When Plans Go Awry

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. Mae West

The month of March has been pretty much a blur for me, and I haven’t had the benefit of drugs or alcohol to blame for it. I had gotten a call that my father, who is just shy of ninety years old, was in hospital. He lives about ninety minutes away from us, so we drove down as quickly as law and nature would allow.

The nature and details of his illness are immaterial to this story, but suffice it to say that he was in critical condition and, when we had arrived, he was knocking at Death’s door. Due to the excellent work of the ER and ICU doctors, nurses, and assorted medical staff, Death never answered the door (but jiggled the handle just enough to make us nervous).

Life’s that way. We’re moving merrily along doing our own thing; we’re doing chores, paying bills, buying groceries, marking items off our checklist as we prepare to head to Texas for a wedding in early April and, with one phone call, all of that stuff fades into the background as what is truly important jumps to the fore.

Duty calls. Family calls. Nature calls. Love calls. The bugler’s call is loud and clear, and so we answer. There’s no thinking involved.

We are blessed. I know people and families for whom the answer to the trumpet’s song would be, “It’s about darned time; Tough luck!” So many families are estranged. So many family ties have been strained or outright broken.

Two women fly a thousand miles to visit their father – another father, another crisis. He awakens from his sleep in critical condition, looks at his children and mutters, “What the blazes are you doing here?” His words drip with venom. He closes his eyes and turns his head. There will be no Hollywood ending here (and there wasn’t).

Why are people mean? Why are people so toxic? Who knows. They’re easy to hate, a pleasure to avoid. While I like to think reconciliation is always a possibility, I know from experience that people walk the path they have either chosen or that’s been forced upon them, and unless we have walked that path alongside them, we cannot know what forces have warped their souls to such a point there is no return. That too, is life.

While their attitudes and actions may be miserably unconscionable, returning fire for fire is a dubious luxury I cannot afford. I have learned that that which burns up, burns down as well; I have enough wounds of my own to tend without applying anything as toxic as resentments or hatred to those wounds. In the words of the wise, it is enough to let go and let God. They are God’s to deal with, not mine.

I’ve also learned over the years that whenever I focus on the badness of others, I tend to ignore my own contributions to whatever is happening, and I forget to pay attention to what’s important. Like the old proverb puts it, “When you’re up to your rump in alligators, it’s easy to forget your job was to drain the swamp.” So, we focus on the task at hand and hold the reptiles at bay with the same stick we’re using to clear the drain.

In sum, I’m blessed. I love my father, and my siblings and we have been able to rally ‘round to tend to his needs. Each of us has his or her rough edges, to be sure, but each also has a strength and skill that allows us to work together, addressing the physical and emotional needs of the moment. We are all old enough we tire more quickly than we would like to admit or show, but those years have also given us the grace to move along and stay focused on the matters at hand.

I don’t believe there is any great Master Plan unfolding before us, or that our lives are predestined to reach a point where we’ve met or fulfilled our destiny. God has called us each to take care of one another, to be just and merciful, and to let the love of God be our guiding light.

 That’s the plan, anyway, here in this, our valley.