It seemed the whole world was holding me. Why had I ever thought I was alone? I was in the embrace of the earth, of those who loved me no matter what they thought or understood, of the very stars.
“Father,” I said. “I am your child.”
-Anne Rice,
Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt
Death has always been the only phenomenon to bring about the resurrection of God in my life. Not birth, nor marriage, nor love. When a new baby is born into the world, I see not a miracle, but an act of biology. When I said my vows and exchanged the symbolic rings with my wife on a Catholic altar, I agreed with the Monsignor that the words and the act were sacred, but not because we’d just been wed before the eyes of a God. To me, these words and these acts were sacred because I loved, adored, and most importantly, respected this woman I’d just married. They were, and are, sacred because I made a promise before the eyes of all our friends and family – a promise before the eyes of the faithful.
I’m not sure exactly when I lost my faith. Though, I seem to remember elementary school science classes playing a role in it. I was on a fourth grade field trip once, to Estes Park, Colorado – an overnight excursion to learn about the natural world. We’d studied plants, trees, birds, compass orientation, and now we were to learn a thing or two about the things above us. We gathered in a dark room, on benches made of trees split in half, lengthwise (which quickly numbed our behinds), to watch a film about the origins of space and the fate of our planet. It was in this dark, uncomfortable room that I learned about the theory of the Big Bang, and about how the universe will eventually cease in its expansion and draw back in upon itself, essentially reversing the Big Bang and imploding. Now, this in itself might have been enough to make a nine year-old boy question God, but there was more. We then learned that the sun is growing, and that some millions or billions of years into the future, the sun will eventually envelop the Earth.
Why is God going to let this happen? I wondered. I was nine years old and didn’t exactly have a tight grasp on concepts of time, and even events millions of years into the future seemed imminent and terrifying.
Why would God let this happen?
A year earlier, I’d been called out of class by the principal of my school. He had a message for me stating that my mother was there to pick me up, and that I should meet her outside. I didn’t understand, as it was early in the day, but I packed my things and met her in the bus zone where she waited in the car. My sister, Molly, was there too, in the backseat. There was nothing curious about her being there, because Molly was only three years old, and my father had left town the night before, "for work," I'd been told.
Mom was quiet. We drove out of the school parking lot as I began my interrogation: Why did you pick me up? Where are we going? What’s going on?
I could see the hurt in my mother’s eyes. Her lip quivered for a small moment and she pulled the car to the side of the road.
“There’s been an accident,” she said, her voice cracking a bit. “There was a gun. It was an accident. Your Grandpa Jack is dead. We have to go to Denver.”
I could see that she didn't mean to say it like that. But there it was.
She watched me. She knew how much I loved him – how close we were. She put a hand on my knee. “The funeral is in a couple days. Everybody’s going. Are you okay?”
I stared at the road in front of us – the unmoving, unchanging road and the dead grass lining the ditch at its side.
Dead?
It wasn’t that long ago that I was in my Grandpa Jack’s basement. I was drawing dinosaurs with oversized teeth on the green chalkboard at the bottom of the stairs when he hurried down, threatening to “get me.” I ran, as quick as my little legs would carry me, to the other end of the basement, but he got me. I let out a scream, muddled with laughter, as he lifted me up, spun me, turned me upside down, shook me a bit and set me down on the floor.
“Grandpa!” I yelled. He tickled my ribs, neck and hips with his bony fingers, sending me into a desperate fit of giggling and gasping for air.
“Are you okay?” She said again.
I looked into her eyes finally and I knew it was true. Grandpa Jack was gone.
Two days later, I sat upon a harsh wooden pew in a church in Denver – an unforgiving seat in this, a house of forgiveness. My mom sat to my left with Molly in her lap, and my dad to the left of her. I knew what we were here for. I knew that this was a funeral for my grandfather, but there was something off about it. I’d seen funerals before, on the television. There was always a casket at the front of the aisle, near the altar. But there was no casket here and I didn’t understand.
The funeral began. People said things. There was music. But I didn’t understand. I looked around at the people –my aunts, my uncles, my mom and dad, their eyes all fixed on something in front of them – not the speaker, nor the singer, nor the organist – something else. I looked forward and saw it: A small, simple, vase-looking thing sitting atop a white tapestry-covered altar. Despite the words and the song and the music, everyone looked at the thing.
I looked to my mom, her eyes moist and locked on the object before us. I looked to my dad. No tears, but a blank, sort of lost expression on his face, like he was staring at something beyond that which I could see. I looked back at the thing, then to mom, then to dad, then back to mom as she looked into my eyes, then back to the thing. I understood. My grandfather was in there.
