But the Greatest of These is Love

I started this as a rant about governmental and even private beaurocracies that exclude you from aid if you DO have a job, but the longer I wrote . . . I don’t know how to end my writing on a negative note. For all my defenses of tragedies, I don’t think I could ever actually write one. I haven’t been doing very well with tips for the last three months. People don’t like emotional waitresses or waitresses that have just shut off their emotions, because they can’t do them right then. So I’ve seen a marked difference from what I used to make as “one of the best” to what I make now as I just put one foot in front of another and occassionally have a much welcomed lapse into the “old Abi” that my manager says she’s confident she will see again.

There is one thing that is interesting about all of this. I noticed it as soon as I started waiting tables, and then it came to mind again yesterday. When I first started and wasn’t really very good yet, I was always so increadibly touched and amazed when I got a really awesome tip from a table I hadn’t done well with or had downright messed up. I remember standing there in my section one day over a year ago, looking down at a good tip I’d gotten from a table that I thought would stiff me. “This is grace,” I thought to myself. “I didn’t deserve it—but they gave it anyway.”

So yesterday the hosts kept seating me more tables than is the “legal limit” according to company standards, one of them being a large party, and I had to go to the manager and tell him that he HAD to make the hosts STOP doing that, because I was about to loose my mind! Even under the best of circumstances I was having trouble focusing yesterday, and hugely stressed even without the added bonus of being crazy busy . . . I had several tables tip me HUGE! A couple that I thought for SURE would be mad at me weren’t. One tipped me a little over thirty percent of their ticket. The large party tipped me and my section partner thirty dollars over their eighteen percent automatic gratuity, and I realized after they left that I’d forgotten to get something they’d asked for clear at the beginning of the meal.

What a simple and yet profound picture of grace. You were working for it, striving for it, but so clearly didn’t deserve it. When it came right down to it, you had screwed up too bad to deserve it—and yet it was so freely given. Sometimes our minds get so caught up in the theology of grace in terms of a moral belief system that doesn’t handle anything concrete and touchable. And then you get out in the work force, in a proffession with only suggested fees that cannot be inforced (tips), and it cuts away all of the symantics and replaces it with cold hard cash, real debt, something touchable that translates into actual bills paid.

“This is grace,” I have thought on so many occassions. And as I sit here typing this, I think . . . and laugh. I still can’t find this refference, but somewhere there is a passage that talks about how my God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, so—to paraphrase—what the HECK am I worried about? Yeah, I have huge medical bills, but if God will lead me into a life with a chronic illness for which there is no cure, He can and will take care of all the pieces. If even when I screw up, I still have tables tip me well, what makes me think He can’t do anything more miraculous? All I have to do is trust that regardless of if He gives me what I think I need, He IS giving me what I need—whether I can see it or not. If that is grace, then this, THIS right here—the trust that He will take care of me even if I can’t see how or when--this is faith.

I smile again; “But the greatest of these is Love.” Love gives me the heart to even HAVE the faith instead of fear. Love gives me the eyes to see His grace in such simple circumstances. Yes, the greatest of these is Love—HIS love, and the love I have for Him from which all else springs. This is grace. This is faith. This is LOVE.

. . . carry me

(Originally posted on my facebook page on November 28, 2008.)


“She walked with God until it came time for Him to carry her Home.”--A tribute to my friend Emily Joy.

I have said so many times that I would give back everything that Emily’s death has taught me if it meant she could be back here with us. I would gladly hand over—shove away even—all of the maturity, the insight, the deeper understanding of Him, everything good that has come from loosing her if Emily could just be back again . . . Praise to our God, who orcastrates our lives, for His enduring mercy—that I do not have to choose. Inicially, in the shock, and loss, and grief, there was no question in my mind which I would rather have—Emily or the “personal growth” it had worked in me, the new Abi that no one recognizes. Over time I have still held to that while still struggling to imagine going back to who I was before. Now—my graditude knows no bounds for one simple phrase: “You are God, and I am not.”

Jesus knew what He was asking of us when He said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple . . . In the same way, any of you who cannot give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” He knew what that meant. I have never understood it. How could God command that of us if we are called to love one another?

I sit here now in a cubby hole in the kitchen of the restaurant where I work, my hair in my eyes, my heart opened to a tender place, and write, “Anything but Him.” I would give anything BUT Him. In the weeks after Emily’s death, almost nine of them now, the gospel has become so real, scripture has become so real, the undying, amazing, extravagant epic of His Story has become so intensely personal. But in the last two months, as my personal knoweldge of Him grew, it shifted from knowing OF Him into knowing Him, simply knowing Him . . . though I am quickly learning that through the simplicity: how simple, and yet how intricate!

