A Dark & Stormy Night

 

~ Sunset ~

When I became a partner with my church, Pastor Lisa, at the conclusion of The Newcomers’ Dinner, had said, “At some point, someone at this church is going to offend you.  Whether they don’t like your tuna casserole or you disagree with some theological point.  Whatever it is, someone at this church at some point is going to offend you.  We all make mistakes.  That’s why we’re here.”

Having spent years drowning in a fundamentalist church–where everybody always acted like everything should be wonderful all the time–those words were a breath of fresh air.

And, of course, Pastor Jim still points that out every once in a while.  ”It may be seven months from now.  It may be seven years from now.  But at some point someone at this church is going to offend you.” 

In ways I could never have imagined, they were right.

~ Twilight ~

But this is not just a story of a long night of loss and betrayal.  It is a story of enduring the darkness until the day breaks.  It is the story of what happens to those who are left behind when a loved one commits suicide.

  It is the story of my friend, Britany.

I met her several years ago while we were living in the same apartment building.  Since we were both Hard-of-hearing, we easily became fast friends.  And it was great for us to discuss the prejudice and the discrimination we faced in a hearing world.  She understood my frustrations at the arrogance and the impatience of hearing people, and I understood her frustrations with the dismissive, resounding “Neverminds” and “Forget-Its.”  She knew why I had to fight like hell just to make it through college, and I knew about her struggles with identity, about being torn between the hearing world and The Deaf Community, about owning aspects from both places and yet belonging to neither.

It was always great to get together with Britany because neither one of us ever had to explain the communicative ramifications of our disability.  And, of course, we would both roll our eyes whenever an arrogant hearing person would dismiss their own prejudice by saying that we were using our disability as an “excuse.”

But there is one burden that Britany carried that I could scarcely comprehend:  she had been sexually abused as a child.  As is so often the case, that atrocity had created a triangle of the victim, the violator, and the denier(s).  So when Britany was old enough she left home to escape the abuse, but the nightmare of what she had endured still haunted her.  As our friendship grew–and I had earned her trust as one of the few people who did believe her–Britany began to tell me of the true consequences she’d had to endure because of the abuse.

Because children do not have the capacity to comprehend the evil of sexual abuse in the same way that adults do, the experience is tremendously traumatic for young children.  This, of course, is not to say that such an atrocity is somehow bearable for adults, only that adults who have been violated have already endured the pain and the experience of growing up.  Children are innocent.  In Britany’s case, that innocence was stolen in the dark dungeons of a pedophile and compounded in the throes of denial by the very people she had trusted as a child.  So her brain had to find a way to survive the psychological shock, to persevere through the persecution.

As it turns out, Britany’s post-traumatic stress manifested itself primarily in the form of multiple personality disorder.  The sexual abuse was so devastating to her young mind that her brain had actually disassociated her self from the experience by creating an alternate personality so that she could survive.  And when she split, it scared the hell of her.

Once, she woke up in the hospital with no recollection of how she had got there.  Britany later found out that she had started yelling and screaming at her roommate and had ran out of the apartment when her roommate had tried to stop her from hurting herself.  But Britany could not remember anything at all about that entire afternoon.  The doctor had asked questions she literally could not answer.

~ Dusk ~

 A few months later, Britany moved.  I was sad to see her go.  And I was worried because I didn’t trust her roommate, who soon took every cent Britany had and threw her out on the street.  It was months before I had heard from her again.  And when I did, Britany had changed dramatically.  We spent a great deal of time catching up.

 I had left my job at the factory, started my own business, and was about to start graduate school.  Britany told me what had happened with her roommate.  She also told me that one morning while waiting for the bus she had met some Christians who were praying.  Britany was freezing, homeless, unemployed, pregnant, and scared to death.  So, desperate for hope, she became a Christian and prayed for some way she could find a place to live so that she could keep her baby.  Someone had told her about a church that gave out winter coats to those in need and Britany got one with the address of the church stitched inside, like a tag.  She went to the church one morning and soon the pastor and his family took her in for six months until the baby was born and she had got a place of her own.

