The Healing Journey

November 7, 2024

“When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him lies on the paths of men.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Of the five siblings in Margaret’s family, she thought she knew her father the best. After all, she was the oldest, and she was the nurse who monitored his care and who brought him to the hospital whenever there was a crisis during those last five years of medical complications.

She was the one who talked to the doctors for him and interpreted what they said. She was the one who calmed him down when he insisted that he was leaving the hospital and no one was going to stop him. And she thought that sometimes they were so close he probably told her things that he didn’t want his wife to know because he didn’t think she could handle it.

During his last days, she made all the arrangements. She got him into Hospice and stayed close to him until he died peacefully, surrounded by his family. She made the funeral arrangements and helped her mother select the grave, the songs, and the holy cards. She also stood beside her mother as the people arrived at the wake to pay their respects.

But in those moments she discovered she didn’t know all there was to know about her father because so many people shared stories that she had never heard. She knew her father was a recovering alcoholic, but she had no idea the number of people he helped get sober, including a man who came into Alcoholics Anonymous when he was 24 and now had 40 years of sobriety. When he walked through the doors it seemed his life was over when it should be just beginning, and her father took him under his wing and saved his life.

But that wasn’t all. Her father had also helped this man’s father get sober. And there were others, eager to share how one man had brought them back from the precipice and helped them find a new life a day at a time. That night when she lay in bed, she uttered a silent prayer, “Thank you, Dad, for all that you did.”

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