Without words, my father’s restraining hand let me know that the pastel egg my sharp eyes had spied beneath the forsythia bush should be discovered and claimed by Jessica. I watched as her plump arm reached under the golden bower to claim the treasure I’d spotted first. She happily placed the egg in her empty basket. I didn’t want to let Jessica find the egg. I remember disliking her and the fact that I had to be nice to her.  
My father’s wordless lesson in kindness to Jessica, in “respecting the dignity of every human being,” is one I’ve remembered but not always followed. Kindness, human compassion, is perhaps one of the first of many lessons I can attribute to my father. By word and example, I have witnessed and adopted life skills he hoped to impart. I remember being told, for instance, how to move from moss-covered rock to slippery surface in order to transgress the creek. “Watch the green rocks. They’re slick!” Or after mounting my bike, using the slight hump in the field behind our house to settle my 4-year-old legs up and over and onto the pedals: “Keep pedaling, keep pedaling! Steady, steady, keep the handlebars straight!” Or removing a fish from the barbed hook: “Twist the hook and ease it out, like this. If you yank it, it just digs in deeper.”
I also learned by being told what not to do. There was the time my father spoke to my third grade Sunday School class about the Ten Commandments at Christ Church, Roanoke. When he got to the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain, I interjected, “But Daddy, you did.” “When?” he asked confidently before me, my fellow classmates, and more importantly, my Sunday School teachers. “Nina, when have you ever heard me take the Lord’s name in vain?” I replied with the truth, and all who heard it knew it to be true: “When we were going to the beach and got halfway there before you remembered that you’d left your wallet on the dresser.” Later, I remember he told me that I had embarrassed him.
Another time my father’s lesson was one about sparing someone else embarrassment. We were visiting someone who was very ill. I recall the long drive up the hill to the house and the medicinal “old people” smell that stayed in my nose and mouth even after we’d returned home. Edith was seated on the sofa. My dad sat in a chair nearby, and I suppose I played on the living room floor. I asked my father, in front of Edith, what the bag at her feet was. My dad looked directly at Edith and responded to my question saying, “It’s medicine.” I remember the look that he gave Edith, and the slight nod. Just as it took hindsight to understand that the brightly filled bag was a catheter, it takes hindsight to recognize that the look that passed between Edith and my father— a look I remember vividly— was one of complicity, of compassion, and of respect for the dignity of a dying human being. An unspoken lesson.
A spoken lesson I recall comes from more recent events. Dad was the interim priest at St. John’s, Lynchburg when Gene Robinson was elected bishop. My father’s excellent leadership and his innate compassion led him to deal with a potentially divisive and painful topic by giving voice to the issue and inviting others to do likewise. He opened the discussion at several meetings designed to let folks unleash their thoughts. He visited every family or parishioner expressed difficulty in staying with a church that embraced ideas counter to their beliefs.
My father taught me one of the lessons I most treasure and consciously aim to use in my daily life: Never make people feel bad about their beliefs. We can disagree, but we should never make others feel ashamed of who they are. People can change their opinions, their minds and their beliefs. And after all, except in cases of inhumanity, we can stick to what we believe is right without total agreement from those around us. What’s most important is loving our neighbors as ourselves and not allowing different perspectives to cloud how we treat one another as human beings, as children of God.

I always thought that the surprise of death was preferable to the anxiety, pain and discomfiture that came with a diagnosis. I imagined that I would prefer the clean, neat, abrupt parting that came as the result of a car wreck, a heart attack, a stroke. Knowing ahead of time seems such an emotional burden on the dying person and on those who begin to grieve even before the actual death. It seems much tidier to go happily along up until the moment of death and then grieve once the actual   death takes place. I was wrong.
The lesson I learned in those final weeks with my father is how to die and how to comfort others while doing so. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to ease into this place. I needed my father to help me see the way with his usual humor, grace and strength of spirit. He is my teacher, my protector, my guide. The remaining troubling thought is, how in the world will I navigate the unfamiliar places of a world without him? I pray those lessons from him will continue to nourish a lifetime of learning. //

Nina Salmon is an English professor at Lynchburg College and a parishioner at St. John’s, Lynchburg.