Recycling the Generations

Heredity

As old age dawns on each of us, things happen that are beyond our control. How can we prepare ourselves for them, and yet celebrate the good in each generation?

"If this man has a son, warn him." As blunt as the sentence a judge would pronounce upon a condemned man, the doctor attending my father after his heart attack put me on notice. He had just completed his diagnoses of Dad's condition. Despite a medical checkup and a "clean bill of health" six weeks before the attack, the muscle of Dad's heart had closed down for eleven minutes, causing him to lose oxygen to the brain. When the medics "jump-started" the heart again, a strong beat registered Dad's overall fitness, while a flat line on the EKG left no doubt. The brainstem was dead.

   My only sister arrived at the hospital first. I was still en route from Seattle to Sarasota when the doctor made his diagnosis. As he walked out of the room where my sister waited, the words of warning were spoken without hesitation, "If this man has a son, warn him." They came to me with the sounds of an early death sentence. With his

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professional bluntness I felt an eery, extrasensory fear. The doctor had no idea that I existed!

   When I heard his report, I angrily suggested that his lack of tact gave him the bedside manner of a barracuda. Later I calmed down and had my first cholesterol check.

Reliving a Relationship

During my childhood and teenage years, Dad served as my personal and spiritual model. I can still see him sitting in the back row of the auditorium when I debated in the regional contest and standing behind the fence when I played tennis in the state tournament. To this day, I don't know how he found time to take off work in the middle of the afternoon, but his presence clearly communicated his priorities. Nor can I forget him coming to school and having the principal page me over the loudspeaker when he found out that I had been paying my paper bills with cash taken from the coffee where he put the loose change from weekly church offerings. When he impressed upon me the trust that had been given to him as treasurer of the church and the responsibility he had for the cash in the coffee can, I left school and did not return home until I had collected every back bill from my customers. Knowing how I must have hurt my dad punished me more than a physical beating. He had taught me how to build sailboats and model airplanes. He had given me part-time work on mechanical drawings for his company, he had personally introduced me to Jesus Christ, and he had funded all of my undergraduate and graduate school tuition in order to give me the education he never had. Seeing his only son and daughter receive Ph.D.s from the University of Michigan must have been a reward of highest order.

   When my sister and I left home, our parents' marriage came unglued. Dad came home late without explanation, often smelling of alcohol. After an embarrassing arrest for drunken driving, his boss gave him notice: "Once more and you're done." Rumors of another woman began to circulate, and Mother's despair became obvious. In

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1961, when I taught on the faculty at Ohio State University, Mom drove through the night from Ypsilanti, Michigan, to Columbus, Ohio. A frantic pounding at the door after midnight awakened us to find her on the front porch, face swollen by tears. Hysterically, she announced, "Your Dad has another woman!" The next morning, I found her car half in the street and half on the lawn. She had driven over two hundred miles in a state of shock.

   Six months later, in 1961, I accepted my first college presidency at the age of thirty. Desperately, I wanted my dad to share the inaugural ceremonies with me. Instead, he called me one day just after the school year began to ask that I meet him outside of town at a drive-in restaurant. In the parking lot, over the hood of the car, he told me that he intended to divorce Mother and marry again.

   For the next fifteen years our contacts were cordial but guarded. Any mention of religion put a strain on the relationship. When Dad's brother, Bob, lay dying of cancer, I tried to minister to him in the hospital. But Dad rebuffed me with a dismissal: "Bob's affairs are all in order:" For those fifteen years, we had little personal contact other than holiday phone calls and courtesy visits. Then in June, 1976, after Mom had died, Debi, our oldest daughter, announced her wedding. Immediately, I called Dad to ask, "If I buy your airplane ticket, will you come?" As quickly as I asked, he accepted. "Yes, of course I'll come." Before we hung up, fifteen years of frustrated love and unmet need broke through to the surface and I said, "Dad, I love you." Emotion muffled his words of response. I think that he said, "I love you too." No matter; we both knew that the frayed lines had been repaired by the words of love. Dad's visit to Seattle for Debi's wedding would be a long-awaited homecoming.

   Five days later, the fatal call came. A heart attack felled Dad and reduced him to a vegetable. My rage turned against God. While rushing to catch a last-minute flight to Tampa, I kept demanding, God, tell me why? If you had just waited two weeks, we would have been a family again. God may have answered, but I refused to hear him. Finally, just before the plane touched down at O'Hare Field in

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Chicago, the Holy Spirit calmed me down with the message, Your last words to your dad were "I love you." Even if he came to Seattle, and lived for many years, what more could you say? I rested temporarily in that truth.

   Waiting through the night and morning hours for a delayed flight at O'Hare Field is a modern form of purgatory. I couldn't sleep, so I wandered from terminal to terminal. What happened next must be put in the category of burning bushes, parting seas, and the sun standing still. While sauntering through the aisles of black leather and chrome seats in the terminal, I spotted a yellow paper cutout  in the shape of a doctor's old-fashioned satchel. Curiosity prompted me to pick it up, open it, and read the contents. The yellow satchel cutout was a religious tract with nothing more than Psalm 121 printed tastefully inside. I blinked in disbelief. Grandpa McKenna died in 1945 after quoting the psalm with its promise in the last verse, "The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore" (Ps. 121:8, NKJV). When my dad had called the family together for our regular devotional, the day after Grandpa's funeral, I drew Psalm 121:8 out of the promise box before we prayed. I claimed that psalm as Grandpa McKenna's spiritual inheritance to me. Later, I passed it on to our children as "The McKenna Psalm." We quoted it together when leaving on a trip, or when marriage, education, or career moved us across the country. Today, the Bible in our family room always lies open to that psalm. Wherever we go, or wherever they go, the psalm is our bond of love.

