My name is Art Townsend. I was born in Mansfield, Ohio on August 27, 1957. I died June 11, 2009 in Rock Hill, S.C. This is the story of God’s amazing Grace in my life. I am just an ordinary man with some extraordinary experiences. I have always liked the quote from Richard Bach, “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If your alive, it isn’t.” So since I’m alive, even though I was dead, my mission is not complete. And if you are reading this, your mission isn’t complete either.
Heart disease has been in my life since I was twelve years old. It was the summer prior to entering “junior high” and I was naturally playing baseball and my father was in about the 4th year of being our coach. I always enjoyed baseball but not as much as my old man. We ate, drank and slept baseball throughout most of the year. Well it was the first game of the season and I was the starting pitcher. I liked pitching if I had my “control”, which didn’t happen too often. That day control was nowhere to be found. I hit the first 3 batters with fastballs, threw an easy groundball over the first basemen’s head and walked the next two. After which my father proceeded to have the first of many heart attacks over the next several years. The good thing about all of it, was I thankfully got to leave the game and follow my father to the hospital. But I digress; let me start at the beginning.
I am the youngest of three children. My parents were Leo and Anne Townsend. I have two older sisters, Beth and Pat. I grew up in a great midwestern neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else in the neighborhood. There was really no knocking on doors and waiting for someone to answer the door. Usually you just knocked and let yourself in. It was a time of black and white TV with only three channels, telephone party lines and no bicycle helmets. Being the youngest of three children and the only boy, I was only slightly spoiled rotten (okay maybe it should be very spoiled), very argumentative and sometimes a little cocky. I remember my Mom telling me in the second grade she hoped I’d be an attorney. I asked her “why”? She said because I enjoyed arguing so much with others. I immediately replied, “No I don’t!” Thus starting another argument.
I spent most of my time playing whatever sport was in season. In the fall we played football, in the winter basketball and in the spring baseball. As an athlete talent and size were never on my side so I had to rely on discipline and determination. My motivation always started out with a bet. “I bet you can’t do ________.” Fill in the blank and it was on. Our teams were mediocre most of the time and a winning season came around every now and then.
I got in the usual mischief growing up that most times started with my mouth. I would have to say I’ve been pretty much a smart aleck my whole life. As the son of a marine sergeant, discipline was always prevalent in our house. We were Lutherans and for 17 years we went to church every Sunday come rain, snow, sleet or hail. And if you were sick, that didn’t get you a pass either. From my perspective as a kid it was pretty much a dead church, maybe the adults felt differently. It really was a social event for us kids.
Well anyways, one Sunday my mouth got me in a whole lot of trouble. I think I was about 12 or 13, proceeding to the height of my smart aleck ways. My mother was on the far inside of the pew. I was sitting next to her and my two sisters were next to me and my father was on the outside. My mother said something that to this day I can’t remember, but my first thought was, “Oh shut up”. Now that thought turned to action, an action a wiser person would have never followed up on. I proceeded to tell her to “shut up” but I swear I stopped at “shut”. Nevertheless, she heard what I was thinking and it was on. She proceeded to grab a communion card and start writing. I was earnestly wondering what in the world she could be writing. She finished and handed me the card and sternly said “Pass this to your father.” I turned the card over and read, “Leo, YOUR son just told me to shut up. What are you going to do about it?” I passed the card to my sister who read it and began to snicker. She passed it on to my other sister who read it and snickered. She handed it to my father.
I immediately felt this hand around my neck tighter than a vise grip. To this day I believe it was the beginning of the stretch armstrong doll. I felt my body rise out of the pew against my will and I was praying this was a spiritual experience and not something manifesting in the physical world. Unfortunately for me, it was the latter and what should have been the Holy Spirit, was actually the anger of one very upset marine father. As I proceeded to leave the pew, against my own free will I might add, and hauled down the aisle in front of the whole church, my mind raced with thoughts as to what my punishment might be for this slight slip of the tongue. Where are social services at when you really need them?
