Fog in March

The hours creep on past midday and I glance out the window. Drizzle has been the friend of the morning, and the unseasonable warmth of this late March weather has helped chase away much of the remaining snow. The fog across the valley catches my attention. The dreary landscape rises from field to trees and ends in a wall of gray. Sky and land are lost there and it is somehow grim and tantalizingly curious.

I know the hill is not so very tall, but in the moment of imagination those trees could keep going up and up to a high mountain peak. There might be dragons there.

Fog threatens and invites, and seems it will never leave until it suddenly does. The heavy cloak is a waiting that will soon pass.

Louder Than Words

“The Silence of God” by Andrew Peterson

It’s enough to drive a man crazy
It’ll break a man’s faith
It’s enough to make him wonder
If he’s been sane
When he’s bleating for comfort
From Thy staff and Thy rod
And the heavens’ only answer
Is the silence of God

And it’ll shake a man’s timbers
When he loses his heart
When he has to remember
What broke him apart
And this yoke may be easy
But this burden is not
And the crying fields are frozen
By the silence of God

If a man has got to listen
To the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes
Of all the happiness they’ve got
When they tell you all their troubles
Have been nailed up to that cross
What about the times when even
Followers get lost
‘Cause we all get lost sometimes

There’s a statue of Jesus
On a monestary knoll
In the hills of Kentucky
All quiet and cold
And He’s kneeling in the garden
Silent as a stone
And all His friends are sleeping
And He’s weeping all alone

And the man of all sorrows
He never forgot
What sorrow is carried
By the hearts that He bought
So when the questions dissolve
Into the silence of God
The aching may remain
But the the breaking does not
The aching may remain
But the the breaking does not
In the holy, lonesome echo
Of the silence of God

-AP

Recording: https://youtu.be/cvytewIxll0

The Strangest Gift

I am not very consistent about giving gifts. Sometimes I give a gift for the sake of giving a gift–but I much prefer giving a gift that springs from thought and comes with meaning. The meaning in the gift can be as simple as “I read this book and I thought you would like it” to as deep as “I hand crafted this item to be a token of my love.” Whatever the meaning, the gift must be something more than the requisite tie, socks, or gift card if it is to escape being so boring to give so as to not feel worth the effort.

It is often the case that when a gift-giving occasions come around I find myself without ideas for meaningful gifts and so I just don’t give anything. I have passing dreams of being a great gift giver who finds the perfect meaningful gift for everyone each time, but the reality is that–at best–I have been very erratic in gift giving. I don’t have a strong need to receive gifts either–I appreciate a thoughtful gift but I don’t measure how much I am loved by my loot–and these tepid feelings don’t help me be more consistent in giving gifts.

My wife is quite the opposite. For Debbie, gifts are a primary way of expressing love. Being aware of this fact, I have been very careful to not succumb to my habitual laxity. I always enjoy giving her gifts, but I must be on top of my game since my preferred way of giving requires thought–sometimes daydreaming and inspiration–and often the application of time.

Because I delight in giving meaningful gifts, bouts of creativity can produce gift giving even when not expected. It is not traditional (in American culture) for a husband to give his wife gifts on their wedding, and Debbie was not expecting anything from me on this occasion. But for me the delight of giving totally unexpected gifts is second only to the delight of giving meaningful gifts, and so with great anticipation I formulated a plan to give Debbie one gift for every day of the week of our honeymoon. None of the gifts were extravagant, but I put careful thought into each of them and what the giving of them meant.

The strangest gift was the first, which I gave on our wedding day. It was a box of seven eggs.

On the superficial level the gift was an allusion to an event in the second novel I published, The Stuttering Duke of York. The hero of the story was told he had to provide a gift of infinite worth if he wanted to marry a princess–and so he provided eggs which could hatch and the chickens then lay more eggs which could hatch…and so on. Infinite worth.

On the literal level the eggs were an opportunity. I told her she could either just use them like eggs from the store and eat them, or we could borrow my sister’s incubator and hatch the eggs. She could turn the gift into a gift of chickens, if she so chose.

There was a serious side to the gift as well. Life is the greatest gift, and eggs–with life stored away inside them–are a picture of life. I gave Debbie a metaphor for the giving of life–symbolically, the greatest gift I could give on our wedding day was my life.

