Memorial Service for Tom Barton

TOM EDWIN BARTON
December 30, 1949 – April 5, 2006

As I spin through my childhood recollections of Tom, always he is in some kind hot water. Those are the only memories I can pull up. I know that there must have been good and pleasant and fun times but I can’t seem to locate them.

I remember this older brother by 6 years who was rambunctious, loud, mischievous, mean, and argumentative. He marched to the beat of a different drummer and sailed against the winds of conventionality.

Before I knew what the word frustration meant I learned it by observing Dad and Mom. Tom was not an easy son to parent. He seemed bent on doing everything his own way.

Tom left home when I was 12 years old. He joined the Marines. I remember the excitement of the day when he came home from basic training in San Diego. I remember waiting at the airport gate. What I recall from his brief time home was looking through his pictures of basic training. I felt proud of my older brother who had graduated from basic training and wore a Marine uniform to prove it.

Next thing I knew he was shipped off to the Viet Nam. Suddenly that war became frighteningly real to me. The daily causalities reported in the Idaho Statesman and by Walter Cronkite on the CBC Evening News were of young men like Tom. The ominous nature of that conflict hung over our home everyday.

And then one afternoon after school it entered our living room in the person of a Marine officer who came to the door to tell us that Tom had been wounded. Wounded, thank God, but not killed. He would survive.

As a side-note, some of us found out in February at Tom’s ‘say yes to Jesus’ celebration at the Capitol Care Center that the night Tom was wounded people here in Boise were awakened to pray for his safety. Dave & Dee Friesen, who lived across the street from us, woke up in the middle of the night and felt led to pray for Tom; specifically that he would be protected from shrapnel. When Tom heard that he pulled up his shirt sleeve and showed us shrapnel wounds on his left arm.

A few miles away dad’s brother, my Uncle Jr., was awakened to pray for Tom as well. I can’t help but believe that those prayers were instrumental in safely carrying Tom all these years from that moment in the jungles of South Viet Nam to the Friday evening, 16 days earlier, when he checked himself into St Alphonsus Hospital, and more than he ever could have known at the time, checked himself into the hands of his doctors and family where those long ago prayers were finally about to be answered.

In one of his live recordings Bruce Springsteen introduces the song War by sharing stories of his high school friends from New Jersey who were sent to fight in the Viet Nam war. He told how some of them went and didn’t come back and that others of them went and came back but were never the same. The first time I listened to him say this I thought of Tom – he went, came back, but was never the same.

Something happened to him and in him during that war. About twenty-five years ago he opened up to me about his experiences there for the one and only time. I could hardly believe the stories he told me. What he was commanded to do, what he did, what he hated doing, what he saw, and the scars it left on his heart. His drug and alcohol use were largely intended to bury those memories and pain.

After Viet Nam Tom lived for various amounts of time in California, Idaho, Florida and only Tom knows where else he laid his hat down as home. I remember good times spent together in California after Sue’s stroke. Tom faithfully stood by Sue as she gallantly fought back as best she could and for as far as her body and brain would allow her.

But for Tom that was not to be. God had a different plan. Tests were done that January 20th Friday evening when Tom entered the hospital. Brent called me the next day to tell me that Tom had a brain tumor. Three days later I flew to Boise.

One afternoon I sat down with his doctor, Dr. Cherny, along with Dad, Mom, Larry and Judy. He slowly and carefully explained Tom’s condition to us. He took us to a computer and showed us the brain images from Tom’s MRI. This was both fascinating and sobering. Through word and picture he explained to us that there was nothing that could be done to save Tom’s life. He gave him one to two months to live. If my calculations are correct, Tom lived approximately two months and two weeks after we heard this. I don’t think any of us had any idea what God had in mind for those last seventy-four days of Tom’s life. I know I didn’t.

With Tom God gave us the gift of life, love, family and faith in a manner that we had never experienced before. His maverick, wandering, independent, and loner self needed us. To calm his fears, answer his questions, cut up his meat, hold his hand, sit next to his bed, talk and laugh and cry, and share this abrupt turnaround to his life. I will never forget kneeling down at his bedside, one of my hands holding one of his, and my other hand and arm around his shoulder – trying to comfort him as he groaned and cried as the news sunk in that he was going to die.

Tom needed us and more than we probably realized at the time we needed him. We needed to be able to love and care for him. To make up and overcome and put to rest all the years and all the miles and all the issues that had kept us apart. The years, miles and issues quickly and mysteriously began to peel back and melt away, especially for Dad and Mom, who together bore the heaviest load of any of us for Tom. It was a beautiful, wonderful time.

An inoperable, walnut-sized brain tumor lodged behind Tom’s left eye brought us all together for one final romp and dance. Through the eyes of my faith that tumor has become as holy of a relic as I know.

That tumor of physical death became, in God’s hands, the instrument of spiritual life and family healing for Tom. That tumor stopped Tom in his tracks and redirected his steps in a path that, I for one, had given up hope of his ever finding. That tumor led him to say ‘yes’ to Jesus as his Savior at 3am, Sunday morning, January 29th, after his nurse woke him up to check his vitals and he was having trouble going back to sleep. She checked his physical vitals and Jesus took care of his spiritual ones.

