The Greatest
When he says grace at the table, he does it in Swedish — and sometimes in song. When we were kids, he put us to bed with stories of wolves chasing our ancestors through the woods at night. When he lived in Cameroon, he ate with the local witch doctor and was friends with the local king.
Another doctor once told my mom that, had he wanted it, my grandfather could have been one of the top surgeons in the United States. He could have been wealthy in the eyes of our world — but instead he took his skills and medical degree and went to Ethiopia, setting up shop by a colony of lepers and treating them for free.
I grew up knowing about the time he fell ill as a younger man — with an illness that weakened his heart until he nearly died — but it wasn’t until recently that I learned about the pregnant woman who came to the clinic while he was clinging to life himself. Too much exertion would stop his heart, but the woman’s labor wasn’t going well and he was her only hope.
He could have been famous in the States with a fancy practice in New York or D.C., but instead he chose to be the kind of man who told his staff to prepare for an operation that would save an unknown woman and her child — but would almost certainly kill him. He could have been famous, but he was too busy laying down his own life to save those who had no other options and often couldn’t even pay for the help he offered.
By the grace of God, the woman gave birth just in time, but I will never forget that my grandfather was prepared to die so she could live.
He was born and raised in Minnesota, but Swedish is his native tongue, and it’s what I imagine he’ll speak in Heaven one day. He learned English in school and can also chat with friends in Amharic, Pidgin, and (probably) French. He reads Spanish and Hebrew — and, knowing him, can speak them, too — and I suspect he’s fine with Italian and German as well.
This Minnesota farm boy treated diseases the US doesn’t even have. He knew the cry of the hyena, camped in the territories of baboons, swam in rivers that carried crocodiles, and lived in a place that could only be reached by plane. He treated people fifty years ago who still remember him today, made friends with outcasts and kings, told pagan witch doctors stories of the Christian God, and — when forced out of Ethiopia by the Marxist revolution — took his skill to Cameroon where he trained generations of locals to provide the same level of care that he has always offered.
He’s seen nearly one hundred years, served in a world war, and had a documentary made about his life — and when he sits with his wife in the memory care unit of her current home, he holds her hand and calls her a queen, even when she doesn’t know his name.
He’s kept a raspberry patch in the backyard of their Minnesota home for as long as I can remember, and he loved taking us on hikes through his family’s old abandoned farmstead outside of town. He knows all the names in the small church cemetery nearby and can tell stories about half of them to anyone who will ask. He walked two miles every day well past the age of ninety, and he recruited local kids to play with us whenever we came to visit.
And he always asked about my car, because he says that everyone needs someone else who cares about things like that.
We don’t often write tributes these days until the person in question is gone from our lives, but in this year of nothing being normal, I’m sharing this now (while he can hopefully still see it) in tribute to one of the greatest men I’ve ever known — but he didn’t get that status because of the frills and thrills that make his life sound exciting when written out. What I see, and what I will always see when I look at my grandfather’s time on this earth, is a man who has loved his God with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength, and who has time and again tried his best to love the friends and strangers around him more than he loved himself.
Even at the cost of his own life.
My grandfather has chosen to live for nearly one hundred years as though love is something we do — and as though it is the greatest thing we can do, whether in big or small ways. This is the legacy I will carry to the end of my days, and when he leaves this life and stands before his Lord, I am positive God will look at him and say, “This is a man after my own heart. Welcome home, T.P.C. We’ve been waiting for you.”