Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The last word I heard him speak

“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners...to comfort all who mourn...” (Isaiah 61: 1-2).

While Advent is always a time of preparation, last year my family found itself preparing for something very different than a celebrated birth - the unyielding combination of Alzheimer’s disease and incurable, aggressive cancer made it clear December of 2013 would mark my father’s seventy-eighth and final Christmas.

My dad battled Alzheimer’s for the better part of a decade, so I had plenty of time to adjust as my name gradually disappeared from his memory. While I had never taken his disease personally, during the months leading to Christmas it became difficult to digest the idea that I could pass the father I adored and emulated without even a flicker of recognition of his only son in his eyes. On Christmas Day itself, cancer had left him so emaciated the wheelchair felt empty as we pushed him into the sitting room where all his family gathered with gifts. I didn’t realize my dad’s final gift to me, something I had spent the past few years hoping for, was near.

The next day as I was sitting on the edge of his bed, my father startled awake and with the slightest lift of his head, his eyes locked onto mine with fleeting clarity. Expending great effort to force out enough air, my father managed the last word I heard him speak:  “Brian.” I casually replied, “Hi, Dad,” as if it were any one of the thousands of times I had greeted him. Exhausted, he sank back into sleep and I wept. Thirty-six hours later on December 28, while my mother held his left hand and I held his right, my father died.

Christmas and my father’s death will now be inextricably linked, but Christmas will never be a period of mourning for me. Because of my faith, which my father and my mother were instrumental in developing, I find the comfort Isaiah describes. I will always see Christmas as a season of hope; as a celebration of the good news delivered to us through Jesus Christ; as a treasured memory of a final full-family gathering; as the moment my father was released from captivity and found peace with his Lord; and as the last time my dad called me by name.



Brian Schou is a high school English teacher by day and musician by night.