Daddy cried at Deborah's funeral, said she always treated him with respect. A year later, we broke ground for the new homeless mission and chapel to be named after her down on East Lancaster. Mama came, as well as the mayor and several state legislators.
Dad stayed home.
“What's all the big deal raising money and building buildings for the homeless?” he groused. “They ain't nothin but a bunch of drunks and addicts. They got themselves in the mess. Let 'em get out on their own.”
He endeared himself to me further with this addition: “If you wanna give a bunch of money to someone, why don't you give it to me?”
”What would you spend it on?” I asked.
“I'd buy better whiskeyâJack Daniels instead of Jim Beam!”
It irritated Dad to no end that I spent far more time with Denver than with him. And even worse, every time I visited him, Denver was with me. Earl Hall had definitely been a racist. He claimed to have taken a cure and gotten over it, but I didn't believe him.
Dad told me it wasn't right for a man to live alone and that a very beautiful person was going to move in with meâ
him.
I actually thought that was funny, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of his humor with fresh vision. But a couple of months later, it dang near killed him when I moved Denver in with me instead of him.
Lupe Murchison, John D.'s fabulously wealthy widow, had followed her husband into glory, leaving two hundred million dollars to charity. The Murchison family asked me to move into the estate and sell off the Murchison art collection, which was valued at around ten million dollars. I invited Denver to move in with me and help me guard the place. That meant Daddy had to stay in Haltom City. When it came to sowing and reaping, I tallied that as a fair deal.
Rearview Mirror
As the mother of four boys, from toddler to age eight, Carina Delacanal had very little time to herself. In 2007, she learned she might not have much time left at all.
Carina, then twenty-nine, had just given birth to her youngest son, Joshua. And while three boys plus a new baby could drive any woman to distraction, Carina began to think that something might actually be wrong with her. “I noticed I was more forgetful than usual,” Carina remembers. “Just for peace of mind, I went to see my doctor.”
Peace was not what she found.
“The news isn't as good as I'd hoped,” the doctor told Carina when the results of a CAT scan came back. “You have what we call an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) on the right side of your brain.”
An AVM is something like an aneurysm, the doctor explained, a weakness in the wall of a blood vessel. Carina had been born with hers, and if it ruptured, she could die instantly. Her only option: brain surgery, either conventional or with a radiological gamma knife.
“I felt so overwhelmed,” Carina says. “I wanted to hear God's audible voice tell me where to go, who to see, what procedure to choose.”
But questions tore at her heart:
“Why? Why me? Why this, why now? My children need their mommy! Why would God tear me away from them?”
Before the diagnosis, Carina had been a harried mom who barely had time for her daily devotional reading. Now she dove into the Scriptures, clinging to those that quickened her heart and writing them down in a notebook.
She sought counsel from her pastor and proceeded “cautiously, in baby steps,” asking God and each doctor for wisdom. All the while, Carina poured out her anguish and concern in her notebook.
“Why?” she still wanted know. “What possible purpose could this serve?”
The risk of death loomed like a phantom. But there was another risk: even if doctors could repair the AVM, they said, the surgery could leave the left side of Carina's body paralyzed for life.
After weeks of painstaking research, Carina selected Don Woodson, a renowned Phoenix neurosurgeon, to perform her operation. And she continued to battle her fear with prayer. “I asked that the Lord's hands be on the surgeon's hands as he operated on me.”
When the time for the procedure neared, Carina flew to Arizona and checked into the ICU of the hospital where the surgery would be performed. The day before the procedure, a nurse came to check on her. Still gripped with anxiety and looking for comfort, Carina asked her, “What kind of surgeon is Dr. Woodson? What's his reputation here?”
The nurse offered a reassuring smile. “When Dr. Woodson is in surgery, it's as if God is using his hands.”
Carina's heart soared! It was as if the nurse had spoken aloud the answer to her prayer.
The next day, Carina emerged from surgery with full mobility and her AVM successfully repaired. Back at home, members of her church beat a steady path to the Delacanals' home, bearing meals and offering babysitting. One close friend also brought a stack of books.
