Peace like a river: My father’s life and faith

On the ninth day of Christmas, we buried my father.

Parkinson’s disease and dementia had been pummeling body and mind. And in these last months of separation, a new ugly foe. Loneliness slithered in to lie and exasperate and corner him in the nursing home.

The virus, Daddy. Remember, we can’t visit until after this virus. Same incomprehensible promise every time. More precisely, every FaceTime. First tears I ever saw on my father’s face were tears I couldn’t touch.

And now it’s our turn. To remember and lament. My mother, Janice. My brother, Michael. Our wives and boys. Friends of my parents from Oakland Avenue Presbyterian Church in my hometown of Rock Hill, SC. Family in my father’s hometown of Greenwood across the state.

And, without question, friends and colleagues from his beloved Winthrop University, where he served as an award-winning photographer and, I hope he’ll forgive me, an iconic bicycle-riding fixture on campus for a half-century. “An institution within the institution,” as Tom Moore, Winthrop’s former vice president of academic affairs told a reporter from The Herald in Rock Hill back in 2008 when my dad retired.

There of course was no public funeral this afternoon for Joel H. “Nick” Nichols, Jr. Born Feb. 16, 1934, in the middle of the Great Depression. Died — not even two hours into the day after Christmas — as we stagger on through another one. This modern-day depression a putrid mix of financial and relational burden, weighing heaviest in times that beg for sacred gathering — to cry and to sing and to crush the head of Loneliness.

And yet, this is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 118:24).

Eyes on you

“A bleak backdrop just makes the gospel come out in bold colors,” I heard a theologian say long before the year we just left behind. That backdrop, that reality, after all doesn’t have its genesis in 2020 but rather Genesis 3. Back when God’s children broke His heart, followed immediately and graciously by His promise that a Rescuer would one day come to save, to get rid of the sin and the dark and the sadness.

That gospel promise of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ was my father’s hope and comfort, the bold colors that lit the way home. “Nick loved our Lord,” as his dear friend and strawberry ice cream eating partner from church said. “And he is with Him and surrounded by love.”

We don’t know what to do Lord, but our eyes are on you (2 Chron. 20:12).

That’s where my father’s eyes were. That’s where I’ll keep mine.

Through the cross

But in order to grasp the gospel in all its fullness, its beautiful hopefulness, I also won’t sidestep that bleak backdrop. Redemption goes through the cross on the way to the resurrection. The truth is that, in years past (maybe when the backdrop to our lives wasn’t so acutely bleak), our response to death was to look perhaps too quickly to the bold colors of joy. Bypass the mourning and get on with the morning. Death becomes passing away. The graveyard becomes a cemetery. Funerals become memorial services and ultimately celebrations.

I remember someone eulogizing a family member once with this opener: “Y’all know this is not a funeral we’ve come to today, right?” I know what he meant. In Christ, we do not grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13). But we do grieve. Everywhere he went, Jesus’ earthly ministry was about truth and tears. Far from “a natural part of life” to be taken in stride, death is in fact unnatural, and very much something to mourn. Its sting has been removed, but its bite remains.

Or as renowned pastor and author Tim Keller put it, “death is hideous and frightening and cruel and unusual. It is not the way life is supposed to be, and our grief in the face of death acknowledges that.”

Life everlasting after all was God’s plan in the beginning; death is the curse for human sin. Jesus in John’s gospel stands at the tomb of Lazarus knowing full well he will shortly raise him to life, knowing he will soon conquer death itself. And yet, he weeps (John 11:35). In the original language in fact, he bellows with rage, he absolutely wails.

And, as I keep my eyes on Him — as I remember Jesus’ truth and tears — so will I.

It is well

My father trusted in the Jesus he heard about in church and read about in the Bible, including the one he sometimes carried around in a wheelchair in the nursing home, Rock Hill’s Westminster Health Center. Betrayed by the legs and central nervous system that let him ride his enduring bicycle, first as a summertime teenage telegram deliverer for Western Union back in Greenwood, and later on his commute to Winthrop and back for incalculable miles.

He trusted in the Jesus from the old hymn “In the Garden” I heard him softly singing one afternoon as I wheeled him to his room. (Back in a time remembered wistfully as 2019.)

