Dad by Bryan

I want everyone to know how dad met his final trial in this life. I want everyone to know what a good man he was.

Dad and I talked quite a bit. It kind of started in the Snowflake house as soon as we got home from Lori's house right after his last surgery. I would see him looking through his scriptures and I would ask, "dad, what are you reading about today?". To which he would reply, "Nothing really. I'm just looking through the things I marked." We would talk for a bit about what he was looking through, then he would ask me, "What did you read today?" I would talk to him about what I was currently reading in the Book of Mormon.

We talked about pride vs. humility. We wondered together about how much pride we had and how to be truly humble. He seemed to struggle over this one as did I. We talked about how sometimes when we were alone and praying that even then we tended to put on airs even though it was just us and the Lord, like we could make Heavenly Father, who knew us better than we knew ourselves, think that we were something other than what we were. We talked about that quite a bit. It was a little sobering praying where the other could hear after that...I realized that much of my life was spent looking for the bad in others so that I could look good to myself. Dad listened and offered counsel, but I noticed he did not say much. I am convinced that the reason for this is that he did not have those feelings and so could not completely identify with me.

We talked about faith and miracles. It seemed that a lot of what he was reading of his marked scriptures always came back to this. What was a miracle, why did they happen? did they happen only to the righteous? what about Alma the younger? Does the Lord know that even if he struck us dumb for 3 days that we would wake up and just continue doing things the way we always had? We wondered if we had faith to have his cancer cured. We spoke of this often. He prayed every night that Heavenly Father's will be done, but he knew that if it was His will, Heavenly Father could remove his cancer with "the touch of a finger".

When we came to my house the conversations continued. He wanted to be read to. Lenay, Lori, Jared and I all go to read to dad. Sometimes I would look up to see dad with his mouth open, totally asleep. He would open his eyes and say "what did you stop for?" I told him that I wasn't going to waste my breath reading if he was going to sleep through it. To which he promptly quoted (correctly) the last sentence I had read.

Dad started to get weaker and weaker. He stopped eating full meals. He would try and end up in so much pain that relief only came after he threw up everything that was in his stomach plus some. But in this he never complained. Not once did dad say "Why me Lord?" Not once did he say "This is unfair." I'm sure he may have thought about it, but he did not say it where I could hear it.

At times he would be so out of it, going on about picking cotton, and being in places other than my basement. But when one of the grandkids came in, he would sit up straight, give them a hug and tell them how much he loved them. You could see the exertion on his face, you could tell he was concentrating for them. He didn't want to scare them.

Towards the end people would call or come over. They would ask how he was and he would say, "oh, today is a pretty good day." It wasn't. He was in pain, he was hungry, he couldn't walk, he was throwing up, he would accidentally spill urine in his chair and yet he said to a friend who asked what challenges he was going through, "No, no challenges, just opportunities." That was just a few days before he passed away.

Dad was not perfect. But I know that regardless of how many mistakes he may have made, he earned his right to sit at the feast of the Bridegroom in those last few months of his life. Even to the end he was faithful to his Father in Heaven. As grandma Roxy would have said, he was indeed "A Heavenly Father's Man".

I am so proud of my father.