A Prayer or a Dream, this Christmas
“…the band is going home, it’s raining hammers, it’s raining nails. And it’s true there’s nothing left for him down here…And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train- you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away. And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget, that history puts a saint in every dream…are those dreams or are those prayers?...” -Tom Waits
God in heaven and on earth,
You know my thoughts.
Was it a dream of him? A prayer for him? A prayer of him?
He was 22 and he lived. He couldn’t speak, but he looked just like himself; moved just like himself. Shoulders tall. Stride fast and long [he always moved with purpose when he was sure of himself or when he wanted to be.] His hands were in his pockets because it was cold, and as an optimist, he never wore a proper coat. A half grin and a twinkle, something like an inside joke he’s ready to let you in on, in his eyes. In a University of Georgia hat, the gray hoodie that I now wear, and old boots with one leg of work khakis that hadn’t cleared them. We were at 346 Tugaloo, and I held his hand and sang to him. An Alabama song of all things. [I wish it had been a cooler song.] “Down home, where they know you by name and treat you like family”. As I sang, Father, he was 10 years old again, smiling so big that he showed all of the newly crooked teeth that he wasn’t old enough to try and hide- my favorite age of his, I think, but how could I pick? So, I sang that line again and he laughed right out loud: his 10-year-old quick giggle that he kept until the day he died [do I get to hear it again with my ears instead of my memory, God?] So, I sang those words again and he, miracle of all, sang them with me. So, I kept singing it; we kept singing it. I never wanted to stop singing and laughing. I was ok that he wasn’t the same as long as he could sing and laugh, and, mostly, hold my hand. I never wanted to wake up.
I have a lot on my mind, Lord, about how things have changed now that I wake up to my worst nightmare instead of from it. Fear doesn’t touch me in the ways it used to- ie snakes, heights, disease, thievery, what people think of me… but somehow dismantles me at the sound of a cell phone vibrating on a hard surface or a helicopter flying over. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” they say. “It’s normal,” they say. It’s not normal, I say, but it also makes sense in this way: if a piece of my heart is gone, how could a piece of my mind not also be? How, God, could the bullet that pierced my son not also pierce me? I’ve made an unpaid living out of trying to sense my children’s movements; trying to anticipate them, predict them. I have tried to watch and feel every move he made from the time he was conceived. At first, “When will he move in my belly? Should he be moving already? Is he moving enough?” And as I lost him, begging that someone please take those taped bags off his hands. [he’s no criminal!] I needed to see if they could still move. I needed to see if they would squeeze mine like they always did when our prayer was ending.
I knew somewhere deep down in the places of knowing that if his hand could squeeze mine when I asked him to, it would. Just like when he got those horrible covid shots in his stomach because I asked him to, because of his lifelong struggle to breathe. The foreshadowing of it all, God… remember me and him, sitting in the small bathroom in the middle of the night with the shower on full hot so the steam would help him breathe, while I read to him so he wouldn’t be afraid. And so, even as I lost him, I read to him and whispered in his ear for only him to hear- “Son, you know the Shepherd’s voice, you can go to it if you hear Him.” Because if he could have stayed for us, he would have.
His hands didn’t move. They still felt the same. They were cool yet clammy- used to leave a film on my steering wheel when he borrowed my car- but my God in Heaven, they did not move; did not squeeze mine. They had squeezed mine for the very last time.
“But what about heaven?” a well-meaning person might ask. Father, You know I trust You. You know all my hope is in You and I know even in these deep dark places that You will make eternity the way You make “all things” [together for good, You said], but I do not trust in heaven, only in the God of it. I don’t know heaven. I know You. It would be as if I had an accident and upon waking, You tell me I will live and it will be more wonderful than before, but I will no longer experience touch, taste, smell, sight, or sound. Surely it would be wonderful since You said it, but I cannot for the fallen life of me imagine that it would. And I cannot for the grieved life of me yet bear the foolishness of someone who thinks that they could imagine it.
My willingness to put up with foolishness- this died too, Lord. A lot of things of mine died that day. Parts of my memory and feeling still lay buried. This has persisted in such a way that sometimes I can only remember what is important. Sometimes, all that is important is how beautiful he still was in the hospital. Sometimes, it is the way the young ER doctor with glasses that were too big for her face and somehow made her look sadder said “devastating brain injury” and how I thought I had never heard a more fitting word. Devastating. And sometimes all I can feel is the way the absence of feeling sort of hurts too: like a vacuum that will suck everything up if you don’t pay better attention. “It’s not pain, it’s pressure,” they say- as if pressure feels far better than pain; as if pressure does not immediately precede pain. God, I am not okay with losing my son, [You know this because You know me], but I am okay with losing some of the other stuff, even if I fight against it sometimes [forgive me for still occasionally wielding my weak weapons]. That’s the thing about living down here with bullets, Father [your Kingdom come], there are unintentional targets. Sometimes, there are multiple casualties. Your people in the south have a lot to say about this topic, Lord. I wonder, could they look me in the eyes and say it with the same hubris that they do on their bumper stickers? In my eyes…
My two eyes: one that sees beauty and one, only pain. Yet You ask that I keep both open and let them somehow work together to see a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. How did You do this, Great One? Design us to somehow carry both utter grief and unshakeable hope at once? It is too heavy, too complex. You knew this. You made a way, The Way, to shoulder it.