I lost it and buried my face in mom’s shoulder, barely breathing for the remainder of the ceremony.
I would learn some years later that the shot fired that night was not an accident. My grandfather had had too much to drink, and an altercation with his new wife had pushed him over the edge - something about an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband of hers. He threw his wallet at her, muttered something about them not being able to identify him, and left. His body was found the next day. Beside him, an empty bottle of scotch and a pistol. A hole in his head.
On the night before mom picked me up from school, dad had left town “for work,” so that he could search for his father.
I prayed. I prayed all the way back to Cheyenne in the back of our car. I prayed for several nights after we’d returned home. I prayed that Grandpa Jack was happy and that he knew how much I loved him.
I wish today, that I could feel the kind of faith I felt as a child, even if only for a moment. I wish I knew in my heart that God was here right now, watching over me and my family. I feel something, but it’s not faith. Perhaps it is hope. Hope that we really are more than mere bodies. Hope, that in some shape or form, my soul will meet those of my loved ones after our physical selves are gone from this Earth.
It was summer's morning when I saw you
Lying there.
With lights dim, surreal
Was the moment.
I found my place among one of the plush, violet chairs
Lining the interior of the room.
I could not believe it was really you.
I allowed my eyes to fall upon you as you rested.
Tried to see where you must have been
That very moment.
I drifted,
Searching the banks of my memory,
Careful to stow away
Each and every piece of you left
Untouched by fog.
Silence was broken by cries of others,
And truth settled
Within itself.
My vision blurred.
Heart sank.
You were beautiful,
Grandfather.
You are still beautiful.
I wrote these clumsy words during a lonely night years ago, on the dock next to a decaying house I rented a few miles outside of Bremerton, Washington. I sat at the dock’s warped wooden edge, thinking about my family, many of whom I hadn’t seen in some years. I reflected on those I felt I’d lost, and those I’d actually lost.
Eventually, I thought about that warm summer day. I thought about my mom’s father, Grandpa Kenny, and I wished he knew how much I missed him. The only way I could tell him it seemed, was to write to him.
As I wrote, I was seventeen again, sitting in that room, staring at the elevated coffin holding my Grandpa Kenny. There he was, lying there, so calm. Not moving, not laughing his throaty laugh at the expense of my mother and my aunts, not teaching me how to properly swing a 9-iron, not torturing me with the dreaded “whisker-rub,” wherein he would pin me down and scratch my rosy cheeks with his second-day beard growth, and not reaching for the little mint candies he kept on the dashboard of his mammoth red and white van. He just lay there, sleeping it seemed.
It settled in, as it often does, when I looked into the wet, swollen eyes of my mother and her sisters. That’s when my vision blurred. That’s when I begged God to take my Grandpa.
I prayed.
Please God, accept my Grandpa in Heaven. Invite him into your home, your arms. Make him content and at peace. Let him meet and embrace those he has lost through the years. And let him know that we love him and he will see all of us again. Thank you.
Time passes, as do the emotions that go with mourning the loss of a loved one. Before long, I am questioning the existence of God all over again. I wonder how there can be the type of God that Christians believe in, when so many people are hurting. I wonder why God sometimes lets bad people live and good people die. I wonder why I can’t feel Him when I’m told I’m supposed to.
My questions never get me anywhere. I cannot believe in the Christian mythology of Heaven and Hell, or the Book of Genesis, or that God is an omnipotent being - a creator, and final judge as to how we spent our time on Earth. However, I also cannot believe that we are nothing but biology – that we live, we die, and that’s it. There has to be something.
Now, doesn’t that sound like a desperate statement? There has to be something. Isn’t that a prayer?
Please, be there. Whoever or whatever you are. Just, please be there.
I envy the faithful. I want so much to believe what they believe – to feel the comfort and the warmth in knowing, knowing that God is there. For now, it seems, I will remain the hopeful.
My dad’s mother, Grandma Betty, passed away when I was five years old. She’d been sick for some time, though I didn’t know it then. I would later recall having dreamt that I was thirty thousand feet up, on an airplane with my mom. I don’t know where we were going, only that I was sitting in the window seat, looking out over the blooming landscape of bright white clouds below us.
“What do you see?” mom asked.
“Clouds,” I said. “I’m trying to find Grandma.”
We were after all, flying over Heaven.
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
-St. Augustine
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