When we got to the car, I looked at my Dad’s face and saw it turning shades of red that I never knew existed. On the drive home my father gave me a history lesson on my birth and how the woman I just told to shut up, nearly died that day. I tried to correct my Dad (imagine that one) that it was just shut and not shut up. I almost got out of the way of the hand flying my way. As we were finishing our basement into a “rec room”, our garage was filled with an assortment of lumber. My Dad told me when we got home I was to go to the garage and pick out a piece of lumber that would be his new favorite paddle. Unfortunately he added a warning that if the piece of lumber was not large enough, he would pick the next piece out.
Well things weren’t all bad; at least this bought me sometime to come up with plan b. As I picked up 2 x4’s and rejected them all, and scrounged around for something small like a 1 x 2 which I knew my dad would reject, I formulated a foolproof plan. I figured the sooner I started crying, the sooner he would stop hitting me. God, I’m such a genius. So I made up my mind I would just start balling with the first wack. Brilliant idea. I spent the next 30 minutes trying to find the perfect piece of wood. Actually I was praying it would break after the first or second hit.
I think you know how this ends. Plan B failed miserably and my rear end got lit up like a Christmas tree. Needless to say I never thought or said shut up to my mother again.
Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s there was not much technology for heart disease. They pretty much just gave you some morphine for the pain and maybe some nitroglycerin and hoped you made it. Back then the first 48 hours was the most critical. Children were not allowed on the hospital floors and had to wait in the waiting area or hang out in the coffee shop. If you were allowed up on the floor it usually was not a good sign.
Things were grim with my father after a couple of days and each one of us kids were called into his room individually for I guess what was supposed to be our last goodbyes. Being the youngest I was the last one in and I watched each of my sisters come out with tears in their eyes. My father was my hero, he was bigger than life to me, but as I walked into his room he seemed much more human. The only part of the conversation that I remember was he told me, “Art, whatever you do in this life, do it the best you can. Otherwise, it is not worth doing.” That is great advice when you are doing something good, unfortunately I also followed it when I was doing bad things. I left his room with a feeling it wasn’t over yet and it wasn’t his time quite yet.
Over the next several years my father continued to suffer several more heart attacks and strokes. I grew up looking for the car behind every ambulance siren I heard to see if I recognized my mother, grandfather or sisters following my dad to the hospital. My mother was an RN and became the breadwinner of the family as my father eventually ended up on the disability list. I think it was a role that took its toll on my mother and added more stress in her life than she could handle.
We went from an average middle class family to a struggling one-income family. My sisters eventually joined the work force and contributed to the family budget. I never really noticed that things were tight. As long as there was bologna (and ketchup) in the refrigerator and I could play sports my world was fine. I finally started to notice a couple years later when converse “Chuck Taylor’s” became popular along with Levi jeans and I had neither. My parents had a Sears’s credit card and if Sears didn’t carry it, we didn’t get it.
My family’s financial condition became on of the biggest humiliations in my life in the 8th grade. Every Christmas the student council of our junior high would select a “needy” family in the area and have a food drive for them. One night the captain of our basketball team who was also the student body president and one of my closest friends knocked on our door. I was upstairs and heard my father welcome Steve in and heard several boxes of food being deposited on the kitchen table. Steve told my dad that our family had been selected as the needy family that year. My dad yelled several times for me to come down and say hi to Steve. I was so embarrassed and humiliated I refused to come downstairs. How could we be needy? We lived in a great middle class neighborhood. My mom and sisters all had jobs and there was always bologna in the refrigerator? Surely there was a more needy family in our town. The rest of my family seemed genuinely gracious for the food while I hid in my room from shame and embarrassment.
I’ve always had a problem with authority, whether it came from God, my parents, my sisters, my teachers etc. There was just something about being told what to do that grated on me. If someone said don’t do it, I wanted to do it. If someone told me to do something, I either didn’t do it, or did it unwillingly. Proverbs 16:18 says, “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Well that’s exactly where mine usually led.