And He walks with me

And He talks with me

And He tells me I am his own

No longer able to sing, or even speak, hymns were part of his soundtrack, especially Christmas week, his last. “It is Well With My Soul” playing next to his ear on Christmas night exactly at midnight, 108 minutes before those words were eternally true. Peace like a river. That’s the rhythm I’ll remember in Room 232 as the days and hours dwindled. A hymn. A prayer. A memory. A psalm. I will not fear.

From my dad’s Bible, I know he is not, in this moment, taking pictures of angels. Not riding his Schwinn down streets of gold. (I know these sentiments are offered — lovingly — to help and to soothe, not always to be taken literally. Finite minds imagining the infinite.) I also know his body is not “already perfected.” We buried it. But, when Jesus returns, in the twinkling of an eye, my father will be raised bodily to live forever in the new heavens and the new earth (1 Cor. 15:52).

And where is he now? Where will you be if you’ve put your faith in Jesus — the resurrection and the life? The Bible says those who’ve done so are with him as soon as they die. Which, as the Apostle Paul assures in his letter to the Philippians, “is far better,” the best thing imaginable. And then one day, rather than going to heaven, heaven’s coming down. Heaven and earth overlapping.

We’ll then be reunited with perfected and glorious bodies. No more death, corruption or decay. Those tears I couldn’t touch, wiped away (Rev. 21:4). A whole new metaphysical reality. Life with a whole new color, a whole new shape, a whole new dimension. Life after life after death. Everything inaugurated with a party at the wedding supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9). And, who knows, maybe then Jesus will smile and nod at Joel Nichols to go grab his Nikon.

Why the theology? Because I need it. Because, in any time, in every hour, eternal truth in love is the only thing that counts and comforts, not what I might imagine, or glean from popular lore. I awake in these days and ask God to help me set my mind on things above (Col. 3:2). Then I rise, catch my breath and another memory and a glimpse of a next step forward.

Sorting through many of my father’s photos in recent days, it’s a few of his words that hit me, from a short speech in 2003 when Winthrop awarded him with a permanent campus photo exhibit of some of his best work: “You know me as a photographer,” he says. “But I’ve always thought of myself first as a journalist.”

He sought truth. And now the truth has set him free (John 8:32).

Hop on and ride

But, yes and amen, I will celebrate his life for the rest of mine. Until I see him again, I’ll see us on his bike on a storybook summer morning. He had several elevated “hopping on places” as he called them around Winthrop where my childhood self would indeed climb on and basically sit in his lap while he pedaled. Balancing us both, along with cameras dangling from his shoulders, as we picked up speed and laughter, and I longed for this super man to stop time itself the way he did with film and patience and light.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone who knew him at all who didn’t talk about the figure he cut gliding across campus or town. A reporter once wrote that he looked like a “stately gentleman pedaling across the English countryside.” Up tall in his 6’4” frame, ramrod straight down busy streets with a camera bag, multiple cameras, and I’m not kidding, sometimes groceries from Harris-Teeter, on his way home.

Crazy balance and coordination. Despite blowing his neurologist’s mind by showing up for appointments on his bicycle even after his Parkinson’s diagnosis (“I’ve never seen that,” the doc said), those were the very things that ultimately went haywire and led to so many devastating falls indoors and on walks around my parents’ condo circle. By October 2019, he was off to a first stop at Piedmont Medical Center, never to return.

Family trade

I’ll see one of his photos in my house or on my mind and be transported back to his Winthrop darkroom or the one in our old garage, mixing chemicals and developing film and marveling at magic. My father was a third-generation pro photographer; his grandfather traded a hog for one of the earliest cameras. His father and younger brother operated studios in Greenwood. All three of his uncles were in the business as well, with studios across the South Carolina Upstate. They would come over to his house in Greenwood and set up cameras in the front yard to compare equipment.

After graduating from Erskine College near Greenwood, he enlisted in the Army where he did his best shooting with a 35-millimeter. Images of tanks and jeeps and fellow servicemen at Fort Hood, Texas, including an already pretty famous private named Presley.

