As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, Thanksgiving, like Christmas, can be an emotional time. The absence from a familiar seat, the stories and jokes not told, the embrace not given are all painfully felt. For those who know the biblical injunction, however, it is a necessity to “give thanks in all circumstances.”
My family certainly did our best to heed that call this week, even though my uncle, James H. Deavel, died on Wednesday at the age of 84. Though we were not going to celebrate Thanksgiving with him or his widow, Arlene, his loss still leaves a hole in our family. It also gives us an occasion for thanksgiving for the strange ways of Providence. For the very presence of Uncle Jim in the lives of my late parents, my brother, me, and our families is itself a wonderful gift and opportunity for healing that we never expected or asked—but which God in his goodness saw fit to give us.
To explain this gift, a bit of backstory is necessary. My grandparents, Harold and Mary Deavel, were married in 1919. Both smart and talented figures who could easily assume the role of “life of the party,” they had a stormy relationship that went hot-and-cold. A daughter was born in 1920, another in 1924, who lived only three days, then in quick succession three more children: a boy in February 1929, a girl in April 1930, and my father, Phil, in January 1932.
Given the Depression, Harold moved jobs several times with the family. While they were living in Dayton, Ohio, in 1937, Harold announced that he was taking a job in Denver. He would, he said, set up house there and then send for Mary and the children. In reality, he met another woman and moved to California.
His disappearance was a devastating blow to both his wife and children. He wrote periodically, sometimes sending money. He did not reveal that he had started a new family and fathered a son in 1941. It was in the early 1960s, after my Aunt Shirley moved to California, that she discovered that her father had remarried. This was news because there had been no divorce.
I don’t know what my grandfather’s second wife, Dorothy, knew of his first family or when she knew it. My grandfather died in 1968. Harold’s obituary was yet another blow to my grandmother and her children, for there was no mention of them anywhere. My grandfather and his second wife did not want their own secrets to get out—even to their own son, Jim.
Harold’s second wife lived until 1998. Anxious to destroy some documents before her death, she didn’t get a chance to complete this task. When Jim was taking care of her belongings afterward, he did find a divorce certificate for his father and a woman he had never heard of—from the 1960s when he was in his twenties!
This sent him on a search to discover the truth about his father and his own past.
Oddly enough, right before Thanksgiving that year, I had been noodling around on Google while working in the library computer lab at Fordham University, where I was a graduate student. I had never met or heard of anyone with the name “Deavel” who wasn’t related closely to me. Even on the worldwide web, there were few. What I found included several people close in age to me and an older couple, all out in the western U.S.
Having been told about my grandfather’s story, I wondered if these people were part of his second family.
A few days later, while celebrating Thanksgiving in Washington, D.C., with friends, I talked with my parents. They told me that my father’s half-brother, an engineer who lived near Seattle, had just contacted them, looking for information. While my dad knew who Jim was, Jim had no idea who he was.
It was a difficult conversation for Jim. The revelation that his own father had abandoned a wife and four children was a punch in the throat. My grandfather’s reputation as a family man and respectable businessman in South Pasadena had been impeccable. Harold was on the Rose Bowl Parade committee for a time. Additionally, his and his wife’s personal rectitude in the home gave no reason for a son to ever suspect what he found out.
My dad invited Jim and his wife, Arlene, out to visit them in Indiana. My parents, in turn, went out to visit them. Though only half-brothers, Uncle Jim and Dad were very much alike in personality, temperament, and much else. Both were serious Christians who had gravitated toward the Reformed (Calvinist) camp. Both had two boys. Aunt Arlene was very similar to my mother in personality and temperament.
Friendship with this newfound brother was a gift for my dad, and an opportunity for his own healing. Only five when his father abandoned him, my dad’s loss had been profound. Dad told me once that, after his father left, he had gone out into the woods and had cursed God for the loss of his father—an action for which he still felt some guilt, I think. Dad’s own grief and anger abated when he realized this younger man, who had received the attention of his own father who left him, also was now suffering because his views of that man had been shattered in many ways.
Uncle Jim and Aunt Arlene became a part of my life, too. Because I married a woman from the Seattle area, Uncle Jim, whom I had met at my parents’ house and liked (he teased me about my enormous appetite, calling me “The Gorger”), and Aunt Arlene came to our wedding in Everett. So, too, did their son Young Jim (as his mother called him) and his family.
Young Jim moved to Montana a few years later. Because my family drove from Minnesota to Snohomish, Washington, every summer, we took up the habit of stopping to stay with him for a day or two. Then, in Washington, we always met up with Uncle Jim and Aunt Arlene. They came to us, too. Uncle Jim and Aunt Arlene journeyed to Indiana for my mother’s funeral in 2003 and my dad’s in 2013.
Eventually, Uncle Jim and Aunt Arlene moved to be closer to Young Jim in Montana. Jim’s younger brother, Bill, also moved there. A trip to or through the Big Sky State allows us to see all the Montana Deavels at once. My next one will be to say goodbye to Uncle Jim.
It was Thanksgiving of 1998 when I found an uncle, and my father discovered a brother. An uncle and brother whose very existence was due to circumstances for which we were not thankful, but in which we had discovered blessings we could not have imagined and hadn’t asked for.
This Thanksgiving, 27 years later, those unimagined and unasked blessings are all too present in my mind. Even as I mourn my uncle, I am grateful for God’s Marvelous Providence. Normally, the sins of a father are visited on the third and fourth generation. This is no doubt true in some ways. But, in our case, God has already brought healing, love, and friendship out of them.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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