One time we were having a picnic at one of those famous roadside parks in Ohio with a grill, picnic tables, trees and gravel parking lot. While dad was grilling the burgers, I decided to start throwing stones into the nearest tree. After a few minutes my mother told me stop throwing stones before I put somebody’s eye out. I looked straight at her and said, “Ok just one more.” Now the tree I was throwing at was directly in front of me and my mother was nowhere near it, the best I recall. I didn’t know at the time that the last stone I would pick up just happened to be the exact same stone that David used to slew Goliath.
I reached down and grabbed that stone and threw it has high and as hard as I could at the tree. I mean I wanted to knock that tree down. To this day I have no earthly explanation how that stone ended up right below my mother’s eye. I stood there in shock and disbelief as the blood shot out of my mother’s face. Upon hearing my mother’s screams and crying, my father looked first, at his wife and then back at me. How a person’s face can show such deep compassion and anger at the same time is beyond me. Somehow all the “I’m sorry’s” did not take away my mother’s pain nor my father’s anger. That pride and haughty spirit will get you every time.
As my dad continued to suffer with heart disease over the years, I mentally prepared myself for his death. I knew with all his heart attacks it was just a matter of time. I can remember staring at his face and just wanting to burn that image in my brain. When he talked I wondered if I would ever forget the sound of his voice. I knew he wasn’t going to be around very much longer and with every ambulance siren I wondered if it was him and his life was over. I’m sure these are not the usual thoughts of a normal young teenager, but it was my reality.
We lived in a 1-½ story cape cod home. There were two bedrooms and a ½ bath upstairs, which my sisters and I shared. I was awakened on March 11, 1974 about six am to my mom screaming in pain. My dad yelled upstairs to us that he was taking our mom to the hospital. I went about my normal morning routine of getting ready for school not worried at all about my mom. Other than an ulcer or two she was healthy as a horse as far as I was concerned.
I drove to school that day in my own little world of sports and peer pressure. Around 11 o’clock I got called down to the principal’s office. I immediately thought back to any pranks I might have been involved with that would warrant such attention. Nothing came to mind so I was clueless when I entered his office. He said the hospital called and I needed to go down there and sign some papers for my mom’s surgery. Now that just didn’t make sense to me because I figured my dad was there and could sign whatever needed to be signed. But realizing this was a ticket out of school I didn’t say a word.
I grabbed my keys and rushed out to the parking lot. The only surgery I could think she would need would be something to do with her stomach. For just a split second I had this far-fetched thought about maybe she is dead, but dismissed it as quickly as it came into my head. I quickly turned my attention to how long hospital visit would take and what my plans would be for that afternoon. Is there anything better than being 16 and driving? I love freedom.
I arrived at the hospital and walked into the emergency waiting room. My grandfather, father and sister were there. Dad talked about what happened between 6 a.m. and 10a.m. My grandfather told stories and I waited patiently to be dismissed. After what seemed like two hours, our family doctor (remember those) came in followed by nurse with a syringe. What he said next changed my world forever. He looked at my father and said, “Leo I did everything I could to save her.” My father shot up out his seat screaming and crying. The nurse, knowing my dad’s heart history, immediately gave him a shot in his arm to sedate him. Everyone in the room bursted into tears, including me. I could not believe what I just heard. Surely this wasn’t happening and there was a mistake somewhere. I was in shock and my world just stopped. There was no way this could be happening. I had never felt so much pain and hurt. My heart felt like it was beating out of my chest. This just couldn’t be. For years I had prepared myself for dad’s death knowing for certain my mom would always be there. How could this happen? I was dazed and stayed that way for a while. What do you do when the world crashes around you? I don’t remember driving home from the hospital. When I got home I do remember slamming some kitchen cabinet doors in anger and my sister yelling at me to stop.
I realized I had never even said goodbye to my mom that morning. I never even said I love you. I just knew I’d see her that night after school. I was in my own world and I took for granted those nearest to me. It was my first life lesson that there are no guarantees in life. Unfortunately it would take a few more reminders to actually “learn” that lesson.
No comments:
Post a Comment