I didn’t know what to expect from a visit to my father’s grave, but I knew I had to make the trip. It had been nearly 10 months since I stood by that plot at the graveside service. Afterwards Samuel, then 3, packed down the mound of brown, moist dirt, engaging this shocking loss more freely and tactually than anyone else. Our conversation was profound:
“What did we just see happen, Sam?”
“Grandpa is dead.”
“And where is he now?”
“He’s into God.”
“And where is his body?”
“His body is down there.”
Fast forward to last weekend and the dirt was flat, hard, and pale. Centipede runners stretched across the plot, slowly acclimating this light brown patch of earth to the surrounding green.
As my brother and I stood there, it took a moment to absorb everything. For once there was nothing to distract–no decisions about what to do with Dad’s stuff, no legal papers to sign, no real estate phone calls. Everything was quiet, the ratio of sun and shade perfect, the breeze strong enough to move the infamous Savannah gnats along their way. And in that moment, all still, we lost it. There was nowhere to hide from the fact that our Dad was dead. This load-bearing wall of the Davis house had unceremoniously fallen, and we crumbled there, embracing and weeping at foot of his grave.
I cried so hard that my left contact flushed entirely out of my eye. An awkward scan of Danny’s shirt and mine yielded no results. It was gone, so I spent the rest of my time at Bonaventure Cemetery either squinting or acclimating to partially blurred vision.
Such is grief. Looking out of one eye, everything seems amorphous and undefined. Looking out of the other, I find that the acute loss has sharpened my focus. Thankfully the latter was the more dominant perspective from my trip.
The greatest clarity my dad’s death has afforded involves my own sense of identity, captured in three events. The first came there at the grave, as I scanned the names of my dad, paternal grandparents, great-grandfather, and great-uncle. These are the people who shaped me with their values of faith, family, education, hard work, civic duty, and blend of thrift with generosity. I will lie in this land next to them one day, should the Lord tarry. This sense of family identity gives wonderful clarity to how I want to live until that day comes.
The second clarifying event took place about 24 hours before our graveside encounter. Back at my parents’ house in Atlanta I chatted with Luis, the guy we hired to shred 26 boxes’ worth of financial documents. Conversation meandered from his native Puerto Rico to fathers who won’t listen to doctors to more personal matters–his marriage, severe health issues, and his desire for his faith to be at the center of his life again. Once everything was shredded, I asked if I could pray for him. He agreed and remarked afterward that he had chill bumps and felt grateful for our conversation. I shared that I was simply carrying on my dad’s legacy. Lee Davis never met a stranger, and no matter what his other obligations, he would always take time to pray, share Biblical wisdom, and do whatever he could to help a person in need. I walked back into my parents’ empty house knowing that my greatest inheritance from my father has nothing to do with stuff and everything to do with a Christlike, servant’s heart.
The third experience that pulled everything into focus did not take place during this trip but was on my mind throughout it. A few years ago our family pulled up to my parents’ place after the long drive from Alexandria. Samuel, not one to sleep in the car, had bravely warded off slumber until he crashed around 10 PM with only half an hour left in the trip. When we arrived he was out cold. He looked angelic beyond his natural sweetness. I stood there marveling with my dad and rhetorically asked, “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
Even now my eyes well up with tears as I recall his response: “Yes I have.” Samuel is my spitting image. To love him as deeply as I do causes me to reckon with how deeply my dad loved me when I was entirely unaware of it. The full circle of that love is a wholeness I do not take for granted. For all his faults, I know my dad loved me. And there are few greater gifts in the world.
Of course, one can only squint for so long to see with this clarity. When I open my other eye, there is a disorienting mingling of the clear and the blurred. As much as my dad never hesitated to make his perspective known–with vigor!–the canon is now closed. We can guess what he might say but precisely how he would do things is unclear. The future is also unclear. In the periphery of my dad’s grave is that of a girl who died at 17. She had 50 years fewer than my dad, a reminder that nothing is certain in this life. Most of the clarity comes from looking backwards, most of the blur from looking ahead.
So I strive to live in the present with this vision-scrambling grief. I miss my dad terribly. And I am not alone. His legacy lives on in the family harmony he worked so hard to create. We will take one day at a time, grateful for the gifts we can plainly see, humbled by the unknown, and trusting our Heavenly Father to make everything clear when he sends his Son to make all things new.
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