“I’ve dreamed many dreams that never came true
I’ve seen them vanish at dawn,
But I’ve realized enough of my dreams, thank God
To make me want to dream on.”
MOCKSVILLE — It was 22 years ago when an impaired driver ran into William Calvin Ijames’ home on Parker Road.
He and his wife, Vertie, were jolted awake by the noise. Calvin thought the furnace had blown up.
“Our two younger children, Marjolene and Steve, were still living at home,”he says. “So I yelled, ‘Get up, get out, the furnace has exploded.’”
But when he opened the door to the basement and started down the stairs, Calvin could see there was nothing wrong with the furnace.
He walked out the back of the house and around to the front, where he asked the neighbors walking toward him if they had heard a loud noise. One responded, “Yes, there is a car in the north side of your house.”
Calvin looked to see a 1950 Lincoln embedded in what was then an office in the front room.
“It just shattered that office,” he says, “tore up everything, the office equipment, the furniture. Needless to say,I was disgusted and angry because of what the driver in his condition had done.”
The next morning, Calvin began to take inventory of the damage. He was looking around the room when he spotted a poem he had typed and framed years before hanging on the shattered wall.
“Not even a piece of glass in the frame was broken,” he says. “When everything else was all torn up, this was left intact and I started looking at it, and I said, ‘God what are you trying to say to me?’”
As he read the words, Calvin says he forgot all about the wreck. “In fact, I even apologized to the impaired driver a few days afterward,” he says, “because Irealized when I saw that that God had allowed perhaps that wreck to occur to get my attention to something that was far more important.”
The poem, written by an unknown author, would be a source of strength for Calvin in the coming years. “Little did Iknow at the time,” he says, “that a big wreck was going to come to our family four years later.”
“I’ve prayed many prayers when no answer came,
Though I waited patient and long;
But answers have come to enough of my prayers
To make me keep praying on.”
Jeff, the oldest of Calvin and Vertie’s three children, was only 12 when he was diagnosed with melanoma. After surgery that year and the two subsequent years, the disease went into remission.
“We were so thankful,” Calvin says. “It looked like we had won the battle.”
After graduating from Davie High School in 1974, Jeff attended Catawba College before going to work at Ingersoll-Rand Company in Mocksville. He was at a church conference in Ohio when he met Isabel, the woman who would become his wife.
After marrying in 1976, they had two daughters and their third child, a son, was only a month old when Jeff’s doctor found the melanoma had recurred. Over the next 18 months, he underwent four surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy, but nothing could stop the cancer that was ravaging his body.
On May 14, 1983, just 13 days after his 27th birthday, Jeff took his last breath.
Calvin was devastated. He recalls the day he walked out of his son’s room at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem for the last time. He got on the elevator, Jeff’s belongings in his hands, and realized he wouldn’t need to go back.
“But then after that I said, ‘Oh God, don’t let me be that selfish,’ ” he says. “ ‘There may always be somebody at Baptist Hospital who will need me.’
“And I knew that had Jeff lived, he would have wanted to have gone back and returned something for the love that had been given to him.”
He would become a volunteer at the hospital, Calvin decided, after he retired from Ingersoll-Rand.
In the meantime, he struggled with his grief. He would get up at 4 in the morning and walk up and down the country roads around his home, reciting the poem over and over again.
The words comforted him and gave him strength.
“I’ve trusted many friends who failed
And left me to weep alone;
But I’ve found enough of my friends true blue
To make me keep trusting on.”
Eager to share with others, Calvin and Vertie started a local chapter of The Compassionate Friends, a national support group for bereaved parents. Seeing how this helped led them to start chapters for bereaved parents in Catawba County and Winston-Salem.
“And then it began to weigh on me,” Calvin says. After realizing he couldn’t wait until he retired to volunteer at the hospital, he signed up to work in the family surgical waiting room on Friday nights.
Calvin had sat in that same room on seven different occasions during Jeff’s battle with cancer. “I thought I had some idea about what a hurting person needs in there.”
When the Ijameses were there, the volunteers sat at the desk and let them know when they had a call. But Calvin wanted to do more.
“Guess what I found to be probably my most effective tool when I went out to somebody to see if I could help,” he says, “ ‘Let me tell you a story.’ I would get on my knees in front of them and guess what story Iwould tell them — the story of my wreck.
“And then of course you know what the ending was. Iquoted the poem.”
People asked for copies and soon, Calvin was passing them out on a regular basis.
Once, when he was volunteering, Calvin led a woman whose loved one had been transferred to intensive care to the waiting room where Vertie had started working as a volunteer. When he got there, she asked if he knew where a copier was.
“I said, ‘It’s 8 o’clock,’ ” he says. “ ‘The offices are closed.’ ”
But the woman’s desperate, Vertie told him.
