Real Families: Meditations on family life

Pop’s encore was set in motion as my mother, Betty Detweiler King, was dying in September 2010. Breaking his hip last February had left my dad Aaron’s mind fogged-in. Alzheimer’s? Lingering post-hospital psychosis? We were never sure. We just knew that we, along with millions more, were facing that slice-through-the-heart feeling of seeing now in second childhood a parent who once symbolized the very essence of strong and adult.

The first time he wanted me to cut his hair, I thought, I just can’t. It was too stark a symbol of our role reversal. I wanted him to take care of me, to be my shield against life’s dangers. To cut his hair was to take care of him.

But I cut his hair. Then and later. And how far I realized we had journeyed together when on the last day I saw him alive he wanted to be sure his hair was combed. Someone offered me a comb; I said, “No, this time I want to use my own comb.” I was tempted to seal it in glass but put it back in my pocket, grateful to think of my dad’s DNA blending on it with my own.

And between the first hair-cutting and the final combing did come Pop’s encore. As my mother was dying, I doubted we should get Pop to the hospital. I thought it would be too intense—it would hurt so much, but he wouldn’t know why. My sister Jewel was unhesitating: He needed to be there. She was right. He found tears and words to say goodbye to the woman he was able to name one last time the love of his life.

Then, and who can say precisely how it came to be, he kept back in skilled nursing care the ability to name he had regained in the hospital. Genesis tells of God giving humans the ability to name what is. What a power! What a loss when it flees us! What a miracle when we recover it, as he did—able once more to look into my eyes and name me “Michael” and into the eyes of all his children, grandchildren and friends and name us all!

But he had regained even the ability to name his relationships with us, his love for us, his wisdoms if anything too rarely uttered while our mother was alive. For three months he poured himself into reaching back across his 88 years to our births, to our childhoods and adulthoods, to the life shared with friends, such as beloved members and spouses of the Crusaders Quartet (Aaron and Betty, Roy and Florence Kreider, Eugene and Alice Souder, Paul and Bertha Swarr). He’d give us, as one of my brothers put it, that “piercing blue gaze,” and we’d know either some insight to treasure was brewing or that the blue gaze itself was this time the gem.

One treasure was his renewed ability to track that I had become a seminary dean. He first learned I was a candidate before he broke his hip, and all he managed to do was worry (as did I, actually) that the job was too big. Then he lost ability even to understand what a job was. But during his encore I prayed with him one night, prayed that God would be the strength making perfect his deepening weakness, and as I moved to the amen I heard his halting voice start up. He prayed, “And God, give Michael your strength to do his job.”

That was for me a big moment in Pop’s encore. But that small matter of hair and comb also kept turning big. His combs kept vanishing. That care for hair that had become a sign of the dignity increasingly hard to come by would be blocked by a missing piece of plastic. For weeks I’d visit and forget to bring the new combs I kept promising. Finally I did it; I managed to buy not only one comb but three—one for the top of his dresser, one to be a spare in the drawer and one I kept in my car just in case. We both had a sense that day, combs everywhere, that life had taken a fine turn indeed.

I could tell of all the ways he blessed countless more, but those are their stories, so let me just say this yet: The power of those three months stuns me. Earlier last year I thought Aaron M. King had pretty much given the fathering he had to give. Yet his encore transformed much of what had gone before. He died Jan. 3, having taught this final father’s lesson: No matter our health or life stage, we can give each other amazing blessings to the end.

Michael A. King, Telford, Pa., and Harrisonburg, Va., is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and publisher of Cascadia Publishing House, LLC.