By Joseph Fielding McConkie
Few who heard Bruce R. McConkie’s last conference address followed just days later by his death will ever forget it. For many, it was one of the most moving experiences of their lives.
This is the second of two excerpts from Joseph Fielding McConkie’s new biography of his father, The Bruce R. McConkie Story: Reflections of a Son published by Deseret Book.. Read part 1 here.
Bristled hair . . . and guileless tongue . . .Tear-filled voice, emotion wrung . . . Manner strong and features kind . . . Speech incisive . . . steel-trap mind.
-William Kent Wadsworth
About a year before Dad started to have trouble with his health, he felt impressed to move himself and Mother out of the family home on Dorchester Drive and into a condominium near the Church Offices. Toward the end of 1983 he started to experience some pain and discomfort in his stomach. There was no thought that the matter was particularly serious, though he seemed more tired on occasion than he ought to be and had a rather listless appetite. The doctors ran about a dozen tests on him for ulcers, cancer, and so forth. All the tests came back negative. A spot was noticed on his liver, so the doctors recommended surgery, just in case something was wrong. Elders James E. Faust and Neal A. Maxwell gave him a blessing, and the surgery took place on January 20, 1984. To our surprise and overwhelming disappointment, the doctors found cancer in Dad’s system to such an extent that there was simply nothing they could do for him.
The doctors sewed him up so that he could go home and die in peace. They told the family that he had only “months” to live, meaning, we were later to learn, that they really thought he had “two weeks to two months” to live. Tears were shed, expressions of faith were made, and both the Smith and the McConkie families-including uncles, aunts, and cousins-united in fasting and prayer. Together their resolve was to walk in all “the ordinances of the Lord blameless” and to call down the blessings of heaven (Luke 1:6).
In typical Bruce McConkie fashion, he made every effort to keep the matter out of the public eye. Yet all efforts to that effect were unsuccessful. Rumors spread with speed rivaling that of light itself. In the hope of stemming the tide of rumor, Oscar announced the matter to the press. Don LeFevre, as spokesman for the Church, confirmed the report without adding to it. The seriousness of the situation was downplayed for the press, but no one who had any knowledge of this kind of cancer was fooled.
President Gordon B. Hinckley visited Dad and, at Dad’s request, gave him a blessing. Elder Boyd K. Packer called Mother and asked if he could visit and give Dad a blessing. Of course she responded affirmatively. He came, saying that he had struggled with the matter for two days and that he was fighting mad: “Bruce was not to be taken.” He gave Dad a blessing and told him that they were laboring on both sides of the veil to keep him here. Brit was also called to administer to him. He repeated Elder Packer’s words and gave the same promises, though he was unaware that the earlier blessing had been given. Thousands of faithful Saints throughout the Church added their prayers with much effect. Dad was scheduled to go home from the hospital two weeks after the operation. He went home after a week. The doctors called it “a little miracle.”
While he was still in the hospital, Sister Hulda Parker Young, who was the Relief Society president for the hospital, told Dad of a patient there who had been paralyzed for years. She was a young mother who had almost surrendered to despair. She had asked Sister Young, “Couldn’t I have one of the general authorities that come in to bless Elder McConkie come down and administer to me?” Dad said he would see to it. He got up out of his bed and said, “Come on, Mother.” Together they went down to the room of this woman, and he gave her a blessing. She now walks.
He left the hospital on January 27 and began chemotherapy about two weeks later. In a letter to the family written February 20, Mother noted that “Dad has passed the first phase of the chemo-therapy with relative ease-slight nausea and exhaustion, but no violent reactions.” Notwithstanding his tolerance for the chemotherapy, his battle to live was attended by “pain beyond description.”
While in the hospital he observed to Elder Packer that the early apostles had suffered much and perhaps this was the equivalent suffering for the Twelve of this day. “Suffering sanctifies,” Dad said. He believed his affliction was a test, and he was determined to pass it well. In a talk written for, but not delivered in, the April 1979 general conference he said, “Life never was intended to be easy. We are here on probation. We need the experiences of mortality, experiences which could be gained in no other way.” He then suggested that we must each face our own Gethsemane. We will all “be tried and tested to the full extent of our power to withstand,” he wrote.
