Mamaw's Man

Papaw wasn't perfect, but he was perfect for us

I talk a lot about my Mamaw in this space. Of all of the people the Lord set around me in my childhood, she was the one whose actions and words shaped me the most; largely because those actions and words followed a clear pattern of Scripture. Mamaw showed me what it was to be a woman, to live my life as a reflection of something known but not seen, to be the very hands and feet of Jesus to the people I love and yes, even those I should love more.

And then there was my Papaw.

I don’t want you to think that he was a silent partner in a marriage to a dynamic woman. Oh, goodness. That man was anything but. He was stubborn and headstrong and cussed like a sailor. Mamaw wasn’t a great wife because she had a cooperative husband. She was a great wife because iron sharpens iron, and those two were both made out of the kind of stuff you only find in Appalachia, so you can imagine how fine a point they came to by the end. By the time I was born, they were mellow, gentler. The edges my Dad and his brothers saw had been worn down, and their differences had become something that brought out the best, not the worst. And they were still in love. That was a given. I can still see him walking in the back door, smelling like tractor exhaust, making a beeline for her as she worked at the stove. She sang as her hands went through the motions they knew by heart: Amazing Grace as she kneaded up dumplings, What a Friend We Have in Jesus as she salted soup beans. But Papaw was a rascal of the first class, and he would slide behind her and slip his hands into her apron pockets and add his own song. Jackson, always Jackson, just to tease her. And it worked. Her ears would go red and she’d laugh and do the closest thing to dancing a Missionary Baptist was allowed to do, which was sway just a little. Then she’d swat him away, showering him with flour usually, and tell him he’d best get in the shower or he’d miss his dinner.

Papaw was the fifth of ten children. He’d missed out on schooling. It had been his mother’s dream to see her kids educated, but she didn’t see it fulfilled until her husband relented and allowed the baby of the family to be excused from working every day to go sit in a classroom and learn to read and write and figure. Papaw always regretted his illiteracy, and while I never heard him use the word “shame,” I can see it now when I think back on how the stories of how hard he pushed his own boys in school, and in the way he glowed as he’d clap his big hand over mine when folks stopped by. “This one right here,” he’d say, “she went to college and got herself a paper.” Later, when that degree sat in a closet collecting dust as I homeschooled my own kids, I asked him if I had disappointed him, and his words stay with me to this day: “Learnin’ ain’t about big jobs, Baby. It’s about having something in your head ain’t nobody can take from you, ever.”

That was my Papaw.

He didn’t profess Christ as Lord until I was married and had babies at my feet. I suspect that he knew all along that Jesus was who He said He was, but felt unworthy to come to the cross. His life hadn’t been clean— he had been a heavy drinker and all that entails as a young man— and the Jesus you are often told of in the pews of the little country churches that dot the hollers of Appalachia wants you cleaned up just a little before you bring him your dirty rags. He was also intensely proud, and there’s nothing like pride to prevent you from admitting that you need a Savior. In any case, he confessed and was baptized, and even darkened the door of the church from then on, something that was so foreign to me that for the first few times I sat alongside him when I visited, I had to keep checking to make sure it was really true.

Becoming a believer changed Papaw. Those edges that had been wearing down for years lost most of their sharpness. He continued to struggle with trusting people (“they just ain’t a drop of good in most of ‘em!”) and I personally witnessed him drop a handful of cuss words as he was telling stories to the pastor when he came to Sunday supper. But he would listen to Mamaw read her Bible aloud to him in the evenings and would nod from time to time, saying, “imagine that now, would ya?” and, “I’d have liked to have seen that.”

On February 18, 2013, he no longer had to imagine and was given new eyes to see. Papaw passed away two heartbreaking years after Alzheimer’s stole him from us. Those years were sheer agony, punctuated with violent outbursts and the slow loss of all that we loved. Our family made the decision to move him to a memory care facility, and it nearly broke us all. We were not those people. We do not abandon our own. We love and serve and keep family close, to the very end. Years of judgement had to be repented of, because keeping Papaw at home was dangerous, disastrous, and unsafe for everyone involved. He left his home and we knew the end was coming— prayed for it, even. If you’ve walked that out, you know how it eats you every day, how it gnaws your soul to feel the tension of memory and reality as someone you love fades so far from who they really are.

He forgot me towards the end. At my last visit, he mistook me for my mother, calling me by her name, asking me where my father was, and scolding me for not bringing his Baby— me— to see him. I stepped outside the room and sobbed, and a nurse passing by stopped. “You’re that granddaughter Mr. Ralph talks about, aren’t you?” she asked me. I cried on that stranger’s shoulder, and I thanked her. The fact that God allowed him to remember me somewhere, somehow in what was left of him carried me through.

It carried me through giving birth to my fifth son a few months later, and carried me through looking into his big blue eyes and naming him after my Papaw. It carried me through boarding a plane with that newborn just a handful of weeks after he was born and flying home to lay his namesake to rest up on the hill of our family cemetery plot.

God’s lovingkindness to my Papaw is still carrying me through. You’d think that all these years later— that baby just turned 12, after all— the loss wouldn’t loom so large. But here I am still, aching to hear his voice call me Baby one more time, longing to feel him hug me with those strong, work-hardened arms. Some time today or tomorrow, I will find a quiet moment and will sneak out under our pole barn, to my Papaw’s truck. I will slide up on to the red bench seat and breathe deep, remembering when Papaw sat behind the wheel and I rode shotgun, pressed up against his thigh as we bumped through the fields counting cattle. There will be tears. So many tears. But half of them will be tears of thanks. I was loved well. God gave me something—someone—so precious when He decided to make that man my grandfather. He gave me a foretaste of the kind of love He has for His children, and taught me how to receive it. Papaw’s love wasn’t perfect. He was just a man. But it was a reflection of the kind of love I have found in Jesus. I can’t think of that truth and not cry again.

The best part? My Papaw is in the presence of that very same Jesus. The Jesus who he didn’t have to get cleaned up for, because Jesus Himself bears that burden. Papaw is standing there, with Mamaw, waiting. I’m pretty sure Johnny Cash is there, too—maybe even singing. I can’t say for certain, but I have a feeling Mamaw might just be dancing with her man for real up there. Dancing like David, with all her might before the Lord. I can’t wait to see that.

In Christ,

Heather