So King of Kings, this Christmas, [how do they keep coming?] in my dreams or in my prayers, I dream and pray for patience. [“Don’t pray for patience or you get trials,” they say. As if You are someone who is waiting to catch us in our words to send us something really bad. Foolishness.]
I pray for my friends’ patience with me and for my patience with them. For the ones who miss the ‘old me.’ For the ones who think I should go back to ‘how things were’ : to half-truth, to pleasantries, to frantically worrying over things that do not matter. I pray for the ones who want me to “let my grief go,” when doing so, to me, feels like a betrayal [Not of Alex- he can no longer be betrayed now that he is with You, but a betrayal of myself, my soul, to make others - what??? comfortable? blissfully ignorant? ]. I pray that I don’t betray myself by holding it too tightly. I pray for the ones who, for now, have the luxury of a mostly untested faith or who, at least, walk upright in the round world that I used to walk in before it somehow went flat and flipped in a millisecond. Who knew how malleable the world could be? Mine, suspended in time and place while others, probably on the same night, opened up to some kind of new, glorious dimension. Your world is enigmatic.
I do remember, Lord, the last time my world was spherical. Do You? [Sometimes I ask silly questions.] It was me, You, Rev, and the two strangers who were discussing a pasture fence [for Pete’s sake]. We were inside a snow globe of the ICU waiting room- some sort of microcosm of our old lives [it was shrinking already]. We wanted to be alone while we waited for the results of the last test that would be performed. There we were, a mom and a dad who needed to be alone but were in fact with dozens of well-wishers huddled in the hospital halls, nothing separating us but a material that probably wasn’t even real glass. Probably plexiglass. Plex: root word- fold. A material that is made to bend instead of breaking… because we want to believe that the things we love can’t slip through our hands and shatter. I find plexiglass offensive the way I find all cheap substitutes so. Things we love; people we love; we, ourselves, are breakable. It’s part of what makes us precious.
It may have been my last moment in a rounded world, but it was taking too long. I was somehow in my chair but completely in Rev’s lap at the same time. Did that doctor consider what was happening out here in the snow globe? Did she realize it had gone still? Did she perceive somehow that even taking too long may have been a bit of a blessing? That, at the very moment it occurred to me that it was taking too long, I looked at my phone and it was 5:17, the same numbers that she would say…. no, brand into my soul when she said them just after saying “the time of death”. THE WHAT? I searched all six of the other professionals’ faces to see if there was anything at all to cling to. I found only reverence and pity in each face. A reverence and pity that stopped speaking and waited because I was not the first one to lose her son in this way. They knew the five seconds that it would take for the news to travel to my heart. When it makes it there, I am, again, at once still on my feet yet somehow boneless in Rev’s arms like a small child. He is bearing the entire weight of me and the loss of his only son at the same time. [God, you don’t make many men like that. I noticed You, even then.] I was saying one word over and over again into his chest. It was a word that was muffled by his shirt else the whole world might have heard it. It was a word, Father, that may as well have been muffled because it held no power anymore [had it ever?]:
“No!”
No, this is not right. Doesn’t matter.
No, I do not want this. No one asked you.
No, this is too much. Tough luck.
No, I want to go back. No can do.
No, I want him back. That’s life.
Rev’s shirt muffled my words. Death muffled life. Life muffled death. It was all very circular, Lord, in my freshly flat world and I didn’t know anything but 5:17, time of death.
But I digress, Good Counselor.
My friends will need patience as they try to walk beside me in this alternate universe. I will need patience as I try to walk beside them.
I pray, God, for the ones who may not be able to make sense of abiding joy yet refusal to celebrate it anyway but quietly. Who are sometimes concerned about my inability to worship in any way but by tears [because most of the time that is all I have to offer You: Here, Father, is my pain, can you do anything with it? ]
I pray for my friends whose worlds are currently the same shape and direction as mine. It is an unfortunate and devastating gift, but it is a gift, God: to have a kindred catch a lump in their throat the same time I do, and not just to catch it, but tell me that they did. That is You, is Love, that presses them to tell me. Like the quiet one, who made sure to say: “I dream about my Dad like that too.” Said he thinks of us when he hears a song [“life is a battelfield. and it will drag you right through hell. bites like a rattlesnake. the kind that you just don’t see on the trail. and i miss my father every day. the kind of pain I pray don’t fade away. for the ones above to guide me down the road. yeah, grief is only love that’s got no place to go…” -Stephen Wilson, Jr.] It is Your way of reminding me, in all my self-induced independence, that I am not alone. And for the time being, it is to me the way You always are- More Than Enough. I pray these kindreds will also find You so.
I pray that all of us, no matter the current shape of our world, will be patient with each other. That we will give each other the same grace we would like to be given. That we would consider that even in a joyous time of year, most people we know are cripplingly sad about something, and to think of this before we open our clever mouths. That we would consider that someone is having the best day of their lives and to also rejoice with those who rejoice, if quietly.
I close my prayer/dream with this, Father: an echo from a beautiful poet, that I only could have found during an airport delay. And even this makes my heart smile when I think of You and the ways You make beauty, not only out of our great tragedy but out of our ordinary inconveniences and temporary setbacks. Oh my Heart, it is just like You. Because You know how hard it is for me to come back home to this after I’ve been away. Because You know I need a little hope first, a little glimpse of You, a little glimpse of us. I am so thankful. “Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” You said ‘I’ six times. So my eyes are trained on You, El Shaddai. Though my cup is misshapen, it still runneth over.
“Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.”- H. Abdurraqib
Your daughter,
Martha