Finally, the gift was (to me) also a riddle. It was a picture of the riddle for what life is–the greatest and hardest and strangest gift we will all receive.

******

Debbie decided to hatch the eggs and we started the incubator when we returned from the honeymoon. Over the course of the incubation period it became apparent that one of the eggs was not developing so we discarded that egg, leaving six. Then, after the appointed number of days had passed, the eggs began to hatch. This was Debbie’s first experience watching eggs  hatch so the process was followed with much excitement.

Five of the eggs hatched without any unusual difficulty (though you only have to watch an egg hatching in progress to realize what hard work it is for the chick). However, the last chick was unable to extract itself from the shell. Once this became apparent we undertook to extract the chick–a slow and almost surgical process. We discovered the chick was still attached to the shell via its umbilical cord which I cut and hoped for the best. The chick did survive and even flourished.

In my many years of raising chickens I have named only a few–chickens come and go and becoming too attached adds difficulty. But these chickens were Debbie’s special pets and she wanted to name them, so they became: Eldest (the first to hatch), Petunia, Gawain, Matilda, Jerusha, and Lazarus (the chick we had to save from its shell and an early death). The naming process happened before the gender of the chicks was apparent which resulted in the humorous mis-match of a rooster named Petunia. By some stroke of luck the rest managed to be gender appropriate.

Life started good. The chicks lived in a box under the unfinished cabinet space beside the refrigerator. Debbie delighted to watch as they grew and developed in their individual personalities. Then they were old enough to begin exploring outside, and soon we were taking them cricket hunting in the yard. All was well until we noticed Gawain had a problem with his beak. A genetic deformity was causing his lower beak to not develop while his upper beak was over-developing and curving sharply like a parrot beak. The problem became worse as he grew, and it became increasingly difficult for him to pick up food. As his bottom beak continued to fail in development there was no space for his tongue in the beak so it was pushed back to block his throat and making it nearly impossible for him to swallow.

We observed him for a number of days and it became apparent he was not getting enough food–and it soon became clear that without intervention he would starve. I stepped in as chicken doctor and trimmed the upper beak as best I could and tried to feed him soft foods (such as bits of bread soaked in milk) which he could more easily swallow (though this was still quite difficult and sometimes I would push the food down his throat with a Q-tip). Several times each day I would carefully feed him. We hoped that if Gawain grew big enough his beak and throat issues would improve enough that he would be able to feed himself. For a short while I thought we might be successful. But Gawain continued to fall further and further behind his hatchmates, growing ever more gaunt while the other’s flourished. Even if he did not starve to death in spite of my feeding efforts I didn’t see how he could survive the winter in his poor condition.

Gawain’s lower beak continued to fail to develop to the point that he eventually swallowed his tongue, a little pouch forming beneath his beak. I thought perhaps with the tongue not in the way as much it might help his swallowing, but this wasn’t the case. Every day I repeatedly fed Gawain, but every day he became more desperate for food. It became apparent that it was only a matter of time until he wouldn’t be able to keep going any longer. Some days it felt like feeding him was just prolonging his misery.

The first chill mornings of autumn came. By this time the chicks had graduated to the real chicken coop our in the back yard and every morning I would let them out for their daily adventures in the great outdoors. After a chill snap in late September I opened the coop door to find Gawain dead on the floor. Whether the cold did him in, or starvation, I don’t know.

Gawain was a hard loss. I have dealt with many dead chickens, and in the process of butchering for meat I have killed a lot of chickens. Dealing with death is never fun, but Gawain’s death was peculiarly difficult because I had invested so much time and effort in trying to overcome his deformity and give him a good life. His death felt like my personal failure against the ugliness of life, and the sadness felt like it stood in for much larger hard things in life.

That day got worse. A few hours later I was outside and noticed the chickens were acting strange–very watchful and alarmed. With a stomach dropping sensation I noticed one of them was missing. Where was Jerusha? Hawks had made several attempts on the young birds over the summer and I had almost perpetual anxiety that predatory success was just around the corner. Some searching–and noticing the few feathers drifting on the air–brought me to the front steps where a scattering of more feathers told the story of where the hawk hit Jerusha and carried her away.

