Charting the Unknown Read online

  Through the wrought iron cemetery gates and beyond the large oak and maple trees now stripped of their leaves, I could see our small town square. People were hurrying across it from all directions. A man in a dark suit was talking on his cell phone, striding confidently across the cement sidewalk. This simple gesture was part of his fragile plan for the day. It was clear that he was unaware of his high wire routine. At any moment he might misstep and fall headlong. I had a frantic desire to wave and yell out at him, “Hey buddy! Watch out!”

  Circus music blared in my mind. Miraculously the businessman carried on across the street and disappeared into a Beemer. Shortly after, a small girl entered the same square. She skipped lackadaisically beside her mother. For the girl there were many distractions. She ran to gaze at the fountain. Walked along its sculpted edge, toe to heel. Grabbed her mother's hand and pointed at a nearby ice cream store. Both seemed to be oblivious of the fact that at any second, life as they knew it might cease to exist. Not far from them, an old woman sat on a concrete bench and fed some pigeons. I imagined the bench balancing precariously on two legs high above the circus ring.

  Everyone, I thought, is on high wires and completely unaware. The occasional person teetered off, arms waving, as the band played and the Master of Ceremonies cheerfully said, “Ladies and Gentleman for out next attraction…”

  Despite watching several family members fall to their death, Karl Wallenda had this to say, “Life is being on a highwire, everything else is just waiting.”

  Some years before, while hiking with friends near a lake in Colorado, I stepped in thick mud up to my shins and couldn't get out. Everyone thought I was kidding around and left me. Noticing my absence some minutes later, they returned and a large stick was extended in my direction which eventually aided in my release, but not before I lost one of my running shoes. I had to hike back down the mountain, like the nursery rhyme, with one shoe off and one shoe on.

  The memory of this incident led me research “Quicksand” in the library and in one book under “What To Do if You Step in Quicksand” I read something like: quicksand usually isn't more than a couple feet deep, but if you happen to come across a particularly deep spot, you could very well sink quite quickly down to your waist or chest. If you panic and thrash around you can sink further, but if you relax, your body's buoyancy will cause you to float. Breathe deeply. Not only will deep breathing help you remain calm, it will also make you more buoyant. Keep as much air in your lungs as possible. It is impossible to ‘go under’ altogether if your lungs are full of air.

  In the days following Bethany's death, I recalled the movie Mike and I had watched the night before she had passed away. I remembered the words I had uttered just before falling asleep and was stunned. Life, I thought, was going to force me to deal with what I had previously thought unbearable. I decided the best way to deal with her death was to remember to keep air in my lungs. Breathe. In…and out. In…and out. I became obsessed with breathing, especially in the middle of the night. I would wake up, my eyelids flipping open, and see Mike's horizontal form next to me. Squinting through the darkness, I would study his back for breathing motion. Making out nothing, my gut in wrenching spasms, I would stretch out a tentative hand and place it on his shoulder. Oh God…Oh God…his bare skin seemed unnaturally cold and reminded me of when I bent over to kiss Bethany a final goodbye as she lay lifeless on a guerney in the ER.

  Despite the coolness of Mike's skin, my fingers detected movement. The faint rise and fall of his chest. He was breathing. I realized I had been holding my own breath which I consciously released, expelling air in an audible gush through my nose. Unable to sleep, I quietly made my way to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. I was wary of using wine as a relaxant, but more wary of the sleeping pills that had been prescribed to me by my doctor. It only took a scant glass of chardonnay to put me to sleep.

  On my way back to bed, I crossed the tile floor and into the hall where I paused at the threshold of Lauren's room. I listened. I slowly pushed on the white paneled door which opened with a whispered whoosh. I placed my glass of wine on her dresser and knelt down beside her bed. My hand knew what to do, but before I could make contact, she sensed my presence and stirred, emitting a small sigh. She was still alive. Relieved, I made my way out of her room, climbed back into bed, and with my back against the headboard, hugged a pillow and drank my wine in the shadows. When I had sucked the last drop, I lay down and listened to the sound of my own breathing. In…and out.