For a time, we attended a Deaf church together.  Unfortunately, I was working seven days a week at the time and the drive was over an hour one way.  It soon became too much.  But Britany and I stayed in touch and got together every so often.  We went to see The Passion of The Christ together, which was great for us because every version of the film is captioned (or “subtitled,” as hearing people would call it).  She seemed to be doing well.

But nightmares of the abuse still haunted her.  Like a demon.

~ Mid-Night ~

A few months later, my friend, Maggie (who is not a Christian), stopped by in the middle of the night and woke me up.  I don’t sleep with my hearing aids in, but she knew where I hid the key.  When I felt her body shaking against mine in the darkness, I realized she was crying.

“Sshhh…” I whispered.  ”I’m here…It’s all right…Let it out…Let it out…”

 When Maggie had composed herself, she told me that the night before her sister had been beaten and raped by three men.  I didn’t say anything; I just held her.  She kept crying.

 ”I feel so guilty,” Maggie finally said.  ”I should have given her a ride home…if only…”

“All right,” I said.  ”Wait…Wait…Wait…You can’t…The night before Cathy was killed in that accident, my fiancee and I were at her house.  Cathy had gone out for a few moments, but she had said that she would be right back.  We waited, but it was getting late and I was getting tired.  My fiancee was starting to fall asleep.  So I insisted that we leave.  Cathy was killed the next day.  For the longest time, my fiancee blamed me because I didn’t want to wait any longer that night.  But I had no way of knowing that she was going to die the next day.  And if Cathy, who would have been The Maid of Honor, had lived then I probably would have gotten married and lived happily ever after.  But it didn’t happen that way.  ’What-If’ living is not living.  You cannot blame yourself for what you never knew was going to happen, Maggie.”

That was probably a rare occasion when I knew just what to say–and in such a way that it had actually helped.  Oddly enough, it would not be long before I would have to take my own advice again.  A few days later, I was at Maggie’s house when I got the news about Britany.

 “I apologize for telling you this in an e-mail, but it’s the only way I can get ahold of you…”

 I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at that e-mail from Britany’s pastor and trying to digest her death.  Somehow, I got directions to the church because the memorial service would be held the next day.  I know Maggie gave me a long, hard hug–like I had done for her just days ago–but most of the rest of the afternoon is a blur.  And all I really remember about that night was that I went out with Maggie and some of her friends.

And, for the first time in a long time, I got drunk.  Very drunk.

I’m not proud of it.  Not at all.  But neither am I ashamed.  I simply accept it for what it is–self-medication for post-traumatic stress.  Besides, I figure God loves all of me, especially the parts that are hurting so much I just don’t know what else to do in my despair and desperation except drink (which, by the way, I do not do very often).  I went to the memorial service the next day with a hangover that would have levelled Frankenstein.  But, since I had just found out what had happened less than 24 hours ago, that hangover was just enough for me to keep my composure.

~ Tempest ~ 

About two months later, Britany’s suicide was pressing upon me with an intolerable weight one Sunday morning.  I had just taken communion and sat down when it happened.

 My heart started racing.  My knees started shaking.  My hands started trembling.  I held my hand over my mouth, put my head down, and tightly shut my eyes.  My head felt like it was going to burst as my whole body shook with convulsions.  Trying to stop it, trying to hold it back, was like trying to stop a category-5 hurricane with a snowplow–impossible.

My grief had ambushed me.  At church.  In the middle of communion.

An eternity later, when I had finally composed myself, the band was still playing, people were still walking by, and even the women holding the communion cups–who were standing two feet away from me–were still doing just that.

It was like nothing had happened.

And the last song the band played that day was “If We Are The Body” by Casting Crowns.

I didn’t sing.

When the service was over, I was so embarrassed and so humiliated that I left as quickly as I could, thinking that someone would surely call me that afternoon to see how I was doing.  I know that not everyone saw me, but I do know of a handful of people who did. 