Two chickens lost in one day (our two favorites). It was a hard blow for Debbie when she came home to the news.

Still, life went on. When Debbie’s sister Abigail lost all of her chickens except two survivors to a wild animal attack, we inherited the fortunate Agnes and Edna, two Red Star laying hens. Not too many days later Edna revealed herself as a psychotic chicken with a compulsion to wander far and wide and spend the morning tearing up the neighbor’s flower beds. So Edna was soon traded to my sister Deirdre for Beatrice–another Red Star–as a replacement. Everyone settled into the new pecking order and life was good.

Then one winter morning I found Lazarus dead in the chicken coop, his headless body dragged over into a corner–the probable work of a mink. The foolish rooster liked to sleep in nest hutches which were far less safe than the roosting poles. “Our favorite ones always die,” Debbie said bitterly. First it was Gawain and Jerusha, and now goofy brainless Lazarus who had risen to take the place of the departed. Debbie decided she didn’t want to see the ravaged remains of Lazarus, so I trudged through the snow to dispose of the body up in the woods.

The rest of the chickens continue to live out uneventful days. Matilda is the clever and thoughtful one but she is the least dominant and is picked on by the other chickens. She likes being held by the humans she trusts. Petunia is the rooster in charge, a congenial fellow who gets along with people and manages his flock with with a light rule. Eldest is skittish and resentful with bouts of hostility. Agnes and Beatrice faithfully lay an egg a day and quietly think the world revolves around them.

I was sad when sorrow hit Debbie in the first tragedy of the chicken flock, but I had known it would come eventually–not if, but when. Therein that promised sorrow was the riddle of the gift. Those eggs–bound tight up with the promise of life–were filled with both joy and grief. If she decided to hatch those eggs I knew Debbie would gain delight and suffer loss. That doesn’t feel like the way a gift should be, but life is the strangest gift.

As I watched this gift of life unfold in egg hatching and chick growing and animal dying I thought about how it all–in hurt and hope, gain and loss–was a metaphor for the lives we have, what we have been given. When God gives us life, He gives the strangest gift. Our own life given to us is unasked, unexpected, and beyond our understanding. We marvel at the joy, struggle in the loss, in all things wonder why it is so that all the goodness and meaning of living  is mixed with the hurt. It is inexplicable that God would give us this strangest of all gifts–but when you find yourself giving an echo of that to someone you love then you understand something of why the strangest gifts are the best.

Reprise

September 24th, 2016.

It’s strange how life travels in full circles and what was is now reversed.

Ten years ago today I left home to begin caring for Grandpa in his Alzheimer’s journey. Now I am back to that old house, and it is home again. Time runs its path, but there are no words to easily grasp the decade which has slipped away.

A decade ago my younger brother Arlan had just finished college and was living with Grandma and Grandpa. He came home for a Saturday celebration of his birthday. It was a windy autumn day when he told me he had found Grandma crying that week, overwhelmed by Grandpa’s deteriorating condition. So began my journey of caregiving, one which took me through valleys I scarcely could have imagined a year prior.

The years passed. Arlan moved on from Grandma and Grandpa’s, and the rest of my family moved away from the old homestead. The place of childhood sat empty with overgrown lawns and abandoned fields. Arlan landed in California, the rest of the family settled deeper in the countryside of upstate New York. And somehow my circuitous path took me back to the old worn places of my childhood.

Life is different. They say you can’t go back again. You can’t. And you can. Familiar tracks can be traveled again, but the veil of time remains between now and former days.

Arlan flew in from California for a few days to celebrate his birthday with the family. On Friday he stopped by to check out the old place–home to myself now and once home to him. The two of us walked the field of our youth, now much overgrown, two men closer to middle age than to the season of childhood. Where we had once played in the grasses and weeds, saplings grew toward trees. In places thorns choked out the undergrowth. Curiously, where the older trees hid the ground in shade things seemed much unchanged, but in the field of sunlight life flourished and the world shifted almost beyond recognition.

The old plastic slide looked the same as always except for the absence of children. The forts built by little dreamers were much broken down. The old trail still etched its way up the field, marking the path where many wandering feet had trod. Things were so much changed, but the echo of what had been still remained.

