Tag Archives: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Courage at Twilight: Happy Birthday, Dad

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Dad turned 87 years old today.  Which means, he said, the day was the first of his 88th year on this planet earth.  Eighty-seven is just an arbitrary number to me, but its numerical value in a human-life context does imply advanced age and all the ailments and challenges and wisdom that accompany.  And 87 seems awfully close to 90, which everyone knows is old.  But to me, Dad is just Dad, whatever his age.  He refused my recent suggestion that we move our traditional Baker Christmas Eve party from the 24th to the 23rd—he would not countenance celebrating himself in juxtaposition with the Celebration of Christ.  What’s more, he shares a birthday wish Joseph Smith, born in 1805, to whom the Father and the Son manifested themselves in fiery visitation and through whom They revealed a restoration of the gospel and church of Jesus Christ.  No, Dad would not set himself up for celebratory propinquity with the Son of God and His great latter-day Prophet.  I conceded the point and informed him of the family conveniences of celebrating Jesus and Joseph and not him on the 23rd, and that any festivities would be purely coincidental and all pointed heavenward.  So, the family gathered, and we ate a hearty meal, and we sang Christmas carols and hymns, and Dad narrated the story of the birth of Jesus in the company of animals and the humblest of people, and how even the earth’s great scholars from eastern lands came to honor and endow.  Two great-grandchildren, Lila and Gabe, arranged the animal and human figurines as the story played out in their three- and four-year-old minds.  And, yes, we sang happy birthday to Dad, by which point he could not escape our ebullient attentions.  And he received our gifts, some wrapped in gold paper.  Now we are two days from Christmas.  People in politeness persist in asking me if I am ready for Christmas, to which I answer “almost.”  But I wonder if I am ever ready for Christmas, if any of us are ever really ready for Christmas.  I did manage to purchase all the gifts and mail all the cards which convention and family require.  I helped decorate the house and the yard and helped cook the meals and bake the pies.  I joined in the board games and snowman building and the Christmas-movie watching.  But is my heart ready for Christmas?  Is my heart ready for all seven of my children and their spouses and children to be elsewhere for Christmas?  Is my heart ready to make Christmas special for Mom and Dad, the objects of my awkward caregiving, and I in turn the past and perpetual object of their careful childrearing?  Am I ready to be humble and kind and generous?  Am I ready to forgive and to move forward with courage into newness?  I want to answer, Yes, I am ready, or will be in time, but the silent truth is, I am not ready—not really—but I’m trying.  I was ready enough to stand around the piano with the family group and sing my part, and I was ready to join the friendly snowball fight with the children and to be tackled by my barefoot smiling son in the snow and to roll frostily around grinding snow in each other’s laughing faces, and I was ready to say “I love you” to my cherished ones.

(Pictured above: my Nutella French Silk Pie, in a Julia Childs pie shell.)

(Below: glimpses of a celebration, with birthday boy under the light of the lamps.)

Courage at Twilight: Maracangalha

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They came from Texas to Utah, and wanted to stop by the rehab center and see Dad.  They had met each other in 1972 in São Paulo, Brazil, and had met Dad then, too, when they were 21 and he was 36, the President of the Brazil South Central Mission, their President.  They were serving as volunteer youth missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (misnomered “Mormons”), preaching the Gospel of Jesus and of faith and repentance and baptism and of Christ’s Church restored in 1820 through the prophet Joseph Smith.  They met me, too, in 1972, but I was only eight.  I had met Steve and Dorothy and the others many times at mission reunions in Mom’s and Dad’s basement great room, with their name tags and paunches and gray hair (or no hair), with a taste for mousse de maracujá (passion fruit mousse) and guaraná (Brazilian soft drink) and feijoada (Brazil’s black-bean stew), and with love in their hearts for Mom and Dad and for the people of Brazil, and with still-vivid memories of their formative experiences with a benevolent personal living God.  Dad served a mission to Brazil in the 1950s.  I accepted a mission call to Portugal in 1983.  And my children were sent to Oklahoma and Florida and South Korea and Mozambique and Brazil.  Missionary service is not compulsory in my Church, but every young man and woman is invited to serve.  We dedicated two years of our time, energies, and resources to share our convictions about God’s plan for the eternal happiness of humanity.  Covid-19 ended Mom’s and Dad’s annual reunions, and we felt a new emptiness, one of numerous new voids compelled by the pandemic.  But Larry emailed the group, and a Zoom mission reunion was conceived.  Mom and Dad sat at their kitchen table, looking at my laptop screen, as dozens of thumbnails popped up, of their beloved former missionaries, with whom they had labored, with whom they had been reviled, with whom they had formed strong bonds of caring, who now listened as Dad declared his convictions, evoked their common tender memories, and expressed to them his love (as did Mom).  And at the click of an icon they were gone, and we sat on the sofas, Mom and Dad and me, and reminisced about Brazil, and about how at mission reunions I had led them all in the old Caymmi songs: Maracangalha (1957): a young man so excited to attend a party in the next town; Coqueiro de Itapoã (1959): a youth missing the sand and the waves and the coconut palms and the beautiful morenas of Itapoã.

