Some Gifts Don’t Get Rusty
He sang all the time. “Amazing Grace.” “Victory in Jesus.” “Cowboy Joe,” (the University of Wyoming fight song)…
Songs lived in his head and danced on his lips.
Rarely did Jim Coale do anything--make a sandwich, drive to a ballgame, hammer a nail, cut the grass, tie a fishing line--without providing a musical score. He sang in church, often leading the congregation (though he was at his best in his pew singing bass) and along with every single song that came on the radio, whether he knew all the words or not. Mostly, as he got older, he joined the radio crooners about a half beat late and held on about a half beat too long, but he was always precisely on pitch. Some gifts don’t get rusty. Especially when you use them every day like he did his. And from my vantage point, he’d earned the right to come and go as he pleased.
As the toll from Jim’s series of strokes piled up, he was less clear about where he was or what was going on around him but neither the pain nor his geographic coordinates could quell the songs. One day as we were in his room at the skilled-nursing center waiting on him to return from rehab, “Row, Row, Row your Boat” came booming down the hallway in full baritone bravado. When he was happy you knew it. The songs he carried with him were too big for his body. He couldn’t help but let them out.
Jim Coale, my husband’s father, was a teacher by trade. His college degrees were in education, pieces of paper he wrung dry by spending 40-plus years serving public schools. Papa, as he was known by his children’s children, was a teacher, a coach, and for over 20 years, an administrator. Education was his profession, but a teacher is who he was at his core. He taught his own children basic things like how to tie their shoes and bait a hook and pray. But he also taught them and hordes of other people’s children the not-so-basic things—like how to stand up for what you believe in, not quit, and find a way to get along. As a school administrator, he had to draw hard lines and fight big fights. These tasks wore on him over time, but he never tired of championing people. Especially coaches and kids.
Jim was also a builder. He could make something from just about anything-- a table, a shelf, a front porch, a house. But mostly what he did was re-build. From Lewistown, Montana to Garden City, Kansas to Tuttle, Oklahoma (and all kinds of places in between) every house the Coale family lived in was a product of Jim’s hands. He added square footage and tore out tile, painted, plumbed, and generally did whatever it took to make the living quarters fit his family and function like a home. The only one he and his bride of 64 years, Pat, ever shared that didn’t have his blood, sweat, and tears in the walls and on the floors was the one he died in Saturday afternoon.
When the stroke that started Jim’s steady train of setbacks ultimately forced him to require around the clock care, visitors showed up at the hospital in droves. The boomerang of a life well lived came back and landed in his lap. He and Pat had cooked for the local high school football team at the church on Friday mornings. They sang at funerals, visited the shut-ins, and taught every kind of Bible class you can think of at scores of area Churches of Christ. On any given Sunday morning, Jim might deliver the sermon, lead the singing, serve the communion, read the announcements and fix the air conditioner. In the four decades I knew him, I never saw his faith so much as wiggle. He worshipped at the church and in the mountains and in the streams and through the pastures. He saw Jesus in a deer stand and a bass boat and in nature’s changing face.
If ever there were a man God was holding the door for, it would be Jim Coale.
They say when an 83-year-old light goes out, ‘at least he won’t be suffering anymore.’ They say things like, ‘he had a grand life’ and ‘he’s in a better place.’ And all of those things are true. But it’s still hard. We will miss him. We will miss him for us and we will miss for him the things we know he would have loved. The weddings he won’t get to see. The babies he won’t get to hold. The fish he won’t get to watch his great-grandchildren catch. The goals he won’t be on the sideline to cheer for. We’ll ache for a bit inside all the big happies because we’ll know how much he would have loved to be present for them all.
Over the last Christmas holiday when I sat alone with Jim at the senior center, I played some country music for him from my phone. When “The Older I Get” finished playing, he turned his face toward me and said, “Who was that?”
I told him, “Alan Jackson. You like him? Want me to play it again?” He nodded, yes. I hit repeat.
When it concluded for the second time, he asked if I could help him with the words. And so I said into his ear in the spaces between the stanza lines:
“…The older I get/ The longer I pray/ I don’t know why, I guess that I’ve/
Got more to say/ And the older I get/ The more thankful I feel/
For the life I’ve had and all the life I’m living still.”
“I really like that one,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said, as I hit play again.
“And if they found a fountain of youth/ I wouldn’t drink a drop and that’s the truth/
Funny how it feels I’m just getting to my best years yet…”
No doubt about that. Congratulations, Jim. You are finally home.
P.S. The Older I Get