Calvin says he offered to talk to her. “When I got to this lady,” he says, “she came up with this piece of paper and said, ‘Sir, some nice man gave us this poem last week, and we’ve shared it with everybody else in intensive care all week long. We’d like to find a copying machine to make a copy of it before we tear it up.’ ”
When he looked at it, Calvin says, it was the poem he had been handing out.
“I’ve sowed many seeds that fell by the way
For the birds to feed upon,
But I’ve held enough golden sheaves in my hand
To make me keep sowing on.”
When he was asked to speak at the 1989 national conference of The Compassionate Friends in Tampa, Fla., Calvin told the story of the wreck and Jeff’s subsequent death, concluding by reading the poem.
When he finished, a woman came running up to him and said she had to have a copy of the poem. He told her that he had an extra copy in his room if she would wait.
She pointed to the long line of people waiting to talk with him and said it would be a long time before he could get it. “In other words, ‘Pull it out from your notes, give me that poem,’ ” he says. “And Idid.”
A few months later, a book titled “When Your Dreams Die” arrived in the mail. Written by the woman at the conference, it contained a copy of the poem.
In the meantime, Calvin was doing such a good job volunteering in the surgical waiting room that the hospital asked if he would be willing to work in the emergency room on Saturday nights.
“I said, ‘I like what I’m doing in the family surgical waiting room, and I hardly want to give it up. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll keep working here on Friday nights and I’ll go down there on Saturday nights.’ ”
Time and time again, Calvin was called on to console family members after traumatic deaths. Some of them were parents, like himself, who had lost children.
One man asked if he got paid to work there. “No,” Calvin said.
“Are you a minister?” the man wanted to know. “No,” he said.
“Are you trying to tell me that you work in the emergency room at Baptist Hospital on a Saturday night for nothing?” Calvin says the man asked. “He wanted to have me committed.”
Over the years, Calvin continued to reach out to people in pain.
He has received many awards, including WBTV’s Jefferson Award and the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service from Gov. James B. Hunt Jr.
Because there are so many people in pain, Calvin and Vertie also helped to train others, including senior citizens and church members, to reach out through a 13-week video series on “Hope for the Hurting” by Dr. H. Norman Wright.
As more people began to hear about what he was doing, Calvin was asked to speak at churches and has spoken more than 200 times over the years.
Last year, he compiled some of the material he had used in his speaking engagements in a book titled “Survival Kit for the Christian Journey.” Published by Brentwood Christian Press in Columbus, Ga., the first printing consisted of 565 copies. Of those, Calvin has sold 500.
“We just received a second shipping of 625,” he says.
Available now at Carolina Christian Bookstore and Bits of Brass, both in Mocksville, Calvin says efforts are being made to market the book to other Christian bookstores.
“Responses are very positive,” he says. Samaritan Christian Counseling Service in Statesville has ordered 40 copies, and letters of endorsement from ministers and more invitations to speak have started to come in.
“I’ve drained the cup of disappointment and pain
And gone many days without song,
But I’ve sipped enough nectar from the roses of life
To make me want to live on.”
Calvin actually started the book 41 years ago. “But in the course of time, raising a family and trying to take care of all the ‘honey-do’ things,” he says, “the book got pushed aside.”
Through the years, Calvin says he continued to think about the book. “But when you reach 65 years of age,” he says, “as I was last year whenI started writing on this, you look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘Old man, I guess if you’re going to do this, you’d better get on with it.’”
For three months, he concentrated totally on the book. “I had a tablet by the side of my bed every night,” he says, “and I was up and down all night long. I’d get a thought and be afraid that I’d lose it if I went back to sleep.”
There are 15 chapters in the book, and Calvin says they’re short and to the point,“something that will capture the attention of a hurting person.”
People in pain don’t have the stamina to read a long book.“I’m speaking from self-experience here. After our son died, the things that reached me had to be fairly brief.”
In his introduction, Calvin wrote that he has endeavored “to proclaim the message of hope for pilgrims traveling through dark clouds and present the source of strength to those who are climbing rugged mountains.”
The 120-page paperback combines Bible passages, poems and inspirational readings with Calvin’s personal experiences in addressing such subjects as “Have a Worthy Purpose,” “Avoid Negative Attractions,” “Travel with Christian Eagles” and “Don’t Give Up,” the last chapter in the book.
“My purpose will be fulfilled,” he wrote in the introduction, “if these examples help fellow pilgrims survive when physical and emotional hardships crash into their lives.”
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To order a book or to schedule a speaking engagement by Calvin Ijames, write him at P.O. Box 832, Mocksville, NC.27028 or call him at 336-492-2371.
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