Finishing a Father's Journey

Steve Martin is known best for his early work in absurd comedy but he has also evolved into a serious art collector, playwright, and fine writer. In his memoir, ”Born Standing Up” he revisits the death of his father. Growing up in Waco, Texas, Steve remembers his feelings toward his father as mostly ones of hatred as his father was cold and stern. He was critical of Steve’s career and their relationship was awkward at best:

“In his early 80’s my father’s health declined further and he became bedridden. There must be an instinct about when the end is near as we all found ourselves gathered at my parents’ home in Orange County California. I walked into the house they had lived in for 35 years and my weeping sister said, ‘He’s saying goodbye to everyone.’

A hospice nurse said to me, ‘This is when it all happens.’ I didn’t know what she meant, but soon I did.

I walked into the bedroom where he lay, his mind alert but his body failing. He said almost buoyantly, ‘I’m ready now.’ I understood that his intensifying rage of the last few years had been against death and now his resistance was abating. I stood at the end of the bed and we looked into each other’s eyes for a long unbroken time. At last he said, ‘You did everything I wanted to do.’

I said the truth: ‘I did it for you.’

Looking back, I’m sure that we both had different interpretations of what I meant.

I sat on the edge of the bed and another silence fell over us. Then he said, ‘I wish I could cry. I wish I could cry.’

At first, I took this as a comment on his condition but am forever thankful that I pushed on. ‘What do you want to cry about?’ I finally said.

‘For all the love I received and couldn’t return.’

He had kept this secret, his desire to love his family, from me and from my mother his whole life. It was as though an early misstep had kept us forever out of stride. Now two days from his death, our pace was aligning and we were able to speak.”

Read again the Genesis account of Abram’s leaving Haran and his father’s family to strike out on his own calling and you will notice he had begun the journey to Canaan but never completed it. Instead, he had settled in Haran.

Life changed for Terah on the way to somewhere else. He took the wheels off the mobile home and settled half-way there. It was not a detour or side road or wrong turn but a rest stop that became a residence. There is a powerful urge to settle in, to find a comfortable place and still feel like you are on the way. Haran was an interesting place. It was not out of the way or off the road. There was lots of activity with traders, travelers, new ideas, and interesting experiences. There was the illusion of going somewhere by constant exposure to people who were.

You’ve just stopped for a bit. But that bit becomes a lifetime. I can imagine them after a while continuing to talk about the dream to reach Canaan or even reminiscing about Ur and saying, “Tomorrow or the next day we are going to get on our way to Canaan. We’ve not stopped. We’re just taking a break.”

Abram was being called in a sense to finish his father’s journey as part of his own.

There was a time in my life when I would have thought each generation has their own dream and no right to foist it on the next. To live vicariously through your children or to allow yourself to carry the burden of a father’s dream for his own life was completely unacceptable. My job as a son was to find my own mission independent of my family. My task as a parent was to help my children discover their own path free of mine. Whatever my unfinished journey to “Canaan” was should not determine what they do with their lives. I believed then that God’s desire is for each of us to live out our own mission, regardless of previous generations and not with any thought about those who follow. And then I read Genesis and realized it may take hundreds of years and a stream of generations to accomplish the work of God. Our life is connected to those who came before and those who follow. We are not a collection of independent short stories. There is no disconnected individual journey. Our lives are chapters in a novel whose author has woven us together to accomplish His purpose – one life at a time.

“You did everything I wanted to do.”

“I did it for you.”

This is an excerpt from “Where The Light Divides”