Touching One Heart
We had an uncle, Keith Facer, who was easy to love. Gentle and unassuming, stalwart and true, he would be anyone’s dream uncle, his face lighting up with delight when he saw us like he’d just been waiting for this moment to fold us in his arms and give us hugs.
His smile was infectious. He was always a student of the gospel, coming in his 80’s to our adult Institute classes, even when he had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease and his legs began to quake beneath him. The diagnosis turned out to be false, and he took the year of trauma granted him by the doctor’s inaccuracy like the good sport he always was.
His daughter, Laraine, died in her mid-fifties of Alzheimer’s disease, a condition that ravaged her mind and memory, and stole her away too early. Keith watched helplessly as the young grandmother forgot her family members’ names, forgot who she was.
At her funeral, Scot sat down by Keith. They had pulled a little away from the crowd and were sitting on a couch alone, facing the casket. Scot asked, “Keith, you’re sitting alone. You are looking at your precious daughter in the casket. You’re away from your family. How do you really feel about this loss?”
Keith said, “Scot, I have trusted the Lord all my life, and I feel to trust him now.”
With moments like these stored in our soul, it was wrenching to hear that Keith had developed a particularly rare and vicious kind of cancer — Merkel-cell carcinoma. This was one where the tumor grew not inside his body, but on the exterior — from a nasty red lump first appearing on the left side of his face, on his cheek, then around to his ear and his neck to grow into a hideous, enormous, almost reptilian-like growth that crawled across his face, first closing off an ear and then an eye, and then finally his ability to breathe or eat at all. The face we had loved was distorted, unrecognizable, and his suffering nearly incomprehensible.
The bright red of the now-enormous tumor, which seemed to grow daily, looked angry, burning. His torso was covered with dime and nickel-sized sores. Radiation treatments were attempted but only burned his body, making the pain even more intense.
We could not have recognized Keith as anyone familiar except for the affectionate tone in his voice, while he could still mumble out a few sentences.
Keith did not live far from President Monson. In fact, at one time they had been in the same ward, before boundaries had been redrawn. President Monson got word about Keith’s illness and called immediately, wondering if he could come by that very early evening to cheer him and give him a blessing on his way home from work.
I don’t know what else might have been on President Monson’s schedule that day — surely many pressing things, a desk full of urgencies. Yet, nothing is so urgent for President Monson as the soul of the distressed. It calls to his sympathies; it stirs his love.
We had been visiting Keith that day before President Monson arrived. He was surrounded by his wife, a son and daughters who loved him, but the situation was so grim, it was hard to be anything but teary. Life just seemed too hard if someone like Keith could be so afflicted and we struggled to say anything besides a pitiful, “I’m so sorry, so sorry.” We felt heavy, grayed over with the burden.
Then, at the appointed moment, President Monson arrived, and it was like the sun came up on a new day. It was not only that the Spirit was with him, which we all felt immediately; it was that his very presence was buoyant. A tangible sense of joy and assurance had entered the room.
Here was someone seasoned in the sickroom and knew what we didn’t. He didn’t look surprised or shocked to see Keith’s condition. He didn’t put on a long face in sympathy. He smiled that large, warming smile and with enthusiasm said, “Keith it is good to see you.”
President Monson then began to give Keith what he needed most. It was the same thing any very sick person needs, whose once energetic and perfect body has been ravaged by an illness until he can’t recognize himself anymore. President Monson gave him back his identity, and a sense of himself.
“Keith,” he said, “Do you remember when you were in the bishopric and I had just moved into the ward and you assigned me to head up the committee to build a new meetinghouse? I told you that I didn’t know anyone in the ward, and you said, ‘That’s OK. Just call them Gunderson and you’ll be right 40% of the time.”
At that Keith laughed out of the corner of his mouth not yet smothered by cancer. We all laughed, our laughter cascading through the sick room like a blessed relief. President Monson continued the banter about everything he knew about Keith, a heartening conversation about how dedicated and committed Keith had always been. We were swept away by a series of delightful memories. Each one drove the gray and gloom further and further from our hearts.
Then President Monson did a remarkable thing. He changed the subject to something even lighter. (How completely delightful for a sick person to finally get to hear something besides how sorry all the rest of us are and how sick they are.)
He started to tell us the story about when he recently went to lunch with the chairman of the board of Parker Brothers who said that Monopoly was still their best-selling game, and he had asked, jokingly, if President Monson could remember the names of any of the properties of the game. He told him that he could indeed remember them — all of them — IN ORDER. We were all laughing then, and President Monson, with his perfect memory, named them all — right there beside the sick bed — Mediterranean, Baltic, Reading Railroad and continuing all the way around, he ended with Park Place and Boardwalk.
With all of us now is a happy mood, he said gently, “Now, Keith, let’s give you a blessing. Scot, will you anoint?” The Spirit continued to illuminate our hearts.
Then he laid hands upon Keith’s head and gave him a blessing of power and comfort, promising him in a powerful voice that, “This is only temporary.” (And it would be. Keith died ten days later.)
The joy that filled the room, the Spirit comforting every wounded heart, was tangible.
Some of us went in the living room with him, thinking he would quickly be on his busy way. But before he left, he also gave us the complete lineup with their positions of the 1948 Salt Lake Bees (a minor league baseball team). I’m sure he must have been in a hurry, but he didn’t seem like it. For those moments together, we were his entire focus.
This grim sickroom had been transformed by a priesthood blessing and by a spiritual emissary who knew just how to minister with love. That bright moment stayed with our family for the days and weeks ahead and will never be forgotten.
Many thousands have known just such bright moments in their grim times from President Thomas S. Monson.