But nobody called that afternoon.  Nobody.

Monday came and went.

Nobody called on Tuesday, either.

Or Wednesday.

By the time Thursday came, I was so angry then that it didn’t matter that someone finally did call to see how I was doing.  I let the machine get it.  And I didn’t call back.

Pastor Lisa was right.  I had been offended.

But, since I really did need someone to talk to, I called my friend, Gary–who is now a youth pastor at my old church.  I told him what had happened.  It was a short conversation, but I had said that I would get in touch with him again.  Over the next few months, I left several messages on his machine.  He never returned my calls.

I called my friend, Scott.  He lives in another state–like Gary–but we had always stayed in touch.  And just like Gary, I got the same reaction:  Scott never returned my calls, either.  So I thought, What is going on?  Aren’t Christians supposed to help each other at times like these?  What the hell is going on?

A few weeks later, I told Pastor Jim–for those of you wondering, he will probably read this Essay–but I had told him point blank, “I feel like the guy who got his ass kicked in The Parable of The Good Samaritan.  I’m lying on the side of the road bleeding to death and everybody else is just walking by like nothing happened.”

I had never felt so alone.  Ever.

I lost my appetite.  I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time.  I lost my temper over things I had no business getting upset about at all.  I drifted through the days like a robot, with habits like going to work and paying bills being all I could manage.  And my grief still hit me time and time again.  I would fall to my knees like I was having a seizure and I would say (or pray), “I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!”

I needed a vacation.  So I spent months training Maggie, who had volunteered to cover for me so that I could take the time off.  It probably seems ironic that I run my own business and yet I do not own a car.  Instead, I chose to pay my employees a decent wage because I want to follow The Golden Rule.  And, as Rolin had said when I was in The Gulf Coast, “If you are not following The Goldren Rule economically, you are not following it at all.”  Of course, I could talk about The Golden Rule as much as anyone, but if I am not living my words then they are meaningless.  Yes, it’s tough walking to work when it’s 18 degrees outside, but is my faith so weak it cannot withstand a weather change?

Is yours…?

But, I digress.

When I was convinced that Maggie could handle things in my absence, I did take a vacation.  Unfortunately, my business was in shambles when I got back because, for some reason, Maggie had her sister do the work.  I lost an account and my remaining clients had me hanging by a thread.  Maggie had messed things up so badly that I had to fire her.  Sadly, that was the end of our friendship, too.  ”I just wanted to grieve in peace,” I had told her.  It took me months to recover from her betrayal.

And then there was Chuck.

I’d known Chuck for ten years.  I’d always been patient with his cynicism because I know that he, too, had been sexually abused as a child.  But, one evening over dinner, that cynicism became unbearable.

In the course of a single conversation, Chuck talked about a woman who couldn’t stop talking about her dead son, another woman who had lost her daughter, a man who had died on his wedding day, and he made a sick joke about an alcoholic suicide attempt:  ”It doesn’t work.  Because you pass out before you die.  Get it?”

And then…he laughed.  He actually laughed.  Sick.  Twisted.  Cynic.

Granted, I should have said something to him once he had started rambling, but I kept wondering.  Wondering why he was telling me this…wondering why he was telling me this in a public restaurant…wondering if he really knew what he was saying…wondering if he understood that I had recently lost someone to suicide…wondering what his point was.  

But Chuck had no point.  And I was so shocked by what he was saying that I didn’t know what to say.  He just kept going on and on.  Granted, Chuck had turned his back on Christianity a long, long time ago because of his experiences with religious fundamentalism, but he had not descended without surrendering the greatest asset of humanity–Hope.  As a result, Chuck didn’t just kick me when I was down.  After that, he beat me half to death with a sledgehammer of cynicism and then mutilated me with a chainsaw of narcissism.

Needless to say, Chuck and I aren’t friends anymore. 

I have no regrets.

