Mountains and Men

On this day three years ago, I stood in a room with my brother and sister and watched my dad take his last breath. Even now I can’t really describe to you what that feels like to watch the man I’d grown to respect and love not just as a “father” but as a friend and mentor slip away when I’d expected him to be there for many years to come. The last thing I’d written about my dad that other people have read up until this point was his resignation letter to the church he was the pastor of when he died and a quick post on this blog. I can’t remember exactly when, but not long after he passed I told myself that I wouldn’t write anything substantial about him for other people to read for a year. After a year, each time I tried I found that I just couldn’t do it. The words wouldn’t come, until today. Why that was the case turns out to be a testament to the man Mickey Leon Basham Sr was to his last day.

I want to start this out by telling my friends who don’t consider themselves believers in anything that I love you and that I’m glad you’re here. Just as a heads up, this story isn’t a lot like my other ones. It’s not likely to be all that funny and it won’t hurt my feelings if you stop here and wait for the next hilarious story I post. However, if you bear with me, at the very least it’ll explain the “me” I’ve been over the years.

You see, I was raised in church. We used to joke that I was in church nine months before I was born. From day one I was prayed for and over by countless family, friends, and little old ladies in churches all over Tennessee. By the time I’d gotten to high school I’d already wrestled with the idea of “is this my faith or just something my parents taught me” like Santa Clause or the Easter bunny. That faith informed a lot of my decisions over the years and set a foundation early in my life, like marrying my beautiful bride Amy even when we were so young. I’m not going to pretend I was some kind of super-Christian. I had, and have, my faults. My wife knows them, my friends have seen them. However, my life in general was one where I tried to depend on that relationship with God to make not just good decisions, but the right ones. It’s not that my life has been easy. I’ve worked hard jobs, Amy and I survived some days at college sharing a plate of black beans and rice from the University Center cafeteria for $1.50 ($1.75 if we splurged and got sour cream), and more than once found ourselves with too much month and too little paycheck. However, I can say without a doubt that up until three years ago my faith had never truly been tested.

Amy and I were a month into our Italy adventure when I got a facetime call on my iPad. There, laying in a hospital bed my dad told me that he had terminal cancer. I held it together long enough to tell him that I loved him but after the call was over I sank to the floor in a corner of our apartment and wept hard (which is just the King James Version of “ugly crying”). He had over the last few years become something more than just “Dad”. I depended on him for his wisdom, I knew he would give it to me straight. The child / parent relationship had become something else, and now I was going to lose him and that relationship. Every time I thought about it, even now really, it tears my heart out. Two days after learning the news I was on a plane headed home to be with him and my mom to the end, but I didn’t realize at the time that it was going to be a three-year long journey.

The three months leading up to my dad’s death was the most emotionally wracking experience I’ve had to date. Emotional highs of retelling stories and spending time with him in the beginning; and heart crushing lows of coming the grips with the slow, steady, and visible decline of his health and sobbing with my head in my hands in a quiet corner of the house. It breaks my heart to this day that those last few days what I saw laying in that bed hurt my heart so badly that I wasn’t praying anymore, I was begging God to let my father die. Through it all the members of his church were some of the most loving and caring people I’ve seen on earth. I’m still carrying around some of the weight that I gained eating the food they cooked and brought to us every day for those three months. I have never seen an outpouring of love and caring from people like that before, but that’s not because it had never been there, it’s because I’d never been in that position until that moment.

Not long after his passing we were all getting cleaned up as the last 72 hours had been non-stop watching over him. I likely hadn’t had a shower in days. As I stood in the shower crying and trying to come to grips with the soul crushing sadness butted up against the shame of feeling relief that it was over something happened to me that I never, ever, expected. I got angry. No, not angry, furious. Of all the men on planet earth, this was the one to get cancer? There wasn’t some psychopathic dictator it could have happened to? How about that guy in North Korea starving his people to death and brainwashing them into believing he’s a deity, there’s a good candidate. No, instead it was a man who had dedicated almost forty years of his life caring for others in need, sitting beside the dying, and through it all trying to connect people with a God who cared. Except now, it didn’t feel like a caring God.