Odd feelings come with such walks where the physical surroundings feel like a metaphor for my mind. Many people have died in the decade which has passed and their absence is felt like the cast-off leaves resting beneath the trees. I remember and feel that which is gone; the loss lingers strangely. And like the shadowed ground beneath old trees the memory of them remains unchanged. The rest of life has moved on, young trees hungrily reaching for the sun. Woven through it all is the echo of familiar things.

Where is my past self, running through the grass? Where is the boy who cut a path with his jackknife through the brush, creating a path for his wagon? What happened to the sticky summer days and the sweet wild strawberries? Strawberry Hill is lost in the locust saplings and the boy has run off through time’s doorway.

Age measures and marks us in ways too deep for easy scrutiny. I am older, perhaps wiser. A bit more broken, and a bit more whole. And I now see that answers can take the form of questions.

It startled me a bit to realize I am only a few years younger than my father was when he moved into this place. He seemed old to my child’s mind. Has time really moved that quickly, and what have I made of it? Or what has it made of me?

The years of a man are seventy, or eighty if he has the strength. When this autumn’s failing comes to its end I will have reached half of the former span. My strength hasn’t failed me yet, but my stiffness in the morning reminds me of more than autumn air. The body starts its betrayal early. The decades are short. Life is like a summer breeze that slips away to end in stillness.

I wonder about it.

Life and death are woven together in ways I wish I better understood. I find myself living in the midst of longing and promise which feels bittersweet and contradictory. We are bound by promises and loosed by death. In loss we know what we are given. There might be words for a poem in that. It is the riddle of the life I find myself living.

I can’t escape the paradox of how death delineates life. I’m not sure I should try. The tension first struck me when I began caring for Grandpa, a task of love and service I knew would not end until his death. Life felt marked in a way it hadn’t before. The reality brought a mindfulness both uncomfortable and grounding. Newly married now, I can’t avoid sensing the parallels, the promise of “Til death” still fresh from the lips. This bond of love is forged in a happier season, but all of life will not be sunny days. The last decade has taught me that. As surely as autumn follows summer, sickness follows health. In this life what begins will end.

Full circles. We laugh now, and build. But we see clouds on the horizon and feel the years in our soul. Having married a woman who lost her father early, we both know that life is different than childhood dreams would tell us. Still we love, and deeply, for it is love which will carry us through every turning until the final reprise.

Knowing and Being Known

known-knowing2

The heart’s desire is to know and to be known. In life many people know us some, but we are blessed indeed if we are ever known by another in our deepest person. It is a miracle that comes in its own mysterious way, and it can’t be replicated by intellect or effort. It is a surprise, and it is a gift.

For everyone who has felt that special knowing, it is unique to each how it comes and how it is felt. With me, the way in which I know God is the key to how I know myself, my life, and the world. For someone to know me on the deepest level they must know God–see Him, and experience Him–in the same way.

So it began.

The first thing that caught my attention was Debbie’s writing online about how she knew God. It echoed what I had experienced in my own heart. At the time I thought the echo remarkable, but I took it no further. Months turned into a year, and we saw each other occasionally because of an overlapping social circle but we went our own ways. We were acquaintances, nothing more.

Change came with the tidal shift brought in the gravity of hard things. Sometimes the worst pain opens doors. In grief friendship is forged, and sometimes what is found there is the deepest meeting. There friendship began, but then in September of 2015 we faced the reality that our incipient friendship was leading down a path of something more than a casual relationship.

Still, at first, we walked slowly down this path. We talked a lot online about God and life and the hard things that come with loss. In spite of the fact that we lived close, we kept the blooming friendship almost entirely online for two months of long talking. After two months we agreed it was time to see if a friendship started in online letters could continue in the space of words shared face to face.

Debbie had never previously had a close male friend. She felt nervous that what had grown in the safe space of online talking would come to silence where words were shared in spoken vulnerability. For a shy quiet woman this was a big step.

But we took that step, and in taking that step we found there was no turning back.

In those last days of autumn, on a cold late afternoon, we met in a small town. There we walked the narrow path around the corn field of a country park. Around and around we went, and we talked. The sun slid down, and the moon came up, and it grew colder still. And still we walked and we talked until we were so cold we couldn’t walk any more.

