“We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. In analysis, you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry.” – Bruce Springsteen

“Honor your Father and Mother” – Moses

“In the time between your own death and resurrection, all that’s left of you are ashes and stories.” Those sage-like words are what stumbled out of my mouth as I stood next to my father’s childhood home just outside Maryfield, Saskatchewan; my bare legs covered with his ashes. My dad’s last request before he lost his battle with Leukemia in June of 2022, was to have his ashes spread at the farm of his childhood. I was standing there after making something of a mess of the whole experience, trying to mine something of significance from the experience for my own kids who were with me. In the end, ashes and stories. It’s a pretty sobering thought.

Many of the stories my father left behind are not good. The truth is if you weighed them on a morality scale, the good on one side, the bad on another, by most accounts we would be looking at a lopsided victory. To simply name my father’s garden variety vices of alcohol abuse, gambling, and womanizing, would be to not broach some of the darker realities. Of course the good side of the scale had its stories too. “Coach Terry” was known for being extraordinarily generous with his time, whether developing athletes, community sports programs or cooking a feast for a guest or loved one.

In his mid fifties, in the wake of his third wife leaving him, my dad had a powerful conversion experience. And while I would love to tell you that along with the conversion came an overwhelming number of good stories, such that the scales would be tipped towards the good, the truth is most of the good from his conversion came not so much in conquering his vices as simply being able to admit they existed.

So what story do you tell your own kids about their grandfather, whose DNA is coded in their own blood, as you spread his ashes?

As we walked around the old abandoned farmstead in Saskatchewan that day I came across a surprise, through which I found a story worth telling.

After his third wife left him, my father found himself penniless, and in need of moving all of his material possessions back to British Columbia. One of those possessions was an old 1960-something sky blue Ford truck (not one of these refurbished show trucks mind you, but a truck that had literally sat for a few decades rusting, and happened to still run). Long story short, over the course of a year and a half, my dad drove the 40 hr round trip from Saskatchewan to British Columbia and back at least six times, each time hauling a load of his stuff in the back.

When I unexpectedly came across that old truck, while at the farm, looking for a place to spread his ashes, I knew the story that it seemed both my heavenly and earthly father had conspired together for this very moment. The following simple story comes from a conversation I had with my dad during our second to last visit before he passed away.

During that year and a half he drove that old truck across the prairies of Canada (not able to top 50 mph!) there were times when he was so broke he had to collect cans along the side of the road in order to buy enough fuel to continue. Yet, looking back on his life, through the clarity perhaps only an imminent death can provide, he told me that those long hours in that old truck were some of the best hours of his life. Why? Because it was during that time, in that truck when, finally admitting the limits of his own goodness, he began his journey discovering the limitless good of a forgiving God. Of course the story is longer than that, and how the old truck even wound up on the old farm is another story. Yet, as I spread his ashes around that old truck that day it brought an immense peace knowing that the work God began in that truck meant that it was not the weight of my dad’s goodness, but that of Christ’s which ultimately tilted the scales to make a good story out of my dad’s life. The same is true for all of us.

“Death is a passover from corruption to incorruption, from mortality to immortality, from rough seas to a calm harbor. The word “death” must not trouble us; the blessings that come from a safe journey should bring us joy. What is death, but the burial of sin and the resurrection of goodness.”  – Ambrose of Milan