A few days ago I received a letter* from my father who died at 3am on March 1, 1993. The letter is dated Friday, January 22, 1993 and is written to Sister Marilyn Thomas, BVM, my dad’s sister-in-law, known to her family as Fawny, short for Florence.

Except for a few references in the four page letter to “terminality” and “tumor metastasis,” one would never know my dad was dying. The letter is full of references to what is going on in the world, from the tragic death of Iowa basketball player Chris Street, to the election of Bill Clinton, and the wars in the Middle East.

And he foretold the future, with this description of how long Fawny and her sister Dody would live. “It looks like God may have provided a yellow brick road for you to live nicely on into your 90’s, past your mother [who died at 94], and possibly/probably Dody with her walking exercise, so you two have each other’s company for a long time yet.” Dody, on the left, would die in 2017 at 96 and Fawny, on the right, completed her earthly journey last year at 103.

In this section of the letter about how “nice and fortunate” it would be for my mom and her sister to have long lives together, my dad added the words that form the title of this essay.

FOR ME, ENUF IS ENUF.

The sinus cancer that had been diagnosed in the spring of 1984 and that had been caged longer than his doctors had predicted was now on the hunt and it was time for my father to die. He knew it and accepted it; “enuf is enuf.”

Like many of you during this COVID-time I have been dreaming more than usual. Many of my dreams are set in and around my childhood home, with one or both my parents in the dream, silent and in the background. Each is materially gone, but still part of me. If you have lost a loved one, you probably know what I mean. What does it mean for a parent to still be with me?

If you were to have asked me, before I read my dad’s letter to Fawny, what life lesson he taught me, I would have said “my father taught me how to die.” And this letter reinforces that lesson. Paul Gardner senior fought his cancer relentlessly until his body and mind told him ‘no more.’ He accepted this impersonal verdict – one that looms ahead somewhere out there for each of us – with dignity.

There is another lesson contained in this letter, one that is even more valuable to the living-me. My father had such a big heart. Dying, his condition “slowly getting worse,” yet the words, sentences and paragraphs in this four page letter are all about the world and others. Not just a big heart but an open heart. Toward the end of the letter he writes the following.

I THINK THAT GOOD LIFE AND HAPPINESS SHOULD BE AS EXTENSIVE AS POSSIBLE FOR THE HUMAN RACE, AND AS REASONABLE AS POSSIBLE FOR ALL OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM.

In The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg describes a closed heart as

Insensitive to wonder and awe. The world looks ordinary when our hearts are closed.

My father’s heart was open and because it was open it was big. He not only knew how to die but he knew how to live. This letter-gift from my still-with-me-father is that we die as we live.

How to open our hearts? Borg, again in The Heart of Christianity, says one way is through thin places, or places where the world of spirit intersects with the material world. Neither Paul Sr. nor Paul Jr. was or is traditionally religious.

However, my father taught me to be open to the world’s mysteries. One of those mysteries, perhaps even a thin place, is how a letter written 27 years ago enters my life at the exact moment I am open to its messages.

A few months before he wrote this letter my father had cataract surgery. Let me give him the last word in this blog, as he described how before this surgery he had not realized the world had gotten so dull. Now, he said,

IT’S ACTUALLY BEAUTIFUL

*Thanks to Linda and AJ Thomas for archiving this letter and many other Thomas’ family memorabilia.