Courage at Twilight: Visiting Hours

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Visiting hours are 9 to 9, which seems quite generous. The other rule, however, is not.  Only two visitors at a time.    Despite the three-person couch and other chairs and the spacious room.  So, my saintly 83-year-old mother, who has gone to the hospital for eight days straight, must leave her sick husband’s side for two neighbors, or two siblings, or two children, or two grandchildren to visit.  Or Mom stays in the room and only one other visitor is permitted.  I had seen the rule on signs in the elevator, nursing station, and the patient room doors.  But since none of the staff had troubled us over three visitors, or four, for five consecutive days, and since we are quiet, peaceful, clean, and helpful people, I thought perhaps the hospital did not mind so much.  Not so.  On day six Big Meanie nurse instructed all but two family members to leave.  It’s IMC’s rule.  I did not argue or accuse or abuse, but I did inquire, in an effort to understand, and to explore flexibility.  Did it make a difference that I am Dad’s attorney in fact and have his advanced directive in my briefcase?  I’m sorry, but no.  Did it change things if I am the authorized physician contact for when the doctors stop by to explain their diagnostic and treatment efforts?  No.  What about the fact that we are all Covid-19 vaccinated and boosted?  No.  Did it make a difference if immediate family were gathered bedside to perform my Church’s religious ceremony of invoking the power of faith and pronouncing a blessing of health and healing on the sick?  No, and that isn’t the case here anyway.  Well, it was the case when Dad’s three siblings and their spouses, and my brother and sister and me, gathered around him to give him such a blessing.  A beautiful thing for loving, spiritual family to do, perhaps the last opportunity to do such a thing for Dad, to offer this expression of faith and hope and love, and perhaps of good-bye.  Did you know that we have been very helpful to the nursing and therapy staff, adjusting the bed angle and height, feeding Dad, sponging him off, helping slide him head-ward when he had slipped down the sloping mattress, brushing his teeth, shaving his chin, helping him stand, pivot, transfer, use the toilet, take a seated shower, stand, pivot, transfer back to the bed?  For all her strength and grace and experience, Heather could not have done it all without us, and thanked us for our contribution and learned expertise.  So, I left Dad’s room and walked down the hall to sit uselessly on a cracked and stained sofa, where I could not help or comfort or observe.  I felt angry at the rule, and thought it inhumane—a bureaucratic pronouncement out of context.  (I learned later that the two-visitor limitation was not IMC policy, which was, instead: Maximum number of visitors at the bedside is determined at the discretion of the care team.  Discretion was allowed, after all.)  I felt angry at Big Meanie nurse who enforced the rule so militantly.  And after two days she went off shift and the familiar smiling nursing staff welcomed us all back to be helpful and complimentary and appreciative.  To be present.  For our father.  For each other.