God is so, so close. I can feel Him with me every day—so close it’s almost a physical presence. In tears and turmoil, I am reminded that God will never test us beyond what we can bare. I cannot go back. I cannot EVER go back! In looking at what Emily’s loss has taught me, it would no longer be a choice between Emily and my new self, but Emily and HIM. I know Him now. Her death revealed Him to me. I have always felt a residual loneliness that followed me throughout my life no matter who was near—I miss my friends sometimes, especially now, but I do not feel desolate. It’s not about understanding Him now, but KNOWING, intimately, closely, irreplacably. “Unless a man forsake . . . “ I cannot ever say I would not choose Emily—but I WILL NOT say I would choose against Him. Blessed be the Lord! I do not have to choose. So simple, and yet so extravagant!

I’m reminded of the fiery furnace: “Our God can deliver us, but even if He doesn’t, we STILL won’t bend the knee.” Or Job’s simple defiance to despair, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” I can look the worst in the face and say with gentle confidence, “Take it all. Anything but Him.” Emily is gone. Yet I know she would be overjoyed to know that I choose what she would have wanted. That I choose what she chose. And that I want it reguardless of if she did. I want it in my own right. I can just hear her saying, “I hoped this for you too.” Abraham’s sacrifice comes to mind. The one thing that he wanted most was the one thing God asked of him—his son.
Emily is gone, and yet I must release her. I thought I had. I think it has been a process I was unaware of these last sixty-two days. Where I once felt her presence everywhere, now I feel His. Where I once found comfort in remembering what she had hoped for me, I find peace in His delight of me--past, present, and future all at once. As I looked up on the month annaversary and realized I was thinking of her every moment conciously or subconciously, now, at the two month annaversary, I realize He is always on my mind. “This one’s not yours,” I can hear Him say as He has said of so many others I have had to release into His care. I am reminded of my own art, the picture of the man carrying a sleeping child in the light of the cross that I painted four or five years ago. I picture Him standing before me and lifting Emily out of my arms. “Let me carry this. It’s time to let go.” “

Cast your cares upon Him, for He cares for you.”—Emily Joy, one week before her death.

Cast your cares upon Him for He carries you . . . I let go. I give her to You. Carry her.

. . .carry me.

But I Need You

(Originally posted on my facebook page on November 11, 2008.)

I have written a note every two weeks for the last six. I don’t know why. Two weeks later, it just always feels like it’s time. It has been six weeks since we lost Emily, and it is still hard, yet . . . I am late in posting this, because God has been so at work. I guess He always was, but I didn’t see it before. There are so many layers to this grief, and I haven’t been able to work through one stage of grief and then move on. I keep recycling back through them with every annaversary, weekly and then again on a much larger scale on the month mark. Yet, I begin to see . . . there is such a journey of discovery in this life with Him. As one of Emily’s favorite songs says, “With pleasing grief and mournful joy, my spirit now is full.”

So many things about me are different from the way I was before, and so many things of me are different every week, every day that follows. “You are not the bouncy, happy Abi that I remember,” one of my managers, Mary, said when she took me aside to talk last week. I have felt so strongly that each of us, all of us that loved Emily, died on that walking trail that afternoon, and when we all reawakened, she was the only one not in pain. I have grieved my own passing in addition to the loss of her. I have wished so many times that it could have been me. That SHE could continue on in her life and service here. In some ways, I think it is just my own selfishness and lack of courage. As one of my other managers, Nick, said that first week when we were talking about the legal system, “I always thought that capitol punishment was the easy way out, anyway,” He said. “You don’t have to live with yourself.” I heard it that first time in refference to the man that still walks free somewhere, that holds the last moments of Emily’s earthly life in his memory, just as we hold every other moment in our hearts. Now . . . that comment is about me. Death is the easy way out. Death is the absense of me having to walk every day of my life in its shadow. It was relatively easy to come to terms with my death in those first few weeks. Coming to terms with my own life . . . how much harder. How infinitely harder. Last week, as I sat wearily and in tears in a dark corner booth in the restaurant, Mary left me with another sentiment, “I didn’t know Emily,” she said. “But she sounds like someone who . . . she would want you to be strong.” Music has a wisdom nothing else seems to, as I write this, I listen to one of Emily’s favorite songs. A clear woman’s voice sings out for Christ, “I died that you might live.”

There has been so much talk of what Emily would want for us, what she would think of the changes that have come over us, what to do in our lives with her death shadowing, scaring, and reshaping our hearts. In some ways, I feel like all of Emily’s prayers in life were bottled up until the moment of her death, and with her last breath, they spilled out onto an unsuspecting world. She did not see in life what came about in her death, but what poetic beauty. Within the hour of her death, I made arrangements to go to church the following week. I would not learn the infinite, the painful, the heart-wrending, and heart-rendering significance of that moment until the following day. When the news came to me that Emily was gone, I didn’t want to go to church the next week. I didn’t want to go spend so much time with a group of people that didn’t know me and would never, now, know Emily on This Side. But in the days that followed that first horrible one, I began to realize . . . if there was one thing that Emily would want me to do, this was probably it. I mentioned it to Grace as I lay curled up in bed with the phone to my ear. “She would,” Grace said. She brought back a conversation I had forgotten. About six months before I had been spouting off about the pointlessness of church. It was one of my most cynical moments. I had forgotten about it. “She told me that she hoped you’d go back, that it would be good for you,” Grace said. I sat there in silent shock. We hung up, and I still just sat and thought about what Grace had said.

