This story was written for The Challenge, a Medium publication.
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My Dad wore button-down shirts to his engineering job at Bendix Corporation. After eight years of retirement from college teaching, a light blue Oxford cloth shirt with tiny collared buttons is still my everyday choice.
Paul Sr. was never without a hat and jacket when the weather turned cool.
Neither am I.
He used a lather of hand soap to shave rather than shaving cream. Every few years, I buy a can of shaving gel, and it sits in my bathroom cabinet drawer while the Dove in the soap dish dwindles.
After he retired, my father wrote letters to members of his extended family and friends telling stories about his life.
What are my Medium and blog (paulmuses.com) stories but an incarnation of my Dad’s efforts to draw insights from his life and offer them to a wider audience?
Eight years ago, my cousin Jim told me this story.
Linda was out, so I was alone. I had done a bike ride.
I believe that I died.
I went to a very crowded place. Lots of people of all
Different races and ethnicities waiting in a crowded line.
I got in line and gradually we moved ahead to what I can only describe as
Gates. At the gates, I was met by your dad. He told me that I must go back.
“Your work is not done,” he told me in a commanding voice.
Next thing I knew was waking up in an insulin reaction on the kitchen floor.
I was able to crawl to the refrigerator and get some orange juice.
I tried to tell Linda what happened, but to no avail. She says this is all low
Blood sugar.
Jim, 76, is a lifelong diabetic. Linda is his wife. They live in Des Plaines, Illinois. After this incident, Jim talked with his friend Bob, who is a Lutheran Pastor. Jim and Bob were in a Catholic Seminary together in the early 1970s.
My cousin dropped out, studied philosophy, and worked in personnel management for Montgomery Ward for thirty years. In retirement, he tutored math and other subjects at a Chicago-area community college.
Later, Jim told me about Bob and his conversation about my Dad’s otherworldly encounter with him.
When Bob and I talked about your dad, this was our main insight:
When he and I were in seminar we were taught that no one gets to heaven
Without practicing religion. Neither he nor I thought this made sense.
You can be a good person and live a good life and earn a place in heaven
Without any religion.
You may have the opportunity to develop yourself more.
Reincarnation and rebirth are common in some cultures.
Your father has obviously made it to another level.
And is doing the work he is supposed to be doing.
“Your work is not done,” was explicit and very direct to me.
I’ll never forget hearing it. What work we are to do is always the question.
My father and Jim’s uncle died in 1993 of sinus cancer, at 71. He was an agnostic, I believe, to the end. That skepticism about traditional religious beliefs, like button-down shirts, hats, and jackets, shaving with hand soap, and writing in retirement, is also something he has passed on to me. Or, perhaps a better way of framing this phenomenon, things he and I have in common that I have chosen to embrace.
On January 13, my Father’s 104th birthday, Lynn L. Alexander asks whether we have a wish. When I started writing this story, my idea was to communicate a longing for an encounter with my Dad, similar to my cousin Jim’s, my skepticism about the possibilities beyond our natural lives be damned.
But I’ve changed my mind. I’ve had my Dad for 76 years. He lives inside me. I can encounter him at a moment’s notice. Lynn’s prompt reminded me of this. Perhaps you feel the same about a deceased parent, someone who is gone but lives on inside you.
And yet, his ‘your work is not done’ to Jim sounds so much like him. Which leads me to wonder exactly what occurred eight years ago on that kitchen floor in Des Plaines, Illinois.
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