It may sound unusual, but I started my career in political analysis by arguing with my eighth-grade American history teacher. As a spunky 13-year-old taking on a seasoned liberal Bill Clinton voter, I needed two mentors to make that possible: Rush Limbaugh and my Dad. We all lost Rush in 2021. I just buried my Dad two weeks ago.
Even typing those words still hurts, and it’s taken me some time to be able to write them.
In a way, Dad’s passing was a relief because I didn’t want him to suffer anymore, and he finally arrived in “Sweet Beulah Land,” the longed-for home spoken of in his favorite song of that title. But I wasn’t really ready to say goodbye.
Dwight Clyde, Dad, was like all of us — a sinner in need of the saving grace of Jesus Christ. He had glaring, painful flaws, but he clung to his Savior, and I believe he rejoices with the heavenly throng today.
But life can be hard. Among other health challenges, he suffered from frontotemporal dementia, a somewhat rare but brutal disease. That was particularly so for Dad, who battled a mix of even rarer subtypes that affected speech and mobility. By the end, he couldn’t walk, and he would often give up trying to say something because he couldn’t find the words. “Oh, never mind,” he told me when failing to get a story going over Labor Day weekend while we watched “Andy Griffith” reruns.
“It’s okay, Dad.”
It was a cruel disease to endure for a man of many words. Literally. I remember Dad occasionally reading the dictionary to boost his vocabulary. When I was a teen, he taught a Sunday school series on the history of the Reformation, for which he studied for countless hours and read dozens of books.
Speaking of books, you wouldn’t believe his library. When we moved Mom and Dad out of their house two years ago because it was too much for them to manage, I sorted and packed 175 boxes of books for him — history, politics, theology, you name it. He couldn’t pack them himself, but he knew where each one was and what it was.
The family joke was that he loved his books and his family deeply, but we weren’t sure which ranked number one.
Jokes were one of his primary gifts to me. Dad was always teasing Mom, my younger sister, and me, sharing a pun — especially with one of those highfalutin dictionary words — or otherwise being silly to make the people around him laugh. A mischievous grin would spread across his face before delivering his one-liner, so you knew something was coming.
He had a temper (that, doggone it, I got from him), but he often dealt with life’s hardships with jokes, and that’s a gift I both treasure and find very useful. In the last couple of years, he couldn’t really laugh anymore; he’d just turn red and shake a little when he’d crack himself up. That, too, was funny. He even made his hospice nurse laugh.
When we had to dismantle my parents’ king bed to bring in a hospital bed for him and a twin for Mom, he took to calling his wife of 52 years his “neighbor.” When my daughter wheeled him to the family room each day, he’d call her his Uber driver. As I helped him shuffle from wheelchair to recliner while holding his arm and hand, he smirked and said, “I never thought I’d be dancing with my son.”
What I wouldn’t give to laugh with him one more time.
Mom and Dad knew each other all their lives. Their families attended the same church, pastored by Dad’s dad, Clyde. Clyde led Earl, Mom’s dad, to the Lord and officiated Mom’s parents’ wedding. A couple of decades later, he did likewise for Mom and Dad’s wedding.
Dad was ordained soon after and worked as a Baptist pastor for four years. Knowing that his draft number was coming, he enlisted in the Air Force and served four years, mostly in Germany as a mechanic on the F-4 Phantom II.
He took those skills and eventually landed (pun intended) a job at McDonnell Douglas working on the new F/A-18 Hornet. Early on, he was laid off twice, including the week he brought his newborn son (me) home from the hospital, but he persevered, finding other work to bridge the gaps and turning that job at McDonnell (later bought by Boeing) into a 35-year career.
He turned down promotions so he could keep working near the planes he loved. But as I learned at the funeral, he also loved his crew. Dad was a foreman for most of those 35 years. He retired 12 years before he died, and several of his crew members came to the visitation to pay their respects to what each one of them called “the best boss they ever had.” I was floored. Not because I didn’t think my Dad was a pretty great guy, but because you’d have to be one heck of a boss for your former crew members to come to your funeral a dozen years later. I guess when your hairspray habits lead to the beloved nickname “Slick,” you’ve developed quite the rapport.
Though he never flew in one, Dad loved military jets because they’re fast (and loud). He also loved fast cars. In fact, one of his crew guys laughed as he recounted having left work ahead of Slick, who was always the last one out, only to see a “streak of red” fly by on the interstate. Yep, that was Dad. “By the book on everything,” said another crew member, “except behind the wheel of his car.”
I guess that describes all of us. We all do pretty well with some or even most things, but we have vices that can cause trouble. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,” Jesus said. The glorious gospel message is that none of our sins is beyond the power of Jesus to redeem.
That’s what Dad taught me via the first verse he helped me memorize, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
As I write this, I’m listening to one of Dad’s favorite Southern Gospel groups, The Cathedrals. In their song “The Man I Used to Be,” this is the chorus:
And I know I’m not the man that I ought to be
Many times I fall short of what You want in me
And I’m surely not the man I really want to be
But thank God, I’m not the man I used to be
That was Dad. Not always the man he ought to be, but not the man he used to be. Today, he is made whole — he can walk, he can remember every word he ever learned, and I guarantee you he’s making people laugh.
Dad, I love you so much, and as I told you Labor Day weekend, I’ll see you next time.
