Dickie

Family stories

I come from a dynasty of Christians on my father’s side.  Men and women who have followed Jesus for generations.  There are many stories of  human faith and divine faithfulness but there is one story that captivated me as a child because it had to do with that greatest of all mysteries...death.

My father is the second of four brothers.  They grew up in a small Eastern Oregon town in the 30’s.  Whenever my uncles got together, my siblings and cousins and I would get them talking about their childhood and to our combined delight, the well worn stories would spill out.  Stories I still tell my children of the boys climbing water towers, swimming across the snake river and accidentally lighting the neighbor’s field on fire when smoking “indian tobacco”.  All of the stories had the same predictable ending, nervously waiting for their punishment from my stern, no-nonsense Grandfather in the black widow infested basement.  I loved the Tom Sawyer quality of these stories, the hours of unsupervised time and the never ending summer days I imagined children had in the “good, old days.”  There was one story that was different from all the rest but I always wanted to hear it. Usually my Grandma was the one to tell it and all the uncles would get quiet and reverent while she spoke. The rest of us followed suit and grew quiet to better hear Grandma's emotion- filled voice.  It was the story of when the youngest brother, Dickie, died at the age of 14.

Dickie had had some kind of childhood cancer that required the removal of his arm when he was a boy.  Despite this disability he had participated in many of the brothers’ antics and was laughing and rough housing in all the photos.  He had even learned to fly the neighbor’s crop duster.  He was quoted as saying that he never felt pain while he was flying.  All the boys learned to fly and for two of them it became a lifelong love.  In 1945, at the age of 14, Dickie took ill again and my dad came home on leave from the army due to his brother’s imminent death.  All the other boys came home to be with the family as well and they took turns watching over young Dickie and tending to his needs.  One evening, while my heart-sick Grandmother watched over her dying child, she noticed his eyes opening and his face lighting up.  His lungs were filled with fluid and it was very difficult for him to breathe or speak.  Dickie would shut his eyes tightly only to open them in astonished wonder again and again.  Grandma Irene leaned close and asked him, “Dickie, what is it?  What do you see?”  He struggled to answer her and finally he looked at her and said “I see the Truth.”  Within the hour, he was gone.  The family gathered around the body and my dad played a hymn on the piano while the others sang in their combined grief, relief and wonderment to what they had just witnessed.  That moment bonded the family like no other.  The hymn became a touchpoint that always brought wistful looks to the aging faces of my father and his brothers.  The music transported them to that room, that event, that moment in time when they experienced one of the most horrible and yet most faith affirming moments of their young lives.  I watched the change in their faces and my young faith was affirmed.  I have heard of people seeing a nondescript tunnel or a bright light but there is no mistaking the meaning of “The Truth”.

The bible states in John 14:6, “ I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  No one has any doubt that what Dickie saw that night was indeed, Jesus himself coming to bring his child home.

In my fifties I went to the small town where my father and his brothers grew up and searched out the graveyard where many of the names from the old stories are now carved on stones.  I found the favorite Uncle Sky, the fast swimmer, Paul Weese and the patriarch, Orrin Bull.   As an adult it is easy to look back at my own childhood memories and wonder if I am not perhaps glorifying some of my father’s old stories.  As a typical westerner I am not always comfortable with mystery or unscientific spirituality but then I found the simple headstone of my young uncle.  I read his name and the dates of his short life.  Then time melted and I was again that eager faced child hearing about the safe passage of young Dickie to heaven.  For there, carved in stone, for generations to see, was the reminder of that old story and Dickie’s vision from that long ago summer night.  It read “I am the Truth.”