We read in Psalm 139:16, all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. I think of Tom walking off his island sometime on Friday, January 2oth, never knowing that he was never to return. Somehow he got himself to the hospital.

That trip from Glenwood and State Street to St. Alphonsus Hospital was the most important journey of his life. With every step he took Tom was walking not from life to death, but from death to life. I see his small island in the Boise River as symbolic of his old life, his old way of living. And I see the hospital, the place where people go to be made well, as symbolic of his new life, his new way of living.

Bono and U2 sing these lyrics in a song they call Kite –
Something is about to give
I can feel it coming
I think I know what it is
I’m not afraid to die
I’m not afraid to live
And when I’m flat on my back
I hope to feel like I did
Tom wasn’t afraid to die. In one of my last conversations with him, 2 weeks before he died, he told me that he was thinking a lot about heaven.

I asked him if he was depressed living there at Capitol Care Center. He turned his head sideways, squinted his eyes, and said to me, “why should I be?” I asked him if he still had a deep sense of peace inside, like he told me he experienced after he said ‘yes’ to Jesus. Again, he turned his head sideways, squinted his eyes, and said, “Why wouldn’t I?” At that moment I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that something had changed inside of Tom.

He wasn’t afraid to live. He wasn’t afraid to die. His thoughts were filled with heaven. He wasn’t depressed. And he was living out of the deep peace of God.

This story of Tom walking off his island only to discover that he had an inoperable brain tumor, only to discover the love and devotion of his family and friends, and only to discover that Jesus unconditionally loved him just as he was is a most wonderful story that we his family will cherish for as long as we inhabit this earth.

The night before he said ‘yes’ to Jesus I read him the story of the Prodigal Son. We talked about the story. He knew he was the prodigal. He knew it was time to come home to his waiting, loving, accepting Heavenly Father. And he finally did about 6 hours after I left him for the evening.

When he told us all the next day Dad cried, Brent stood up and gave Tom a double ‘thumbs up,’ Mom sat next to his bed in a state of shock, and I looked at them all and looked at Tom and realized that this was the moment we had hoped and prayed for for years and years. Those seconds were strangely surreal but full of joy.

Through Tom’s life and death we all of us have learned a lesson to beat all lessons about God’s grace. He lived his 56 years his own way. Though there were a few brief times when his face was turned toward God, the years piled up where his rebellious back was all that God saw of him.

It came down to the wire. To the last 11 weeks of the 2,912 weeks that Tom lived in his 56 years. We’re talking about a minuscule sliver of Tom’s existence – a .003777472527 part of his life.

There’s a story Jesus told about a vineyard owner who instructed his manager to hire help for the day. He hired men at 6 am and agreed to pay them $1 for their day’s work. He hired others at 9 am, still others at 12 noon, and others at 3 pm. And finally he hired the last group at 5 pm.

Then it was time to pay up starting with those hired last. They received $1 for 1 hour of work. Those hired first began to lick their chops. They saw dollars signs in their mind’s eye. But everyone was paid $1. Boy did the grumbling begin!

The owner of the vineyard met this grumbling with these words, Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first and the first will be last.

Tom worked 1 hour but he got paid for 12. He picked up a full pay check. That’s God. That’s grace. That’s God’s amazing grace. And the last few weeks of Tom’s life he lived out of that grace.

I miss him today in a way I never dreamed possible. While he was physically dying there was a spiritual transformation taking place in his life. I saw peace in his eyes that I’d never seen before. He told me one night on the phone when I called him from Canby that he was praying for me – I almost fell off my chair. I used to call him from Canby just to hear him tell me that he loved me when we said good-bye. I hadn’t heard this from him before.

He spoke to me of how lucky he was to have the family he did. Initially he was surprised that we all came up to the hospital to see him. He didn’t expect this. But he came to love it and told me how much he liked having visitors.

My last contact with him 13 days before he died went like this. We were in his room – Dad, Mom, Brent and I. It was time for me to leave for the airport. I knew that this would be the last time I saw him in this life. We held hands and I prayed. (By the way, this was another change for Tom – he wanted me to pray for him and he wanted to hold my hand while I prayed.) At the end of my prayer I thanked God that Tom had said ‘yes’ to Jesus as his Savior and that he was headed to heaven. At that moment he squeezed my hand with his as hard as he could. His squeeze was our final good-bye.

And that was Dad and Mom’s good-bye as well this past Wednesday evening when he died at 9:30pm. Dad and Mom were the only ones with him when he took his last breath. He died peacefully, no struggle, but a gradual stealing away to Jesus.

Mom held one of his hands and Dad the other. How appropriate. These two whose union of love had brought him into the world 56 years earlier. These two who loved him in a way that none of us ever could. These two who shared the pain and disappointment of his life as only his parents could. These two who were given 11 weeks at the end of his life to make up for all the lost time of all those lost years. These two who finally shared the joy of their prodigal son coming home to them and Home to Jesus. The script couldn’t have been written any better.

I want to thank all of you for coming today. I want to thank those of you who stood by Tom during these past two months with your visits, prayers, and love – especially Judy and Larry, Vicki, Steve, Howard Jr. and Ed. Thanks for being there for Tom and thanks for being there for Dad and Mom.