Like me, newspapers beckoned and he soon found his way on staff at The Charlotte Observer. He had no portfolio other than his Army work. But the Observer’s chief photographer also had taken pictures for the Army. My dad got the job, the go-to rookie for all the assignments no one else wanted.

Winthrop’s ‘quiet storm’

In 1962, when Winthrop called the Observer’s photo lab looking for someone to fill a newly created staff photographer position, a colleague handed my dad the phone. He saw the job as an opportunity to do more work, to get away from those projects other shooters passed on. The fact that Winthrop was an all-girls school at the time may or may not have played a role, too. Let’s say it did.

He started in July of ’62 with two cameras and a basement office with a darkroom. He took photos for campus publications and the student newspaper. The job included lots of public relations assignments, but many photos he found by simply wandering and riding and observing. “I never viewed any assignment as boring, even ones that might have seemed routine,” he wrote in that permanent photo exhibit speech many years later. “Everything was a challenge, capturing moments as they happen, a mental exercise to make even the mundane exciting, and above all else, to tell a story.”

Elsewhere, in his notes for his “The Art and Craft of Photojournalism” lecture series: “Photojournalism is visual anthropology. You need sensitivity, intellectual curiosity and instinct,” he wrote. “Patience and street smarts and desire, you have to be all eyes all the time…Look beyond the obvious and always strive to get better.”

By the way, those who knew my humble, unassuming father know he never talked that way. Those words came out because he was asked in advance to reflect and define his life’s work. That’s what was going on in his mind, his blood, all those years while he “worked quietly to be as anonymous as he could,” said a longtime Winthrop friend. “He never wanted to be the center of attention anywhere he went. He put his imagination and skill to work in the shadows in order to get the best, most natural shot. Seemingly everywhere but also unnoticeable.”

Or as a Winthrop student ambassador once succinctly put it to The Herald, “Mr. Nichols is a quiet storm.”

A lot of famous people would wander into the eye of the storm. Ronald Reagan. Michael Jordan. Diane Sawyer. Bob Hope. My old USC dorm mates Hootie & the Blowfish. But he lived for the day-to-day work. Classroom assignments. (How do you make those interesting?) Basketball and softball and other sports. Evening music recitals or plays late into the night (the only times we ever saw him get out of a car after work rather than park his bicycle.)

Graduations, banquets, alumni events. All the milestones as he served under five presidents. But the most memorable shots to me were the day-in-the-life images he captured on the way to somewhere else. Guys from other schools on pleasant afternoons visiting with their Winthrop girlfriends on campus benches. Smiling students hanging out on the dock out at Winthrop Lake at The Shack, or building a giant snowman near Oakland Avenue. All eyes.

He chronicled Winthrop history during the most transformative decades since its founding in 1886. The integration of black students in 1964 and men in 1972. University status in 1992 and the incredible growth of both the student body and campus in his last several years. In 2000 he won the Nikon Award for the best image made during the annual Nikon/Kodak photo shoot by the University Photographers’ Association of America.

A quiet storm finds time for fun, too. Living on campus his first year in a dorm for single college staff, he replaced the light bulbs in a colleague’s room with flash bulbs. “The fellow who lived in that room was pretty surprised when he got home that night,” he told The Charlotte Observer in yet another profile. “That flash could’ve lit up a football field.”

In 1989, my dad was named Winthrop’s Employee of the Year, in 2000 he received the Presidential Citation from the late Anthony DiGiorgio, and in 2001 he was the recipient of Winthrop’s Community Service Award. A magazine in the 70’s cited him along with authors Pat Conroy and James Dickey as “among the best writers and photographers in the South today.”

By his side

Only one of his untold thousands of photos came with him to his small room in the nursing home. The one he took after about a month at Winthrop for an alumni magazine. He asked a brunette senior if he could take her picture studying in the library under the watchful eyes of a sculpted Plato. She agreed. Later she came by his office to ask for a copy of the photo for her mother. Not long after that he took her picture on a shrimp boat, part of the fun they had in the idyllic small town of Southport, NC.

My father and the student in that 1962 photo — “the picture I treasure above all the others,” he said in the speech — marked their 57th anniversary in June.

