But What Was Left Behind
Jamaal was a mechanic. He made about $45,000 in a good year, and at least a third of the years were good. His wife made their home and spent herself raising and teaching their six children. He was a deacon at Christ Church, their Presbyterian church home.
Jamaal came home tired and with grease on his hands and his overshirt and his pants, the sweat having soaked through all of it since the A/C in his fifteen-year-old car didn’t work. But he’d wrestle with the kids in the front yard if it was summer or go inside and read them a story if it was winter, always careful to turn the pages of the book with a paper towel since he hadn’t washed his hands yet. That could wait.
The three girls loved playing dress-up, and he would quietly watch and smile and laugh as they tried on different outfits and pretended to be princesses or mommies or veterinarians. Two of the boys liked to climb trees, and so five years into their first mortgage he found a house with a bigger backyard and two thirty-foot oak trees that were side-by-side, and they moved in and he built them a treehouse within the first month. After that he and those two older boys would sit up there and catch bugs or whittle or eat barbecue potato chips and tell stories. The youngest boy enjoyed drawing, and so Jamaal used some rainy day money he kept in his sock drawer to go to an art supply store downtown and, after some help from the owner, buy him some fancy colored pencils and paints and an easel and paper. After that he would sit with him on their screened-in back porch for an hour or two and quietly watch him sketch and paint. Neither of them would say much, but they wouldn’t trade the time for anything.
Jamaal’s friends at the shop told him he was crazy to have six kids, and would mock him for it all the time. They knew he and Jasmine were married and Christians and all that, but still it was nuts to have that many children. They knew it, and they told him so. The birth control jokes weren’t exactly funny, but he was good-natured and gracious, so he’d usually smile and roll his eyes. One time Joey, a guy he’d actually gone to high school with, asked him honestly if he ever regretted it, having so many children. He said he didn’t see how it could be worth it or how Jamaal could do it. Joey drove a new Mustang, and he had a camper that he took out at least once a month, and his time was his own. How could Jamaal make what he made for a living and have that many kids and still have a life where he didn’t want to kill himself? That was how Joey talked, and Jamaal appreciated his candor. So he gave him candor right back. He told him God calls children a blessing, and he didn’t know what he’d do with a Mustang or a camper that was better than what he did with his children.
It was different with his church family, because it was more subtle. Nobody actually ever said he was crazy, but the little jokes and the raised eyebrows amounted to the same thing. But usually Jamaal didn’t say anything, because he was a simple man, and simple men usually leave things unsaid when the saying won’t do much good. His pastor understood, and that was enough for him most Sundays, so he gave it almost no mind and enjoyed his church all the same.
Jamaal didn’t have many hobbies that he didn’t share with Jasmine or the kids. Jasmine and he loved music, and as the kids grew up he continued to search out what they enjoyed and enjoy it with them (or do his best to enjoy it). They read the Bible together, all eight of them, every night, and sometimes his youngest son would draw pictures of what they’d read, and sometimes the girls and Jasmine would make a meal that represented a story or a book of the Bible they were in.
His oldest daughter was the first to get married, and by the time that happened all six kids had truly believed in Jesus, and loved Him, and Jamaal had the deepest peace he’d felt since he’d become a father. He walked his daughter down the aisle, where her two sisters and a friend from Christ Church and a cousin were all waiting as bride’s maids down there at the front. The man she married had grown up with her at Christ, and he loved the Lord and was prepared to be a good husband. He’d come back to town two years earlier after serving in the army and had approached Jamaal about his daughter shortly after his return. As he walked his daughter down the aisle to him, Jamaal felt like he might forget what to do or say, but he looked up and there was Pastor Ted, and then he looked over and there was Jasmine, who was crying but was able to nod to him, and he was okay then. “Her mother and I.” He said it well.
One of his sons moved to St. Louis to take a job as a police officer, but as adults the other five lived within an hour of home. His two local sons and one of his daughters were still members of Christ Church, and he saw each of their kids every Sunday, which made him as happy as Joey’s season tickets to the local NFL team made him. Happier, truth be told, but Jamaal would probably tell me to leave it at that, so I suppose I will.
Three months after his sixty-third birthday Jamaal went in for a check-up and walked out with an appointment with an oncologist. He didn’t tell Jasmine about it yet, because of what I already told you about simple men. Good simple men, anyway.
But a month later he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he and Jasmine told the kids and their spouses, all but one in their thirties now and all with kids of their own. And they asked how he was and gave him hugs and cried and then they all ate ice cream and watched old movies together while the grandkids played upstairs in what the previous owner had used as an office, but what Jamaal and Jasmine had first converted into a bedroom and then into a grandkids’ play room. Jamaal went to bed tired and happy, and then he told the shop owner the next day and, at the owner’s urging, retired with some severance. He had a 401k, but the balance was about a third of what most of his peers’ balances were. But the most important things to him were that he had life insurance and that his kids believed in Jesus and that those grandbabies were hearing about Jesus. He stopped at a sports bar on the way home and had a Miller Lite, and laughed and told stories with Frank the bartender, who he’d known for about ten years now. He didn’t tell him about the cancer or retiring. He wasn’t sure why.
Jamaal died six months and two days after that. Christ Church held the funeral, and Pastor Ted, the pastor for the last twenty-four years of Jamaal’s life, cried seven times during his sermon. And one of Jamaal’s aunts, a sweet lady from Georgia, came up to talk to Pastor Ted about Jesus after the service. She couldn’t understand how much Ted loved Jamaal, and how much Jamaal had loved his church. Until she did, which happened after Pastor Ted shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with her, and her heart found something it had been hungry for all her life.
A month after the funeral Joey was telling two other mechanics at the shop about what it was like to work with Jamaal when he was younger and each of those kids just kept coming and coming. He laughed about it, still missing his buddy but figuring a post-mortem joke at his expense couldn’t do much harm. But before he could finish the story he had what he thought was the worst case of indigestion in his life, and he rubbed his sternum for a minute before going into the break room to sit down. An hour-and-a-half later he was at the hospital being treated for a heart attack. He survived, but he had to have surgery, and after being off work for six months he had to sell his new RV and the Corvette that had replaced the Camaro that had replaced the Mustang.
I know Jamaal died without ever owning a new car or seeing Europe. His life may not seem like much at that. But when I think of the man’s thirty-one grandchildren singing to Jesus on Sunday mornings in two different states on two different sides of the country, when I think of those grease stained hands and that paper towel, when I see what was left behind, I know the life I’d rather live.
To all the Jamaals out there, keep it up. Though this story is fictional, I know it is true.