In the course of some months, another scan was made of his liver, which showed that there were no new cancer spots and the old ones were shrinking. His doctor told him that this was medically impossible. A couple of days later his doctor, not a member of the Church, visited his office to explain, “I don’t think you understand. What has happened is not medically possible.” Dr. Russell M. Nelson confirmed that. “No one recovers when the cancer has spread like it had in his liver.”
Dad stood in April conference to say: “I am quite overwhelmed by deep feelings of thanksgiving and rejoicing for the goodness of the Lord to me.
“He has permitted me to suffer pain, feel anxiety, and taste his healing power. I am profoundly grateful for the faith and prayers of many people, for heartfelt petitions that have ascended to the throne of grace on my behalf.
“It is pleasing to that God whose we are when we fast and pray and seek his blessings; when we plead with all the energy of our souls for those things we so much desire; when, as Paul says, we ‘come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need’ (Heb. 4:16).”1
For a time Dad continued to improve. By the end of August he could jog five miles, but early in September he began again to lose his strength and the original symptoms returned. He was completely spent by the time he returned from the office in the evening. Tests showed that the cancer had returned with a vengeance. At about this time he asked the members of the Missionary Executive Committee-Elders Packer, Faust, and Dallin H. Oaks-to give him a blessing. Elder Packer was voice, and he gave a powerful and positive blessing. He indicated that people on both sides of the veil were laboring for his recovery, particularly President Joseph Fielding Smith. A second miracle occurred, and again his life was extended.
During this period of reprieve he was able to accomplish a number of things of particular importance to him, including three talks now regarded as classics by Latter-day Saint religious educators. The first of these, given June 3, 1984, dealt with missionary work, conversion, and the place of the Book of Mormon. It was given to teachers at Brigham Young University who were being trained to aid Religion faculty members in teaching Book of Mormon classes. In these remarks he showed how in our missionary efforts we have hindered the work by attempting to find common ground with people of other faiths. The attempt to show that we share a faith in common-that we are Christians just like them-left those we were teaching without reason to hear the message of the Restoration. We exist as a faith because of our differences with historical Christianity, and only in those differences is reason found for conversion and the kind of faith it takes to be a Latter-day Saint, he said.
In August of that year he spoke by assignment to Church Educational System personnel. The title of his address was “The Bible, a Sealed Book,” which identified the two seals that lock the meaning of this sacred record to the understanding of men. The first he identified as “the seal of ignorance” and the second as “the seal of intellectuality.” He showed how the true meaning of the book could only be unlocked by the spirit of revelation.2
On Saturday, November 3, 1984, he gave another landmark talk entitled “The Doctrinal Restoration” at a symposium sponsored by the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University. In the keynote address he charged all who have been commissioned to teach the gospel to be true to the revelations of the Restoration. As to the Joseph Smith Translation, he said, “May I be pardoned if I say that negative attitudes and feelings about the Joseph Smith Translation are simply part of the devil’s program to keep the word of truth from the children of men.
“Of course the revealed changes made by Joseph Smith are true-as much so as anything in the Book of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants.
“Of course we have adequate and authentic original sources showing the changes-as much so as are the sources for the Book of Mormon or the revelations.
“Of course we should use the Joseph Smith Translation in our study and teaching. Since when do any of us have the right to place bounds on the Almighty and say we will believe these revelations but not those?”3
I participated in this symposium and was scheduled to speak immediately after Dad, perhaps so that he would be able to stay and hear my presentation. I had looked forward to this event because it would be one of the few times we shared the same platform. Immediately after his talk, however, he indicated to me that he did not have the strength to stay. Like everyone else present, I had no idea how difficult that presentation had been for him.
Another goal he was able to accomplish during his second reprieve from the ravages of cancer was planning a family trip. On August 28, 1984, Dad wrote to each of his children and their spouses to invite them to join him and Mother on a visit to the Holy Land. Because Brenda and I had had experience in leading such tours, he asked us to make the preparations. Among other things, a schedule of family study classes was drawn up. All who could attend were expected to take their turn instructing the group at our family nights. When it was Dad’s turn, as something of a measure of his interest, he came with typed outlines twenty to thirty pages long.
