Rise & Shine

The sun is already high in the sky…, much higher than I would like it to be. I wanted to get a good start to this day. I guess I’ll take what I can manage.

It’s bright outside, not a cloud in the sky this spring morning. One might say it was cheery if one was predisposed to that sort of sentiment. It’s the kind of thing with which I would have annoyed others early in the morning when we were gathered at camp.

I can’t call this early—barely still in the a.m.—& no one else is around. What’s the point? I’d only be annoying myself.

They told me not to push it. “Take whatever time you need,” is what they’d said. So I’ll get up, shower, get dressed, eat a little something for breakfast (brunch? or will it just be lunch?), & head over to the church office.

Forget about going for my usual morning walk. Save that for when I can get myself up before sunrise. I want it to be pitch black outside. Don’t want anyone to see me. Don’t really want to see anyone else.

Two weeks is what my wife & I had decided. We would both take two weeks out of the pulpit, & then we would push ourselves to get back out there. We wouldn’t like it. It was still hard to breathe, to move, to sleep, to eat, to do anything but ache in a way neither of us had ever experienced before.

Two weeks. That’s what we allowed ourselves. Others under similar circumstances had managed with far less, some with literally no opportunity to catch their breaths before moving forward. We weren’t the first. We wouldn’t be the last. Though it would be both the first & last for each of us.

Apri 29, 2013. Two weeks ago had been a Monday & it had begun with a dark cloud hanging over it. It was the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Sandra had been watching the news & saw it unfold before her eyes. Less than twelve years since 9/11 & the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon, & a field in Pennsylvania. The horror of it had come rushing back over her & left her numb. She became so obsessed with following every news update through the day you would have thought she was the one of us who was OCD. She was glued to the television when I came up from working out in the basement. She was still glued to it when I finished my shower & left for the office…, & when I got home for lunch…, & when I left at one o’clock to head to the food pantry for the afternoon…, & when I got home for supper around 5:30…, & when I ordered the pizzas from Gambino’s…, & when I left to pick them up…, & when I returned home to set them on the kitchen counter.

The tv was off when she called me upstairs a little after seven.

The horrible, awful. It’s the only day Sandra can remember when she neither laughed nor even smiled all day long.

What do you do when the two highway patrol officers standing outside your door will not speak to you until your husband is with you? Somehow she managed to call downstairs to me so they could sit with us in our living room & tell us our son was not coming home.

They say that the first year is the worst, facing every annual event for the first time without them. It’s true. But those first weeks are unspeakable, waking up every morning screaming prayers of desperation that the dreams from which we have just awakened where he is still alive might be what is real & that our waking hours are nothing but a passing nightmare.

I have long preferred to use the word “whelming” rather than “overwhelming”. Is it not enough to be whelmed? But neither word suffices to describe the waking terrors, anxiety & absolute numbness in which we found ourselves drowning.

Two weeks. That’s what we allowed ourselves, understanding that it would be unbearable whether we were moving or still.

I would hide in the office, working on bulletins & sermon preparation for next Sunday. I would greet people & offer provisions to those who would come to the food pantry that afternoon.

I would mark 5:12 p.m., two weeks precisely since Keenan crossed the center line on his way home & drew his last breath. I will remember how I almost went to the movies in the very town from which he had been returning that afternoon, how I would have been detoured around the accident & been half an hour from home when Sandra opened the door that evening. And I will find it all but impossible to breathe—unfathomable how I might even attempt it.

But I will do it. On this bright, beautiful & glorious day filled with a sunshine I cannot appreciate, I will get up, get ready, & walk out that door.