Lauderdale: Daddy searches Scriptures he can no longer read

Daddy keeps his Bibles with him at the nursing home. He can no longer read them, but he holds onto them.

He wasn't in his room when I visited Saturday.

He was sitting on a white bench near the nurses' station. When I greeted him with, "Hey, Daddy," he didn't seem to recognize me. Since dementia started taking over about seven years ago, it's been hard to know what he recognizes.

He was dressed nicely, with a warm sweater. It was almost dinner time.

Beside him on the bench were two paperback Testaments from the Bible, and a large comb.

I asked if we could go down to his room. I wanted to take a picture of him by his door that my sister decorated for Christmas, covering it with green gift wrapping and gold ribbons.

Daddy's response was, "Where's that?"

So I read to him for a few minutes there on the bench, while people much less lively than Daddy were being wheeled into the dining room.

We read from the first chapter of John because it was the topic of the next day's Sunday school lesson.

On Sunday, we talked about a painting at our church by the late Elizabeth Grant. She liked to paint the Gullah children of Hilton Head Island when she moved here in 1975. Other artists say Elizabeth's own childlike wonder at the world lives on in those faces of children in oil on canvas. But this painting is of the Nativity scene. And it's almost all black. Where there should be floating angels singing, bright stars and gold-laced wise men, Elizabeth has a sea of darkness. The only light is on the mother with child.

As I read the Scripture to Daddy -- "In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" -- he started flipping through his New Testament to follow along.

Of course, he couldn't do it. I snapped a photo with my smartphone, and it was an instant keepsake.

Between the time Daddy was on the cradle roll at his father's church in Lexington, Va., and this moment 87 years later, he was a missionary who wrote reams about the Bible. He translated it in its entirety into rhyming, metered verse called WordSing, hoping it would help people around the world to sing the Scriptures.

A lot of darkness has come over Daddy's mind since then. But there's still one thing he can hold onto.

Follow columnist and senior editor David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale and facebook.com/david.lauderdale.16.

This story was originally published December 8, 2015 at 2:40 PM with the headline "Lauderdale: Daddy searches Scriptures he can no longer read."