Monday, October 26, 2020

After the After

 I was rereading this chapter that I wrote for Elizabeth Lesser's book, "Broken Open: How Difficult Times Help Us Grow". 


Before and After

————————————

In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

 until, in our own despair, against our will

comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

—Aeschylus

 

            At the end of a talk I gave on the subject of death and grief, a man and his wife lingered behind to speak to me. Several hundred people had been in the audience, but my attention had been drawn all during the talk to these two people. They were listening intently, as if their lives depended on it.

            Before we said anything, the man handed me a laminated card. On the front was a drawing of a young man being held by an angelic figure against a sky-blue backdrop. On the other side was a copy of their son’s obituary. “He was 21,” the man said, as I read the card. I caught my breath. One of my own sons had just turned 21 a few days previously. Suddenly I could find no words. I put my hands on the shoulders of the man and his wife, and we just stood there looking at each other, nodding our heads as if we were speaking in some secret, silent language.

            I stayed in touch with Glen and Connie. When Glen heard that I was writing a book of stories that focused on being broken open by change and hardship, he asked if he could send me his own story. Many people have done this, and I have been touched by every story I received, and have woven strands of many of them into the book. But Glen’s story needs to be shared in its entirety. It is the story of a man who rose from the ashes of one of the most difficult Phoenix Processes a person is asked to make. Glen divides the process he and his family went through into two sections, “Before” and “After.” These are his words:

 

Before. . .

 

Eric and his identical twin brother, Ryan, were born on New Years Eve. My wife, Connie, and I were so busy and so happy. And when Katie, our beautiful little girl and final child, was born 5 years later, our lives were complete.  And life was very good. A well paying job for me allowed Connie the opportunity to stay home with the kids and manage the endless activities of a big family: sports and scouts and school and backyard play. We lived life fully and happily.

As the years went on our kids excelled. They were Eagle Scouts, state champions in sports, high honorees in academics, accomplished musicians. So many blessings, so easily taken for granted. Then Eric and Ryan went off to college, one to study mechanical engineering, the other electrical engineering. Summers were spend hard at work earning college tuition for the coming year, but we always found time to enjoy each other and the Maine summers at the lake and coast.

Eric earned an opportunity, through good grades and hard work, to apply for a semester abroad and was accepted at Melbourne University in Australia. He flew off on his adventure one beautiful summer morning. We communicated often over the next 5 months and shared in the adventure he was having. He was recruited to play rugby for his college team.  He formed a jazz combo and played the drums and the sax. Rock climbing in Brisbane; sheep herding in Adelaide; dirt biking in the outback. Eric loved people and made wonderful friends from around the world. And he kept a journal which—later, during the “after” part of this story—was such a bittersweet blessing for our family. The school semester ended in November and Eric took 3 weeks to travel in New Zealand. He traveled as students do with a backpack, sleeping in youth hostels, and reveling in the joys of being young and in some of the most beautiful nature on God's earth. His letters were frequent and filled with awe at the majesty of New Zealand's "Southern Alps" and ice blue glaciers.

Right before he was to return home, Eric and two school friends did the longest bungee jump in the world. We found a videotape of his jump in his belongings two weeks later. He was tanned and muscular and smiling broadly as he faced the camera with arms around the shoulders of his friends. He was filled with the joy of living. The next day he got on his rented motorcycle to make his way back Christchurch to catch a flight back to the states, back home to us.

The police officer that attended the scene of the crash said, “He was traveling near Mount Cook, on a dry, straight stretch of road, with an incredible view of the snowcapped mountains. As near as we can determine, he must have had his eyes on the distant view when he drifted into the ditch.” He was unconscious when a man who saw the crash ran to his aid. And he died in that beautiful place.

 

After. . .

 

The agony of the days that followed shocked me to the core. I had never dared to dream of such darkness. I clung to my friends and family as we plummeted into the depths of despair. The awful pain of having to tell my wife and children of Eric’s death will live in my heart for the rest of my days.

