…

My father was a complicated person, who grew more mysterious to me the older we both got.

I’ve shared parts of his story before…

He didn’t have an easy life. He was the third youngest of 8. His older brother was a Golden Gloves champion who taught him how to defend himself and his sisters.

He grew up in the hardest of times during America’s Great Depression. Money was scarce.

He remembered his mother serving hot soup to the hobos and homeless men who walked the alley behind his family’s home, all searching for work and food.

He did what every young man of his generation did after December 7, 1941 – he volunteered for the war effort. He was good in math and so became a navigator of a B-17 crew in Europe. His plane was shot down during a mission, killing two of the crew members, but he parachuted safely and spent almost a year as a POW in Stalag Luft 3.

He and his fellow prisoners endured a forced march deeper into Germany as the Russians advanced, until he was eventually liberated by General Patton’s troops. He had contracted tuberculosis and was starving, literally, but he had survived! He was going home.

He thought he had a sweetheart waiting for him in San Antonio but after taking the first train there once he got home her mother told him she had married while he had been a captive and she had not told him because she didn’t want him to suffer more than he already was. He took a train back to Louisville, Kentucky that same night and moved on.

He met and married my mom, a registered nurse, who would support him while he got his BA degree. He was a very good student and was offered a scholarship to Harvard Business School.

They were very poor. They already had a daughter, my older sister, and before he graduated, they had me. So earning a chance at the Golden Ring of success that Harvard offered seemed an answer to prayer. But he had felt a different calling and my mom told me late in her life that she had felt it too. So he turned Harvard down and got a graduate degree in theology instead. My parents had decided to become missionaries.

They took 3 young kids (10, 8, and 4) halfway around the world to Malaya, where they built and pastored a church in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

On a mission trip to the east coast of Malaya, my father met a Muslim man in a small fishing village and left him a Bible in the Malay language because the man asked him to. It was, and is, illegal to convert any Muslim, but when that same man showed up months later at my dad’s church in PJ  asking to be baptized, my father baptized him.

Luckily, my parents weren’t arrested or imprisoned but after that term of service ended in 1970, they were not allowed back into what had then become Malaysia.

They moved back to the States, my mother and youngest sister settling in Waco, Texas to be near my older sister, while my father, now 48, lived in New York City, attending Columbia University for his PhD in Pyschology. Once he had his doctorate, he accepted a job as head of the Psychology Department at a small college in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and so they moved once again.

In what he later told me was the worst mistake of his life, he asked my mother for a divorce and spent the second half of his life without the woman who had most loved and supported him. He broke her heart.

She moved back to Louisville, Kentucky, her home town, to care for her oldest sister in the final stages of her life. She never remarried, and she never stopped loving him.

He eventually ended up in Sequim, Washington, in a lovely home that looked over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, with bald eagles nesting in the trees and deer munching on his front yard plants. He had by then remarried, a wonderful Chinese woman, much younger, whom he named “Hope,” who took wonderful care of him and encouraged him to stay active and travel widely in the last third of his life.

He made good friends, as he did everywhere he lived. In his final year, he was the guest of honor at his neighborhood’s July 4th Parade. They were proud to have a POW and a living member of the Greatest Generation in their midst.

I was there with him when he died, just days short of his 92nd birthday, of pancreatic cancer, in 2014.

My dad lived a really long and interesting life.

He laughed a lot. He cried sometimes too.

And he never ever failed to make me feel loved.

Near the end of his life, days before he passed, he had been mostly unconscious, sleeping deeply, when he woke and asked me how Paris was doing. He knew I had a client there and was always interested in their progress. I told him all was well, and he smiled and went back to sleep.

The last thing he said to me was, “I love you, Doug. Thanks for coming.”

My father made lots of mistakes, as I have with my son. As all fathers do with all sons.

He was human. He was flawed.

And he was my dad and I was – am – proud to say that.

I miss him a lot.

I wish I could hear his voice and give him a tight hug today and make him laugh out loud.

He would’ve loved that too.