A Burning in My BonesMuestra

Father Wound

Eugene’s dad Don Peterson was honest and generous. He was a respected leader in both the church and the city. He was driven, an entrepreneur who never slowed down. At 18, Don was the youngest MacMarr (later Safeway) store manager in the country. After moving to Kalispell, Montana, he opened a series of butcher shops before opening the Meat Supply Co., the thriving enterprise he owned until he retired in 1963. Even in retirement, his grandsons remember going with him to his office where he worked real estate deals. They remember him as fun and engaged, and they loved their summers as his sidekicks.

Eugene, however, had a very different experience. “My dad was hard working and a good man,” Eugene explained. “But he wasn’t a very good father.” His dad never once showed up at the gym for basketball games on a Friday night. He never sat in the stands at a track meet to watch Eugene run. His dad only wrote him one letter—and that was about someone else. His dad never hugged him, never said “I love you” or “I’m proud of you.”

His dad provided housing regularly to those with no place to live. He regularly gave away food from his butcher shop. He always had boundless energy and time for his customers. But not for his son.

Eugene always longed for closeness and affection that his dad was unable to give. But in the final days of his dad’s fight with colon cancer, Eugene encountered unexpected mercy. When his family called with news that his dad had turned for the worse, Eugene caught a flight from Baltimore to Montana. Arriving at his dad’s bedside, a nurse plopped an orange on the table and taught Eugene, with a needle piercing the aromatic peel, how to administer injections. For ten days, Eugene pumped his dying father with morphine. He scooped his dad in his arms and carried him to the bathroom, fed him, watched over him.

“We were never very close,” Eugene recounted. “But in those final days, there was such intimacy, what I’d missed growing up.” It was healing, Eugene would say. Somehow, in those frail and fleeting hours, the love between a father and son was mended, forgiveness extended and received. It wasn’t that all the pain was undone; but somehow, in the mysteries of grace, love had the final say.