The days began and ended with sounds of sorrow. The time between troubled bouts of sleep was filled with previously unimagined tasks of sadness—arranging for Eric’s body to be returned from the other side of the world; buying a casket and burial plot; preparing his clothes and planning a service; receiving telephone calls and visitors and flowers and food and books and cards. We walked as if in a terrible dream, praying to be awakened from the reality of it all. In those weeks and months, our minds reeled and recoiled from the horror.

And we awoke, each of us, in our own time.

In hindsight, my life “before” was about quantity and velocity. Bigger jobs, larger houses, more things . . .quicker, sooner, now.  I justified my lifestyle as a way to be the best provider I could be for my family. It came at a price and yet I paid it. As my family grew, I abandoned my former career path in environmental biology and took a better paying position with a paper manufacturing company. In that decade especially, the paper industry had much work to do to clean up their operations and I told myself, with some truth, that I was not “selling out” but rather working for change from the inside. But then came the opportunity to climb the competitive career ladder. Two years in Technical, five years in Production, two years in Sales and a Masters degree from MIT. By the age of 38, I was so successful that I was positioned to take the next step to the top. Even though I had grown to hate my job, I worked long and frantic hours, accepting thankless tasks (as well as big bucks). My thought process was a constant countdown: “Just 10 more years, and if the stock market cooperates, then I will have my life back.” I had discussed my dissatisfaction with my family and they all told me they supported me in changing course. But I didn’t. I was controlling the universe, keeping my family safe and prosperous, and if sacrificing my values and happiness was the price I had to pay, then so be it. By the fateful summer of Eric’s death, I was being courted to accept the president & CEO position at a newly acquired manufacturing facility in Chicago.

My delusions of control were destroyed on the day Eric died. My family fell apart. None of us knew we had been living life on the surface of a bubble until it popped. Katie, who had been a talented and happy sophomore in high school, found it impossible to go back to life-as-usual. Ryan did not return to college. Connie, who had always been active in school, church, and community stayed close to home. My greatest agony was in having no ability to “fix” the despair of my family.

My colleagues at work desperately wanted me to put the past behind me and “get back in the saddle.” For most it had to do with their extreme discomfort in having to confront my pain. Others were more concerned about my productivity and the profitability of the company. I became furious as the attempt was made to shoehorn me back into the mold. I was outraged that the world had not changed for others as it had for us. I was stunned at the people who placed profit and the status quo of the system above my family’s loss. 

I began to devour books searching for words of wisdom to face each day. I discovered there are entire sections of bookstores and the Public Library dedicated to loss. As we reached out, we began to understand that we were not alone in our pain. Many others had walked this terrible path before us. A wise and sober understanding came over me. Before Eric’s death I had suffered relatively little of life’s losses. I had thought I was in control of my life; now I knew I most certainly was not. I looked around at others now—those who were living the way we had before—and I knew that they too, in their own time, would have to learn what we were learning.

We tried to learn it from the books. They helped. But we learned that the lessons of grief, like music or medicine or art or parenting or marriage, must be lived to be fully understood. And so began our journey through the “awful grace of God.”

At one point in history, mankind believed the world was a flat table, and that those foolhardy enough to venture too near the edge would fall off into a terrible world of fierce sea monsters and destruction upon the rocks. They were right. Eric's death pitched us headlong off our daily plane of existence into the darkness to be wrecked upon the rocks. For weeks and months, we roiled and thrashed in pain, submerged in agony, not sensing the light or knowing in what direction to turn. We fought to hang onto each other and the lifelines tossed to us from above were not recognized or were purposefully ignored. Each of us prayed at times to simply drown and be done with it. Were it not for friends and family—who flung themselves into our brokenness, to hold our heads above the water—we may well have drowned in our sorrow

This place of hopelessness and fear is real, not a cute little allegory. Some people never leave that place and are broken on the rocks. Some people stop fighting and slip into the depths. We came to understand that although we do not have control, we do have choice.

God or Spirit or Creator or "Whatever" wants us to go down into the dark waters, but also wants us to come up to the light. God will not force us to do so. We are free.  We are made so and it is our great gift. We can choose darkness, fear, addiction and despair. We can choose light, hope, meaning, and joy.