I should probably mention here that, strangely enough, the question of whether God even existed only briefly came up in my mind. That question had long been settled in my mind. To my friends who aren’t Christ followers who have made it this far, I apologize for it sounding a bit arrogant. I know that it can be a little off-putting to hear someone say that with certainty. Because of what our life was like at that time I had a lot of time on my hands to think about this kind of stuff. By the time I’d returned to Italy I’d started a routine. Practically every day I would have a conversation with God, though I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it prayer. That conversation would inevitably end in furious anger, and I would take it and shove that into the deepest darkest corner of my mind…and then open it the next day and start again. I wasn’t arguing to myself or with God the question of “how can a good God let bad things happen?”, but rather, “how do I trust God when this happens to a man like my father?” Why him? If anyone wants to know all the “deep” thoughts I had on those questions you can take me out for coffee, but for this story it’s just enough to know that I struggled with it, day-in and day-out, for a year and half.

Before that year and a half was up I sat down to write about my dad on the anniversary of his death, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write it for the blog, I couldn’t post something on Facebook, I even muted the group chat my family shares on our phones. Instead I just muted everything and sank deeply into the ways I’d found to cope. I do want to say that it wasn’t that I didn’t get to enjoy the time we had in Europe. It was an adventure. Amy and I got to travel, see things we’d never seen, experience things we’d never thought we’d experience, but through it all there was a deep anger and sadness crammed deep into a corner of my heart. Soon after we returned home I found myself back in my old job at Seacoast church doing I.T. I’d missed the people, and the job, and to be honest I’m grateful God made it possible for me to go back (sorry Brendon :)  ). However, months after returning I found myself in Pastor Michael Morris’ office. I’d finally broken down to the point that I needed something to budge. Either I was going to trust God again, or I was going to walk in a spiritual wilderness knowing God was there but being disconnected from Him by my own choice. In that office I unloaded quite a bit and that loving man looked me in the eyes and spoke words that truly were those of my dad. I would love to say that I walked out of that office and everything was ok, it wasn’t. However, while the nearly soul crushing sadness was still there, there was no anger and I was grateful. What had replaced it though, was a numbness that lasted until a week ago.

Trust in God is more than an intellectual thing, it requires that you follow it up with action. I wouldn’t tell Amy that I trusted her but track her every move and read every email she got, that’s not trust. The problem for me was that I was finding it hard to put that trust in God into action. I was numb. When we attended services on Sunday (if I didn’t find a good excuse to just stream it over the internet) I didn’t feel like worshiping, it didn’t move me. I searched the sermons for good advice and ways to be a better person but never for how those things could connect me to God. I still felt broken, and I was worried that this is just the way it was going to be. Then, a few months ago, my wife (forever obsessed with camping and hiking) convinced me to sign up to do a backpacking trip with other men from Seacoast. Four days off work, no phone, no emails, no distractions, sure why not?  There were some meetings leading up to it, a lot of us had never done that kind of thing before and we had to go over what would be needed, what gear we had and needed to borrow, things like that. Along with it we spent some time getting to know the guys we were going to hike with and talking about what else we might get out of the hike. I had no expectations.

There’s a lot to unpack (no pun intended) about what those four days on the mountain did for me, but here is not the place for all of it. There is one particular thing though, that made this post possible three years later. The first night into the hike we had chosen verses that had been laminated on little strips of paper after sitting down for dinner around the fire. After a long day of hiking and thinking about the anniversary of my dad’s death that was coming a week later this verse brought me to tears. Around that campfire with eighteen other Christian men, I poured out the ache in my heart I’d been carrying for three years and the fear that after all this time it had left me permanently numb and broken. I looked forward to almost nothing, I had a love for my wife but little passion, I had a trust in God but no real connection. We had been asked before the first hike started, “What do you want out of this hike?” What I had wanted and asked for during that first day was an answer, and there in my hand, was that answer. I picked this verse at random out of a bag, but I believe there is little in life that is truly coincidence:

“Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.”
                                                                                                                                (James 1:12 NIV)

Why him? Why my dad? That’s why.

The last gift my father gave me was an example. The example of a man facing death and having no fear, his faith as strong as an oak in the face of pain and suffering. What I didn’t know is that I’d need that example over the next three years. Amidst my own pain that example drove me to seek an answer that I could just as easily have given up on. That verse also spoke to me. I had spent three years with a different kind of cancer eating at my soul, and I left it on that mountain.

Thank you Dad. Not a day goes by that don’t wish I could talk to you, but I’m forever grateful that you left me a legacy and example to follow. Mickey L. Basham Sr, a good and honorable man. God grant that I live up to your example.

Want to Share?

email

Twitter

Facebook