Someone had noticed me. Even in my own blindness, someone else had seen and cared.

Emily and I hadn’t been one-on-one friends who shared personal, intimate, private conversations about deep things. Not like some of the others. She was one of the kids in the group. So was I. That was how I remembered her. I can’t even remember most of our conversations clearly. Except for one that I remember very, very vividly, they were mostly just jokes and hestarical, uproarious laughter over nothingness. With her and with everyone else, I don’t often remember WHAT we laughed about . . . just that we did. There is a sweetness in that simplicity, and yet a sorrow that there was nothing more—at least that I knew of at the time. I remembered that she was always enthusiastic, friendly, cheerful . . . always the first one to say hello, always pulling me in when I felt on the outside. I hadn’t expected that she thought of me, that she had any particular thought of me except to recognize me as Micah’s sister. I hadn’t expected to hear that she had talked to another friend about what she hoped for me.

Within that first week, there was almost always a student presence in the chatroom. One morning, there wasn’t. I came in and it was just me sitting in the “Emily Joy. . . . Memorial Lounge.” I just sat there. It was a step away from “before,” and I didn’t know how to handle that. Those first few days of the round-the-clock vigil were over. No one was there. So I just began to type, talking to her about everything that had happened that week, about how much we missed her, about how much I envied where she was now. After several days of tears, I started to laugh as I gave her the names of people I wanted her to find up there. “Hey, go give my Grandma Margaret some gummy bears,” I said, laughing mischeviously in the empty chatroom. “Watch her stick out her tongue . . . yeah, that’s where I got the length in mine.” I laughed, thinking of an old memory of a woman who had died in her sleep, and left me with her spunky quirkiness. “Oh, and then go find my Uncle Roy and ask him about how he lost his finger ‘digging for buried treasure.’” I started laughing again, that sort of exhausted, nervous, caffeine-like laughter . . . the relief of realizing I still knew how.

I went to church that following Sunday. It was a holy experience in so many different ways. I felt as though she were watching over me. In the weeks that followed, if someone invited me to do something with them on Sunday morning, I declined, simply saying that I had to go to church, that I had “promised a friend.” I walked into church, and my friend was waiting for me. He said hello and then dissapeared with the worship band. I sat down in the pew and began idly looking through the bulletin. I know I wrote some of this before, but it wasn’t until later that I put together the events of the entire week. I read 3 John 13-14: “I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. Peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name.” I sat there and sobbed. I knew it was from Emily. Later I realized . . . I had talked to her in chat several days before, though she hadn’t been there to hear it, asking her to talk to the friends THERE . . . the ones that “send their greeting.” I tend to be very cynical and suspicious about such experiences, but I wasn’t even LOOKING for this. It was as if God were granting me an assurance and a comfort . . . that Emily was happy, that SHE could not wait to see us again any more than WE could wait to see her.

I have been to church every Sunday since. It has been the only place that I feel so fully connected to all of these friends that my heart is with every day even though we are spread out all over the globe. When I am there, I know that almost ALL of us are doing the same thing at the same time. When I am there, I know that we are all doing, at the same time, what EMILY is doing—standing in awe and worship of Him, being completely at the mercy of the One that Saves. Two weeks ago I went to church and then rushed out and went to mass with a Catholic friend. It was All Soul’s Day. I hadn’t remembered. They talked about the hope and certainty of heaven. Somehow I had trouble picturing Emily doing what I was doing, standing, sitting and kneeling two seconds behind everyone else, since she was a Calvinist and a Baptist, but sitting there in the pew, listening to the prayers and joining in a few lines that I knew, I knew that Lauren, the resident Catholic member of the school, was doing the same thing at the same time. We were both thinking of each other during the same time, knowing we knew where the other was.

It is at these moments of clarity, I feel even stronger that Emily’s prayers were gathered together and released at once for maximum impact. She had hoped I would go back to church; in the same hour that she died, I made the arrangements to go. She had prayed for her group of friends, my friends, praying that we would be drawn closer to Him and to each other. In the last week we have had such opportunities to press into Him together. Monday morning I sat at the computer, talking with John in Korea. We turned on Blessed Be the Name of the Lord, and together, on opposite sides of the world, we sat in worship of Him, crying out to him, “You give and take away! My heart will CHOOSE to say, Blessed be Your Name!” Later that day, several of the girls joined in prayer from every corner of the country, our fingers flying as we typed our prayer into chat. Wednesday the opportunity came again, and the prayer went on for an hour and a half.