 

(Photo from intermountainhealthcare.org, use pursuant to the fair use doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Temple Quarry Trail

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We were here!  At the Temple Quarry Trail, for a new adventure, the adventure of the rolling immobile, Mom and Dad guided by myself and my sister Sarah pushing their wheelchairs.  I discovered the short asphalt trail when finding my hiking/biking trail which starts from the same trailhead.  Availing ourselves of the handicapped parking, and knowing the restroom was there just in case any of us needed it, we set off on the trail, Mom and Dad debuting their “new” used wheelchairs.  The trail was paved, but there was nothing flat about it, and I strained, my body slanted to 45 degrees, to muscle the chair and its occupant up the incline.  This was the place where a century and a half ago the newly-arrived Latter-day Saints chiseled by hand enormous granite blocks from the mountain as foundation stones for their new Temple in Salt Lake City, Utah.  The men worked in pairs, one holding a pointed steel bar, the other striking it with a sledgehammer, the bar man turning the bar a quarter turn, and the sledger striking the bar again, and the turn, and the strike, slowly drilling a hole six inches into the rock.  I cannot help but wonder how many arm bones and hand bones and finger bones were shattered by errant blows.  After a line of holes had been “drilled,” the mason inserted steel wedges and hammered until the granite broke with a “crack” in a neat line.  We could see the wedge holes in the giant slab of rock before us, and we shook our heads in awe at how the rudimentary techniques and tools of the time nevertheless resulted in a gloriously beautiful and sacred structure, a monument to the Living God and a tribute to his humble stonemasons and carpenters and plasterers and painters and tinsmiths and goldsmiths.  We pushed on, the river cascading in our ears, the granite mountain soaring overhead, the trees closing in gently over the trail where we pushed our parents.  There were their childhood canyons and rivers, their playgrounds and adventure grounds, and now here they were at the ends of their lives able to enjoy again, though differently, the sounds and sights and smells, because of wheeled chairs we all wish they did not need but which make these nature walks possible and pleasurable and safe (presuming one always engages the wheel breaks when letting go of the handles, which as a novice wheelchair facilitator I was careful to do).  Then the darkening clouds opened and baptized us with a gentle warm summer shower, and we turned our faces upwards and embraced each raindrop.  The Salt Lake Temple was completed and dedicated in 1893, a full forty years after its commencement.  The temple foundations stones weighed dozens of tons each, and broke the wagons and exhausted the oxen and foundered the canal boats and finally came more easily when the railroad spur reach the quarry.  But these remarkable people built that stunning thing which we call The House of the Lord.  The Temple stands strong and tall on its old granite foundation stones, not granite at all, actually, but quartz monzonite, a pretty white with black specks.  “White granite” they called it, and I am happy to call it granite, too.  We all thought we should roll the Temple Quarry Trail often, to get out of the house, to get into nature, to see the canyon as the seasons change and the gambel oaks and mountain maples and boxelders and wild cherries lose their leaves and the stream slows and freezes and the granite mountain stands as strong and as tall as ever.

In Little Cottonwood Canyon on the Temple Quarry Trail.

 

(Granite stonemason photo from Getty Images, used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.)

 

Salt Lake Temple

(Salt Lake Temple photo from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.)

Courage at Twilight: Between Two Temples

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Taylorsville Utah Temple

Church President Russell Nelson announced the construction of 17 new temples, from Montana to Texas, the Congo to Spain, New Zealand to Peru, bringing the total number of temples to 282 worldwide. I drive past two temples under construction every morning and afternoon, one near my home—the Taylorsville Temple—and one near my work an hour away—the Deseret Peak Temple.  While I could drive an alternate way, I feel drawn to the temple route, where twice a day I get to see the construction progress.  Through the winter, the crews completed the steel framing of the Taylorsville temple, and dressed the ribbed walls with foam-panel insulation.  Behind scaffolding, marble and granite slabs began to clad the ground floor, and just today enormous cranes lowered the steel-gray steeple.  In Tooele, the Deseret Peak temple shows only the steel-beam super-structure forming the ground floor, mid-section, and tower, the walls yet to be built.  These temples are sacred edifices to the Latter-day Saints, Houses of God.  There Church members learn about the purpose of life on earth and the possibility of eternal life with an omni-beneficent Father.  There we make covenants to be determined disciples of Jesus: chaste, sacrificing, kind, generous, and honest disciples.  And there we are “sealed” or joined to our families in eternal unbreakable familial links and bonds.  I look forward to seeing what the crews accomplish each day, and I rejoice in the progress toward the ultimate stunning exalting beauty of the final buildings.  I wondered aloud to my siblings about this fascination of mine, and realized that the slow incremental transition from the foundation cornerstone to the steeple capstone gives me hope, hope in the life process of slow and careful creation toward a perfect end.  Like the temples, I hope my character is being similarly dressed and shaped and polished.  I know this: as I age, every act of meanness and gossip and pride and stinginess brings me pain, and every instance of kindness and compassion and generosity and forgiveness brings me pleasure.  So it is that I joy in driving by these two temples, twice a day, knowing they will be finished and perfect, in time, and hoping the same for me.

