First Bride -- a story (denouement)

Resolution: what the story has done to the man who tells it. The denoument wraps things up. What does he do with a story he knew absolutely nothing about just a day or so ago? When he speaks to his dying father, what might he say, if he says anything at all?

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I hadn't gone to that house like the prophet Nathan, to exact some penitence. When I'd come up the lane, I didn't know even the barest outline of the story. But when I left, I'd come to learn more than I'd ever guessed I would. I understood that what she'd told me she wanted my father to know was not only something painfully torn from her own stubborn and courageous heart, but also something my father would want very much to hear--not for himself, not simply to staunch a festering wound of unrequited love. Both of them were beyond that. But my father the Christian would want to know what she'd told me because it would enable him to leave this earth with hope for his first bride, accounts settled. He would want to know that she'd said what she said, not for his sake, but for hers, this woman he probably loved so much he couldn't speak of the pain she'd given him for the rest of his life, pain he’d likely tried hard to cover with love.

What I've come to believe, now, as I drive back to my father's South Dakota farm, is that this burden of history I've unearthed, this story will be a gift I can bring to his last days on earth. It will not be unsettling, a nightmare arising from ashes long grown cold and blown away in the countless seasons of prairie winds he's endured on land many would question was meant for anything other than buffalo. The story of Berendina Janssens will give him peace.

I know exactly how he will take the news because I know that what he sees before him now is an honored appointment with the King of Kings. His final journey began two years ago with the discovery of his cancer. Death has been made flesh in his ravaged body, and while he always knew he was going to die, since he's discovered how, his stoic sense of when has only deepened his assurance.

And if I can't give to him what he really wants--something of his son's clean and clear commitment to the Lord he himself has served through so much of a loveless life--I can at least bring him the broken heart of a woman who once broke his, but more than that, the penitence of another sinner, one he knew intimately and yet not, a woman he slept with and thought he knew just as fully as he is known. This historian who happens to be his son is very grateful that he can make this one last road straight for the coming of his Lord.

Today I will see my father. We will sit on the deck of the house where I grew up, a place my mother left five years ago. We'll look out on the empty barn he ritually visits three times a day to feed a multitude of cats, the only animals left. We'll sit on chairs beside the geraniums he keeps up on the railings, the sweet smell of redolent life in the air all around us, just as it was on that small farm just outside the Veluwe.

I'm on my way to tell him something he will savor. When I went to the Netherlands, I wondered whether I should even leave the continent with my father in such poor health. I went with no motive other than something professional and academic. But I have become, by grace alone, a prophet of joy, and for that I thank my father's God, for he has entrusted the great blessing of healing to me, someone who has doubted His goodness and mercy for many years.

My father has been ready to die for a long, long time. But today, maybe for the first time, his son, who has given him great pain in many years of questioning and doubt, is finally ready for him to leave.