My close friend, Mary Margaret, called me shortly after the prayers subsided, and I was so full of excitement and enthusiasm. “I feel so different,” I said, almost breathless. “I don’t even know where to begin, what to do with myself. He is SO close!” She must have been smiling on the other end of the phone. She has seen me at my very worst, my lowest points, and my deepest cynicsm. “I know,” she said, a bit of amazement in her voice. “I can hear it in your voice.”

In these last six weeks, He has come to me as He did to Thomas when he was too weak and hurting to have faith in more than what he saw. But then last Thursday began another trial, another stage of the journey in which He was there, but I did not feel Him. Wednesday was the day that we prayed together with such fervor and felt Him so tangibly present. Thursday, I wanted it again. I SO wanted it! That connection with Him and with the others. I have come to recognize that Still Small Voice so personally, like the voice on the other end of the phone that your ear knows even before an introduction is made. I wanted to suggest another prayer session, to go in, to pray, to do so together . . . but I knew it was not the time. “Not now,” I could hear in my spirit. “Not now.”

“How can this be You?” I asked. “It’s PRAYER.” Yet I continued to receive the same response. I couldn’t do it. I understand now why we stray from Him. Why do we not trust His leadership? Because we take things at face value and do not look beyond. We, very foolishly, say, “But this is something YOU would want,” instead of waiting for Him to say, “Now it’s time.” We look up at Him with the indignance of a four year old, hands on hips, and say, “But You said . . . “ as if He needs reminding.

I went on without Him. I started the prayer, and it was . . . dead. There was nothing in it. For the first time since Emily died, I could not feel Him tangibly beside me. I sent a private message to friend in the group, “Do you ever feel like your timing is off?” She had felt it too. I had gone on ahead of Him and asked Him to bless what I was doing rather than follow His lead and accept His invitation to join in what HE was doing. I felt like I had failed, and even more so . . . I felt like I had lost Him. It was not like in that moment He was gone, and then as soon as I closed the prayer He returned. I walked away from the computer and could not feel Him beside me. I took a shower and cried out to him. “DON”T LEAVE ME!!!” I sobbed. “I can’t do this alone! Don’t leave me!” I knew that He has promised to never leave nor forsake me, yet I have gone most of my life not feeling His presence as I have these past several weeks. I had a taste of it now. I was still broken and bleeding, and I KNEW what was out there for me. I continued to cry out, to pray, to seek that Voice again, but it was in confusion. I’d hear a simple sentiment, but I did not recognize the voice behind it, but what if it was wrong? I somehow knew that stepping out from under Him had muddied the waters. I had heard his Voice, known it was Him, and walked in the opposite direction. I knew that was the reason I could not recognize Him now. It was not a punishment. It was as Eve, the woman fashioned so literally by God’s hands, who had not trusted that He knew what was best. She had stepped out from under Him, and suddenly realized she was naked—a distance was there that was not there before. I continued to pray, to sing, to cry out to Him. “I NEED YOU!” But He was still distant. I slowly began to realize that I could not pursue Him hard enough. I could not push hard enough and guarrentee that closeness. I could not MAKE Him come. He would come if He came. It was a gift, not a birthright. “He’s not a tame Lion,” as was said of Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Several days before, I had fallen to my knees and cried out to Him. “DON”T LEAVE ME!” I had felt Him through those prayers. I had prayed them, feeling Him near, because I needed to say it, not because I felt Him distant. Thursday was different. I cried out desparately, not because of a broken heart, but because I could not feel Him with me. What if that was it? What if the closeness didn’t come back? I kept praying, kept pleeding. I knew I had nothing to offer the others without Him with me. I knew I could not stand up under it all without Him near. I would be wooden and without wisdom. “I can’t do this alone!” I continued to pray. I thought of what Emily’s father had prayed when Emily’s death was confirmed, “Lord, help! Help!” Finally, I got out of the shower. I felt exhausted and still panicked. “Pray for the others now,” I heard the Voice. It sounded familiar, but I was still concerned I was not hearing Him, was not able to tell His Voice from my own. I had gone against Him once when I heard His Voice, and I thought I recognized this voice, so I was reluctant to do anything other than what it said . . . but I needed to say something else. Tentatively, slowly, I ventured out into a conversation. “But . . . *I* need you.”

I felt a Smile, and I recognized it. It was His. It was the Smile I had felt the night nearly a week before when I had clung to my sheets, on my knees beside my bed crying out, “I NEED YOU.” It was the contented, happy smile--the sheer THRILL in His heart for being pursued, for being desparately wanted. THIS was the answer His heart had hoped to hear. I felt it swell in His heart, and in that moment He was THERE. I curled up into a ball on the floor right there, and I felt another promise of His overwhelm me so strongly: “He will shelter you in the shaddow of His wings.” I lay there for a good, long while, feeling His Presence so closely, so intimately MINE. I lay there in comfort and relief, then I heard the Voice again, “Okay, now stand up.” Like a little child snuggling with a parent in the warmth of an old quilt on a lazy afternoon, my heart resisted, “Oh, do I have to?” I felt the Smile again: “just a few more minutes.” And then again . . . “Okay, now it’s time.”

