by both sides.

My prayer is that he dies now knowing without a shadow of a doubt how much he was loved - not alone in his house and not in a cold hospital. I know that I have "won" in ways I can't fully express - serving him, being allowed to slowly say goodbye to him. I know my family and my marriage has changed and my children have been blessed.

So maybe part of daddy's legacy for me is "be foolish - sometimes it's worth it."