The Christian Writer’s Notebook

April third, 2006

The news yesterday of my father’s death obviously blew the day’s
creative productivity right off the itinerary. I am so thankful for the
sixteen years He allowed dad and I to have together.  My mom and dad
divorced when I was about five, and she kept him out of my whole
childhood. It wasn’t until 1989 when I was living in the Chicago burbs
that my sister located dad here in Lafayette Indiana, and set up our
first meeting in nearly two decades. Over the next five years we
visited regularly and developed a wonderful relationship. In May of
1994 I moved to Lafayette and stayed at his house until I got
established. Back then I was working on my fantasy work, White Iron.
Dad had focused his lifelong creative efforts into entrepreneurism, and
had started several companies, but never enjoyed any degree of success.
My bouncing ideas off the old guy nourished a drive that he never knew
he had, and in the late nineties, he funneled his creative energy into
his first fantasy novel. Like the work of any new fiction writer, it
was bad, but he had a natural gift for plot-development and in six or
seven years really learned how to turn a phrase. I’d been driven to
write my whole life, so my father’s new interest opened a commonality
that gave a new depth to our relationship. A few yeas ago dad
discovered elfwood.com, the web’s largest fantasy and science fiction
site. He made many friends there and after a year, founded Fantasy
Writers International, a writer’s club for aspiring novelists. In
January of 2005 he solicited FWI’s members for contributions to an
anthology of high fantasy. The anthology’s completion was delayed my a
family crisis involving his sister in California. He and my grandmother
flew to California to support my aunt. The trip dragged out longer than
anticipated, and the decision was made that dad would fly back to
Illinois and drive my grandmother’s car to San Deigo. On the evening of
April first, somewhere around Fort Worth Tx, the car left the road and
rolled. He was ejected from the vehicle and found some fifteen feet
away by paramedics. Dad was immediately alert and responsive, but once
in the ICU the only movement of which he was capable below the waist
was the movement of his big toes. Then he went unconscious. My brother
informed me that dad coded four times in the early AM hours of April
second and never regained consciousness. At about 7:30 PM my brother
again phoned phoned, this time with the news that dad had been declared
brain-dead.
C.S. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after Joy, his wife of three years,
was taken by cancer. After weeks of his soul’s torment Lewis turned a
corner. At this point he wondered why he couldn’t see that there was
nothing to do with suffering but suffer it. In 1996 these words
comforted me when my mother died of complications brought about by
Multiple Sclerosis. Lewis’ same words sustain me now.
Dad was so happy in the last years of his life, and although he was not
able to hold the finished book in his hands, assembling this anthology
for his fantasy fiction club was his dream come true. My wife, Cynthia,
is the anthology’s editor and told me last night that she’s decided to
see this project’s completion. Dad’s dream will be posthumously
realized. It has, over the last twenty-four hours, slowly occurred to
me that this book will stand, in my mind, as a memorial. Regardless of
any future success that I may enjoy as a novelist, this secular fantasy
anthology will undoubtedly stand as my life’s most meaningful published
work. It will be a physical symbol to the years with my father with
which He blessed us.
Thank you Father for the time with my father.