After my brother and I were born, he started documenting the story of our lives as well. There I am just a few minutes old in a half-page spread in The Charlotte Observer. Leaving the old York General Hospital in my mom’s lap. Getting a bath back home on Ragin Lane. As we grew older, any moment was worth capturing, especially with his artistry. Not just around the house at birthday parties or on vacation chasing seagulls at the beach. It was trying on shoes at the mall. In the grocery line with my mom. Routine checkups at the doctor’s office for heaven’s sake. Rarely a posed shot in the bunch.

Like so many Winthrop folks, we would forget, somehow, all about the camera.

And as word spread, he became a go-to guy for documenting Rock Hill, York County and Palmetto State history, much of it preserved in volumes and museums. There’s Lady Bird Johnson in 1964 aboard the “Lady Bird Special” at the Rock Hill train depot on her whistle-stop campaign tour for her husband.

Here’s a moving image of young black men and women in the early 60s, walking stoically, eyes on the back of the head of the person in front of them. Down the sidewalk in their Sunday finest past the old Woolworth building downtown in segregated Rock Hill. Carrying homemade posters with messages like “No Color Line In Heaven.” My father, the consummate storyteller, was able to capture that moment because long before the days when everyone had one in their pocket, he was never without his camera. Always “a journalist first.”

The journalist once drove to Columbia straight from Winthrop one weekday evening to help a journalism major at USC, his eldest son. You would’ve thought I could handle the one photography class as part of the writing-heavy curriculum. Don’t these talents pass on to the fourth generation, too? In my case, they did not. I was having enough trouble with my daytime photo assignments around the historic Carolina campus and now, the horror, I was tasked with capturing a decent image at night. This was when dinosaurs roamed around South Carolina’s capital city back in the late 80s, not with your fancy iPhone.

I called my dad’s number in his Winthrop darkroom as I had so many times before. Like when I was 11 and already suited up for my first football game, in need of his quiet voice to calm my nerves. Let me rephrase: To get me to turn loose of the sofa leg and go play the game. Or when I was named sports editor at The Gamecock student newspaper, or about to board a plane with the basketball team to cover an NCAA tournament game.

Now? I just wanted a pointer or two. Shutter speed? F-stop? “I’ll be there in a few hours,” he said. Not to take the moonlit shot in downtown Columbia for me, but, as ever, to be by my side.

Baseball and strawberry pie

When I celebrate my father, I’ll remember his word meant everything. On a devastating early Saturday morning in 1984, he got a call from Greenwood that his mother had died following a quick, hard battle with myeloma. Somehow he got up, put on a suit and a smile and went out to photograph a long wedding and reception that very day. Then, incredibly, another. The Lord of Psalm 23, softly read by my mother in the stillness and agony of that June morning, keeping him upright. Your rod and your staff, they comfort.

I’ll remember tossing baseballs in the backyard before supper. My mom — the decades-long kindergarten teacher, sports chauffeur and gourmet cook from Whitmire, SC, smack dab in the middle of Rock Hill and Greenwood — watching out the window over the kitchen sink.

Baseball on TV and his memories of Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Pee Wee Reese from his beloved Brooklyn and, later, Los Angeles Dodgers. The team that finally won the World Series again a couple of months ago after years of frustration. In proper 2020 fashion, too late for my father, by now no match for the cruelties of dementia, to take it all in.

I’ll come around a glorious curve on the Blue Ridge Parkway and suddenly be back on another family camping trip in the Carolinas. How I would close my eyes in angst in the back seat as my father’s head swiveled around behind the wheel, taking in one beautiful scene after another.

Or maybe I’ll be back in Charleston staring out at the Battery, thinking about the best man at my wedding down there, the best father a man could have.

I’ll be on a car lot somewhere and wonder why I’ve never paid cash for one like he insisted on every time. Not because my parents’ state salaries made them rich, but because when you’re born in America in 1934 like my father, frugality stays with you. You find your Christmas trees “out in the woods” in your own neighborhood. You don’t leave the lights on and water running any longer than necessary. And yet I could never once, not a single time, slip away after a visit to my parents without him sliding “a little gas money” in my hand.