I stood to my feet. I put one foot in front of the other. And He was there. There at my side every step I took from that place, at that moment. Guiding me, giving me little instructions. I knew His Voice. I could hear it. I trusted it, and I reveled in it, delighting in His company. I continued throughout the day, listening for His Voice as He guided me through the simple things. I listened to worship music. I chatted with friends. I felt myself reaching out in my spirit just as I had physically as a small child . . . reaching out to make sure my father was still there. As I realized what it was I was doing, it was MY heart’s turn to smile. In the absense of the physical representative of such a love, the love of a father—HE was there.

I began putting paint to a drawing I had sketched a few nights before, my heart singing praise. A song that Bis had shared with me the day before that Emily had loved came to mind. Suddenly, and I don’t know why at that moment, I felt threatened. “What if there is more to the gospel than I ever figured?” I have always had the loosest concept of what it takes to be saved of anyone I have ever known, but in that moment I wondered if I was wrong. If maybe ALL of us had missed it. I was panicked again. What if I was kidding myself? I recognized the threat. I knew the voice was not His. I dropped my paint brushes on the table, unwashed and ignored, and ran to my room, throwing myself down on the floor. “God, I know this is not true! I know that You have PROMISED us! I know that You are holding her right now! GOD, I claim the promise that all who trust in You are saved.” And again, Emily’s father’s words came to my mind: “If this gospel that I have preached is not true now, it never was.” And then Emily’s song came to mind again, “Forever etched upon my mind is the look of Him who died, the lamb I crucified, and now my life will sing the praise of pure atoning grace that looked on me and gladly took my place.” I lay listening in my mind to the memory of the song. I knew it was true NOW. I knew it always had been. I knew the difference between HIS voice and another.

This has been such a rollercoaster of emotions. About the time I think I have made some progress, I loose it again, and at a moment I don’t expect, God appears infront of me with such force I cannot see anything else. There is a hope and a certainty in my heart, just as my manager Mary said near the end of our talk last week, “I know it takes a long time . . . years even. But I know, I KNOW that someday . . . I will see the old Abi again.” We all died that day. And yet there is the same hope of new life for each of us. We will see her again, and I have that Glimpse of heaven before my eyes every day. I begin to realize, that as I grieve the old Abi, and I learn to acknowledge the new Abi, neither of them are the Abi that will walk out of this Valley of the Shadow of Death. They will merge and become one. Avril Lavine’s When Your Gone sings into the void in my heart where feelings and words do not meet: “Everything that I do, reminds me of you.” I realize that from this day forth, I carry Emily with me, and as her life and death continues to teach me of the power of the Gospel, I carry HIM with me too . . . in a way I never fathomed before. As Bis sang that night, before she had learned of Emily’s death: It is Well, it is well, with my soul.” I need Him, and that desparation feels so good.

Twenty-Seven Days

(Oriinally posted on my facebook page on October 24, 2008. I wrote this for myself and several friends, some that knew Emily and some that didn't. I haven't written much lately, except for them. I'm ready to post this here, though, too.)

