Time Piece

This is a meditative piece about my stepdad Fred Gindraux. I'm writing from his trailer in rural north Idaho. A thundershower just passed between the two hills in whose little valley we lay. Now the rain only falls from the edges of trees, grass, fences, mailboxes, a few scattered buildings. But mostly green things now made more green by the the rain.

I'm here because my stepdad is slowly dying from brain cancer, and Mom needs some help. It's a strange feeling to care for someone like this. Now I understand the goal of hospice, to help people die with dignity--not by suicide, but to face death with compassion, not embarrassment. So as I watch this man sleep, and talk, and lose human functions day by day, I see a beautiful man: people mourn the collapse of a museum more than they mourn an old shack falling down.

My stepdad is a museum of victories and failures. He is a living soul who has spent 69 years toiling in this world (25,465 days since his birth). That should mean something. Yet redwood trees and Galapagos tortoises are far older before they die; but being human matters. We are made in God's image.

William Paley once compared God to a watchmaker as he saw evidence in human beings that our bodies are too complex and organized to be an accident; we were designed. The watch analogy eventually fails, but it is still a powerful metaphor for human life.

My dad is like a watch. Not a digital watch; an honest-to-goodness pocketwatch that if made transparent, would display many intricate parts all working in concert.

His great-grandfather was a watchmaker in Switzerland. My stepdad inherited a love for machines and a great skill for precision work. In a way, he truly is a time piece. To know him is to both experience sadness and admiration. His life, as for all of us, is running out of time. Clocks do not run in reverse. May we wisely use the time we have been given. Right now, one of my goals is to simply make those remaining days & weeks as comfortable as possible for him, and to support my mom... though I don't always know how.