   

Deseret Peak Temple in Tooele, Utah

 

(Photos from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)

 

Courage at Twilight: Stories of Cockroaches and Fleas

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Dad, this morning: “I was sitting here remembering an odd experience.  When I was a missionary in Brazil in 1956, my missionary companion [missionaries work in twos] rented a room in a house, where we lived.  He got up in the night to use the bathroom, and when he turned on the bathroom light, the walls and the floor were covered with skittering cockroaches, and my companion screamed and woke everyone in the house up!”  Dad is a storyteller, and when I hear, “I remember when…” I know a story is coming, and I had better just plant my feet in the floor for a few minutes.  His stories are always touching or funny, even after a dozen tellings.  I have typed up every story I have ever heard Dad tell about his life (and Mom’s stories, too).  “I was allergic to flea bites.  The bites would swell in great red mounds.  The itching was terrible, and I scratched the bites with a wire brush—better the pain than the itch.  I got good at catching fleas.  Once I wrote a letter to my mom out of dead fleas.  I stuck them to scotch tape, forming the shapes of the letters with the fleas, then taped them to the paper.  I don’t know how I survived it—I poured a can of DDT in my bed so I could sleep without being eaten alive by fleas, with the sheet tucked up tight under my chin so I wouldn’t breathe in the power.  The DDT killed the fleas, and I’m surprised it didn’t kill me.”  Thirty years later, as a young church missionary in Portugal, I suffered from bed bug bites—the bugs crept out of their hiding places at night while I slept, and bit the backs of my hands dozens of times.  Every morning I awoke with fresh and painful red bites.  I did not know yet of Dad’s mission pesticide story.  As if reenacting it, I bought a can of Raid and sprayed all the wooden joints and slats of my bed and sprayed under the mattress and on sheets.  Fearing illness, or worse, I did all the spraying in the morning, hoping the bed bugs would be dead, and the poison dissipated, by bedtime.  It seemed to work.  And I have my own cockroach story: as a ten-year-old in Brazil, I reached up to open a high closet cupboard, and out poured dozens of two-inch cockroaches landing all over my head and face and shoulders.  Shiver.  I still cannot stand the sight of a cockroach.  I look forward to Dad’s next stories, which likely will be told today.

 

Pictured above: Dad (far left) and his mission colleagues in Brazil, circa 1958.

Angels Sing

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Angels Sing

Prayer was opaque.  Holy writ just words.  I did not know where God was.  We lifted things from the cardboard box, cupping them like fragile hatchling chicks: ukulele – senior yearbook – prom  photo – drawings and doodlings – Church worthiness card – Eagle Scout medal – employee-of-the-month certificate – Godzilla action figure – hoodies and pajamas, smelling of him, a good clean smell.  We planted a linden tree, tall and straight, ringed with daffodils.  He didn’t know who he was.  He didn’t have any sharp edges.  Not.  One.  The only thing I hated about him was that he hated himself.  I have to wonder if one more text, one more call, one more conversation or smile or hug might have tipped the scales.  You slipped a letter in before the casket closed and asked him to remember playing Legos in Grandma’s basement and having play fights with Godzilla.  A small thing, you said.  I am numb and sick and angry and sick and numb.  A man told me once, I am going to walk through that door, and when I do, the darkness will not come through with me.  And the man walked through the door, and the darkness had to stay behind.  Fight to choose light over darkness.  Always.  But our boy was not that strong, yet.  A finger twitched.  A demon slug.  In the end, all we can do to make a difference in this world is to love.  In your quiet times, you will feel a sweetness in your heart, a soft presence, and you will know it is him.  And then, that Church conference on YouTube with the whole world watching during Covid-19 and the audience stayed home to watch and the tabernacle choir stayed home to watch, but recorded choirs sang from conferences past: and there he was, on the back row by the big organ pipes in his black suit, singing and singing and alive!  Our angel alive and singing.

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This piece is a word collage gathering the expressions and feelings and images of many family members surrounding our beloved Korey following his death by suicide.  We love him, and feel him with us still, and always.