My last living grandfather – my mom’s dad – left this world of suffering and sorrow to join his Creator and Savior last month. He was 83 years old, but his death was sudden and unexpected, leaving us all reeling. I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts I journaled the morning after he passed, and some memories I shared at his funeral with the help of my brother. I’m sharing this for two reasons. One is to honor Papa Leonard by hopefully giving you a tiny taste of who he was. Another is to show how Christians grieve – not without hope, but also not without sorrow and a deep sense of loss. Perhaps you who have lost ones you love can relate and find solace in this post. I don’t know how God will use this, but I trust that He will in some way.
Here’s what I journaled the morning after he died, when the shock and pain were still fresh.
How do you boil a man’s life, a man’s legacy, down to some words on a page? Language is powerful, and Jesus Christ Himself was the Word made flesh, but no mere mortal is capable of reducing another to language alone. It isn’t natural. But neither is death. It is perhaps this combination of two results of the Fall of Man that makes obituaries and eulogies such cruel things to those of us who have to write them. To reduce the life of a man in all his complexities and idiosyncrasies to a date of birth, date of death, places of residence, and surviving relatives feels like erasing a human being from the face of the earth.
Most Americans know that Abraham Lincoln was tall, but how did he laugh? We know he was shot in a theater, but what made him really talk if you got him going? What did it feel like when he hugged you – I mean really hugged you because he loved you? What was his smell (every man has his own particular smell that his children and grandchildren recognize instantly)?
But I didn’t sit down to write about Honest Abe. My Papa Leonard just died. It was sudden. Nobody saw it coming. No, I take that back. God did. Yahweh held the days of Richard Lee Leonard in His hands from before He created the cosmos. And nobody – not even Dick’s adoring bride of nearly sixty years nor even Papa himself knew the deepest riches of his soul like his loving Creator and Savior did. But that’s hardly a comfort, even to the strongest in faith. “Well of course God knew him best! What of it?” I sometimes feel that we of the Truth are often unfortunately better at numbing and soothing with platitudes than facing our emotions head-on. I think that our comfortable Christianity loses its power when the life-giving truth we rightly embrace gets used as a spiritual Hallmark card. Does the Bible tell us to put on a happy mask and hide our emotions or does it command (yes, command) us to weep and to mourn? Not without hope are we to grieve, but still we are to grieve, to mourn, to lament the earthly loss of the saints we love.
With these things in mind – knowing I could never capture even the essence of my Papa on a page, and that platitudes are worthless vulgarities – I will set out to record my own memories of him and the impact his life had on mine.
For the next week or so I wrote the following, which my brother Graham helped tweak here and there before he read it for me at Papa’s funeral…
From as early as I can remember, my Papa Leonard has worked with his hands –those meaty, muscled, calloused, grease-and-oil-stained hands scarred with years and years of hard labor.
He’s always smelled the same. Never bad, never a hint of body odor despite always being hard at work and often sweating. Papa’s smell was always a familiar and pleasant mixture of masculine soap, fresh sawdust, and oil, grease, or whatever other fluid he was using on one of his never-ending mechanical projects.
That man could build anything, and fix everything. He could build anything just by looking at a few examples for inspiration, and then figuring out how to make it himself. For example, every Christmas for the last several years he handmade or hand-carved things for his family. Most of us have at least one thing in our house that he built completely from scratch: From candlesticks, to ballpoint pens, to side-tables, to nativity scenes, to entire porches, to swings, to clocks, to staircases, to fireplaces, to shelves, to bowls, to desks, to kitchen tables. You get the point.
When Papa fixed something, it was never jerry-rigged or halfway finished. I don’t recall ever hearing Papa talk about his work ethic or philosophy on repairs, but he never had to. His hands spoke for him.
Growing up, I never even thought about whether Papa could fix this or that; it was only ever a matter of when he could get to it.
Papa’s look was equally consistent. I never knew him without a solid gut and relaxed demeanor. Let me start with that solid gut. While it always hung slightly over his belt, my Papa’s gut wasn’t the average soft flab the rest of us men over twenty try not to acknowledge.
Once when my little brother Graham and I were young kids and feeling a little full of ourselves, Ammaw (our grandma) told us to hit Papa in the stomach. After we realized she wasn’t kidding and it was truly okay, we each took a shot. Graham went first, probably because I made him, and once he struck, his eyes got wide as saucers. Thinking he was just a sissy little boy, I swaggered up to the plate in all my eleven-year-old glory. I reared back, caught Papa’s twinkling eye just long enough to see his wise, mischievous grin, and punched what felt like a solid wall.
