Nineteen years now
At first, he talked a great deal about getting his sight back. With the passing of the long dark years, though, he mentioned that possibility more seldom, and, gradually, his muscles atrophied and his mind lost its sharpness and he spent more and more of his life immobile, a prisoner of his rocking chair.
But he never entirely gave up hope.
With touching determination, he hurled his fading memory at stacks of Spanish instructional tapes—over and over and over again. As recently as last Friday, he asked me whether he would ever be able to see again. I told him Yes.
What I didn’t tell him was that I expected it to be only in the next life.
And now, after his long night of darkness, he can see again.
“Someday we’ll understand all of this,” he said to me several times over the past few months. Now the mental fog that increasingly gathered about him and so frustrated him has been burned away by warm, brilliant, loving light. All is clear. In the words of a beloved Mormon hymn, “The morning breaks, the shadows flee!”
A modest and shy person, Dad would never have seen himself as a great man. Yet he was. In all the truly important things, he was. He loved my mother, and, to his very last day, worried about whether she was receiving adequate care.
He was my first and only missionary convert. I was privileged to baptize him—and Kenneth to confirm him a member—on the night I was set apart as a missionary.
Kenneth and I could have had no better father.
When, just after his stroke, I was about to publish a book, it suddenly came to me with a flash almost of revelation that I had to dedicate it to my father, and how that dedication should read:
Quoting Jesus’ description of Nathanael, I dedicated it
“To my father, Carl P. Peterson—an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.” (John 1:47.)
Dad worried about that dedication. He was afraid that I was calling him “perfect.” I wasn’t, of course. But Dad was entirely without guile or deceit. He was a loving, gentle, patient man. Humble, self-effacing. Kind.