We talked for six hours that day, and when we were done there was no turning back. Though we had passed each other in life many times prior to that day, in that day both our hearts knew we had found someone we knew like we had known no one else before. Beyond our understanding then, we found who our hearts had been calling.

We met twice a week, every week. The long conversations never stopped. From late November the weeks fell away quickly. By February 1st we agreed to marry, and on February 15th the ring made it public.

To say we have been startled by this is an understatement. We are both deep people, and each in our own way cautious by nature. There was a place in our hearts where a whisper said we would never be truly known by another. And even when we hushed that voice we would still concede that if ever we would be known it would be long and difficult. Neither of us expected the sunlight of looking into the eyes of another person…and knowing them. Not knowing everything about them, not knowing all their history, but looking into their eyes and knowing the soul that looked back, knowing that you had met a kindred spirit and knowing that true in a way that was deeper than intellect or mere emotion.

Debbie sees my strengths and knows my weakness. She bears with my foolishness, and listens, and cares deeply. She understands who I am. She values deeply the person she finds with all that I have, and all that I do not. With her I am safe, and I am myself. But all of those are feeble words grasping for a profound truth: We understand the deepest things that move our souls, and to the call of the other our hearts respond. It is a knowing that comes to us not by our effort or cleverness, but as a profound gift graciously given. And there we are glad, there we are overwhelmed with what we have been given.

Every long conversation only confirms that which we felt in our hearts from so early: That we know, and are known.

Her name is Deborah Anne. She loves me. Oh, how she loves me.

known-knowing1

 

The Finger of God

God’s hands are always at their work. He started early, on the sixth day, shaping man from the dust of the earth. A little later he removed woman from the side of man. From the very beginning God’s hands have shaped our lives, marking who we are and communicating who He is. The divine hand is always present, but it is when we behold the omnipotent finger clearly that we tremble.

Sometimes in joy, sometimes in fear.

The Babylonians were engaged in drunken revelry when the finger of God made its appearance and terror descended.

Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. Then the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. The king called loudly to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the astrologers. The king declared to the wise men of Babylon, “Whoever reads this writing, and shows me its interpretation, shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold around his neck and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.” Then all the king’s wise men came in, but they could not read the writing or make known to the king the interpretation. Then King Belshazzar was greatly alarmed, and his color changed, and his lords were perplexed.

With those fateful words the divine inscription sealed the end of the Babylonian kingdom.

But the finger of God can bring better tidings, too. When God met with Moses to institute the covenant with Israel we are told:

And he gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.

This glorious meeting is summed up in the following observation:

When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.

When the hand of God moves and His finger scribes for good then faces do shine gloriously.

But God writes on more than plaster and stone. The very God who shaped humankind and directs the course of every life also writes on hearts. After Moses there was a future promise:

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.

When God writes on hearts, lives are transformed.

The very God who shaped man from dust and drew woman from man–the God who wrote words of hope and words of judgment in stone and plaster–this very God stoops down to write on hearts. It is a marvelous thing, a great and glorious mystery. Even now still the finger of God writes love in hearts. Love for Him, and love for each other.

It is a strange and astounding thing to feel the finger of God tracing love for Him in the heart–a divine reshaping which utterly changes a person, never to be the same again. When the divine fingerprint rests upon the soul we tremble. In those divine imprints love and life blossoms.

And now I can tell you it is also a marvelous and astounding thing to feel the finger of God tracing love for another in the heart. To come to know a profound love for a woman is to experience in another unique way the finger of God upon the soul in a reshaping that changes life to never be the same again. That is when love descends.

Whom God drew out from the side of man He brings back to the place created for it. The One who shapes hearts also in His own good time and own way traces love as He sees fit. As that divine finger traces joy in the very contours of our heart we behold, we wonder, and we tremble for joy.

The God who shaped man and woman in the beginning still shapes them today, and gives them one to another. It is a profound mystery, and it is an awesome thing to know that the God who began a good work is still continuing it–making hearts whole, and knitting them together.

What He gives can only be good.

