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| "This Is What I Know" by Judy Wise |
He was okay when I was with him that night. I say he was “okay”
but maybe he was just content. Knowing peace, feeling forgiven, confident in
the decision—just a few ways that I’ve reconciled that ease I saw in him that
night in January. The doctor had recommended that dad go to an inpatient
program at a clinic where he could receive therapy and more attentive attention
than was possible in this place where he had deposited himself, the place which
required the pajamas for decorum. But he couldn’t last.
I guess he would have to have worn them at the clinic, too, those
pajamas. I don’t know where he got them. Mom, I suppose.
Dad slept in his tightey whiteys by the time I was an adult,
boxers I remember from when I was a kid. And whenever I happened to see him hop
on his one leg to the bathroom next to their bedroom in our tiny modified Cape
Cod he was in those shorts and not pajamas. “Modified Cape Cod”—mom chuckled
when I named it that so many years later. It was basically just a summer cottage
turned year-round-home when they bought it at the end of WWII, that world of
violence which had taken away his leg. Had taken away more of him than I ever
knew.
I loved him and he loved me—I’m certain of that more than I’m
certain of anything. Yet I never knew that this loving and kind
and strong and generous man felt hollow and inadequate and partial and burdened
deep down in his soul.
You can’t explain away a suicide by rationalizing it. You just
can’t. It’s not a split-second decision, I know that. It’s not about cowardice
because this was the most courageous man I’ve known. It’s not simply about
depression and anxiety because they are temporary, if painful, conditions that
so many people cope with day to day. I’ve tried to figure it out for more than
30 years now—the why, primarily—yet there are no acceptable answers any more
than there are sufficient questions about that life-changing moment.
“You do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life?
For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James
4:14)
I’ve been wrestling with that these past three decades. Is it
true? Did Jesus’ sudden and traumatic death impact his brother James in
such a way that he wrestled with the finality of it in the same way? Your
beloved ripped away from you without you being able to do anything about it,
the ethereality yet finality of it all. But did Jesus’ brother know
something that I haven’t been able to figure out? Is life truly only “a mist
that appears for a little while and then vanishes”?
It’s not, of course. I suppose I knew that, know that. I suppose
my dad knew that as well.
But then again James, like so many of us, slips into religiosity in his grief. “You
ought to say, if God is willing we will live and do this or that.” As much as I
know that life is more than a mist that appears and then vanishes, I also know
that my dad’s death was not dependent on God’s willingness.
He was a faithful follower, a man of God, a man who taught me more
of faithful living than I can ever put into words or action. He was, is, and
always will be my dad, the gold standard by which I measure my own fatherhood
and all men I encounter. He was and is more than “a mist that appears for a
little while,” more than simply a glimpse through a curtain of a guy in his
pajamas.
That morning he sat on his bed twisting the trash bags from the
drawer of the nightstand next to him. No one thought twice about it. A nurse
thought maybe he was working on the needlepoint project that he had with him,
busyness that calmed his anxieties. But this was no craft project, this twisted
rope that he set about to use.
He knew what he was doing. It’s not an impulsive move. It was not
a whim. He twisted those bags with intentionality and decision. He rolled up the left leg of those pajama pants
to slip on his artificial leg, he stood and walked that hall toward the
shower room. It was deliberate. It was determined. He had to turn the doorknob
and lock it behind him. He had to tie the knot over the shower head.
When did he decide? Did he know when I talked to him that night
before? When did he know that he could no longer bear the pain, the pain that
surged through his soul like so many others have known in their post trauma
days—months—years—decades. Did he know when he checked into that sham of a
hospital that lost him?
Did the universe know as he bobbed unconscious in the warm water
of WWII's South Pacific 40 years before, sucked through a tear in the seaplane’s
hull, his leg ripped beyond repair? Did the fates know as obcw rescued he lay in the bed of
the sinking plane as morphine was jabbed into his pained body, morphine withheld just before the third dose would have brought him final sleep? As he lay in a bed in a
Navy hospital in Australia hearing his dad’s voice calling to him from just outside the window,
a voice that was 10,000 miles away in Appalachia?
His life didn’t vanish then
before it had reached 21 years, it was more than a mist then and more than a
mist now.
I’ll never know what he knew, when he knew, the pain that draws
away the desire from our living of life. What I’m left with is the doubt, the
guilt, the despair, the emptiness in my own soul.
“May God forgive me for what I am about to do.” His final words of
release—written, prayed, and granted. He is forgiven. This I know more than
anything I know.
© Copyright
2016
James F.
McIntire
All rights
reserved.
