Letter to Jared #4 re: Dad

FOUR

I want to mention Dad.  You know he had a sense of right and wrong.  When Gabby called him after they were married and said something about joining a food co-op and asked what he thought, he said, “Run!”

At the same time, he was sympathetic with the underdog or people in trouble.  I’ve written this before, but our VW mechanic, Don, was in the paper, arrested for growing marijuana but out on bail.  Our car needed work so Dad called Don for an appointment and said, “So, I’ve been reading the paper and it looks like you haven’t had a real good week.” With that out of the way, he made the appointment.  

I don’t think you’re doing your father a favor by following in his footsteps.  If you think he rejected the Church, you should consider things more closely.  You know how adamant he could be if something was wrong or was manipulative or false.  But did he ever try to talk Josh out of serving a mission?  Never.  In fact, when Josh got his call and everyone had left the house, Dad sat in the kitchen with me and said, “I’m happy.”  Furthermore, he made mission payments promptly every single month and never once complained.  There’s no way he would have done that if he thought Josh was making a mistake or the Church was ruining lives.

When we went to Hands Across America where he could be back among the Navajos, I asked him if we should go back to the Reservation where he wouldn’t feel the Utah pressure.  He was so happy to be out there and so concerned for the people, that when we got back home he said to me, “Maybe you’re right.”  I would have moved if he had wanted to.

Once, when we were still in Morningside, I had reached a point where I was just trying to love him and not judge, and he said to me out of the blue, “Donna, don’t give up on me—where the Church is concerned.” While still in Morningside he asked Keith and Steve B. to give him a blessing.

 

Later, less than a year before he died, he said, “I liked my mission.  It was good for me.”  He had other tender thoughts in his last months.  Joshua said that in the hospital at the end, when Dad couldn’t talk because of the tubes, he took Joshua’s hand and placed it on top of his head.  Josh didn’t understand, but later figured out that he was asking for a blessing. 

He may have felt like the Church as he saw it was too heavy-handed in the way the Gospel was being taught.  And maybe he was right.*  But he didn’t close his eyes to the good.

*2019 note:  the way programs and things are loosening up now, leaving members more accountable, was the very direction he leaned. 

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE,  Mom