Dana Whorton

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Dana Whorton
By Christine Wicker

Danna Whorton is something else. A personal friend, as was her husband, Preston, for some forty years, a Christian ethical champion in word and in deed, a prophetess and a seer far beyond her place and times, a saint, a woman of God, a doer of the World, a tower of strength, and a paragon of Christian faithfulness, patience, kindness, and goodness, Danna Whorton richly deserves the kudos given her in the accompanying article by Christine Wicker, staff writer for the Dallas Morning News. Published in the Religion Section on Saturday, December 28, 1996, it is reprinted here with their permission.

Danna Whorton doesn`t seem to ask much of God. She just wants him to give her the strength to meet what life hands out. Usually she finds the strength. The one time she didn`t, God stepped in.

On the icy morning of January 2, 1977, lying in the pale green bedroom where she`d slept for 31 years, Mrs. Whorton felt too weary to rise.

"I can`t go on another day," she thought.

She prayed not for a miracle, not for healing, but only that God would help. "Help me, Lord. Help me." That`s all.

For five years, she had nursed her husband, Preston, after two cerebral hemorrhages left him confined to bed. He couldn`t talk or feed himself. Only his eyes moved, following her as she walked about the room. For the first two years, she wasn`t even sure he recognized her.

She hired a nurse for the day shift; she took night duty herself. Every two hours from 3 p.m. until 7 a.m., she shifted and turned her husband. Mrs. Whorton couldn`t remember the last time she`d had a complete night`s sleep. She was 71 years old and so tired.

"Lord, I just can`t make it another day," she prayed.

That afternoon, Mr. Whorton died.

His wife was left feeling totally useless. Her children were grown, and her purpose in life had just been buried.

That`s when Mrs. Whorton`s faith kicked in.

Her theology can be summed up pretty simply. "God takes care of us, and he expects a certain response from us because of all we`re given."

Those years of nursing her husband were some of the hardest of her life–and some of the best, she says. "I felt as though I was just held up on the arms of love."

The Whortons, longtime members of Park Cities Baptist Church, both lived a feet-to-the-ground kind of religion that was short on pious attitude and long on action. When the day came that they needed help, plenty of people were ready.

Mr. Whorton, known as Barney to everyone, was a brilliant, crusty, tenderhearted man who treated his Atlantic Richfield employees like family. His language was so colorful that a secretary once complained that she shouldn`t be required to sit outside his office and listen to such talk day after day.

Mr. Whorton so often brought people home for lunch and dinner that his wife never knew how many she was going to feed on a given day. When someone was sick or grieving, Mr. Whorton would call her and tell her to get right over to the person`s house. And she would.

"I guess he was the best person I ever knew," she says in the soft North Carolina accent of her native state. "If somebody had a baby who was sick, and he didn`t know about it, he`d get really mad."

When Mr. Whorton felt ill, Atlantic Richfield engineers showed up to ferry his wife to and from the hospital. When the patient was moved home, men from his Sunday School class came six days a week to put him in a chair. They stayed for the hour and a half or returned when it was time to move him back to bed. Friends would call and lure Mrs. Whorton out for dinner or a concert. People would come over and bring food and visit.

Some nights Mrs. Whorton was so tired, she stretched out on the floor and fell asleep amid the soothing drone of her friends` conversation.

When Mr. Whorton died after five years of never speaking a word, 1,500 people came to his funeral.

After everyone went home, Mrs. Whorton started figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. "The best part of your life can be over," she says, "and you can still have a life."

A Christian`s marching orders are Jesus` Great Commission, she says. "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you."

Lots of people concentrate on the teaching and baptizing aspect of that command. Mrs. Whorton doesn`t. She thinks religion is fairly personal. She would talk to anyone about being a Christian if the subject came up and she thought she could do them some good. "But I don`t jump to the conclusion that if people don`t believe like I do they are going to hell," she says. "That`s not my business."

With regard to the Great Commission, Mrs. Whorton stresses the "observe all things…I have commanded you" part.

"That means to feed the hungry, help the poor, comfort the dying," she says.

She had once rocked babies at Parkland Hospital, and she considered going back to that. But after all those years of caring for Mr. Whorton, she had more skills and a better understanding of what sick people and their families need.

So Parkland put her in the radiology department, where she sat on a high stool wearing a lead apron. She would talk to people as they were tested and offer to hold their hand if they wanted.

"Mostly they did. There just comes a time when you just need something to hang onto. And I was the something that was there," she says.

"Sometimes it hurt because they sure could squeeze." She held that job until the `80s.

When she heard that the Visiting Nurse Association was starting a hospice program to help people die at home with dignity and freedom from pain, Mrs. Whorton volunteered. "It seemed like they started it just for me," she says.

She visited people`s homes, listened to their thoughts, held their hands, read to them, wrote letters. She can`t begin to remember how many patients she has seen die in the past 19 years.

It doesn`t take any imagination at all for Mrs. Whorton to envision the worst. She`s seen every bit of how bad death can be. She`s seen how lonely old age can be. She knows how cruel life can become.

And yet she is not afraid.

She read somewhere that one of the most repeated phrases in the Bible is "Be not afraid." And so she isn`t.

She`s never been a worrier, and experience has borne her out. "You`re going to have paint in life, even if you hide from it."

"I don`t figure my thinking about things is going to solve it. If I can go out and hold someone`s hand and make them feel better. That`s my talent."

She is 91 now. She gave up driving two years ago, and she has stopped taking on hospice patients because she can`t lift people as she once could.

She sends 200 Christmas cards each year to friends across the country. Each has a handwritten note. She wraps presents for the needy right before the holiday. All year long she and a committee of other volunteers cut up old Christmas cards and paste them together into 1,200 new ones for Meals on Wheels.

But Mrs. Whorton does more than all that. She lives her life with such grace and kindness that people around the Visiting Nurse Association talk about her as if she were a saint.

"I feel sorry for anyone who comes here after Dan`s gone," says Susan Nolin, "because they`ll always be hearing about what they missed."

When Mrs. Nolin came to work at the big organization a year ago, she had the usual difficulties people have adjusting in a big company. Mrs. Whorton made it a point to welcome her and to drop by to chat whenever she was in the office.

She`s real fair about what she says," says Mrs. Nolin. "When you get a compliment from her, it`s true and it`s honest but it`s a real gem. She`s got that old world graciousness."

When Sheila Jacob took the job of vice president in charge of hospices, Mrs. Whorton wrote her a letter before she arrived to say how glad she was that Mrs. Jacob was coming. They immediately became the best of friends.

Mrs. Whorton is still healthy enough to host luncheons with the help of Lillie Mae Booker, who has worked for her almost 50 years and calls her "my little angel." But Mrs. Whorton knows that death could come anytime.

That doesn`t worry her.

"I don`t spend a lot of time thinking about the afterlife. I think if God said he would be with me, he will be."

She likens the fear of death to the apprehension people feel before they marry. "You`re afraid because it`s something new," she says. But in her case marriage was nothing to fear at all and the same is true of death, she says.

"It`s something new."

Mrs. Whorton knows that her quiet steady faith doesn`t fit everyone.

"Maybe it`s being foolishly optimistic," she says, "but it`s a great way to live."