Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
John Donne
I was about 10 years old when I first saw death. It was 1966 and I was in Sunday school at Bruen Chapel, a Methodist church in Northern Virginia and Mr. O’Conner’s* heart stopped beating. I can still see him stretched out on the classroom floor at the end of the hall with several adults, including my parents, nervously standing by like frozen statues, a look of stunned fear in their eyes, while a woman on her knees frantically tried to breathe life back into his limp body.
I don’t remember much else from that day except the way it refused to fit with the other days I’d had. It did not belong anywhere and yet it was too large a mystery to ignore. It stood alone and refused to look away, holding me in its horrible embrace. Mr. O’Conner was not an old man. He couldn’t have been more than 40. He had a thin build, glasses, a pressed white shirt, a boring tie and a dark suit like every other man at church. And one day he went to Sunday school where he crumbled and died on the cool, tiled floor.
He had kids, including a daughter with long blond hair who was my age, and a wife. Their life changed after that. Tell me how we do it. How do we carry on when a black hole fills the vital space where a person used to be?
Soon after, the librarian at my elementary school committed suicide. For the first time in my young life, I was expected to understand that an adult can be so lonely and sad, she will erase herself from the world. What was I to do with that one?
A few years later, I was 15 and living in Beavercreek, Ohio when Laura, a student in my class was diagnosed with leukemia. I was a sophomore the last time I saw her in the high school cafeteria wearing a purple sweater, a dark wig and a brave, scared smile. What is the sound of someone beautiful and young slowly fading into black?
I was nearing the end of my senior year when a tornado ripped through nearby Xenia, the deadliest cyclone among an army of nearly 150 that day that struck 13 states and a Canadian province in the most violent tornado outbreak ever recorded. It was April 3, 1974 and the storm killed 33 people in little Xenia, including the sister and tiny niece of one of my best friends at the time, a tall, lanky joker named Joe, known for his crooked smile and disarming warmth. They tried to escape the storm by hiding in a McDonalds’ bathroom that in a better story would have prevailed against the wind but instead became a tomb for two precious souls.
I never saw Joe cry but he seemed perpetually stunned from the shock of stolen hope. Kind of incredulous and slightly off. The loss broke him like a drinking glass that despite being cracked and fractured, still held its form. He couldn’t speak of it. Not one word in the dictionary could paint his pain. So we just let it sit in the empty space around us as we listened to the Doors, the Moody Blues and the Who while exploring options for altering our perceptions of the world.
A few weeks later, I had a free period and was walking through the cool, dark forest that stood next to our high school with Kim, a new friend who transferred from another school. We came across Mr. “Skip” Hanson, who taught science and coached track, and a few students who were helping him cut down tree limbs damaged by the tornado. Skip turned off his chain saw long enough to give me his keys and asked me to retrieve a rope from one of the storage sheds that stood next to the football field. When I returned with the rope, it was immediately clear something was seriously wrong.
The saw was still and the woods were eerily quiet like a church when everyone is praying, their heads bowed and barely breathing. From a short distance I could tell someone was lying on the forest floor while Skip and the others stood over him. Waves of shock and sorrow seemed to swirl up from them like a swarm of black crows. I have no other memory from that moment except for that familiar longing to go back in time and do something – anything – to make it right again.
Evan, one of my fellow students was dead, the victim of a heavy tree limb, wet leaves, gravity and horrible luck. I remember carefully giving Skip his keys and the rope and walking in a numb stupor back to the school where I soon found myself standing alone in one of the long hallways at the top of the stairs trying to grasp the cold fact of death and feeling ashamed I couldn’t cry.
I knew Evan. He’d been to my house. I have a photograph of him from one of the crazy parties my brother and I threw when our parents left us home alone for the weekend. But we weren’t pals. I was, however, close with Luke, who happened to be Evan’s best friend.
Luke was a wonderfully quirky guy who played Dylan and Lightfoot songs on his guitar, didn’t fit in with the popular kids and always made me laugh. And he and Evan were often together. And so I knew Evan but I thought of Luke as a special friend. Until Evan died, that is.
I did not realize how much Luke needed me after Evan passed. I should have known but I was a bit oblivious in those days. Nothing was making sense. My dad had left my mom and my girlfriend broke up with me and went away to college (41 years later and I still make excuses). I was in therapy where I perfected the art of emotional avoidance. I pretended to deal with deeply emotional issues by not dealing with them, by being invisible, even to myself at times. And so when it came time for Evan’s funeral, my solution was simple. Just don’t go. Anything that risked being painful could be avoided. Problem solved.
Except Luke did not forgive me. He needed me. He had lost his best friend, his brother for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t bother to show up for him when he needed me most. What kind of a friend was I? In trying to avoid my own pain, I had hurt someone I cared about deeply. It was inadvertent. I had no intention of hurting anyone. I didn’t see it coming until the moment it arrived and then I immediately knew it was too late. You can’t unbreak the glass. There are no time machines in this world. We don’t always get a second chance.
Luke never spoke to me again.
The last time I saw Luke was in a different woods a year later. I was sitting by a campfire with Joni and we could hear someone coming. It was a moonless night and clear that whoever was crashing toward us did not have a flashlight and was not on the path. Instead, Luke fought through the bushes and tree limbs and tripped over downed trees until he finally stumbled into the clearing where we were. He had come to visit Joni and had not expected to see me. For a moment I detected a look of pained betrayal in his gray eyes but he quickly shifted his gaze Joni’s way and for the next hour pretended I did not exist. I felt like a ghost. I realized he loved me so much he had to hate me and I loved him so much I had to let him.
Steve Hayes tells us that through our pain we find our values and through our values we find our pain. Through death, we value life; through loss, we cherish what we had and what we hope to have; and through our broken parts we find our hope of wholeness, our chance for renewal and our longing for reconciliation.
Our connections with one another are what make life worthwhile. When we lose a link to the whole, whether through death, a careless comment, inattention or neglect, we can feel that loss like a severed limb or an open wound. Something in us longs for healing.
The lesson is clear. We value life by valuing the living souls around us. While they are here and we are here with them. Don’t be careless. Forgive if you can. Apologize if it helps. Be generous and kind. This thing we call life is fleeting. It slips away too soon.
*All names have been changed to respect the living and the dead.
