From The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

Our friend Edie Varnado, who lives in the country outside of McComb, Mississippi, and makes soap for a living, wrote to encourage Julie and me. She told us that she and her husband stayed in Mississippi in part to be close to her folks. Her brother moved to New York City. One night, over dinner, Edie’s father said to her, “Even with everything you have, or will have, to deal with, you have the better part.”

She laughed gently at that, but her father looked at her seriously, and said, “You really have.” As the years went by, she saw her father was right. Her brother has memories of all the hurts he experienced as a child. Edie remembers their folks as adults, as real people, for better and for worse. Edie was with both her mother and father when they died, holding their hands and reading the psalms.

“It’s hard, big, real and dirty,” Edie wrote.

We are at that place now, here in Starhill. A month ago, my father entered home hospice care. I haven’t said anything here because I wanted friends and family to find out from him. My mother tells me that everybody in town knows now, which accounts for the steady stream of visitors my dad has been getting these past few weeks. There’s no reason to keep it secret anymore.

He’s very weak, and sleeps a lot. I said to him the other day, “All those people coming in and out, I don’t know how you handle it.”

“It’s good to have friends, son,” he said. Of course he’s right. He has been blessed all his life by his friends, and continues to be. This is the core meaning of Little Way, I think: the value of friends and community. Here at the very end, Paw is comforted and accompanied by so many people he has known and loved all his life. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

You readers who met my father in Little Way, and you who have followed our story through How Dante, please join me in praying for Paw as he rounds this final bend of his life. It has not been easy, my being here, either for me or for him. There have been plenty of times when I wondered why I returned, and I bet he felt the same way. But I know for sure now that despite all the hard, big, real, and dirty times we have had over the last three years, that by choosing to come home after Ruthie died, I have had the better part.

I wasn’t going to post this just yet, but reader Bobby said in the comments section of another thread tonight that he is going for a job interview back in his hometown. He said if he gets the job, he will make significantly less money than he makes now, and will have to give up a lot of things he likes in the major metropolitan area where he now lives. But, he said, his parents are older, and they need him, and having read Little Way and this blog, he has decided that maybe he is called to be there with them.

I am humbled to have played a part in Bobby’s thinking on this point, and if he does go home, I give the credit to my late sister Ruthie, whose story brought a few others back to their homes (I know this because they’ve told me). I offer this photo I took on Sunday, and this news of my dad, to encourage others who may be thinking the same thing about their own aging parents. Little Way and How Dante give you the whole story as I’ve lived it, both the good and the bad, but I can tell you for sure, now that we are in the last days, weeks, or months of my father’s long and good life, that it has all been worth it. Truly, I cannot imagine having done anything else.

If knowing that helps you in your own thinking about your future, I am happy. My folks have been deeply comforted, often to the point of tears of gratitude, to have heard from strangers these past three years, telling them how much of a difference Ruthie’s story, and our family’s story, has made in their own lives — even to the point of causing some adult children to do as Bobby may be about to do, and move home. Given what my father holds close to his heart, I believe it would honor and please him to know that someone he doesn’t even know might choose to move back to be near his or her aging parents because they read something about him.

Please do remember to pray for Paw, though, and for my mother, who is his principal caregiver, and who has a difficult walk around this last bend too. They will have been married 51 years this August 15.