   How can I not believe in miracles? No one can convince me that my wanderings through the airport to discover a randomly placed tract on one of a thousand chairs can be explained by coincidence. The Spirit of God confirmed the peace that He had given me on the airplane and added the assurance that, despite Dad's condition, the McKennas were together as a family again.

   When I arrived at my father's bedside in Sarasota General Hospital, nothing could have prepared me for the sight. Dad's black, wavy

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hair with its distinguishing gray fringe, his unwrinkled face, and his tan, muscular chest reminded me that he could easily pass for a man in his late fifties. But now the eyes stared without seeing and rolled without control. Foam gathered at the corner of his mouth, and he could emit no sound except a senseless moan. The body belonged to my dad, but the mind and soul were gone. All of my anger flared again. I wept, rebelled, and kicked the wall. Again, God had to calm me down. When He did, I remembered the yellow paper satchel in my pocket. I left the room, went to the nurse's station, and asked for a piece of scotch tape. Opening the tract for all to read, I printed "The McKenna Psalm" at the top and taped it on the light panel above Dad's head. Nothing more could be done — nothing more needed to be done. With a good-bye kiss, I repeated once more, "Dad, I love you," and walked out of the hospital room. By mutual agreement with my dad's wife and my sister, we instructed the doctor to make Dad comfortable but take no emergency measures to keep him alive in the event of another heart attack. A month later, the attack came. No life-saving measures were taken, and Dad died without a trace of human consciousness.

Factors out of Our Control

When Jesus restored Peter to his leadership role, after the resurrection, He also predicted his future. "When you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go" (John 21:18). To specify the way that Peter would die, Jesus used the analogy of old age as the time when our destiny is out of our control.

   My experience with Dad fits that pattern. As a person who prides himself in problem-solving and decision-making, I was frustrated by the events of Dad's divorce, heart attack, vegetable state, and eventual death. Try as I might, the situation was out of my control. As tough

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as it may be on us and our egos, sons and daughters of aging parents will find themselves helpless before such forces as the hereditary makeup of the parent.

   Dad did everything he could to keep fit at the age of sixty-nine. He walked, swam, dieted, and kept his weight down. Six weeks prior to the heart attack, he had been pronounced a "young sixty-nine-year-old" by the doctor. Tests could not predict a "myocardial infarction" in which the heart muscle closes down to cause death and opens up again to conceal any evidence of heart damage in the autopsy. Heredity played the culprit. So when the doctor saw the results, he did not hesitate to send the message, "If this man has a son, warn him."

   I got the message. When diet and exercise did not take me out of danger on the cholesterol count, I went to a cardiologist. Hearing the story of my father, and the doctor's warning to me, he wasted no time. "You make my job easy. I'm putting you on the 'big gun.' " He meant heavy doses of medicine to bring my cholesterol down more than a hundred points in three months! At the end of that test period, he pronounced me out of the danger zone but destined me to the medication for a lifetime. While nothing could be done about my father's heart attack, I and my sons must heed the risk of our heredity.

   My hands were also tied by the history of Dad's decisions that created social circumstances out of my control. Sons and daughters who must care for aging parents, are filled with ifs. If only Dad had not divorced Mother. If only Dad had not retired so early. If only Dad had not taken to drink. If only Dad could have come to Seattle... If... If ... If... Sooner or later ifs must give way to the reality of a destiny created by past decisions. Rather than wishing what might have been, our effectiveness as caregivers will depend upon our ability to deal with reality and go on into the future. For me it meant putting aside resentment because of Dad's remarriage and working together with his second wife, who loved him as much as I did.

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Whatever happened in the past was out of our control, but we still had responsibility for the present and the future.

   The point of control slipped further when I thought about the timing for life. Our schedule was not God's schedule. According to my plans, Dad would come to Seattle, be reconciled with our family, and enter a long period in which he and I could go back to capture the moments of fishing and golf of which divorce had robbed us. Out of those special times, then, I envisioned a conversation about spiritual matters that would bring Dad back to Christ and a profession of faith. None of this happened. The time of Dad's heart attack, hospitalization, and death were out of my hands. I could only submit to God's timing and help make the small decisions about time in intensive care, the move to a nursing home and the order against other emergency measures. How arrogant it is to assume otherwise. We are pretenders to the throne of God when we declare our sovereign right to decide the birth or death, abortion or suicide of a person. If my experience has any carryover value, I believe that the best-laid human plans for the timing of life will be frustrated by God's surprises. When all is said and done, we will learn that He is in control.

   Make no mistake: God's control of the timing of life is positive, not negative. From firsthand experience, I am glad to report that the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of aging parents is also out of our control. Never again will I presume that God needs me to get His work done. I'll go a step further. God's will in the life of my father is better than my best-laid plans. This cannot be said without the perspective of time. I'm sure that my plans for our reconciliation and redemption resulted from my best thinking and deepest love. But they must be checked against the facts of history. I found out that Dad set the condominium community in Florida buzzing with his excitement about his pending visit to Seattle and Debi's wedding. As my last word to him,  I said, "Dad, I love you." A tract imprinted with "The

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McKenna Psalm" appeared for me on a seat in the airport, and mercy kept Dad alive until I could unite our family under the promise "The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore."

   As my heritage, Dad left me a warning, and God gave me a promise. What more can I ask?

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