Chris Duel

Broadcaster, Soul Provider

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Archives for February 2015

My Father Died 50 Years Ago Today

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My Father in World War II

My Father in World War II

 

My father died 50 years ago today.

The thought of this blows my mind.

Can he possibly have been gone half a century?

Do I actually have 50-year-old memories swirling in my brain?

I still remember being the four-year-old boy whose father went away forever.

It seems like yesterday.  It seems like another life.  Like another universe.

His passing was my first introduction to death.

More would follow.  Too many and too soon.

I wish I knew my father.

I wish he knew the adult me.

I often wonder if he would even like me.

He was a war hero.

A B-17 pilot in World War II.

A devoted husband and father.

My older brother followed in his footsteps and became an Air Force pilot.

For years my brother would visit our father’s gravesite at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Now they are buried 50 yards apart.  Heroic men sharing hallowed soil.

And I, the least heroic of our family, live to visit their graves, as I will today.

I am the youngest of my family and the last surviving son.

Today when I visit their gravesites, 50 years after my father’s flight to the next world, I undoubtedly will look to the sky.

I will gaze to the clouds where they both flew.

Searching for any sign of them, as I have for most of my life.

I never see them in the sky.

But sometimes I feel them nearby.

Especially at the cemetery, where the silence of a sea of souls beckons my attention.

And I am taken back, to when my father served in Vietnam. And he carried photos of all his children in his wallet.

He left us these photos just before he died.

Photo of me from my father's wallet

Inscribed on the back of my photo…

“Kip (that’s what he called me), You & your sisters and your brother have been on the other side of the world – I love you son, Dad”

I love you too, Dad.

Wherever on the other side of the world you might be.

I miss you.

For 50 years now.

The Eternal Valentine

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Liz and Jimmy

Liz and Jimmy

 

 

I can’t make it through Valentine’s Day without thinking about my friend, Jimmy Parks, Jr.

It was on this day three years ago that Jimmy presented a beautiful Valentine’s card to the love of his life, Liz. 

What seemed like any other Valentine’s Day would soon become much more poignant.

Liz had celebrated Valentine’s Day with Jimmy for every year of their adult lives. 

Sweethearts shortly after they met at San Antonio’s Churchill High School in the Sixties, Jimmy and Liz became inseparable as teenagers and their bond grew stronger over the years.  After high school, Jimmy was offered a full academic scholarship to Princeton, but he turned down the Ivy League because he couldn’t leave Liz.  Instead, Jimmy stayed in San Antonio, attended Trinity University and married the woman he loved.

Four decades later, when I had Jimmy in my radio studio as a guest, Liz would often sit-in with us.  What I witnessed was something I have rarely seen among couples together for so many years: that new-love-sparkle in their eyes.  Both Jimmy and Liz treated each other with the same blissful affection that young lovers do when first falling head-over-heels for one another.

When Jimmy inscribed his words to Liz inside that Valentine’s card, he had no idea that his hours on this Earth were nearly over.  Jimmy was planning his life’s next big adventure – a run for the United States Congress.

But God and fate had a different plan for Jimmy. 

Just five days after he handed the Valentine’s card to Liz, he would leave this world in the blink of an eye. 

Suddenly, Jimmy died the Sunday morning after Valentine’s Day.

Jimmy’s card for Liz was displayed a few days later at Porter Loring Mortuary as I joined a line of mourners wrapped around the building to pay our respects.

That day we all read the words Jimmy wrote to Liz:

 

I am so much more in love with you than I was last year on Valentine’s, that I’m sure my love for you can’t expand anymore.

But I do want to love you more.  My deepest regret is that I only have the balance of a lifetime to love you…

to exercise my love for you…

and to let you know how much I love you.

Jimmy

 

Jimmy's Valentine for Liz

Jimmy’s Valentine for Liz

 

Jimmy Parks taught me many life lessons.

His last was through this Valentine’s Day card to Liz.

Reading his loving words, I am reminded not only of the importance of expressing love, but of the fleeting nature of our dance upon this Earth.

I believe that the spirit of Jimmy Parks lives on. 

And I believe that the love he showers upon Liz and his family and friends is now returning to him in waves. 

On and on.

For Eternity.

The World Is Going To Devastate You

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Note To Self

Note To Self

During a pre-Spring cleaning today, I found this note that I wrote to myself about three years ago.

The messiness of my scribbling suggests it’s a thought that occurred to me out of the blue, or from the other side of the veil, and I had to write it down quickly or it would become lost.

It was February 2012 and my friend Jimmy Parks, Jr. had died suddenly and much too young.

I was grief stricken, along with everyone who knew him.

I recalled Joseph Campbell’s description of the way of the Bodhisattvas.

“All life is sorrowful; there is however an escape from sorrow; the escape is Nirvana – which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere, like heaven. It is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas – joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

– Joseph Campbell, from “The Power of Myth”

 

The final words have always stayed with me: “joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

Life will ultimately be sorrowful.

Life will break you.

Either you will disappear or everyone you know and love will disappear, depending upon how long you live.

Yet…

There is joy.

Everywhere.

And you have a choice.

Boiling down Jimmy’s life and the message of every enlightened being and bodhisattva who ever walked the planet is to choose love over fear.

That’s what this download from the great beyond told me…

 

“The world is going to devastate you.

The world will bring you horrors and griefs.

But you must find and create joy in between the storms of life.”