It has been one month, four weeks tomorrow since we lost Emily. I cannot quite believe that taking one day at a time has lead up to twenty-seven of them. It feels like it just happened, and yet I don’t think I would recognize my old self anymore. I haven’t decided yet if I miss the old Abi. . . but for better or for worse—she’s gone. The new Abi. . . well . . . she’s not a lot of fun right now, but she’s certainly interesting. It’s strange—I’m learning more about the old Abi now that there’s a new one replacing her . . . the old Abi talked casually a whole lot more than the new one. That was one of the first things that people noticed, and I noticed too. “Why are you so quiet?” they would ask. I didn’t feel like talking just to talk. I’ve found that, when I am with my close friends, I ask more questions than before. I have so much I want to know about them. Questions that hadn’t seemed so pressing before that I want to understand now about their lives, and thoughts, and the directions they were each heading. I iniciate conversations that had intimidated me before. Instead of shying away from questions I “don’t know how to ask,” I give it a shot and work my way from there. It’s fulfilling. I feel more contented with the time I have, more powerfully present. The people in my life seem more real in their own right, and less the scenery around the edges of my own story. I am grateful for this fuller life. I have always wondered what I would do if I knew that I would not have another chance to talk to someone I loved. If I SAW the end coming, what would I want to leave them with? Nothing ever felt big enough, so the hypothetical answers always turned out to be sappy, melodramatic, and embarressing—far too embarressing to ever REALLY say if I didn’t KNOW the end was near. So what do I do with the fact that Emily had no warning? We all looked up forty-eight hours after her death and were struck that, while she had been just as surprised as we were, she HAD said goodbye. In the week before she died, she had left us notes, messages, emails, sharing her heart with us, her beliefs, the things that MATTERED to her—sharing that WE mattered to her. One of the girls told me that Emily’s final words to her had been, “I’m praying for you” at the end of a conversation they had had the morning of the day she died. God was helping her set her affairs in order even though she didn’t know she was running out of time. Two years ago when my brother was in and out of emergency rooms and intensive care unit, my dad moved out, battles over custody and finances were waged, we moved from the home where I’d been raised, and my mom and I ended up in separate appartments—back then I had HATED the phrase, “Live every day as though it were your last.” The only way I could drag myself out of bed every morning to sit numbly on the floor of my room and stare off into space for hours on end was to KNOW that there would be a tomorrow, and after that another tomorrow, and after that another, each one carrying me further and further from the depression and pain that was eating me alive. The only way I could survive the present was to look to and have faith in the future. Now . . . I recognize that there is a season for everything, and that sentiment that is so irritated me then really does speak to me now. I find myself looking at the things that demand my time and asking, “If I died tomorrow, where would I wish I had poured out my time?” When I am stressed at work over getting someone’s order wrong or forgetting their alll-important extra olives, I stop and think, “If I have thirty minutes to live and simply don’t know it, would I have wanted to squander my emotional energy in this way?” As I got home from work every day during Succoth (one of my favorite holidays on the Jewish calandar), I would briefly consider my options for the evening, each time an evening of funny stories, deep talks, dancing, and games in which everyone I loved laughed at my expense—Succoth always won; I started to stop even asking the question.

Inicially, when Succoth came upon the heals of Emily’s loss, I complained inwardly. Not that I wasn’t excited to see all the aunts and uncles and friends that were traveling here for the holiday, but that it is the holiday, ironically, in which we are Instructed to lay aside the things that weigh us down and rejoice in God’s care of us. I look at it now . . . God has such a sense of timing. I needed to be close to my family. I needed to be with the people with whom I can be every version of myself at once. That first night of Succoth I sat for three hours and talked to Uncle Bob about Emily. He had read my note on facebook Emily Happened, as had a couple of the other aunts and one of the cousins. We talked about life, about God, about grief, about hitting rock bottom and picking yourself back up again. A few nights later I sat down with one of the cousins, Jessie, and we had a real talk about something I had wanted to ask her for some time, but hadn’t known how to. A few nights later, I struck up a conversation with her brother, asking him about what he was doing, where he hoped he was headed, and the reasons behind things that mattered to him. As I looked into each of these people’s eyes, asked them questions, and really LISTENED to what they had to say, I realized that THIS is how you say goodbye . . . it looks a lot like saying hello. As I pulled out of the driveway each night and started the hour drive home, I felt content. If I had hit any of those deer that ran infront of me on the way home every night and never got the chance to talk to any of my family again . . . I would have done precisely what I wanted—each night I tried to make a concious effort to say, “you matter to me” in a way that would last if I didn’t get the chance to say it again.

I read over everything that I have written above and laugh a little—“Man, she sounds like she’s really put together. I wonder what her secret is.” Yeah . . . not so much. Okay . . . I have decided; I miss my old self. This new one is confusing. I feel like my mind is stuck on the scene from Fiddler on the Roof where Teviah validates two or three diametrically opposed statements. I feel at peace and acceptance with what happened, with Emily’s death, with her murder—yet I am angry with some cosmic sense of unjustice. I slam doors from time to time. I pound my steering wheel as I drive, “God, why?” I feel so mellowed out, so much more patient with the world and myself. Things that once felt so critical loose their weight. Yet in many moments I feel so easily angered by the people around me and their trivial complaints. The nuttiest thing about it all is that I can, and often DO, feel every one of these conflicting feelings at the same time with equal intensity. I sat on the porch swing of my childhood home late Saturday night with a friend, “I feel like the deepest, deepest place in me is at peace, but everything else . . . all that is an overwhelming current of confusion that keeps knocking me off my feet.” If my mind was short circeting at the moment I learned of Emily’s death, now it just feels like it’s running a search of all my computer files . . . ALL of them. No particular search, just so much information and feelings filtering through at breakneck speed that sometimes I cannot tell if I’m really processing anything or just standing back and watching the stampede flood over me. As Josh said in Timeline of their nifty little machine, I can say of this ordeal: “It strips you down to a mulucular level.”

