I Married Doc's Daughter

I married Doc’s daughter!

The tomboy that became dad’s right hand for most anything dad did!

The substitute when Mary, his wife, could not accompany him.

The [only] one of four boys and four girls that dared challenge Doc.

The only one who could bring this 250+ pounder to his knees when all else failed.

The one person on whom this pioneer Oklahoma family depended in time of need.

In marrying her, I now know I gained a whole new family.

Doc’s youngest daughter was born into a family that was part of the 1906 homestead rush that transformed the Indian Territory into the State of Oklahoma—1906. ”Tomcat”, as Doc nick-named her, was my wife for 70.5 years. While Doc intended her to be the son that followed him into medicine, her life took a new direction when she and I met. It happened in Anderson, Indiana at tiny Anderson College (now “AU”) the night “Jumping’ Johnny Wilson” changed the course of athletic history at “AC”.

She was a freckle-faced girl when I made her my bride. She had the prettiest, blackest hair I had ever seen. Her pint-sized frame exuded energy, like the Energizer Bunny she just kept going. Superbly intelligent, strong-willed, sometimes strongly opinionated; she had been gregarious, witty, and unendingly energetic … except now she was recovering from a recent streak of sudden ill-health.

We had determined to spend our lives together and without either of our families present we married in St Louis under the pastoral direction of my then Pastor, Dr. Harold Boyer, in whom we thought the sun rose and set. Now four months later; she sat in San Antonio, TX, at the Fort Sam Houston clinic of her Army Gynecologist and listened quietly to his superior officer inform her she would live no more than three months, twelve at the outside. 

It shaped a death sentence that announced in 1947”… cancer in the last stages. You will live three to twelve months, not more than a year … The most humane thing you can do is go to Chicago, to the Cancer Institute. They will care for you and provide your husband work.”

The carefully-chosen words of the kindly Army Colonel silently launched an unavoidable missile that smashed all those dreams into a thousand falling shivers of broken glass - forever shattered. She had been a bright, happy teenager in spite of a difficult childhood. She had enjoyed a good start at the University of Tulsa where she would fulfill the dream she and Doctor Dad shared, and be a medical doctor like Doc.

It was a dream none of his four sons would accept. When a would-be suitor began pressing for marriage rather than education, dad detoured her pre-med studies and transferred her to the family’s small church college in Anderson, IN for a year of sound bible study under the personal oversight of Dean Russell Olt.

Unexpectedly, she became critically ill toward the end of that fall term of 1946, underwent emergency surgery, and was in recovery, forced to temporarily discontinue her studies for health reasons. I had thumbed my way to the Anderson Campus from Scott Field, IL, en route on furlough to visit my parents in MI. Being a former student, I stopped to visit campus friends and discovered a big ballgame that evening. That immediately aroused my interest and gave me a way to connect for a few hours with former friends and I could go home the following day.

I now know that game held huge significance for Anderson College. It turned a corner in the history of “AC” athletics and formed a never-to-be-forgotten moment for AC Alumni. Moreover, it provided the right setting for me to meet Tommie, when I sought date time with friend Jeannie. Jeannie did not reciprocate, to my disappointment, but we remained friends and both came out with winners.

That evening our tiny, unknown church college, a one-time Bible college attempting to fulfill a liberal arts standard entertained top-ranked NC State Wolfpack, a nationally rated University that kept a basketball team in contention for a top honors in NCAA basketball competition. The game resulted in a barn-burning melee as the unheard-of “AC Ravens” pushed nationally-ranked NC State into a third overtime before losing by a point. This came following the superb effort of local Anderson High School star “Jumping Johnny Wilson.” 

After seven decades of marriage, I painfully watched this still “freckle-faced girl” slowly loosen the bonds holding her to me as she terminated our earthly existence together. It was 2005 when she finally exited the Freeway and I became her fulltime Care Giver for another seven years during which she steadily becomes home-bound. After suffering a months-long siege of flu and pneumonia in Kentucky, she could not return home so I held down the fort and visited as much as possible.

That finally became so dissatisfactory that I closed the house and set up housekeeping with her in Kentucky where I again provided full-time care for two more years as she awaited her exit into the celestial realms, increasingly savoring her face-to-face encounter with her Savior. Remaining quite aware during those last stages of recruiting outside help, moving quickly through Palliative Care and bringing in Hospice, she anxiously awaited stepping through the curtain and waving good bye to her beloved family.

She remained fully satisfied with God’s reprieve that extended the three to twelve month sentence pronouncing her death sentence at the age of twenty. She had no doubt God had commuted that sentence and given her seventy-one very useful years of life — loving — laughing — lifting — learning and she had intentionally spent it with reckless abandon, forever determined to give herself rather than waste her second life.

Her simple prayer before we left San Antonio with my 1947 discharge had been, “Lord: if you have something for me to do, help me to do it; if not, I’m ready to go. Just please, relieve the intense pain.” After more than seventy years she slipped from my grasp; and although I have family … I have dear friends … and I have faith, death remains an ugly pit into whose depth I cannot pierce. Today I sit tearless at my key board in grief's silent solitude and think back and remember . . .

I pull from the shelf the NIV Study Bible my son gave me on one of my birthdays long ago. Inside he inscribed these words inspired by Malachi 4:6: “Together father and son, We have turned our hearts toward Him. . .”  A recent reading during the night hours heavily reinforced the wonder of it all as I realized anew how God “hemmed me in” (Ps 139:5) thoroughly searched and knew me from before my earliest days and beyond.

I do not wonder about the Resurrection as Paul writes of it in I Corinthians 15:  rather I am convinced that ”Death has been swallowed up in victory.” I join Paul in crying “thanks be to God! [because] He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore: I will give myself fully to faith “because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

From Warner’s World, be blest by walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com