Fighting the Good Fight
In the meantime, Dad’s fight with cancer intensified. Elder John K. Carmack recounted events attending a weekend assignment during this period, when Elder McConkie and Elder David B. Haight were assigned to a twelve-stake conference in Santa Barbara, California. “We met to plan the conference in Elder Haight’s office. I was the junior member of the team. Elder McConkie’s only request was that we do what would be most convenient to the people of the twelve stakes. So we planned two four-hour leadership meetings on Saturday, one in Chatsworth and one in Santa Barbara, one hundred miles away. Sunday would find us doing two-hour meetings on the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus. We would return the one hundred miles to Los Angeles and arrive home about midnight. Elder Haight, ever solicitous of Elder McConkie, protested, but deferred to the senior apostle.
“I saw him that week in the General Authority dining room. ‘John, let’s go preach the gospel,’ he said with obvious enthusiasm. He anticipated the chance to once more teach and exhort the Saints.
“On the Friday night before the conference, Shirley and I met Bruce and Amelia McConkie and David Haight at the Burbank Airport. Elder McConkie was completely exhausted. He had just had his chemotherapy shot. (Incidentally, Sister McConkie says that his doctor, who was not a member of the Church, did not quite know how to take Bruce. She said he would walk in on Friday for his shot, roll up his sleeve, and say, ‘Seven more days of life, Doc!’)
“After we met at the airport that night, Elder McConkie went straight to bed without dinner. Over dinner, Amelia shared with us his cooperative disdain for the illness which was obviously consuming him.”
As to the conference meetings, Elder Carmack recalled: “Many felt he was never more powerful than he was at that conference, nor was there a finer regional conference than that on Saturday and Sunday in Chatsworth and Santa Barbara. He was back where his father, Oscar McConkie, had presided in such power. . . .
“Experiencing some difficulty with the sound on Sunday, he grasped the microphone on the podium and pulled it close to his mouth. ‘I didn’t come all this way not to be heard,’ he announced. Everyone heard and everyone understood his message of salvation.
“We drove back to Los Angeles and awaited the late arrival of our flight to Salt Lake City. In the airport many recognized him and Elder Haight and spoke to them. He could travel to no location in the world without being recognized. He and all of the rest of us were tired as we arrived in Salt Lake City at midnight.
“On Tuesday following that exhausting weekend, I saw him at the office. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked. He jumped instantly into the air, clicked his heels, and exclaimed, ‘Great!'” It was the importance of what he was doing that gave him strength, Elder Carmack concluded. “Soon he would join his Savior, but he must endure to the end. This he did with courage and power beyond anything I have witnessed.”4
During this period he also filled conference assignments and reorganized a number of stakes. In at least one instance his pain was such that he called a stake president while lying on the floor of the stake office.
Among the notes written on pieces of scratch paper in my father’s desk, I found part of an envelope printed by an airline containing a flight ticket. It was dated January 27, 1985. On it Dad had written the following little verse, obviously written as he returned from what was a very difficult conference assignment:
We are late, late, late;
And getting later.
It is dark, dark, dark;
And getting darker.
I am tired, tired, tired;
And getting tireder.
Oh Hell!
A Family Blessing and Promise
In mid-February 1985, the family was informed that Dad’s situation was again getting worse. His chemotherapy treatments no longer seemed to be working, so they were stopped.
On Sunday, February 27, the family gathered at the home of my sister Sara and her husband, Jerry Fenn, to seal our fast and importune the heavens in Dad’s behalf. Mother had invited us to do this without Dad’s knowledge for fear he would not want us to make a fuss over him. The spirit of the meeting was positive. Mother indicated that Dad had asked the boys to come down to their apartment and give him a blessing. When we were seated in the apartment, she turned to me and asked me to take charge. I briefly recounted for Dad what had taken place and then told him he was surrounded by men of faith who would be pleased to give him a blessing if he desired it. He said, “I would like that,” in a manner that indicated he meant it. He asked me to be voice in giving the blessing. As we gathered around him, I asked if he would like us to anoint him also. He responded in the affirmative and asked Stanford to perform that ordinance.