There is a daily struggle to know what to do with all of my feelings. How to hold on and at the same time let go. I cried to Grace again this week. “I’m afraid we are forgetting her,” I said. She said she didn’t think that was possible, even if we talked about it less. “Do you really think any of us will be able to hear the name Emily ever again and not think of her?” she asked me. She was right. I find that name everywhere now. One of the other girls told me that first week that she found herself cumbulsively writing Emily’s name all over her hands. She didn’t know why. A few of the girls went out and bought a piece of clothing that reminded them of something Emily had worn and loved. I stopped wearing mascara the day she died out of necessity. I could probably go back to it now—most of the others did two weeks ago at least—but I didn’t want to. I didn’t quite understand why, though I was starting to guess at the reason. When I went out for Succoth and saw all the tzit tzit, tassles with blue threads, hanging out from under the men’s untucked shirts, I understood a little more fully this response to our loss, and I understood the reasons behind the tzit tzit that served as a constant reminder of God’s Word. I understood the desire to be marked just as God had Instructed the Israelites to mark themselves with their clothing, their food, and even their own bodies—this wish to have something on the outside that spoke of the change that had taken place on the inside. One of my favorite quotes, an African proverb, came back to me with more meaning than I had ever found in it before: “As I go from this place, I am wearing you.”

I find kinship to characters in stories I have known for years. Corrie Ten Boom’s admission, as she watched her family die at the hands of the Nazi occupation, that Scripture suddenly took on an epic feel . . . I have “known” this woman since early highschool, but not as I do now. I find that a single passage of Scripture can capture my complete attention for days on end. Last Saturday as I drove out to Succoth, making a mental note of the time signifying the exact time of Emily’s death three weeks before, I slammed the palm of my hand against the steering wheel, “God, why? I don’t understand.” The thought had been following me all day. She SHOULD be here! Why did a fourteen year old girl that would listen to anything you needed to say, who loved to laugh, loved God, and would do ANYTHING for you . . . why did SHE die? Why does a man who could so easily take her life for no reason as she walked home in the middle of the afternoon . . . how could he go free? As I pounded my steering wheel and demanded an answer I didn’t expect to get, I suddenly heard a Voice I have come to recognize: “Will you have Barabus or Jesus?” I was stopped in my tracks. As my foot lay heavily on the gas and the yellow lines whizzed by down the center of the road, I recognized an answer I had not anticipated, and for a long moment my spirit was quiet. Why had Jesus, a man who listened, who laughed, who loved God, who would do ANYTHING for you . . . why was he murdered? Why was he taken when a murderer walked free? I could answer with something about the reason behind Jesus’ death, the purpose in it, the plan from the beginning of time, but really . . . our very sense of justice MUST be taken aback by it just as literally THOUSANDS have been struck by the unfairness of Emily’s murder. Just as Corrie Ten Boom wrestled with the same sense of injustice, she and I both were and are struck by the overwhelming REALITY of the gospel.

These are the parts of this new Abi I am grateful to be as much as it hurts sometimes to walk in her smudged yellow sneakers. Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Emily was not a recognized teacher by any means. She was really more of a student than anything else. But she has taught us so much by befriending us and letting us see her life and work through her death. Each of us that knew and loved her are changed. I can feel a depth in my soul that was not there before. I was talking to one of Emily’s other friends a couple of weeks ago, and we both agreed it is harder for those that are left behind, and yet Gwyndolyn from George Elliot’s classic Daniel Deronda really said it best, “Do not think of me sadly—I am better for having known you.”

Yet after all of this, all of this writing, processing, thinking . . . I don’t know how to go on. I don’t even know if I want to. There is a grief in realizing that the grief is not as strong as it once was. It is the grief of my heart beginning to heal, beginning to step out of the deep, dark hole I had fallen into. And yet I realize it will be a long climb and the shadow of that darkness will remain on my heart along with the scar where Emily touched me and where it bled when she was taken away. There is a constant struggle both externally and internally over the insistance that I have to go on. Coworkers that don’t know what to do with my changed, more quiet and serious persona tell me I have to go on, let it go . . . I am irritated, insisting that it is a long process that I can’t just rush through, and yet I find myself arguing against an internal voice telling me the same thing that they are saying out loud. I have been determined throughout the last month to FEEL it—all of it. I tell myself that I get to decide if Emily’s death was in vain. Yet as I focus on on MY choice, what I have decided to do with this loss, how I have made the decision to carry her with me, I also realize I’m not in nearly as much power over this as I sometimes like to believe. Just as passages from Emily’s favorite Book keep sifting into my mind at random, quotes from other stories she loved keep coming to mind, shedding light and wisdom into feelings I cannot put words to on my own. One of Emily’s other friends quoted Frodo, the unlikely hero from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that suffered the loss of friends, health, and innocence, in an effort to express her own sense of personal loss, “How do you pick up the pieces of an old life? You go through the actions, but in your heart you begin to understand; there is no going back.”