As I was writing this, it occurred to me for the first time in more than twenty years that he might have slipped something hard under his shirt to fool us, but whether he did or not, that moment further solidified my desire to be as much like Papa as I could.
He gave both of my brothers and me no shortage of opportunities to learn how to do so – whether by watching him interact with others at the countless tractor pulls, auto shows, car races and monster truck rallies he took us to, or by listening to his instructions in the art of work as we “helped” him with projects.
Papa taught me how to change the oil in a vehicle, a skill I used for nearly ten years until I became physically handicapped. Papa taught my brothers and me the intricacies of every Studebaker part he could get his hands on. And while not all of those specific lessons stuck (for my part, I would still be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between a spark plug and a starter), the amount of care, dedication and patience he invested in his projects and each of us he let into his sanctum of creation is something I will never forget – and something I pray will seep into my bones and become part of me as I look back and remember this great man.
That relaxed demeanor I mentioned earlier was something I think resulted from this hardworking dedication and level of care he put into everything. When his day’s work was done, he’d settle into the nearest seat, sigh and mutter something like “Oh mercy”, and get to work at his next task: resting.
Papa was the farthest thing from lazy that it was possible to be. Maybe that’s why he put us all to shame with how well he could rest. Give that man an easy chair and a bag of peanuts or a box of Ritz crackers and he’d put a hurtin’ on the show This Old House or almost anything on the Discovery Channel or History Channel.
We lazy kids who grew up in the age of technology would get impatient and start flipping through channels; Papa would sit and watch the same thing until his well-earned snack was finished – interrupting his silence only for the occasional “Hm!” or comment about how “Those old timers were so far ahead of their time.”
Papa’s sound was another part of him I won’t forget. I probably speak for my family and others in saying we’ll miss his unique brand of little sayings. From “This tastes good enough to eat!” during a delicious meal, to “That guy was so skinny you couldn’t see him if he turned sideways”, to “It’s hard to dress a ball”, when talking about the way his clothes fit, to “Those trucks get a little quieter every year!” after bringing us back from a monster truck rally without ear plugs – even though he made sure we wore ours – and one of my personal favorites, “That’s so good it’ll make your tongue come up and slap your brains out!”
Papa was funny, but he was also humble and unpretentious, so he wasn’t particularly talkative until you got him going on something that put the fire in his belly. These topics were fewer than some people have, but he also had much deeper knowledge – and often stronger opinions – than the average man on them. Case in point: vehicles.
He often marveled at the extensive knowledge of the brothers Click and Clack on the radio program Car Talk, but I suspect he would have put them both to shame with his own knowledge of practically every machine known to man. Maybe that’s an inflated opinion from an admiring grandson, but the fact remains that Papa could sit and talk about different makes and models of vehicles – nearly back to the inception of that particular car company.
And if you listened – something I was always fascinated to do even if I didn’t fully understand the mechanical jargon – he would give you a free history lesson on the highs and lows of this or that particular cranny of civilization.
As a young single man I was always confounded by how a man who’d been married for decades to the same woman never grew tired of talking with her. But after having been married for twelve years now, I’m only seeing the tip of the iceberg of love my grandfather had for his wife (not to mention his daughters, sons-in-law, grandkids and great grands.)
Whenever Papa and Ammaw would come up to Michigan to see us, he never left without wrapping my bride in his big arms with tears in his eyes, and saying “Buh-bye Baby Doll, I’m so proud of you all.” I pray my grandkids will one day experience the same example from me that I did from Papa.
Papa’s legacy is one that will live long after he died – which is exactly what every man worth his salt wants. His legacy is one of gentleness, faithfulness, staunch loyalty and stalwart love.
There’s a quote by John Piper that I think summarizes Papa’s legacy pretty well…
“The call to live a quiet life is not a call to inactivity or disengagement, but a call to focus on what truly matters: loving God, loving others, and doing the work God has given us to do. It’s about living a life of simplicity and contentment, free from the constant striving for more, and instead finding our joy and satisfaction in God. A quiet life, lived faithfully for Christ, is a life that speaks volumes in a noisy, chaotic world.”
We love you, Papa. See you soon.