In the blessing we told Dad that he was encircled in the love of his family and that each of us who laid our hands on his head had received the priesthood or its saving ordinances at his hand and now deemed it an honor to place our hands on his head to bless him as he had blessed us. We rebuked the disease in his body, telling him that as the Lord had told Joseph Smith the bounds of his enemies were set, so the bounds of this affliction were set. We commanded the disease to recede to those bounds. We also told him that like Joseph Smith, his days were known and would not be numbered less. We told him that he would be required to rest and recuperate but that the Lord would return that time to him. We assured him that he would “yet bear every testimony, teach every doctrine and write every word that he had been foreordained in the councils of heaven to accomplish.” We sealed upon him the blessing given by our Grandfather McConkie to that effect-and, I suppose, if not in word, then surely by implication-the blessing given in the councils of heaven. We then asked for a blessing beyond mortal ability for the doctors who would attend him.
One week later, before he went into the hospital, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and President Hinckley also blessed Dad. He called to tell me about the blessing, saying that President Hinckley “sealed upon him the blessing given by his family.”
Dad then went into the hospital for what was supposed to be a two-week stay in which they would shoot chemotherapy directly into his liver. He was told that this procedure had a 40 percent chance of working. The therapy worked, and Dad was sent home from the hospital after about the ninth day. All that could have been hoped for was accomplished. Still, he was very weak and had a serious case of jaundice. The treatment also robbed him of his appetite.
His doctors came to the apartment to check on him. Describing these events to the family, Mother wrote as follows: “This morning the chemo doctor came in while I was here. He did his usual thorough and expert checking on Daddy, and after all the thumping and feeling and listening he said that his liver was smaller than it had been and he could not detect any indication of fluid in the area.” These were both positive signs, suggesting that the treatment was having the desired effect. Dad was also doing well at maintaining his weight.
To her report Mother added, “Dr. Maurice Taylor, an old friend and devoted follower of Daddy’s came in. He is a fine old Gentleman and Stake Patriarch. After a little visit he was about to leave and then turned and asked Daddy if he would like to have him give Dad a blessing.” Dad indicated that he would. A beautiful blessing followed, which Dad felt was the most positive he had received.
“It was interesting,” Mother continued, “to hear a blessing with a physician talking to the ‘Great Physican’ and using medical expressions like, ‘As you know the cells are producing ______, which is causing _____, and he needs to have “this or that” take place in order to throw off this disease, etc.’ He rebuked the cells that were rebellious and refusing to act as they should normally do and blessed Daddy that the terrible itching and other problems he’s had would cease. He also said that Daddy was well loved in the Church and his work was not finished and he would remain until he had done all he should.”
Dad had a very pronounced case of jaundice, which we understood to be a good sign because it meant the treatment was working. His bilirubin count was up, and the doctors attributed the itch to that. Pills could relieve the itching but with the side effect of drowsiness. He would take them only at night.
About this time I received a call to serve as the president of a Brigham Young University student stake. It was one of the young married stakes and had in it fourteen hundred returned missionaries. When I told Dad about my call and described the stake, I said, “What do you think Joseph Smith would have done if he had had fourteen hundred returned missionaries with whom to begin the labors of this dispensation?” He answered, “I don’t know, but in a few weeks I will ask him.”
On March 10, 1985, Dad went down to the Motion Picture Studio in Provo to film his part of a short film introducing the new editions of the scriptures. The experience took most of the day and left him so exhausted that when it was finished, he got into the car and fell asleep as Mother drove him home.
Conference Week
Sometime before April conference, probably the last Saturday in March, Mother recounted, “Dad came into the kitchen and said, ‘Would you like to hear what I have prepared for General Conference?’ I was making him a pie, because his appetite had begun to go downhill, and I thought, maybe he’d like an apple pie. I had the apples all ready to put in it, and I was rolling up the dough, the oven was on, everything was ready, and he came in and sat down and started to read me his talk and the tears streamed down his face, and he didn’t get more than a couple of sentences out and I thought to myself, ‘You don’t make apple pies when somebody is saying these things to you.’ So I sat down, dropped everything, and listened to him. I asked him, ‘How are you going to be able to get up and read this?’ Because there he was, having a hard time saying what he was saying because he was so touched. And he said, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to do it.'”
On Monday, April 1, Brit gave Dad a blessing. He said he still had work to do, that the devil had been rebuked, and he blessed him to have the strength to get through conference. Elder Packer came on Tuesday and blessed him and again affirmed that he had more to do.
