Conception Abbey
Conception, Missouri
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Conception Abbey Conception, Missouri |
Tower Topics ~ Spring 2006 |
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Gifts from my favorite convert
Soon thereafter, he and my grandmother converted to Catholicism. Six decades later, a third-generation Catholic, I walked into Oklahoma City’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. I tapped the holy water with my finger tip and made the sign of the cross like I had done countless times before. I felt the same ache just above my right hip when I kneeled for the Eucharistic Prayer (That’s a fairly recent development that I believe has to do with age and too much basketball). Before the Gospel I mumbled as I crossed my thumb on my head, on my lips and on my chest. I grinned at how things come full circle as I listened to Father Edward Weisenburger, an alumnus of the seminary college I work for, deliver a beautiful homily on how Christ can comfort us and walk beside us through the great fears of life – loneliness, loss of independence, illness, death. And I felt the familiar stirring inside as I chanted “Eternal rest grant unto him, and may the Perpetual Light shine upon him.” The wish of rest was our gift to a man who had struggled mightily, and who gave many gifts, not always recognizable to the recipients. Vernon Whittle was no saint, no leader of great acclaim, and not always the best father. He had a loud laugh and was probably a better golfer in his mind than on the actual links. Like me, he used humor to mask insecurities and anxiety. He tended to repeat himself a lot, and was hungry for approval from others. He was stubbornly Republican and told my younger sisters that it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as it is to marry a poor one (Neither heeded his advice). Vernon Whittle moved his family around so much in his younger days that my mother attended 18 different schools between kindergarten and graduation from high school. But my grandfather was a generous man. He once asked my dad and me to help buy a VCR. We talked him into buying the most expensive one, loaded with all the bells and whistles. We said he and Grandma should get something nice that will last. He bought it; we took it home and hooked it up. I was thrilled to be able to watch movies during our visit. But on the morning we were to depart, Grandpa, to our surprise and embarrassment, unplugged the VCR, put it back in the box and handed it to my dad. It was our Christmas present. That was his mischievous plan all along, even while we were telling him, “What’s another $80? Buy the Sony.” My grandfather had a toothy grin like President Jimmy Carter, and like his fellow Oklahoman, Will Rogers, he never met a man he didn’t like. Vernon Whittle was a patient man. One December, my parents left my siblings and me with our grandparents while they went on a trip to Hawaii sponsored by my father’s employer. Grandpa agreed to drive us from Oklahoma City back home to Missouri to save our parents from having to retrieve us. He drove 450 miles with four kids bent on fighting over every inch of the back seat. One sister was car sick the whole way, the other tattled all the time. I tried to “help” the beleaguered old man by bossing my sisters and hitting my little brother at random intervals. My brother giggled and ignored Grandpa’s repeated commands to stop playing with the electric windows. And we all whined incessantly when a sibling so much as touched us. To top it off we unwittingly were driving into one of the worst blizzards ever to hit the Kansas Turnpike. Somewhere near Wichita, the bzzzzzzt-bzzzzzzzt-bzzzzzzzt of my brother’s electric window escapades ended with a crash. The window pane had fallen inside the car door, exposing the back seat to snow, ice, wind and surely Grandpa’s wrath. But he did not fall prey to darker impulses, choosing rather to patch the window with clothing and grimly drive on to the promised land where he could joyously hand us over to our tanned and rested parents, and return to a world without children. This patient man, whether we knew it at the time or not, instilled patience in all of us. When he died a few days before last Christmas Day, which would have been my grandparents’ 64th wedding anniversary, my grandfather, and my grandmother for that matter, had endured much hardship for more than two decades. Alzheimer’s disease began eroding my grandfather’s mind in his 60s. He spent the last decade of his life unable at most times to recognize his wife, let alone his daughters and grandchildren. By the time he died he was blind and unable to speak or even feed himself.
One afternoon not too long ago, my grandmother, as she always did, leaned over and kissed my grandpa on the lips. Opening his eyes, he smiled and said, “Now I know who you are. You’re my wife.” Like the sun peeking through passing clouds, the clarity was gone as quickly as it came. Last November, about a month before he died, I drove alone to Oklahoma to visit my grandmother and go see my grandfather for the last time. While I was there, my grandmother seemed like a young girl. We went out to eat, we fought over the check. On a whim, she suggested we go see the Dolly Parton concert that was in town that night. We skipped it after learning that tickets were $85 a piece, and then joked about what kinds of surgeries Dolly would get with that kind of money. At night, we watched videos of Daniel O’Donnell, the handsome, honey-voiced singer on whom my grandmother has had a December-May crush since she first saw his show in Branson, Mo. I got to know my grandmother in a new way. She later called me her “buddy,” and like a child I felt I had some special status over everyone else in the family. We drove the 250 miles to Texas to see my grandfather. I joked with him that they’d finally let me out of jail, one of his old standard quips, but there was no response. I told him I loved him, but, again, no response. He slept through the entire visit. As I walked from the nursing home with my disappointed grandmother, I said, “Don’t worry about it; maybe when he’s sleeping he remembers in his dreams.” Then we drove back to Oklahoma City, the stereo blasting Willie Nelson music all the way. Thank you, Grandpa.
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My grandfather, Vernon Whittle, returned from military duty at the end of World War
II and told my grandmother, “Those Catholic boys have something we don’t.”
Through the long years when her husband didn’t know who she was, Grandma
continued to tend to him, in later years driving back and forth between Oklahoma
City and Bonham, Tex., where he lived in a special veterans nursing home. She talked
to him, she bought him clothes, she hung updated pictures of his family on the walls,
and she signed his name for him on our birthday and Christmas cards. Grandpa was
unable to say thank you in the traditional ways; there were no words, no gestures.