Tag Archives: Missionary Work

Courage at Twilight: Bittersweet Good-byes

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“I’m not doing my arm exercises today,” Dad announced with some belligerence. I had heard the CNA coughing and sniffling continuously as she helped him bathe and dress.  How ironic, and alarming, for a health care provider to bring sickness into our home.  Dad was none too pleased, and invited her to leave an hour early.  He asked me for the physical therapy supervisor’s name (we’ll say “PT”) and phone number: “I’m going to call PT and tell him not to come back.”  Dad could not walk, could barely move, the day after PT poked and pushed and stretched him, yet a new depth of debilitation.  He made the call and left a message.  He did not confront either the CNA or PT, instead just removing himself from the threats.  For days now, there has been no question of walking to the bathroom at night: the bedside commode has to do, and it is all he can manage to transfer from the mattress to the commode three fee distant.  Today he could lift neither foot over the four-inch lip of the step-in shower stall.  On a happier note, I installed the old steel banister, removed with the stair lift installation, in the basement stairwell, making trips to the cold storage room and the freezer much easier for Mom: a “piece of cake.”  This morning I brought up frozen chicken breasts to thaw.  Hyrum came over for dinner—his last, for a while, with Mom and Dad—and I transformed the raw bird into tangy Hawaiian chicken on a coconut rice bed.  Hyrum, at age 20, is leaving for Brazil to begin his volunteer missionary service, as I did in Portugal in 1983, and as Dad did in Brazil in 1956, for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Two years he will be gone, and I will miss him.  He is my son and my friend.  Dad told him the old stories about eating avocados the size of grapefruits for lunch and being arrested at the behest of local clergy and inviting hard men to lead their families in kneeling prayer and about feeling the love of God for the people.  Hyrum said his farewells, promising to send Mom and Dad his weekly email updates.  “I may not be alive when you get back, Hyrum,” Dad mused, “but I’ll be happy to read your emails while I’m still alive.”  Hyrum and I were both poignantly aware of the real possibility of Dad’s passing before Hyrum’s homecoming, making sweeter and sadder this good-bye from a grandfather to a grandson.

(Pictured above: Hyrum with Dad and Mom.)

The basement stairs, before and after installing the steel banister, left.

Courage at Twilight: Mission Land

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As a young man of 20, I spent two years living in Portugal, as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in a white shirt and tie and pocket name plaque, teaching the Gospel to whoever would listen, and buttressing the new members of our young congregations. I became fluent in the beautiful Portuguese language, and I delighted in the clang of trolly cars and in the countryside of olive groves and vineyards, windmills and farms, cork trees and salt air blown in off the sea.  I returned to the United States a changed man, having strengthened my convictions, and having sacrificed and labored on behalf of these people who I had come to love.  Now 58, I was contemplating how I could strengthen my connection with my 16-year-old daughter, who is moving so quickly toward womanhood, who all to soon will fling herself into adulthood, and I thought, maybe a trip somewhere.  I wanted meaning, meaning and beauty, and a bond we would share our whole lives.  With those parameters, the solution soon became apparent—Portugal.  Between them, my sisters Jeanette and Sarah spent every night I was gone caring for Mom and Dad, making the trip possible for everyone.  After months of planning, our threesome launched, and trapsing one week in bustling chaotic Lisbon and one week on the idyllic island of Madeira, both my former fields of missionary labor.  (Hannah invited her older brother to tag along, and he added so much to the adventure.)  We saw, of course, Lisbon’s compulsory tourist sights.  We sought out the traditional pastries (pasteis de nata were our favorite) and historic neighborhoods (like the narrow winding cobbled streets of Alfama on the capitol city hillside) and authentic working-class restaurants (where we ate sauteed cuttlefish our first night).  Madeira’s scenery is achingly beautiful, and we explored the whole mountainous island, its coasts and peaks, is black-rock beaches and high scenic overlooks, its fruit markets and terraced vineyards.  Most precious of all, I reunited with the first member of my Church on Madeira—Amélia, now 87 years old: cheerful, feisty, and lonely—at whose house the first Church meetings were held, and the small oval inlaid wood table where the first sacramental emblems were blessed and distributed to the just-as-small congregation.  We visited her three times, telling the old stories, laughing at old blunders, baking banana bread, preparing a Sunday meal for her and her family, taking pictures, hugging, weeping at parting.  Visiting Amélia meant infinitely more than visiting the gorgeous cathedrals and ancient castles, though we saw plenty of those, too.  And on the long flight home, I contemplated how this had been a monumental trip for Hyrum and Hannah (and for me).  It changed their lives, their perspectives of the world and their place in it, their perspectives of their parents and family and how they fit in, their perspectives of their Church and of missionary work and of the power of forging relationships of faith in the mission field through genuine loving labor, and the deep and eternal nature of those bonds.  My children may not fully comprehend the power of their adventure, the transformational power, for a long time, perhaps not until they take their own children to their fields of mission labor a generation after.  That is how it is with the generations, each learning what it can from the one before, and then teaching what it can to the next: “I lived right over there.  I walked this street every day.  This is what I often ate: half of a grilled chicken brushed with hot pepper oil; stewed squid; pasteis de bacalhau, pasteis de nata, papo seco bread with creamy cheese and quince marmelada.  Look at the cobblestone streets and mosaic stone sidewalks, and up there the Castelo de São Jorge, and over there Cristo Rei….”  And then to hear Hyrum bubble over, “I am so excited!” for his own imminent missionary service in Brazil.  And then to hear Hannah effuse, “Dad, thank you so much!”

(Pictured above: the north shore of the island of Madeira.)

 

A trolley ride in old Lisbon.

 

Lisbon and us from St. George Castle.

 

Visiting our Church’s Lisbon Temple (dedicated 2018).

 

A restored and working Portuguese wind mill, circa 1810.

 

My dear friend Amelia, 87, ever faithful.