By the grace God, I chose life. I chose to find a way back up. It helped me to visualize myself climbing out of the dark sea, and back up onto the table of daily life. I actually began drawing pictures of tables as I attempted to communicate my deepest emotions to my wife, son and daughter. I named each of the table’s four legs:  Faith, Courage, Growth, and Love. The leg of faith was the weakest part of my table. And it continues to be the primary focus of my path forward. My daily mantra is, “Surrender and relax…into the mystery.” Before Eric’s death, my concept of reality had been that I was responsible for everything that happened past, present and future. But afterwards, I recognized this could not be true.  Even though I had dedicated my entire life to securing my family’s well being, I had been unable to do so. And so, I dedicated myself now to having faith in life, no matter what happened. My attempts to climb back onto the table were often met with silence and, at times, with contempt especially from my son, Ryan, whose loss of an identical twin brother was something none of us could truly comprehend. But my concepts and sketches gave me a place to hang my thoughts.

One day I sketched a table on a napkin in a restaurant while talking with a friend. I didn't notice that he slipped it in his pocket as we left, but that next week, he stopped by the house and gave me a watercolor painting of my "table".  As I write these words, I look above my computer screen at that painting. It is written upon and surrounded by clippings of words and other pictures, pieces of my broken soul, pieced together like an incomplete puzzle. Pieces missing, amputated, never to be replaced, rough and tattered, but treasured, not for it's artistic beauty, but for what it represents. It is a model of our faith, our courage, our growth, and our love. Our survival.

Six months after Eric’s death, after twenty three years with the company and following long discussions with my family, I quit my job. It wasn’t any great act of courage. My family was faltering. I chose family over career. It felt right. After so many years of making decisions based upon my logical, cognitive mind, I felt an incredible euphoria following my intuition, my heart.

We rented a secluded cottage on the lake for the summer. As Eric Clapton said after the death of his infant son, “For a while I just went off the edge of the world.” At times we feared the grief would twist us up so badly that we could not hope for healing. We chose to walk into the darkness and to trust that we would be led back out. We read, we sailed, we rested. We ate well, took long walks and canoe rides in the moonlight, we cried a million tears.

By September we felt ready to begin again. Katie went back to school and a new soccer season. Ryan enrolled at the University of Maine for another semester of Mechanical Engineering. Connie enrolled in an intensive Hospice Volunteer training program, and taught half-time as an elementary school reading specialist job. We bought two wonderful little dogs. I painted the house.

In October I started a consulting company out of the house to earn a little money and because I had always wanted to experience being self-employed. It also allowed me to set my own schedule and stick close to home most of the time. I started to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I was ready, I accepted a Vice President’s position with a small nonprofit 15 miles from my home. It is a meaningful job and I have a real passion for the company’s mission. It is so delightful to look forward to Monday morning after so many years of dreading the arrival of a new week of work. I have also accepted board positions on two local community organizations—one, for hospice volunteers, and the other an agency that provides social services and transitional employment opportunities for the mentally ill. I seem to possess life skills that these groups value and I am pleased to be able to contribute where I can.

Ryan is entering his last year of college and is coaching a 10-12 year old little league team. He plays his saxophone at every opportunity and you can feel his beautiful soul when he blows his horn. Katie went to Bolivia last summer to work with homeless children and the poor. Since then she has been accepted at Boston College in Nursing beginning this fall. Her excitement is boundless.

Connie is now a Hospice Volunteer instructor and just completed teaching a 16-week program preparing new volunteers to assist the dying and those left behind. She is loved by her 5 and 6-year-old students and fellow teachers and adored by her own children and husband.

Eric is always near. We see him in nature; birds, butterflies, rainbows, and sunsets. But mostly we feel him. We are, each of us, Spiritual Warriors. We are awake and nothing can break our circle. Nothing will ever be the same again.

 ..........................................................

The circle is broken. 20 Years has passed since Eric died. And, with Ryan's passing, we must survive yet another horrific tragedy. Life isn't fair and Life ain't for sissies. But Life is good.  We will do our best to reclaim our joy. This is a tough one.

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