Thanksgiving 2025
And the 10th anniversary of the last conversation I had with my father
There is an extra layer of bittersweetness to Thanksgiving this year. As the title line already announced, this marks the 10th anniversary of my last conversation with my father. It was a very good phone call- very full of positive memories and a picture of the simple daily beauty he witnessed from the window of the farmhouse. I have been grateful both to him and to God for that ever since. We spoke, we shared our voices and thoughts and a few days later, on December 4th, 2015, he left this world for good.
At the time, I wrote a post for ricochet.com about the event, which I am going to re-post here in full. I know that others are facing pain or difficult circumstances today, and I want to say to them, Happy Thanksgiving, anyway.
“My days as a cattleman are over.”
That sentence was by a good furlong the saddest sentence I heard all summer…make that all year. It was spoken by my father, John Francis Martin of Montpelier, Indiana, as he sat in a recliner in his living room, one day after his first round of chemotherapy. “It’s kind of like being under house arrest,” was the runner-up. His hair was finally turning grey, at the age of 83, and his mobility, long troubled by bad knees, was now severely impaired.
We had driven up from Texas as part of a sort of farewell tour in late May to see family in preparation for leaving for Germany, where we are now involved in a ministry of inter-Christian reconciliation. We spent over a week with my sister’s family and visited dad as much as we could, talking with him about his family’s history- his grandmother from Ireland, his great-grandfather whose physical strength was still legendary in our family. And we visited him in the hospital when the second round of chemo began. More about that later.
Dad was born in 1932, making him just young enough to have not been drafted in either World War II or Korea (his older brother was drafted to fight in Korea). He got married in 51, became a father of the first of five children in 52, and worked at the General Electric Plant in Marion as a welder on aircraft engines, started a dairy farm and only stopped working at GE when the farm became financially stable. During those years in mid to late 1950,s he also became the father of three daughters. He tragically saw his own father die in a mental hospital in 1957, and suffered a major loss when nearly half of his young herd killed by a lightning strike. The cattle had been standing under a magnificent oak tree in the middle of our largest field when the bolt hit, shattering and incinerating one entire side of the tree and electrocuting them instantly. That tree still stands there, by the way.
The stress of these losses and the responsibilities got to him and he suffered from ulcers and other stomach disorders that put him on medical diet and dropped his weight to just over 90 pounds. He recovered, though, and continued building up the farm so that by the time I was born in the late sixties, he and mom could afford to build a new house and sell the turn-of-the-century vintage house on the hill to one of his farm hands.
And in those years something must have gone terribly wrong in their marriage. Were I to point to a root it would be in a vast divergence of world views. He was a vociferous atheist, a complete philosophical materialist. in those days and mom was a Christian- moving through the early childhood of myself and my younger brother from Church of Christ to an Independent Baptist church, having come from an Apostolic background. I understand- and this only through second-hand remembrances- that there had been a time when dad was at least willing to attend church in the 50s but by the early 70’s he was openly hostile to the idea and did everything he could to undermine the faith mom was nurturing in us. He came to an Easter service exactly once in my entire childhood and otherwise only appeared in churches when weddings and funerals called for it. Later in life my youngest older sister and I would reflect on the tension in our parents’ marriage, realizing how badly it had prepared us for our own. Growing up with parents who were more or less at war with each other over exactly the deepest philosophical issues …well, to us it seemed normal, and we did not realize how abnormal it was until we were out of the home. For her that meant marriage. For my younger brother and me it meant the divorce.
It happened in the mid-eighties, right when my brother and I were young teenagers and least needed the family to disintegrate around us. Dad left mom for a younger woman. Suddenly, the family lawyer who had been a friendly acquaintance was a morally questionable person out to paint my mother in the worst possible light in court and my aunt and uncle were my mother’s enemies. The farm got split down the middle, and I can remember the elders from our church coming to help build a fence to divide mom’s property from dad’s. When he saw what I was doing, dad called me to the barn and threatened to cut me out of his will if I helped with that project any longer. I told him to go to Hell. Then I went back and told mom what had happened and she told me to go back and apologize. “He’s still your father and you will still respect him,” she said. “I don’t,” I replied. “But I will honor your request.” Which I then did, apologizing through gritted teeth, then walking home to beat on an aging, disused silo with steel bar until I got the anger out.
In spite of all this, we did stay in contact through my teenage years. It was impossible not to- he only moved about a mile away to his ancestral house- the house he had been born in. At that time the place had stood empty for some years and my brother and I helped him restore the place to live-able condition. He eventually married the younger woman, and she moved in with him. She became my stepmother and to her and my (and everyone else’s, I’m sure) great amazement, she also became a believing Christian and the best ally I had in ministering the Gospel to my father. Everything worth knowing that I learned about “loving your enemies” and “forgiving seventy times seven” I learned out of my relationship with my father and his second wife. By the time I was in my 30s, he and I had a relationship that was as good as it was before the divorce, and would call each other often. It was not what it could have been, to be sure, but I think of the divorce and our relationship as being akin to the scar left on that tree by that lightning strike. The tree was shattered and burned on one side, and would never be the shade and shelter it should have been, but it still grew, and still gave what shade and shelter it could.
When conversation turned to eternal matters this past May and June, he talked openly about God, about Jesus- he even let Vrouwe (my Ricochet nickname for Susan) and me lay hands on him and pray. We talked about Pope Francis (of whom he generally approved), and of salvation. It was the best such conversation we’d had in years. Mostly we spent valuable time in each other’s presence, not a thing to be esteemed lightly.
The last time I spoke with him he was quite positive and thought he might actually survive the cancer.
“I can’t get out much,” he said “but I can see the hummingbirds when they come to the feeder here by the window. And I can see the momma cat with her kittens come and go from the barn. They are practically cats now, you know. The ones you saw when you were here.”
“Yeah, dad I remember.”
Then yesterday the phone call came, one like to the one several of this audience have also had to receive. My father died at around 4AM Eastern Standard Time, in the house he was born in 83 years ago. I am preparing to fly from Munich to Indianapolis on Monday. Your prayers would be appreciated.