“As a mother of four boys, I have very little time for myself, so just reading my devotion for the day was a huge accomplishment for me,” Carina says. “I was about to give the books back when my friend pulled one from the stack and held it out.”
“This book was very special to me,” she said.
Carina glanced at the title:
Same Kind of Different as Me.
She was unimpressed. Still, to be gracious, she thanked her friend and took the book. That day, with little to do but sit still and let her brain heal, she lay in bed and turned to page 1. And before too many pages had gone by, she says, “It was as if God gave me new eyes to see and new ears to hear!”
Reading the story of Denver's slavelike upbringing and his eighteen years spent homeless on the streets of Fort Worth, of Deborah's cancer diagnosis and her battle against all odds, and of our crazily unlikely friendship gave Carina a new perspective on the terrible trial she'd just been through.
“I began to laugh to myself, wondering if I went through all that I did just to get me to sit down and read this amazing true testimony,” she told us. “It went to my hands, through my eyes, and straight to my heart!”
With her new eyes, Carina could see with crystalline clarity God's shepherding kindness in her own life. The trial by fire of illness had drawn her and her husband closer, like two lovers huddled together before a campfire on a bitterly cold night. In fact, their season of fear had drawn her whole family closer to each other and closer to God.
In addition, knowing she could have lost forever the ability to use the left side of her body gave her new appreciation for what she was able to do. “I would never again take for granted the gift of serving,” she says. Now the simple ability to change her baby's diaper by herself seemed a miracle.
That she had children at all was a miracle too. During consultations leading up to her surgery, doctors had told her that if they'd found the AVM before she had children, they would have advised her to avoid getting pregnant at all costs. Each of her pregnancies could easily have caused the AVM to burst.
But that hadn't happened. Suddenly Carina could see that God had protected her every day of her life, only revealing the AVM
after
she had four beautiful, healthy sons.
“Our pastor had an explanation for why I didn't realize until later how God had held my hand every step of the way,” Carina says. “He says sometimes you can only understand
why
things happen when you see them in the rearview mirror.”
Ron
Like country folks, we sat around Deborah's grave on hay bales . . . For the next hour and a half, we honored my wife.
We sang old-time spirituals and country hymns, accompanied by two cowboy friends playing acoustic guitars. Warm sunlight filtered through the oaks, casting circles of gold on Deborah's pine casket, so that the simple box she'd asked for appeared covered in shimmering medallions.
T
wo weeks after we buried Deborah, Denver and I drove back to Rocky Top. We'd buried her in a simple casket, covering the grave with a pile of rocks and marking the spot with a cross of cedar. The ranch is crawling with critters, from bobcats to wild hogs. Worried that wild animals might try to dig her up, I hadn't slept since. Denver and I were on our way back to build a fence of stones and wrought iron around the grave.
For more than an hour, we rolled west from Dallas in complete silence. Then, just as we crossed the railroad tracks in the little town of Brazos, Denver burst into laughter, as though bumping over the rails had shaken loose some buried joy. I shot him a sideways glare, irritated that he would find something to laugh about when God had seen fit to steal my wife.
“What is so dang funny?” I asked.
“Mr. Ron, there ain't nobody gon' believe our story,” he spit out between chuckles. “We got to write us a book.”
“Who is this âwe,' Kemo Sabe? You can't read or write . . . just who is going to write it?”
“Well, I'll tell you my part, and you write it down. You know your part, so you write that down. Then we'll put it together and make us a book.”
Three weeks later, we raised the gates at what had gone from a lonesome stone-covered grave to a little family cemetery we named Brazos de Dios, which means “the arms of God.” There was so far only one family member in residence, but I knew I would join Deborah there someday, near her favorite spot where a leaning oak sheltered a natural stone bench in a covering of shade. Meanwhile, though, I had a problem. Half my heart was buried in the ground at Rocky Top. What exactly did God expect me to do now? Could He possibly want me to write a book with Denver? And if He did, what would I write?