  If I kept enough air in my lungs, I'd remain buoyant and float.

  Scientists use the word “Panagea” to describe the landmass that existed millions of years ago, when all the continents as we know them were one. Today, if you travel into space, or trust your atlas, you can trace their outline and, like pieces of a mammoth, terrestrial puzzle, can see how they might have fit together. Over the course of fifty million years (give or take a million), volcanic activity forced tectonic plates to deepen along fault lines causing colossal oceanic trenches and ridges to push bodies of land away from each other. It still goes on to this day. In another one hundred and fifty million years, Africa will have been pushed northeast, slowly eliminating the Mediterranean Sea. Two hundred and fifty million years from now folks in Tunisia will be able to walk to Naples for a slice of pizza.

  While my daily life flowed in slow motion, the tectonic shifting of my soul went in fast forward. The earth shook, continents cracked apart and began drifting away. The trusting woman with all the answers stepped out of my body, a ghostly hologram, and walked across a small crack in my soul's crust. She turned to look at me, regretfully, while the crack grew into an abyss. The slab she was on broke apart from mine and I watched in silence as she floated away. I immediately mourned her and have been looking for her ever since.

  I didn't recognize the new person that was me. I didn't recognize my own heart's landscape or the vacant look in the woman's eye who stared back at me in the mirror. The world itself with its vibrant colors, its people hurrying by on the sidewalk outside my window, the cold fall wind, was as vague to me as the moon. On the news, I watched in reverent horror the portrayal of a Middle Eastern woman in anguish over losing her son in a car bomb. She knelt in the dirt in the middle of a road, her covered head thrown back. What I did recognize was the look on her face. Her howl was identical to the one I heard in my own head right before I fell asleep at night. I kept thinking, if I could just find that woman, we could howl together in the dirt and maybe I wouldn't feel like I was an extraterrestrial living on an alien planet.

  Friends from church and family, with the best of intentions, tried to walk me through the grief. There were many, I was surprised to learn, who had suffered great loss themselves. They were the ones who seemed to know what to do. They showed up and simply held my hand or pushed the hair from my face and didn't say a word. This was because, and I learned this, there really is nothing to say. They brought over meals and then stayed to clean up. Took Lauren to play at the park near our house.

  There were a few, as there are in any fundamental bunch, who wanted to turn the ordeal into an object lesson. Mostly they were church leaders, who came with their Bibles in their hands and hop-scotched over my holy ground offering platitudes like, “all things work together for good,” and “you can trust God. He will be there for you.” The fact that God had not been there for me the night Bethany died had somehow escaped them. While listening to one such man ramble on about God's sovereignty, his plan for my life, I had an acute vision of me grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him until his teeth rattled. Strange feelings coming from the newborn being that was now me.

  A neighbor, an older woman with short salt and pepper hair, rang my doorbell and offered me a plate of Nanaimo bars.

  “Nanaimo bars are my favorite,” I whispered to her, blinking rapidly through tears. Spontaneously and slightly out of character, I asked, “Do you want to come in?”

  She eyed me reticently before accept
ing my offer. I made a pot of tea and we sat at the kitchen table. I knew her remotely from several neighborhood parties. She was sad to hear of my loss. She hadn't known what to do but felt she had to do something, so had made the bars.

  “I know what it is to experience loss,” she said quietly. “When my first husband and I were a month into our marriage, my husband went out to get groceries, and died of a brain aneurysm right in the store next to his grocery cart. I loved him very much.”

  I studied her. Here was this woman who I had seen planting flowers in her yard, laughing with a glass of wine at a neighbor's house, and run into at the grocery store. Who knew she carried such a secret? Who else, I wondered, had secret identities?

  “How did you ever make sense of it?” I asked her.

  “I never made any sense of it. But I made peace with it.”

