Homeschooled to Hell and Back

I might never have returned to look my demons — literal or figurative — in the face had I not gotten the call about my father’s illness. My dad, whom I had hated and loved in a roller coaster of extreme emotions — hating the counselor, loving my parent. Fearing his judgment, loving his quiet moments of approval: the smell of his study, and of his cologne, his head buried deep in lexicons and Jay Adams books, racking his brain over and over again for the biblical principles to set me free. And yet, in the end, it was his laying down of it all that sprung me loose from a lifetime of terror and longing that I couldn’t beat myself.

My father was, in himself, a house divided — complex, both wild and controlled. He was full of anger and love, grief and giddy delight — waking us up to climb onto the roof with him for a meteor shower one night, dragging us all to Costa Rica to hand out food to street prostitutes, and, years later, quietly laughing at our sneaking to the edges of our property, where my mother couldn’t see us, to take long drags of cannabis.

My first week home, three men pulled up in large Ford pick-up trucks and white suburbans, coming to anoint my father with oil to heal the bulging growth on his neck. The following week, a close friend sat across from him on my mother’s pleather Ikea chair to read about visions of a God whose robe fills a massive temple. “And seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings, calling out to another and — ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory!’” (Isaiah 6:2).

Prayer requests were shared. Fasting took place. And, as everyone around me pleaded for the power of a living God to save my dying father, he and I began to have conversations to heal our relationship before he left me.

It’s a powerful spiritual experience — the recovery from an acute illness, the death of a loved one, the visit to a shrine, or the experience of a prayer answered — felt uniquely, for a single person, that ultimately creates a believer out of a person prone to belief. It’s the getting that matters — that ability to touch and be touched by faith, and to hold it as your own. According to the research I’ve conducted regarding faith and belief, unique experience also has the power to reveal when a person is not religiously inclined. I didn’t let go of the evil I still believed defined me until my father began to die.

I was 26 when chemotherapy and radiation first wrecked my dad’s body, burning his face to a big, bulbous shape and sapping him of his spirits. During his first round of radiation, he choked on his own blood and was afraid he’d die. In the weeks following, as his vision was partially blocked by a scotoma, he was plagued by panic attacks and a fear of death by suffocation.

It is, perhaps, in acceptance of the division of the human spirit, belief and behavior — the non-compliance of a self that must go its own way — that we are able to find peace. And it was my dad’s experience of his own anxiety that, in the end, allowed us to lay down arms.

He spent the last months of his life asking me if we were okay, telling me how he loved me — finally giving me the unconditional love and acceptance I’d hungered for for most my life. And, in those months, our love began to heal me.

“I’m sorry,” he told me. “What we put you through — I hope you can forgive me.”

“It is not ours to determine when we die,” our pastor used to say to me. And, yet, it was my father and I, together, who finally looked death in the face, together, and gave ourselves over to the disease that wrecked his body. Some whispered that it was a punishment for sin; others said that it was a trial of faith. But, for us, together, it was simply the great equalizer: death, not an evil come to take our joy, but a human experience — painful, real, unrelated to anything either of us had ever done to induce good or evil to descend upon us.

God didn’t scatter my father’s body — dust to dust, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean on the border of Mexico and San Diego. I picked him up in a small, black box and I held him while my mom and my brothers and my grandfather dug their fingers into the ash and small, white, brittle chunks of bone, and scattered him into the wake of a big, white sailboat.

In the weeks following, for the first time in my life I experienced real communication with a spirit. My father came to visit me in the dark , telling me of how he loved me, of how he accepted me as I was, of how he was also grieving, at losing his life too soon. Our wordless conversations lulled me to sleep as I layed in the dark, comforted by the presence of a love that surpassed all fear until, on one particular day, he surprised me by standing in my kitchen, quietly asking if it was okay with me if he moved on for good.

He has never visited me again but, since that day, I have had dreams, on and off, of angelic figures flying around a holy throne with my father.

Alone with my lack of belief in the faith he held onto, I find comfort in a kind of scotoma of my own — a hope that, somewhere, my father is enjoying an eternity of his own making, dancing through all the dark places blessed by a God so full of love and acceptance that my dad disappears completely in the fullness of his light.