Answering, “What is a man?” on my Matters of Soul Importance podcast recently , Rob Marco concluded that, while women harbor and protect life, men “go into the world to meet death.”
This provocative, but truthful, statement seems worthy of highlighting today as we celebrate Father’s Day 2024 and ask, “What is a father?”
Last month, I attended the wake and funeral of Mark Armstrong, husband of my friend and co-author Patti Armstrong of Bismarck and father of 10. His death, brought on by an aortic-valve tear, was shocking and sudden, happening two days before his 68th birthday, just hours after he’d viewed the celestial gift of the Northern Lights.
The loss hit me hard, partially because I saw Mark as an extension of Patti. Through more than a decade of my exchange of prayers and life with her, Mark was always in the background.
Our regular phone chats on nightly walks often would be interrupted by the couple’s commitment to regularly pray together. This routine partially inspired my husband’s and my developing an evening prayer time, which has fostered more unity in our marriage.
During in-person visits, Mark often would be working in their garden or cross-country skiing in the hills of a nearby golf course. He simply seemed to love life.
I knew Mark had been in radio broadcasting—which had brought the family to North Dakota—and that they’d met while working in the Peace Corps in the Marshall Islands, Micronesia. But I only recently learned how the couple had been Jesuit volunteers on the Flathead Indian Reservation, worked with the disabled, and managed a group home for delinquent boys in Montana.
But it was through his children’s testimonies that I really met Mark’s core. If not for his enthusiasm for life, the couple might not have adopted two orphans from Kenya. He “erred on the side of love,” as one friend would put it.
Through his adventurous spirit, Mark met death many times. While at KFYR, he broadcast live from a F16 fighter jet reaching speeds up to 5G, bungee jump, hot-air balloon, and U.S. Navy Blue Angels parachute.
As his daughter Mary shared at the wake, he had a propensity for flinging himself onto traffic in an area of town where drivers were not being cognizant of pedestrians, just to teach them a lesson.
Mark took risks, but at the heart of it all was a love for God and his family. He attended daily Mass, even while traveling. During Covid, locked out of the church, he parked outside, watching Mass online from his car.
Before the wake, his sons scoured his closet to find his colorful shirts to wear to honor their father. This beautiful gesture seemed affirmed by the double rainbow that appeared that evening as mourners left the church.
So, what is a father? Someone willing to meet death for his family, offering a testimony of life-giving love, not unlike the Father who created him and whose Son gave his life for us.
[For the sake of having a repository for my newspaper columns and articles, I reprint them here, with permission, a week after their run date. The preceding ran in The Forum newspaper on June 16, 2024.]
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