  She was a lapsed Buddhist, she said, or maybe an agnostic, so I shouldn't expect any answers or philosophical help from her. I told her I used to be a conservative Christian, but I wasn't sure about anything anymore. She nodded, unfazed. It happens, she said. After an amiable silence, she stood up to leave. She shouldn't keep me. If I needed any help. Any help at all….

  Then she looked around at the stacks of dirty dishes and the pile of laundry in the middle of the room. She said, “I don't want to appear forward, but.. Hon, why don't you take a nap? I'll take care of these dishes, then let myself out.”

  Her kind gesture overwhelmed me and made me do the unthinkable, accept a stranger's offer. I went to my bedroom and fell asleep. When I woke up, I found the dishes done and the laundry folded. Everything was tidy. A note had been left on the table: “Glad you could sleep. Call me for anything.” So I did.

  In the next couple of weeks she came over regularly. Some days she just showed up. She watched Lauren, scrubbed my floor, washed the windows. My past self might have been mortified by the fact that she was witness to all the dust bunnies under my bed, but the new me didn't seem to care anymore. I needed help, and I knew it. It occurred to me that my church friends wouldn't have termed my neighbor a “Christian” but there she was doing the dishes again with no ulterior motive of trying to convert me. In fact, her presence seemed to convert me without her saying a word. I found the holy in her overwhelming, and wondered, if she wasn't a “Christian” per se, than where was all this goodness coming from?

  I stood outside myself, an onlooker in a white lab coat, and watched my response to different stimuli. I was having conflicting responses to life. One day, I came to the conclusion that life was a charlatan. A con man who wheeled his cart into my village and put out rows of glass bottles with nifty-looking labels. He might offer me one wrapped in a cheery box, tied up in a red bow, but I now recognized the ticking I heard inside it. I put the box in a corner of my mind and tried to camouflage it with a pretty red checked tablecloth and a candle. But every day I walked by it, I heard the ticking and waited for the inevitable earth shattering ka-boom. Life was a loose cannon. I watched my back. Peeked around corners. A foreign foreboding set up camp in my soul. I told Mike to drive carefully on his ten-minute commute to work, then waited for a call from the police.

  On another day, life became too precious to look at. Midway through the 6th Century BC, Archilochus the Greek poet said, in reference to a solar eclipse, “Zeus, the father of the Olympic gods, turned midday into night, hiding the light of the dazzling sun, and a sore fear came upon men.” I thought that life after the death of a loved one was an eternal solar eclipse. Running errands, shoveling snow, touching Lauren's face, dazzled with their brilliance. I wanted desperately to watch, to study the details so much clearer now than before. But to open my eyes, to look, was to open my heart. To open my heart was to risk loss all over again. “A sore fear came upon men….”

  I remember my sixth grade teacher telling the class that to look directly into a solar eclipse might damage your retinas. Your eyeballs would feel no pain while they were being fried to a crisp and hours later you'd be blind. I turned my face toward life to take a peek for as long as I dared and then turned away. It was a mortal game of chance. Look too long and be burned. Longing and dread piled in opposite heaps on a scale, swaying one way then the next.

  What was becoming clear to me was that I knew far less than I previously assumed. I began to have serious doubts. I tried to pray through the grief, but my prayers sounded hauntingly heathen. When I wasn't paying attention, and sometimes when I was, I said things like, “Who are you? Do you even exist? How could you let such suffering happen all over the world and not act to change things? Why are you silent? How can I ever trust you again?” God, who used to be containable, knowable, predictable, confidante, wish granter, friend (at least in my terms), had turned out to be someone I didn't recognize. Someone unknown, who might hear my prayers, but for the most part chose to ignore them. Nothing was certain anymore. I had the unfamiliar feeling of having been pushed off the edge of a theological cliff and free falling.

