A couple of weeks ago I decided to schedule myself for a couple of dreaded tests, a mammogram and a colonoscopy. I was long overdue for both of them but kept putting them off for a myriad of reasons. I hate medical procedures of all kinds, and I dislike taking the time for appointments. This is not a good reason for avoiding these procedures! Too many of my friends are cancer survivors, and my own father died of colon cancer at the young age of 56. My son Ben, who is only 29 years old, had a colonoscopy last year where they found polyps but his repeat colonoscopy showed none this year, thank goodness!!!
My father, Thiel Johnson, was just about the best person you could ever know. When he died, people came from all walks of life to pay their respects to a man who was kind, honest and giving. At his funeral, President Harris said, "Thiel Johnson was a man without guile" and he was....
He often claimed, "he was a jack of all trades, master of none." He could build, wire, plumb and cement just about anything you wanted done. I always lament the fact that he probably could have helped me do just about anything around the house I needed fixed or built, but that is not why I miss him. He was so funny, so smart and so very loving. When I think of him, I remember his huge smile, and his talent for whistling just about any song. He would also dance a little jig in front of my friends to embarrass me. It looked a little like a strange type of clogging, but it was the Thiel Johnson quickstep.
At night I would lay in my bed and listen to him play his mouth organ as he called it (harmonica). I grew up loving the hymns because I heard them played by ear on that harmonica. He loved the 'old' country music, and I grew up listening to the verses of songs like "down in the west Texas town of Laredo" and "Don't you listen to him, Dan, he's a devil, not a man, and he's searched the burning sand for water". I have no idea who sang these songs, it has been much too long. Dad died September 10, 1979 from colon cancer, and I miss him still so much. The dead seem to grow more perfect with years, and although in my mind's eye now, I see him as such...he was as human as the rest of us. His language could be a little salty when he got mad, but he always quickly apologized and when illness took him to his bed, he became so humble and contrite. As he grew sicker, he would take to walking the floor above my bedroom at night, pacing back and forth with the pain, playing the hymns while I listened in bed... tears filling my eyes.
He was a very spiritual man, and the gospel of Jesus Christ was everything to him. I grew up watching him read his scriptures, and talk to us of the Plan of Salvation. He knew the Savior intimately because he was a true disciple of Christ. He helped just about everyone, and was the neighborhood handyman.
Mom met Dad at Utah University and their first date was getting ice cream. Dad had just gotten his cone, and turned around to speak to my mom, and a bird flying overhead deposited a little something right on his cone. They always got a good laugh over that!
Dad was very tidy, a quality that I did not inherit. I am my mother's daughter, always cooking , reading, preparing and trying vainly to organize without cleaning up the previous mess. The shed he built in our backyard was a beautiful thing to behold though it was tiny and humble. Every tool, gadget, or piece of equipment to build or fix something was stored in an orderly fashion. He kept lemon drops there in a drawer, and I would sneak in and sit on his stool, and hide out from the problems of my adolescent world. It was a little sanctuary to me where I could spend a few minutes away from the outside world. I was a recluse in Junior High, hated it in fact, and just wanted to be home with my books and my cats.
He went to the doctor because of some rectal bleeding, and had a colonoscopy. He had stage 4 cancer at that point, and he had some surgery to remove what they could at the time. He then had chemotherapy that seemed to go on for months. At the time of his death the tumors were shrinking, but we all thought that the chemotherapy had taken its toll. He lay in his bed in our guest bedroom , and his wife and his daughters were his hospice nurses. Liz would lay on the floor some nights by his bedside, and I would administer the morphine shots. He was so skinny that he wore his wrist watch around the top of his arm, and I would have to hunt for any fat deposits on his wasted body to inject him. I remember once tripping and spilling some soup on him, and feeling so bad. He took my hand and kissed it, saying, "you're my angel, Jane". We would hand him a plastic urinal, and he spilled it once. I , at the tender age of 21, undressed him, and changed his bedding while he sat and cried, shivering on the chair. "I hate you to see your Dad like this, Jane" he wept. "Oh, Dad" , I replied, "you changed me all the time when I was little, it's my turn now". Then I was the one who cried all the way to college classes.
Mom was teaching school, and we needed all the help we could get with Dad's care.
When we were not there, the Craythornes next door came and sat with Dad. It was all quite horrible keeping the death watch, and not knowing when it would happen. Thank goodness we were all there when it did, and I knew the time was close when I saw Dad holding up his hand to someone unseen, yet very near and whispering, "help me". He searched the room just as my mother did when she died, and I know that the veil is very thin between this world and the spirit world. I entered the room to see how he was doing, and found him motionless on the bed with his eyes open, unseeing. I called to mom, and I remember her saying, "Oh ,Thiel, have you gone?" We gently closed his eyes and called the mortuary, and I watched my mom weep as she said goodbye for a season to her companion of thirty years. Just a few weeks earlier Dad had crawled from his bed adjacent to their bedroom to her bedside. She woke to find him crying as he cradled her in her arms. He said, "Fay, you have and always will be the most beautiful woman to me, thank you for being my wife and the mother of our children." What a tender moment that memory holds for me, and such an example of true devotion.
I had a beautiful dream sometime later where I saw my dad enter the kitchen where I sat, and talked with me face to face as in mortality. I had prayed that I might remember the robust, funny guy I knew as my father and not the shrunken, sick shell of a man he became. He looked so good! The dream was startingly vivid, and I remember seeing the scars on his forehead, and his finger. He was dressed in snowy white clothes, and he laughed and made references to all of us, and said how happy he was. He mentioned our neighbors, the Somervilles, and I did not want him to go when he said he must leave.
I awoke from this dream so very grateful for the knowledge I have that I will see him again, and all others who have departed this earth. Elder Russell M. Nelson said that" death is a gift from God because death allows your body to return home to Him. From an eternal prospective, death is only premature for those who are not prepared to meet God."
I searched for pictures of Dad as I wanted to post them, and cannot put my finger on them (big surprise). I found this not so good one of when I graduated from high school about three years before he died, and where he looked like the man I remember.
And so, as I stayed up all last night, "making bathroom trips" in preparation for my colonoscopy....I thought about Dad and how he might have been with us a few more years if he had had the procedure done at age fifty. I fixed myself up two icy pitchers of crystal light and added a little Mountain Dew for good measure. Just saying I will probably not drink either one of those for a good long time! The prep is horrible, but the results don't last forever (although in my case it was a very long night) ... I think I may have overdone it with the powder!
All went well, and there were no polyps, so I am good for another three years! I hope my siblings are falling suit with their colonscopies as colon cancer is certainly preventable these days. I can at least say that I accomplished a couple of things this Christmas holiday.
I am hoping the new year brings much joy to you all along with the trials that are part of life. I am not even going to embarrass myself by claiming resolutions to lose weight and exercise this year....(I have to try a little) because for thirty five years my journal entries are all the same thing! "I need to lose weight, exercise, and get healthy, clean my house, get organized, yada, yada, yada...." For right now, I don't have cancer, and I am happy to spend another year being with the people I love, writing others whom I love, and just being "me".
That "me" was raised by two wonderful parents, who while certainly not perfect, tried their best to love their kids and teach them. I am so grateful to Thiel and Fay Johnson. Love you, Mom and Dad!!!!
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