Dad (Nephi L. Head)

I have used blogging to record some of my most precious past experiences and epiphanies, but I realized this week that I have never recorded the single most defining event of my life: the death of my father.

Here is some background. During my teen years I developed a paranoia that became nearly a neurosis: I became terrified that one of my parents would be killed. In my early teens, I became aware that there was a cruel world out there ready to do us harm. The Korean war was a daily source of bad news, and 1952, the year in which I was 13, was remembered as a year of record-breaking automobile accidents. It was the first year that US auto fatalities exceeded 50,000. (Since then it has seldom exceeded this number by a great deal, due presumably to safer vehicles and roads.) People were dying everywhere and everyone knew victims. That scared me and I became almost pathologically frightened of my patents being caught up in this carnage.

When I was nineteen, my worst fears were realized. Dad died as a result of an accident. It wasn't an auto accident, but it was just as deadly. He was painting the eves of our house and the ladder collapsed under him. For three weeks, he was in a coma, and then he passed away with mother holding his hand.

Those three weeks were a hell born of desperation. Subsequent weeks and months were a hell born of hopelessness. There was no joy in the universe. Joy was impossible. The only thing that could possibly bring joy would be for Dad to return to normal life and routine. That wasn't going to happen. The universe had been irremediably broken. Nothing was ever going to be right again, ever.

Helen arrived from Canada for the funeral and stated that she couldn't believe it. To her, Dad was still someplace else -- a long distance away just as he had always been while she lived in Canada and we lived in the US. And she knew that this perception was true. It helped her.

I had no such help. Dad lived with us. He was always an immediate presence. Dad and I had, virtually up to the day of his accident, been daily carpoolers. He worked at the VA hospital across the street from where I attended the U. We'd had daily opportunity to converse and visit about any and every subject imaginable -- not as a parent and child, but as two adults discussing deep and significant temporal and spiritual matters. Dad's intellectual command was immense and he stretched my intellectual muscles. In those couple of years, I had grown closer to him than I'd ever been. His absence was an intolerable void that could not be filled. I envied Helen. I also envied Lawrence and Kitchener who still had full families and homes to which they could return -- homes that continued, unabated, without ghastly voids. Mother and I were in hell, a hell from which there was no redemption. We fled to Canada for respite. And while we were gone, Lawrence and Kitchener finished the house which had been Dad's death.

In Canada, I read my first church book: "How to Pray and Stay Awake." I read it as avidly as any novel. Religion had suddenly acquired relevance. I was no longer satisfied with Sunday School answers to vital questions. I wanted to know that the Spirit World existed and what it was like. I wanted to know that Dad still lived and I wanted to know what he was doing now.

The next year was a year of huge change for me. I became an avid student of religion. Even before Dad's death, I had become quite enamored with the recently discovered evidences for the Book of Mormon. That was the basis for my testimony. The Book of Mormon was hard to explain away by rational, unbiased, thorough scholars. To me that meant that it leaned solidly toward being true. And that was putting it mildly. If it was true, Joseph Smith was a true prophet. If he was a true prophet, the church he founded was true. If the church was true, then the Church's teachings were true. If they were true, then the Spirit World existed and Dad was alive and active and a part of some great movement somewhere.

This line of reasoning became an urgent verity for me. It had to be true! It had to be. It not being true was simply not imaginable.

I studied vigorously with a concentration on anything and everything pertaining to the afterlife. This provided a framework for the mastery of an ever broader range of Gospel topics. I loved the way it all fit together and I acquired more than a bit of unrighteous pride in my mastery and understanding of the kingdom's mysteries.

And, with time, the broken universe restructured itself into something more exiting and more beautiful than ever. I had experienced the very worst that I could imagine and I had survived. All my childhood demons were swept away. I was afraid of nothing. Death was either no more than a necessary step in our eternal progression, or it was the end of consciousness. Either of these was OK with me, and I found that powerfully reassuring. "It" no longer had to be true, but I enjoyed the reason-derived probability that it was, and I liked that better.

I was amazed at the alteration in myself, and I stated, definitively, more than once and to multiple people, that Dad's death had been the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Why can't we go through the same transformation without the need for such traumatic and final events as the death of a loved one? The universe doesn't work that way, I assumed. "There is a law irrevocably decreed..." and all that. Too bad.

But my testimony was purely rational. Reason trumped faith, and I knew that it shouldn't. My testimony was as dry and lifeless as a parched desert. It hadn't changed me. It didn't have the power. What had changed me was the experience of Dad's death and the reordering of the universe. The Gospel was powerful, itself liberating, capable of creating in an individual all the amazing transformations I had experienced and more -- without the traumatic tragedy. I needed to tap into that power to complete my metamorphosis.

I was aware of something called a "spiritual testimony" and I even understood what it was to a degree and that I lacked it. It was the luxuriant rain forest as opposed to the parched desert. Perhaps flashes of Holy Ghost enlightenment had touched my soul and imprinted upon it a numinous awareness of something just out of reach. I understood a "spiritual testimony" to be a direct communication by the Holy Ghost to one's spirit -- spirit-to-spirit -- more believable and convincing than anything acquired through the senses -- that had power to change attitude and nature. I wanted such a testimony and I prayed for it.

I entered the mission field a year almost to the day from the day Dad died.

My lack of a spiritual testimony proved to be a serious problem. All those wonderful things I had experienced and the amazing absence of demons and the fearlessness did not protect me against depression. The first three months of my mission, with me banging my head against the wall of rejection and persecution, attempting to bear a testimony that remained lifeless, and trying to do it in an unknown language, dragged me down into a hell that was different from the one I'd experienced a year before, but it was nevertheless a hell that made life seem not worth the effort.

Then, in the third month of my mission, during the third week of September, 1959, my prayer was answered and I did receive a spiritual testimony that proved to be more than I ever imagined. That's another story. Let's just say that it continued the transformation that had started with Dad and seemingly would not have been possible without Dad.

When Jerilyn died several years later, I thought, "Wow. Lawrence and Dorrine now have a huge, unfillable void. A 17 year old daughter -- a beautiful butterfly that has just emerged from its chrysalis and spread its lovely wings -- and is then crushed before the wings even dry. What could be worse? They are experiencing the same thing I did -- perhaps even more intently."

When Lawrence asked me to speak at her funeral, I was shocked but I recognized that it would be cathartic. I felt that I knew what they were going through and I could express it -- and express my own feelings and perceptions as well. This funeral talk is on the family web site under Jerilyn's page. I have thought that it expresses my impression of life and death so well that I would like to have it played at my own funeral -- I, myself, speaking at my own funeral. Poetic, no? Carolyn has strong reservations about that. I recently listened to it. Maybe she's right...