Drawn together

 

A Year of Learning to Fly

Vermont View

I look back and can say 2015 was quite a year. It contained far more growing and stretching than I could have imagined. That was a hard year. It was a good year. The two statements are not contradictory. Hard things often produce the deepest and richest forms of goodness.

My one big regret is that I didn’t exercise the diligence to spend more time writing down my thoughts and experiences as the year unfolded. 2015 was one of the most change filled and growth filled years in my life–and most of it exists merely in the folds of my brain. For some people that is the only place they carry their history, but as a writer it feels unusual for me, almost wrong. I put life to paper. It’s what I do.

But sometimes life does burst the seams of paper and the confines of words, then runs before us faster than we can keep up and crafts things bigger and more sublime than we have words to find. There are parts of the past year I can’t capture now with the vividness I could have rendered in the moment. Still, there is much I could write down and yet even for what I could write words feel inadequate.

The first half of 2015 I spent preparing to launch a book out into the wide world. The second half of the year I spent traveling around the country–an expanse in total from Vermont to New Jersey–carrying my words and speaking my story to some thirty places. I met friends and I met strangers, I learned and I taught. I had successes and I had failures, and I saw a lot of beautiful country. I gave interviews and counsel. I met people in the tears of their sorrow, and gave moments of laughter and comfort. Sometimes I saw such great good in what I was doing that it felt impossible to contain. Other times I wondered what I was doing, and if there was any meaning in all of it.

Breath-taking seems the one word to describe it. Little moments stand out in flashes that point to something larger. One moment talking to a woman distressed over her ailing husband. Another moment with a crowd staring intently at me as I speak. Moments of conversation with friends, moments of brilliant countryside framed in the pictures of my mind. So much wide world with peace, and so many lives filled with living and hurting. It is all overwhelming, and enough to feel swept away.

The world is big, the needs are great, and I am so small. I felt overwhelmed going into last year, and I feel just as overwhelmed going into this year. But I have seen great and good things come–not because of me, but in spite of me. And so as I face my overwhelming smallness I can still have hope facing the mountains of this coming year.

This is life. We live suspended in space, going forward carried on a wind we cannot see or control. We are learning to fly. It is thrilling and terrifying and at times a struggle which for moments can seem effortless. Here I am, and a story is being written, and it is not by my hand. Even so, I play my part here in the midst of a wide expanse of mystery and wonder where I can have joy if I will take it and marvel at the story being written in the fabric of all creation. I am not the author, but I am here to read and listen and learn in the very fabric of life, and also to share and teach in the measure I’m given.

It is a good mystery, if we have eyes to see.

On The Mountain

Helpless

On November 13, 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted. Pyroclastic flows exploding from the crater melted the mountain’s icecap, forming lahars (volcanic mudflows and debris flows) which cascaded into river valleys below. Omayra Sánchez lived in the neighborhood of Santander with her parents. The night of the disaster, Omayra and her family were awake, worrying about the ashfall from the eruption, when they heard the sound of an approaching lahar. After it hit, Omayra became trapped under her home’s concrete and other debris and could not free herself. When rescue teams tried to help her, they realized that her legs were trapped under her house’s roof.

Omayra SanchezOmayra was immobilized from the waist down, but her upper body was free of the concrete and mud. For the first few hours after the mudflow hit, she was covered by concrete but got her hand through a crack in the debris. After a rescuer noticed her hand protruding from a pile of debris, he and others cleared tiles and wood over the course of a day. Once the girl was freed from the waist up, her rescuers attempted to pull her out, but found the task impossible without breaking her legs in the process. Each time a person pulled her, the water pooled around her, rising so that it seemed she would drown if they let her go, so rescue workers placed a tire around her body to keep her afloat. Divers discovered that Sánchez’s legs were caught under a door made of bricks, with her aunt’s arms clutched tightly around her legs and feet.