I thought I'd begin my search for answers in Europe. During my art-dealing career, I had often found Italy a refuge. I loved the pace of life thereâwalking up narrow stone streets, waiting for the pizza place to open, finding a vista and a sidewalk café where the only thing you have to do is dip your biscotti in your espresso. I'd spent wonderful times in the village of Positano, famous for lemons so bountiful that the scent of them floats on the air all summer. And who could resist the foodâ
bombalonis
(fresh-fried donuts), fresh gelato with crushed raspberries, that wonderful pizza. People might think I'd be looking at art, but when I'm in Italy, I'm eating.
And now maybe, I'd be eating . . . and writing.
After a ten-hour flight, I landed in Rome and checked in at the Hotel Columbus, located a stone's throw from the Holy See. Standing in the cavernous lobby, I gazed up at the frescoed ceilings arching overhead, marked with beams of dark wood painted with geometric designs. The lobby had been slightly modernized, but through a broad passage I could see the colonnade leading back to the pope's former residence, which stood right at the very entrance to the Vatican.
A coincidence struck me. The Hotel Columbus was named for an explorer who five hundred years before had set out on an adventure. With little to go on but faith, he'd braved treacherous seas to discover a new land. Now here I was, fifty-five years old and also facing a new land, a new future entirely different from the one I'd envisioned less than two years before. But unlike Columbus, who was commissioned by a king to discover a new world, my King had exiled me to a world I hated bitterly, a world without my wife. And unlike Columbus, I had no faith. Mine lay six feet down at Rocky Top, having been buried deeper with every turn of the grave diggers' spades.
As I went through the motions of checking in, I reflected that I didn't really have a solid plan for how I would begin to write Deborah's story down. I only had some fuzzy notion of camping out in this venerable building and scribbling down the memories now darting around in my mind like ghosts. I was sure many prayers had been lifted to heaven from the old rooms over my head. The pope had lived in this building, after all, so I figured God had to be familiar with the address. Maybe He would see me here, clinging to my pen, and help usher my task along.
It was not to be. I had barely settled into my room, with a view of Via della Conciliazione, the grand boulevard leading into the Vatican, when a fresh storm of grief blew through my heart like a typhoon. Day after day, I sat by the weathered windows, staring out at the Holy See. My anguish was a black chasm, the pain physical, as though grief were a fanged monster that had invaded my torso and was feeding on me from the inside out. I felt condemned and abandoned, self-righteous in my anger with God.
In certain moments, I was struck by a realization that I had it better than most, and I felt a little guilty for grieving so extravagantly. After all, who would commiserate with a poor millionaire relegated to a fifteenth-century palace to sip Pinot Grigio while nursing his broken heart? Suddenly, I grieved for the thousands of people who buried their spouses on Sunday and had to show back up at work on Monday to earn money to pay for the funeral. By comparison, I had been blessed. For the two years of Deborah's cancer battle, I had been able to set aside my work and stay at her side. Now I could afford to take some time to heal. This thought, at least, was a lighted buoy that flashed a glimmer of gratitude over the dark sea of my rage.
But it wasn't enough to move me past despair. Not yet. Rome's aura of romance, art, and architecture had rolled up like a cheap window shade, replaced by images of Nero at the Coliseum and me being dragged off and fed to the lions. Unable to write, I decamped and took a train to Florence, managing not to blame my lack of literary productivity on the pope.
I arrived on a cold, snowy day, unusual for Florence, and moved into Villa AngeliâVilla of Angelsâa fifteenth-century country retreat tucked into the hills above Florence, just below a monastery in the tiny Etruscan village of Fiesole. Built seventy years before Columbus discovered America, the property was known as one of the most beautiful villas in the world. My friends Julio and Pilar Larraz, who live there, offered me refuge. My bedroom offered a view of the red-tile roofs of Tuscany below and, above, the monastery nestled in an ancient olive grove.