Pa

I'm not sure if I've always disliked my birthday. My family didn't emphasize birthdays, though I'm able to recall my three childhood parties with equal precision if not equal fondness: a treasure hunt that led to a celebration in our local park; rented gaming consoles from Blockbuster that elevated my social status for just one evening; hours of sweaty squirming at "The Jungle," a three-story tube city that uncovered both my fear of heights and my first crush. I remember both the gift that she gave me (a book of intricate paper airplanes) and the one I wanted (her affection), and that was my last birthday party. 

Several years ago, I was riding my salvaged Schwinn Le Tour through San Francisco when my mom called: Pa had fallen down the stairs and hit his head. Things weren't looking good; we should book a flight to St. Louis. 

I'd had very few birthday parties in my life and I cared about them very little as a result. I'd seen my grandparents rarely throughout my life, and despite that I loved them deeply. 

As I coaxed my steel frame bicycle up the hill to my apartment, I tried to recollect at least ten times I'd seen Pa: that one Christmas, my graduation, last winter, the time my parents went to Europe... was there another Christmas? I don't think so. I wasn't sure what I even knew about my grandfather, a man so unlike me, so capable of quiet and labor and craft. He had worked with cars, loved his truck, gone fishing, and somberly sent men to die in a minor arc of an unavoidable conflict. He could have been a mere archetype were it not for the fact that he was my grandfather, and I loved him. 

Pa fell down the stairs and into a coma one chilly April afternoon, and he died the next day, my birthday. 

On the shelf next to me, I've got an old piggy bank that belonged to him. The little plastic bank doubled as a calendar, and each day Pa would add a quarter, spinning the internal gearing and propelling the date one day forward. This routine had guided the rhythm of my grandfather's days for decades, and on the morning before he hit his head he added one last quarter, marking the date: April 6. Though Pa made it to the next day, his ritual did not, and the date is a fixed reminder of the end of his earthly life. 

That phrase—the end of his earthly life—strikes the modern man as a bit of hokey spirituality or naive optimism: a Hallmark sentiment that offers some comfort but no truth. But it is of course the most important truth of our existence, that we are more than what dies. 

So at Pa's funeral, I read my favorite passage:

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in us the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For while we live we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you.

How could it be any other way? The flesh dies but the spirit persists. Our bodies are mere vessels that carry immense treasure—eternal life. We try to preserve our bodies in a vain attempt at immortality, ignoring the immortality contained within. Our hopeless pursuit disguises the paradoxical truth: in death we find life. 

The soul does not need to support the weight of scientific scrutiny: To search for 21 grams of soul is as foolish as trotting out the scientific method to find your soulmate, or seeking the physics of morality or the chemistry of goodness or the biology of truth. Why do we continue to neglect that which we cannot see, as if our minds are incapable of grasping more than our eyes or our hands? 

Still, what brings solace to the soul may not still the heart, and I wept for Pa. I sat by his gravestone and lamented that I did not know him, that we'd never gone fishing together, that I never called him, that he didn't teach me how to build anything. I recalled his voice, a calming rustic gruff holler that echoed in my mind with Pa-isms: "My achin' back!"

Years after my grandfather died, I called my grandmother. She was suffering from an infection, and I feared I may soon lose her, too. We talked about how she read the Bible to one of her neighbors in the nursing home, how she was struck by the sad note of many sermons, and how she prayed every day. She told me about the day Pa died: She felt guilty that she hadn't ridden in the ambulance with him. She was upset that she sent him down to the basement on that errand. She regretted not talking more to him before they took him away.

I could not assuage her: I felt the same burden of guilt and loss, and I suppose I will until I have nothing left to bear. But the consolations of faith are not the fortifications of fools: The God that sustains everything in every moment is as apparent as the sun—and brighter, too. Just ask yourself: What gives rise to order? From whom comes goodness? Out of what arose any of this? Faith is not a blind guess but a reasoned investigation whose evidence surrounds us daily if we dare look beyond appearances. 

With great hope, I look forward to getting to know the fullness of God's glory in the good days that will follow many other good days, and I will be glad to know that Pa is alongside me, and I'll finally get to know him.