Despite her predicament, Sánchez remained relatively positive: she sang to a journalist who was working as a volunteer, asked for sweet food, drank soda, and agreed to be interviewed. At times, she was scared, and prayed or cried. On the third night, Sánchez began hallucinating, saying that she did not want to be late for school, and mentioned a math exam. Near the end of her life, Sánchez’s eyes reddened, her face swelled, and her hands whitened. At one point she asked the people to leave her so they could rest. Hours later the workers returned with a pump and tried to save her, but her legs were bent under the concrete as if she was kneeling, and it was impossible to free her without severing her legs. Lacking the surgical equipment to save her from the effects of an amputation, the doctors present agreed that it would be more humane to let her die. In all, Sánchez suffered for nearly three nights (roughly 60 hours) before she died at approximately 10:05 A.M. on November 16 from exposure, most likely from gangrene or hypothermia.

Frank Fournier, a French reporter who landed in Bogotá on November 15, took a photograph of Sánchez in her final days, titled “The Agony of Omayra Sánchez”. When he reached Armero at dawn on the 16th, a farmer directed him to Sánchez, who by then had been trapped for nearly three days and was near-deserted. Fournier later described the town as “very haunting,” with “eerie silence” punctuated by screaming.

****

That is a difficult story to read. Suffering and death are always hard, but there is a special knife twist when the helplessness or apathy of people comes into stark focus. In that account I don’t know where the inability of rescuers ends and apathy begins. Yes, saving Omayra would have been hard–exhaustingly difficult–if it was even possible. But when I read that story I feel angry because it sounds like the people didn’t understand what it meant to give everything you have to try to save the life of another person.

By everything I mean not just a good effort, and not just a reasonable try. But everything–every last bit of strength, for the life of another person.

Omayra was clearly visible, as the photo shows. She was not buried deep under a mountain of rubble. By written accounts she was only trapped by an immovable object from her knees down. There was a lot of mud and a lot of water. It was daunting. People did try–some. But when they discovered what seemed to be impossible difficulties, they gave up. Her picture was taken, she was interviewed–and all those people didn’t spend every hour and every breath they had trying to set her free. They recorded the tragedy, and in that act made themselves the greatest tragedy. They gave up before she was dead.

I can’t get that out of my mind.

____

Story source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omayra_S%C3%A1nchez

The World

O Lord
give
eyes to see
clearly
The Mystery
wrought in each day.
O Lord
grant
hearts to know
fully
The Paradox
of our Atlas for all days.

Parting

December winds down, and in January my brother moves to California. That will put the expanse of a continent between us. I am a big boy now, so it isn’t a big deal. At least, that is what I tell myself. It’s true–in the grand scheme of things this isn’t important. Still, it is a reminder to me how parting is the space between every note in the song of life, and finishes every end.

Parting comes more naturally to some people, but it never is entirely natural. People were meant to live together in community, and when the circle is broken we feel it. But ours is a transient culture so for many the sting of lost communion is dulled by the constant repetition of that rupture.

If that is modern life, mine was not a modern childhood. My family did not move often (I have clear memories of only two moves, and by the time I was eight we had settled into the house where I would spend the rest of my youth). As children my siblings and I stuck together. So when my brother left home for college when I was nineteen I felt my first parting with particular vividness.

Even then I sensed how the partings of life echo death. In the early days when my brother was gone at college I would find myself thinking of things and the impulse would come, “Oh, I’ll share that with Arlan–” and in the next instant I caught myself and remembered he wasn’t around. The thought couldn’t be shared.

Arlan wasn’t permanently gone at college, he would be home to visit. But those momentary catches when absence was felt so plainly are the very things we feel with such cutting finality in death. A person is gone and there will be no more sharing. The unease felt in all the partings of life is our hearts knowing what each small parting foretells.

From an early age I grasped the idea of parting and instinctively knew I didn’t want that in my life. My family and I–we would always stick together. Then life happened and I discovered that assumption was the dream of childhood. In this world we all walk our own paths, and often we walk alone. There are many partings in life, and with the years final partings begin to collect. With each we learn that life is hard, and not what we dreamed as children.

This distance between the East and West coast is not the distance between heaven and earth. A resurrection isn’t needed to cross, and in the normal course of life I can expect to see my brother again. And yet, with every parting I am reminded of the losses in this life and how nobody is around forever. As parting adds to parting in my life I have noticed I share less. It feels inevitable, the response to no surety of the enduring presence of others. And yet I don’t like it. A part of me longs to live like I did as a child when partings were un-imagined and sharing was free. Here in this place, I’m not sure how to live.