  It would be nice to say that during this time I grieved patiently, graciously, listening and hopeful, but I didn't. I wrestled and writhed through every slow-ticking second. I stomped around and shook my fist brazenly in the face of God, which I figured would damn me to hell. God, to his credit, seemed to take my ranting surprisingly well. I wasn't struck by lightning. There were no earthquakes. I didn't break out in boils. No one got sick or died. No one was raised from the dead either, not that I tried. Eventually, God and I developed a sort of truce. I didn't bother him (was he even a “him”?), whoever he was, and he didn't bother me, although I hardly anticipated he'd keep his end of the bargain for long. Out of a sense of duty, I decided to keep going to church, but since God had turned out to be someone other than what I had been taught at church, I separated church and theology from the person of God. For the first time, God existed outside of the lines I had unknowingly drawn in my head.

  6

  By day, Mike seemed to be dealing with Bethany's death quite well. He was coming off as the proverbial tower of strength. He shook hands with people at the funeral and made small talk. He tenderly held my hand and made meals. He shed a few tears at the appropriate times. One afternoon, when we were going through her things, we sat together on the floor and sobbed. But the day after her funeral he had chuckled at a story told by a friend who had flown in to attend the services. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. Despite the fact that he seemed unusually tired, a week and a half after the funeral, he went back to work.

  Shortly after that, our paths crossed at 3am one early morning. I had come into the kitchen for a glass of water and was surprised to find him sitting alone in the dark in our favorite rocking chair. His face was turned toward the open window. I knelt down beside him, took his hand, and asked if he was okay. For awhile, he didn't acknowledge my presence.

  Finally, he said, “I can't sleep anymore.” Then he sighed and shifted his position in the chair. Still looking out the window, he whispered, “I don't think I have had more than two or three consecutive hours of sleep since she died. I can't let go of this feeling that if I had just laid her down on her back or had brought her to you for the feeding, she would be still be alive. It was only days ago. Why? Why can't I go back to that moment and change things?”

  I let a few seconds go by before saying, “I don't know. I do know that I have asked myself the same questions. Why didn't I go feed her? How selfish was I to desire my own sleep over feeding her myself? But, Mike, we couldn't have known that this was going to happen.”

  He leaned close to me then, his eyes filled with tears, and looked earnestly into my face before saying, “I need to know that you don't blame me. After all, I was the last one to see her.”

  I said honestly, “The thought has never even crossed my mind. I blame myself. We are going to have to forgive ourselves, even though I don't think there is anything really to forgive.”

  He looked down while nodding. “It's just that, I am not sure what to do now. It's like I am lost in some unknow
n world.”

  “I feel the same,” I said. Then I took his hand and led him back to bed. I held him and told him it was going to be okay even though I wasn't sure of that at all. In a sleepy voice, he said to me, “I know you are having a hard time finding God in all of this. That you feel abandoned. But right at this moment, you are the closest thing to God that I've got, and it is what's keeping me alive.” It didn't take long before I heard his rhythmic breathing slow and deepen. I listened to his breathing for a long time. I thought maybe he was right. When you are lost it is good to have someone else to be lost with.

  It had been awhile and there were expectations. Interruptions to my sackcloth and ashes. A woman from the children's Sunday School at our church called to see if I could help out in the second grade class. The library called to tell me I had five overdue books. I had missed four weekly committee meetings. The refrigerator had goat cheese and beer, a satisfying meal for Mike and me, not so good for a two-year-old. On my mental daily “to do” list, which only had one item on it for the past month: “breathe,” I added “get out of bed.” Surprisingly I survived that, and a few days later I added, “go to the market,” and by the end of the week I made my way to the Sunday morning service.

  Walking into the church foyer was like a sad and awkward version of a debutante “coming out” event. It was my reintroduction into society as a new person. I walked deliberately down a wide staircase into a foyer full of people who looked up to assess my evolution. They studied my face for indications of meltdown. Upon greeting me, they chose their words carefully. They hesitantly asked how I was holding up. They told me I was looking good. Some hugged me and averted their eyes.