On Tuesday evening, April 2, Mother called our home. I answered the phone and could tell immediately from the tone of her voice that something was seriously wrong. She said, “I called to wish you a happy birthday tomorrow.” She then explained that Dad’s blood tests had come back, and they were very bad. “The doctors can do nothing for him,” she said. They had told her “to take him home and make him as comfortable as possible” for what they said would be the last few days or weeks of his life. She told us that Dad had instructed her that the family was to accept the will of the Lord and that they were not to fast and pray for the extension of his life.
As to conference, she reported that the doctors said that he would be too weak to speak and that should he try, he would likely pass out in front of a national television audience and embarrass the whole Church. “Nevertheless,” she said, “your father wants to give that talk. It means more to him than anything he has done in this life,” but he could not even finish reading it to her. Each time he attempted to do so, he broke down in tears.
After Mother’s call, with Vivian’s help we contacted each of our brothers and sisters to relay Mother’s message and to unite the family in a fast-not contrary to his wishes in pleading for the extension of his life but rather that he might be granted both the strength and the emotional control he needed to give the talk he had written.
During the day, Dad would rest on his bed with his clothes on, refusing to make the concession of remaining in bed. He also refused to eat in the bedroom. Regardless of how bad he felt, he would go to the kitchen to attempt to eat.
Wednesday evening, Brenda and I went up to visit Mother and Dad. He had just returned from his meetings and was exhausted. While he took a nap, Mother insisted on cooking some hamburgers for us. Dad came in and sat at the table. This was especially gracious of him because he had no appetite, and the smell of food nauseated him. He too ate, which greatly pleased Mother. Brenda gave him a supply of a diet supplement in the form of an odorless pill, something like an energy bar but smaller. He could eat them because they were odorless. They may have been his primary food supply for the next few days. I remember seeing him put one in his mouth just before he got up to speak at conference.
By Saturday the family had gathered. Mark and Mary Ann had come from Colorado, Mike and Becky from Iowa, and Stephen and Shauna from California. The rest of us-Brenda and I, Vivian and Carlos, Stanford and Kathy, Mary and Ben, Sara and Jerry, all lived within an hour’s drive of Salt Lake City. Sara and Jerry, who had bought the family home on Dorchester Drive, generously made it our headquarters.
In the Saturday morning session on April 6, 1985, Dad gave his final talk in a general conference of the Church. As he rose to speak, his face was drawn and thin, his skin so yellow that many must have been tempted to adjust the color on their television sets, his steps those of a man many years his senior; nevertheless, he stood tall and spoke as he always had, with confidence and power. The family prayer that he might have both the strength and emotional control to give the talk was answered. The Spirit took over as Dad had prayed it would, and one of the most powerful talks ever given in the Tabernacle was delivered.
With a trembling voice, he concluded: “I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears.
“But I shall not know any better then than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.”5
On Sunday, April 14, Elder Packer visited and blessed Dad for the final time. He said the promises given in the previous blessings were fulfilled in his conference address and that it was a miracle we had had him this year. In effect, Elder Packer indicated in the blessing that Dad’s life’s ministry was completed. Afterward, Dad turned to Mother and said, “Do you know what he said?” Mother told him she would try to live to be an honor and a credit to him. He cried.
Elder Packer visited with Mother and left. His instructions to the family were to yield to the will of the Lord. When Mother and Elder Packer left the room, Dad got up and with what little strength he had remaining, he undressed, pulled the covers back, and got into bed, thus signaling that the battle was over. Thereafter he declined food but would sometimes take a little water.
Brenda and I went up to see them. Mother was tired, and even though she had invited us up, she probably would have preferred that we not come. There had been a constant parade of people in that day. We visited with Mother for a few minutes in the living room and then she said, “Joseph, you can go in and sit by your dad if you would like to.” I entered the bedroom very quietly. I thought he was asleep. He was lying on the far side of the bed with his back to me. I didn’t want to wake him; it was enough just to be present. He said, “Hello, Joseph.” I responded, “Hello, Dad.” I then walked around the bed to be closer to him. He turned his back to me. I started back to the other side so that I could face him. He asked me if I would scratch his back. I rubbed his back for about ten minutes. It seemed a special honor. My thoughts were of those privileged to anoint the broken body of the Savior. When I thought him awake, I said to him, “Dad, I wanted to come up to tell you that I love you.” He was unable to respond. After I had rubbed his back for that short time, he rolled over onto his back, and we talked. I said, “You remember Farrell Smith, who I served with in Vietnam?” He responded in the affirmative.