~ Dawn ~

I am very much aware that I have quite possibly come across as self-righteous in the telling of the tales of my miserable comforters.  Self-pity, of course, can be a prelude to self-righteousness, with the emotional evolution flowing from “It’s not fair!” to “I didn’t deserve that!” to “I’m too good for something like that to happen to me!”  But, I am not the victim; Britany is.  And as I see the ways in which people have disappointed me in my grief, I realize that I have my own sins to endure.

Because I let Britany down.  I did.  She’s dead now.  And I have to live with all the things I didn’t say, all the times I never told her how much her friendship meant to me, all those days I’d thought we’d had ahead of us.

I have read The Book of Job several times since Britany took her life.  And I am convinced that the greatest mistake that Job’s friends made wasn’t in their theology, but in thier words.  Job’s friends thought they understood his suffering better than Job did.  They were wrong.  The same was true for Maggie.  And Chuck.

But was I offended by the people at my church?  Sure.

Could they have done things differently?  Absolutely.

But the silence of Christians is preferable to the betrayals of non-believers, especially the ones who have no hope.  As much as it hurt–and still hurts–to endure the pain of grief alone, at least the people at my church knew that they didn’t know what to say.

Months later, that is exactly what Scott had told me–”I’m really sorry I didn’t call you back, but I didn’t know what to say.”  

I got the same response from Kathy, who had been holding the communion cup the day my grief had ambushed me.  ”Sometimes, people just don’t know what to say.”

Truer words were never spoken.  It took me a long time to realize that.  But as the months wore on, I would find myself so consumed with my grief that I would get just as upset when someone asked me how I was doing as I did when someone did not ask me how I was doing.  If you have ever endured the loss of a loved one then you too have probably learned that it is always better for those left in our lives to shut up then to speak a single word as if they “know how you feel, know what you’re going through.”

They don’t.  They don’t know.  They don’t.

There was an article recently in a local newspaper about a man who had shot himself at his wife’s grave two years after she had passed away.  Several letters to the editor have addressed the subject.  There have been fools who say that suicide is a selfish, pathetic act and fools who have said in rebuttal that the man was a good father.  But there is nothing pathetic about the torment that grief brings, and I guarantee that man’s children are not thinking he was a good father; instead, they are wondering, How can anyone say that he was a good father to me when he killed himself?

Truly, it is better to listen than to speak.  Because the wrong words in grief will do so much damage.

~ Sunrise ~

And yet, after everything that has happened, I still believe in God.  Granted, it hardly seems fair to endure such misery, but God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11).  And if I only loved God because I thought He was going to make my life easy then I wouldn’t really love God, in the same way a lottery winner will soon discover that his false friends are the ones who only want what they can get.  But when hard times come “the love of most will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12).  We get so caught up in the anger of losing a loved one that we trade our grief for rage.

And yet forgiveness prevents all of that; it is a releasing of the hatred and the anger and the rage against the injustices we have endured.  Only forgiveness will allow us to stay in our grief, that we may let God heal the wounds we have endured.  But when we harbor negative emotions like anger because of our loss we soon inflict injury upon others.  Deliberately or subconsciously, our rage will rise like a midnight tempest.  I know this because I have been so guilty of it.  And since that was not who I want to be, I choose forgiveness.

So my rage has subsided.  And I eventually realized that my anger at the people at my church was a reflection of my anger at myself for letting Britany down.  Forgiving them has helped me to forgive myself.

It has been two years now since Britany’s body was found.  There are still times that my grief ambushes me and I fall to my knees in tears, begging God to forgive me for failing my friend.  It’s happened three times in past week; I just find a quiet place to release it.  I have also fallen into the depression of grief, where I barely take care of myself.  I have spent several days sleeping in the recliner in my office, I showered only three times in the whole week, and I have given up on shaving (though I just tell people I’m growing a beard).

