Walking With Warner

“You will live three months; not more than a year, the doctor told his young patient. His carefully-guarded statement exploded all her plans in the making for raising and mothering a baseball team. It revealed a truth to her she had suspected, but been afraid to think about because of a family histry she knew only too well.

As for me, I found myself a young Airman looking for a life of normality as a family, living in a place where I was a stranger, and facing a future I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I was a washed-out college student in the Military and facing a future that destroyed strong people of twice my age and maturity. Looking at my bride of four months, I saw a crystal-clear glass vase that had been dropped and shattered into a thousand splinters. Two years earlier. I had graduated from South Haven Central and enrolled in Summer School at Anderson College.

I had completed two terms of fun and frivolity in my newly-found freedom that had resulted in failing grades that prompted me to see myself as a failure and resulted in my enlistment in the Air Force, where I might find another chance to redeem myself. Now, I was a Tech School Graduate, waiting for reassignment overseas from Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. My furlough in Oklahoma with my new in-laws was completed and I reported for temporary duty, until my Shipping Orders arrived.

I knew I had married a bride with fragile health for she was still recuperating from the life-threatening surgery that had derailed her college studies (2-9-47). She was the precocious kid at KVOO Tulsa, the 50,000 Watt Radio Station that broke the announcement across the central U.S. about the death of FDR at Warm Springs, Georgia in 1944.

Our arrival in San Antonio only exacerbated her increasing weakness and resulting fainting spells. She established herself with a Military doctor at nearby Fort Sam Houston and made several trips riding the City Transit Lines unaccompanied to and from the hospital, until told not to return again without my accompanying her. Military Commands are not always coordinated and the next time she had a doctor appointment, my Commanding Officer refused to issue me a Pass. This meant she returned to her doctor alone; again.

As fate would have it, she passed out on the City Transit. The veteran driver remembered her from previous visits and remembered where he had delivered her, which he very faithfully and conscientiously did again. He delivered her at her proper destination in a semi-conscious condition and she gained immediate attention. Her doctor examined her and scolded her for returning contrary to his orders demanding my company. When the Captain called my Commanding Officer to see why I did not accompany her as he ordered; he was told I had already shipped overseas.

This necessitated further conversation in which she explained that I had breakfast with her that morning and then had reported for duty as required (Only later did we learn that I was unknowingly and unofficially AWOL for one lost week that I had not been aware of).

Meanwhile, the doctor called in his superior officer, a leading surgeon and a Colonel in the U.S. Army. The two Officers discussed her case and the Colonel wheeled around, picked up the telephone, and called my Wing Headquarters at Langley Field, VA and asked for his friend, another Colonel. His terse announcement to his friend Joe was, “We call men home from overseas for less than this, and I want a discharge for this patient’s husband – Cancer in the last stages!”

That was how she learned her diagnosis. With that, the doctor informed her the most humane thing you can do is go to the Cancer Institute in Chicago, where they will provide for you as long as necessary, and they will provide your husband with work opportunities. Two weeks later, we boarded the Greyhound Bus in San Antonio with a destination of South Haven, Michigan.

We bid our pastor and congregation at Highland Park adieu, never considering the option of asking special prayer and anointing her for healing. In our private prayers, her prayer had consistently been very simple: “God: if my life is to be taken, I’m ready. If you have yet a task for me to do, by your strength I will do it. Just please, stop the pain.” We walked a day at a time; faith for today; hope for tomorrow.

She prayed her prayer and together we tied a knot in the end of our rope and held on with all that we knew. We rode the cross-country Greyhound and arrived at my home, where we stayed long enough to plan a return to Anderson to school. We did not go near Chicago, until we decided a few weeks later to enroll in Pacific Bible College in far off  Portland, Oregon.

By the time we arrived in Chicago, we discovered we had missed our Portland connection and had to wait what seemed like endless hours. As fate would have it, we followed a big snow storm west of the Rocky Mountains, and all that distance from Chicago, we picked up the passengers on the bus we would have been on, except we arrived late and had a long layover in Chicago. We would have been on the bus that slid off the highway and had to be rescued by the bus we were actually on.

Our Portland days introduced us to two-living-as-one for seventy and one half years. The faith we left with in San Antonio formed the introduction to successful school years, which laid further foundation for forty-five years of pastoral ministry in seven states, serving nine congregations. We clung to our “Faith of our Fathers” in murky days that carried us through five miscarriages and in two live births.

We walked a tightrope between medical bills and the demands for fulltime service in small churches and part-time salaries. We struggled to meet the needs of family life on inadequate income, but faith always proved adequate. In time, we became a growing family, with all the vicissitudes of raising a family and then watching the family expand until it began finally to downsize again.

Three days from hence (9-6-17), it will be two full years that my Irish Cherokee graduated and made her Celestial Commencement. I intentionally and stoically waited with the deceased body and with my own hands I helped place her in the body bag and load her into the vehicle that gave her that final transport. I then watched the vehicle pull away from the house, turn the corner away from Winding Way, and she was gone.

The image is etched into my mind. We had discussed her pending departure and I gave my full consent. I have no regrets that she left and I would not call her back for any reason. I loved her as best as I knew how but I do regret not giving her as much TLC as I now understand she needed, wanted, and deserved.


She was a gifted woman. She was full of the grace of God. She had the discerning of God’s Holy Spirit.  She knew how to communicate with the human heart. Whatever I am today, I am not the man she lived with for seventy years; rather I am the man I was becoming as I lived with her for 70.5 years.

Her family always called her Kit, Kitten, or Kat; thus my familiar url - kitway . She was English, Irish, and First American and what I always knew was that I didn’t want her to go on the war path – Tommie Leora Beatrice Stiles Warner, 3-20-26—9-6-2017 – and this is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com