I told him Farrell was a stake president in Arizona and that he was holding a stake priesthood meeting that night in which they were showing the video of his talk and building their meeting around it. I told him again that I thought more people had been affected by his talk than any talk ever given in a general conference. He said, as he had before, “I wanted to give that talk if it was the last thing I ever did!” I told him that my children wanted to come up and tell him that they loved him, but we were afraid it would wear him out. I said that they were good children, that I had taken Joseph Jr. home teaching with me that day, that he had given the lesson, that he was getting tall and handsome, and that he would be a great missionary. Dad said he knew they were good children and that he was proud of them. He said, “Joseph, I love you.”
Mother came into the room, and when she saw that we were talking, she asked me to get Brenda. I did so. Brenda came in. A moment or two after she came into the room, Dad opened his eyes and saw her. He said, “Hello, Brenda,” with a special kindness and love in his voice like that with which he had greeted me. She said, “Dad, our children wanted us to tell you how much they love you. Shanna felt bad she hadn’t told you that when she was here last week.” Dad said, “I know they do. I love them and am proud of them. You have a good family, Brenda.” Then she said, “We want to thank you for all that you have done for us.” He responded, “It was a privilege.”
At this point Mother sat down and began rubbing Dad’s back again. She made some comments about his having a son and a brother and a father who were waiting to see him. We said we would leave and said good night. Mother excused herself from Dad and walked us to the door. I thanked her for letting us come, and she said we were welcome any time we wanted to come and we did not need to call. We hugged and left.
The next few days family members and close friends came to bid Dad farewell. Each experience contained its own tenderness. The tone of the visit with his mother, Vivian Redd McConkie, was somewhat different, however. She visited Dad to give him instruction. “When you see Daddy,” she said, referring to his father and her companion, from whom she had now been separated for twenty years, “you tell him my suitcase is packed and I am waiting at the curb.” Grandmother, who had hardly been sick a day in her life, was now in her ninety-fifth year-no great thing, particularly, considering that her mother, Lucinda Pace Redd, had lived to be 104. Yet Grandmother McConkie was ready to meet Granddaddy and fully expected Dad to see that the matter was attended to. Three weeks and one day after Dad’s death, she herself died.
Early Friday morning, April 19, Elder Russell M. Nelson came by to check Dad. He took Mother into the living room and told her that Dad would pass away that day. He was leaving for a multiregional conference in Boston, to which Dad had been assigned. He was going with President Ezra Taft Benson, who lived across the hall.
Calls were made, and the family assembled. It was sometime after noon before everyone who was able to be there had arrived. We took chairs into Dad’s room for everyone. Mother suggested that we kneel and have prayer. She asked me to be voice. Stanford’s wife, Kathy, who is a registered nurse, had just taken Dad’s heartbeat, observing that it was strong and regular and would be the last thing to go. Mother, Kathy, and Dad’s nurse had bathed Dad, changed his clothing, and prepared everything needful prior to this gathering.
Vivian described what followed: “We all knelt around the bed. Joseph prayed. He thanked the Lord for Dad’s life and asked him to have regard for Dad’s condition and his obedience and if it was possible, to release his spirit and call him home. Immediately upon the phrase ‘call him home,’ Dad’s spirit left his body, and he was gone. The others were aware he had quit breathing. Joseph asked the Lord to allow Dad to be with us in Israel on the Mount of Beatitudes where the first Twelve were ordained, if it were appropriate.”
Within ten minutes Dr. J. Poulson Hunter came by. No one had called him. He just appeared. He phoned the mortuary and took care of a few other things. Elder Packer called at about the same time. He had just returned from commencement exercises at Brigham Young University. It seemed uncanny how these things were happening. Dr. Hunter called President Hinckley. At about 2:30 p.m. someone looked out the window and saw that the flag at the Church Offices was at half mast.
That spring, according to Dad’s wish, the family made the trip to the Holy Land that we had been planning. Brit and his wife, Beth, as well as Dad’s secretary of many years, Velma Harvey, joined us. We spent some sacred moments together on the Mount of Beatitudes according to our appointment. At the Garden Tomb outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem, we found a quiet place and sat in a circle to listen to a recording of Dad’s last talk. As we listened, a dove flew down into the center of our group, where it remained until Dad’s final amen.
2004 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