But, like I learned in GriefShare, my grief is my own.  And the process of healing comes in cycles of good days, bad days, and really, really bad days.  But if 25% is all I can give during this anniversary, then 25% is 100% of what I can give.  And I believe God understands that.  I also believe He understands why I have shaken my fist at Him in a maddening rage of grief.  After all, God already knows how I feel so there really isn’t a whole lot of sense in trying to hide my anger.  And there is certainly no point in my trying to act like I am not angry.

So did Britany go to Heaven?  I do not know.  But I do know that The Bible does not condemn nor condone suicide.  So for all we know God makes that decision on a case-by-case basis.  I’m certainly not going to do it just to find out, and I hope noboby else does, either.  I also know that it is possible that Britany’s alternate personality took the pills that claimed her life.  If so, then what happens to Britany?  To that alternate personality?  (Assuming she only had one.)  But who can figure out such complexities of the human mind?

 It has been said that there is no proof God exists.  But I say, “Find grief and you will find God.”  Because it is not simply the loss of a loved one that we mourn, but a fucked up world that has stolen our own innocence and that of those we love.  If this were not the case, would we not just accept death and tragedy and horror and suicide with as much ease as we do the passing of the seasons?  Or a lightning strike?

 ~ Morning ~

In The Northeast of America, the pace of life is lived between the ticks of a second.  People frequently complain when they have to wait in line at a Wal-Mart.  We want it and we want it now!  Unfortunately, I have seen a great many people think that God works the same way, that if we have a problem we should pray and expect instant results, like getting our coffee in an average of 26.3 seconds at a drive thru on our way to work.  I pretty much walk everywhere now–which has certainly taught me patience in the middle of winter–but I used to be like that.  I wanted my prayers to be fulfilled the moment I was done praying, but then I realized that Communion is much more than just eating bread and drinking wine.

The act of Communion is a ceremony of remembrance, usually done once or twice a week to celebrate the restoration between humanity and The Divine.  But that restoration is a constant, not an instant.  And it is that constancy that I take with me, whether I am in the midst of an “anniversary depression” over Britany’s passing or I am taking my dog for a walk through the park on a beautiful summer day.   “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 8:38-9).  So shouldn’t we believe that God is with us in our spiritual depths as surely as we do when we have risen to the heights?  Why leave The Almighty behind just because life is hard and things haven’t gone our way?

Because even in those depths, Jesus taught us to ask, seek, knock (Matthew 7:7).  We cannot be “cinderella christians,” waiting around all day for God to dress us up and take us to the ball in a pair of glass slippers.  No, Christ does not work that way.  Because God works with us, not for us.  And that is why, when I was getting buried in my grief, I asked God for help, I sought help, and I knocked on the door of a church that had a grief support group.  I had also asked Neal, who attends my church and had recently lost his father, to join me; we became good friends–which is kind of odd because Neal is a family man and I am still a bachelor.  But the best parts about those meetings was driving there and back with Neal because it gave us a chance to talk about our trials and our grief.  (We were also the only two men in the group!)

The anniversary of Britany’s death has passed as I write this now.  I have cleaned my apartment, I am taking better care of myself, and I am hanging out with my friends again–and laughing hysterically.  And I love going to my church.  I love the band, I love Pastor Jim’s sense of humor, I love the friends I have made, and I look forward to meeting new people and making new friends.  I have accepted their imperfections because I have learned to live with my own, including my letting Britany down.

But, like King David wrote in Psalm 30:5, “weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”

Truly, it has been a dark and stormy night.

And never have I been more grateful for such a beautiful morning.

~ Day ~

It has been two months since I wrote this Essay.  I am so far out of that “anniversary depression” that as I read these words of mine again, I feel like I’m looking at an old photograph.  I know the person in the picture is me, but he is not the man I am today.

I believe God has forgiven me.  And I have tried to share that forgiveness with the people who let me down during this tempest.  And, also, with myself.  Had God not been so gracious, still my ship would be anchored in the storm of my grief.

It is not a sunrise I have seen, but the dawn of a whole new day.

And, somehow, I think Britany would be proud.