Two Saturdays ago I drove my middle daughter to work. The roads were wet from the rain the night before, and the sky was low and gray. We spoke about her life and classes and sang along to the music. Our route skirted the city, and it was a quiet morning.
Then someone pulled out in front of me.
They made a left across our path, leaving me no time to stop or evade. “No, no, no,” I said firmly, holding onto the steering wheel as the front of our car smashed into their rear passenger door. Our car bounced off, their air bags exploded, and their car spun around. Jagged glass and plastic. Wrinkled metal. And then, the quietest quiet.
I looked over at my daughter. “Are you okay?” She nodded, eyes wide. Our dog, who was along with us, trembled. I pulled off on a side road and got out, walked back to the man in the car. There were two little girls in the back seat.
“Are you okay? Is everyone okay?” I asked. He nodded.
I paused, then couldn’t help but ask, “What were you doing? You pulled right out in front of me.”
He shrugged, shook his head, looked confused. “I don’t know. Everything was blurry.”
I marveled at the cars that drove by, not that they should have stopped, but that their lives went on uninterrupted. Their Saturday mornings slid along easily, according to plan, while everything I had thought about how my day would go was upended.
Our car was drivable. After thirty minutes or so, talking to police, getting insurance information, we went home. I wasn’t sure what to hope for—our car is not worth much, so it seemed inevitable that it would be totaled.
Nine days later, on Monday, I got the letter. He was uninsured. If I wanted to make a claim, I would have to go through my own insurance, pay the enormous deductible, and hope for the best.
* * * * *
On Tuesday, the wind through the trees sounded like ocean waves, rushing, pushing, sifting any loose thing from winter and blowing it to the ground. I wondered if that was its purpose, as a sort of cosmic cleanup. Twigs and branches and plastic lawn chairs and five-gallon buckets and leaves and anything else that weighed less than a human scurried along the ground, as if some great vacuum had been turned on in the Northeast and everything was heading there.
In my office, I wrote.
I have a project I’m working on with someone else right now, a beautiful idea we are trying to turn into a beautiful book, and all morning on Tuesday I pressed into the work. Forged ahead. Not taking many breaks. By noon, I had written 3,000 words.
I was standing in the kitchen when the power flickered. Once, twice. I thought of the work I hadn’t yet saved. Surely the autosave was on.
I went back to the office. My computer had shut down. I restarted it, holding my breath, but there it was, the document, auto-recovered. I clicked Save As, only had to retype the name and then hit Save. But before I could, the power went out again.
This time, when I turned on my computer, the work I had spent all morning on was gone. I spent an hour searching every hidden nook of my computer, spelunking deep into the bowels of the hard drive. Apparently there is no auto-recovery of auto-recovered documents.
Nothing.
* * * * *
How do you pray through disappointment? How do you pray through things that are much worse than a minor accident or the loss of a morning’s work?
I was reminded of something I wrote nearly seven years ago, when my aunt died of cancer, when I changed the way I prayed, changed the way I thought about prayer, at least for a season.
We had all gone into the hospital to visit her, and then a few days later were called back when it was clear she didn’t have much time left. This is what I wrote.
* * * * *
When the first flowers finally
dry into brittle reminders, and the nurses
know the names of the family members who spend
every night sleeping on the tile floor, you know
the vigil being kept has entered its second
week.
She had convinced us she would live
forever, but then the realization struck us
like a firework going off: she was just like us.
She was mortal. She would soon die.
In shaky script she wrote to me three days before
she died. Breathlessly she asked for a pen,
a paper, and we scrambled to fulfill her command
like priests in the temple appeasing a god. I stood
beside her bed and watched her do it. She wrote
that she wanted me to come back next week
to work with her on her obituary.
She put her hands on Maile’s stomach
and smiled. We asked if she thought it was a boy
or a girl? “Another boy,” she whispered, shaking
her head in mock sadness. I leaned in before I left
and whispered, “You were always my favorite.”
I cried when I said those words. But
she laughed through her short breath, as if
even then, she was only planning to stay
in the hospital for a short time. “What?” everyone asked.
“What did you tell her?” I refused to say.
That was
three days before nurses mute
the machines. No more beeping, no more
buzzing, no more chirping. The room is quieter
than it should be with so many people. Ten
of us? Twelve? Fifteen maybe? I tick off the seconds
between each breath, a tiny struggle, a refusal
to leave. Three seconds. Four. Not yet.
Anything said is said in a whisper. To leave the room
is to undertake a silent pilgrimage, holding the latch
so it doesn’t snap, guiding the door to its rest.
Maile sits beside me. She reaches through the silence
for my hand and holds it against
her stomach. The baby moves. Kicks. Rolls in
its own little universe. Does it know what we
are waiting for? How must that feel to be Maile,
a mother, holding life? How must that feel to be
my grandmother, sitting quietly beside the bed of one
who once twisted and turned inside of her, now
fading?
Through the eighth floor window the sun splashes us
with pink and red and a deep sense that everything is
being fulfilled. But how? Could this be the end of the world, the last
night? We are a prehistoric people basking in the glow
of the apocalypse, worshiping a God who does not
answer the way we want.
Her last breath is like the thousand
that came before it, diminished. The candle is out. She is finished
waiting. The silence between her last breath and the first
cries of our anguish is long and worn. Generations
are born and die in that space of time. Everything else
in the world stops. The clouds bow down in their
sunset. The red lights in the city
synchronize – everyone pauses. It is a silence
you can fall into.
The moment she dies, just after 9pm on July the 3rd, fireworks
go off all over the city. We watch them from the eighth
floor. We hold each other. Words are completely
powerless. I feel that I never want to speak again.
Later that same night, I am home. I am writing an obituary
a week early, years early, decades too early (she was
only 48). My daughter waits for me
to climb the long stairs to the third floor
of our darkened house. There, most nights for the last
two years, we said a prayer for my aunt. For two
years we prayed for a miracle. I think
I need a break from prayer. I think
I need to stop asking,
at least for a little while.
By the time I pry myself from my office and lean
my way up each step, wondering how I will ever
be able to tell my daughter the news, she
is already asleep. Her light still on. I tuck the covers
under her chin, turn out the light,
and look through her window, towards the north. Towards
the night.
This is how I pray now: I climb the steps each night. I walk
the short hall. I hold my daughter’s hand as she says
the words. Sometimes, I think we need others to do
the praying for us. Sometimes prayer is as simple as waking
each morning and standing up out of bed, or clearing away
the brittle bouquets and bringing in fresh flowers.
* * * * *
How do you pray during times like this?
Goodness, I feel wordless again, but I'll try. :)
We are really compelled by the thoughts and perspective you share. I feel like you're walking in our future, in some way, and I'm really encouraged to hear how you're navigating the world.
Prayer has been this curious, unsatisfactory, anguishing, longing kind of thing -- Am I doing this right? Are you hearing me? It's also been a place of such angry hope -- you could do something, God, but will you? It's been groaning and triggering in turns with bubbling out as a reflex of joy and gratitude.
I'm confused by prayer. I'm also in detox from an upbringing of "doing it right." eg, be careful what you pray for, don't ask in the wrong way for for the wrong things, no mistakes, etc. I feel lost and freed without my prayer-molds. I feel heard and abandoned.
I think prayer is an infinite, relational mystery that we've tried to shape into comprehensible equations.
I really appreciated your words this morning Shawn. I was just talking to my daughter about some hard things she is going through. She talked about borrowing hope from others when she does not have hope herself. I think prayer is the same way. We can borrow others’ prayers or trust others to carry us when we can’t carry ourselves. Thanks for sharing.