And, my word, I will never ever forget his love for food. Especially dessert. Sunday afternoon ice cream sandwiches and anytime was a good time for a Frosty from Wendy’s. While still at a rehab hospital a little over a year ago, I was standing with him next to his wheelchair during a physical therapy session. Watching him toss a balloon back and forth a short distance with a therapist, trying to at least partly stimulate those motor skills he used to balance the bike and the boy and the groceries.

Right in the middle of that crowded therapy room, out of nowhere he brought the session to a halt by catching the balloon instead of tapping it back for the 50th time. In that same instant he turned to me and said matter-of-factly, “How about bringing me a slice of strawberry pie?”

With no visitors allowed in the nursing home these past several months, my mother’s treats were the only earthly delights he had to look forward to. As terribly confused as he would become, there is nothing to cognitively work out when it comes to sweets. Turns out plaques and tangles around the brain cells do not affect the enjoyment of chocolate chip cookies. After picking at meals and even refusing snacks, he stopped eating altogether a few weeks ago. Time was short.

When a man of few words becomes a man of no words, as he was in his final week, actions resonate more than ever. His gentle squeeze of my mother’s hand as she sat at his bedside. A goodbye to the girl in the library in 1962 whom he’d loved so well for so long, and who loved him every bit as much in return.

Several months before, we watched over FaceTime as he sat on a screened porch with a caretaker on a sunny afternoon. “Why don’t you write a note to Janice?” the caretaker said.

After some time, he scribbled,

Dear Janice,

I love you.

Then the most gracious and kind man I’ll ever know put the marker down, looked up and asked, “Is that enough?”

Yes, Daddy, that’s more than enough. That’s everything.

The Great Exchange

Exactly one week before he died, a Hospice nurse cleared the way for our return. For the first time since mid-March, we would be allowed to visit now at any time. To be there for him as he’d always been for us. He would know how he had shaped our lives, and how proud we were of him.

We would tell him again how much we loved him. To hold him close and in doing so let him go. Pictures and video had failed to capture the weight loss. Bones in his shoulders protruding, the skin on his face sunk back to the bones. But no struggle, no pain in those last days. Like a peaceful ride home.

And so I end at the beginning, with the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 22:13). My father, a desperate sinner in need of grace, long ago turned to the only One who freely offers forgiveness of sins. “The Lord is with me” (Psalm 118:6) he closed his eyes and whispered in closing a brief conversation about why I couldn’t take him with me one night following a pre-pandemic visit in the nursing home.

That was his simple, five-word sermon to his very heart that night. That he knew that he knew Immanuel, God with us. The hope of Christmas, my father’s last day.

The Christian gospel turns away both denial and despair. You can be honest about death, “the last enemy,” because, as Paul says in 1 Cor. 15:26, it was defeated by Jesus Christ.

You can face death “in him” and with his perfect record (Phil. 3:9). Like my father, you can have all the hope in the world.

John Newton, the English Anglican clergyman who penned “Amazing Grace” and other treasured hymns, recalls visiting a mostly silent woman on her deathbed and reading 2 Peter 1:16 where the apostle writes: “For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

After a time of more silence, suddenly the woman exclaimed, “No, not cunningly devised fables. I feel their truth, I feel their comfort. Oh tell my friends, tell inquiring souls, tell poor sinners, what Jesus has done for my soul.”

Seven years ago this month, I suffered what I assumed would be a typical concussion. One that would, as they generally do, resolve after a week or so, maybe a month at most. It didn’t turn out that way. Every word of this was typed through blinking and squinting eyes that no longer work together as they should. Our amazingly designed eyes are, for all practical purposes, really an exterior part of our brain.

Many other trials involved in post concussion syndrome. It’s a hard way to live. To the extent anyone else could, my father knew it, too. His words to me early on in the journey were not extensive, but simple and beautiful and pointing again to truth.

“I would trade places with you if I could,” he said. And I knew he meant it.

And I was overjoyed to know the One who not only could, but did just that. Jesus lived, died and was raised for our sins (1 Cor. 15:3–5).

He lived a perfect life and died a substitutionary death — in my place.

In my father’s place.

By grace through faith in Christ, in your place, I pray.

Oh tell my friends, tell inquiring souls, tell poor sinners, what Jesus has done.