I am more alive than I was before, but it is because a friend of mine is now dead. I am grateful for the perspective she gave me, and just as grateful to know that Jesus too was a man “of sorrows and aquainted with grief.” I used to feel so depressed whenever I read that passage, but now I feel comforted. Nothing Emily suffered is unknown to Him . . . . and nothing I suffer now is beyond His intimate understanding. We sang a song every Shabbat during Succoth, “I was a young man, and I grew old, but I have never seen a righteous man forsaken.” Psalms reminds me that, “as I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil for You are with me.” Jesus promised to “never leave me nor forsake me.” I always thought it was harder to be left behind as my siblings went off on trips to the West coast and the East coast, down to he Gulf and clear up north where it actually snows. I was always left behind while they went off on the adventures. I am left behind again as someone I love goes off further than ever before, but as Stephen Curtis Chapman wrote, “I have been invited as a son. I’ve been invited to come . . . “ I am left behind, but the adventure is spread out before me—the adventure of tommorow. Four weeks ago from tomorrow at 5:45 p.m. my time, the examiners pronounced what Emily had already known for nearly a quarter of an hour—she had gone on ahead of us. Tomorrow starts the weekly rite of counting down the time to 5:30 p.m., counting down the time that Emily had left on another Saturday. “Three hours, two hours, one . . . “ I tell myself, dramatically struck by the realization that she didn’t know any more then than I know now of what is to come. My hour IS my adventure. I may have one hour. I may have one hundred billion. But that not knowing, the every day courage of dancing backwards and following His lead, living every day as though it were my last--that is my journey. As Chinese wisdom tells us, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I will take the step. I will live each day she does not have. I will honor the scar she has left on my heart, and the Scars that made my Hope possible, knowing in all certainty that I will see her on the Other Side. So as I mark this moment, this collection of twenty-seven days, I take the first step into the next. With every greeting I am saying goodbye. I miss my old self, as I willingly take on who I am now. As I go from here, I know I am better for having known her. I thank Him for the twenty-seven days He has given me. I ask him for the twenty-eighth, and I look forward to the day in which death too shall die.

Emily Happened . . .

This is something I wrote on my facebook account:

I have something I am finally prepared to share with all of you—with those of you that knew Emily and those of you who are wondering who all of these references on my facebook are about. It is a story that is still in the telling. I have yet to learn the end. And as my friend Lindsey once said, quoting Robert Frost, “No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader.” If that is the case, prepare to be balling your eyes out--I have been.

As some of you know, I grew up on a farm in the north eastern corner of Texas. Late in the summer of 2001, my mom heard a whisper from the Still Small Voice, saying, “You are about to become part of the Bigger Church. Broaden your horizons.” She didn’t know what it meant, so she just held it with her. Then Tuesday, September 11th 2001 knocked the world to its knees. After spending fourteen hours that day in front of the television in shock and horror, we were told from the pulpit that the attack on our nation was judgement from God for the sins of this country. And in the string of events that followed that statement, my own personal world, or rather my corner of it, came crashing down around my ears as we left the church and charted new territories. I was fifteen years old, awkward, chubby, and painfully self-concious, but I was stepping out into a whole new world. It’s amazing how strange those words sound considering how claustrophobic I felt at becoming so isolated so quickly, but the scope of our life was really broadening, not closing in. Our life turned online in a desparate attempt to maintain contact with the outside world.

That was the beginning of Emily.

Three of my brothers and I started taking highschool classes on an online Christian school called The Potter’s School. David, the youngest of the first half of the family, took his classes but didn’t socialize much. Myself, the oldest of the second half of the family, and my younger brothers, Taylor and Micah, took to the online community like ducks to water. Taylor became an editor for the school newspaper. I started a creative writing and critique group on the forum. Micah hung out in chat with the kids quite a bit, and all of us made a bunch of friends. Well, here I am twenty-one, five years after taking my first class on TPS and two years since graduating from it, and I am still doing the same thing I ever was--hanging out with the kids, discussing and debating big thoughts with passion and gusto, writing and critiquing stories, looking at photos, fooling around, and building friendships by mutually wasting time . . . or so I occassionally thought. Today I am off the farm, not nearly so isolated, but still find that the friendships that sprouted and began to grow on that forum to be among the ones I cherish most. Five years of watching myself grow up in the reflection of their eyes and seeing them change and yet stay beautifully the same on the other side of my computer screen as my fingers flew across the keys in a vain attempt to keep up . . . after a while we might as well be spending every afternoon on each other’s couches—we had just as much a bond.

I look back now with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and I thank God for every day that I stayed. I am a good three years older than the oldest kids there, having watched my graduating class, the one after me, and the one after that slowly dissapear into “real life,” seldom if ever to be heard from again. I guess in a weird way, I am grateful that the kids I hit it off with in my first few years were freshmans or younger, giving me reason to stick around to meet the kids that joined the school the same year I graduated. I know now that I could have spared myself a lot of heartache had I slowly drifted away and by that skipped this last, hellish two weeks—but never. Had I done that, I would have missed out on Emily completely, and instead of introducing you to her someday when we meet on the other side, my long-lost highschool buddies would be introducing me to a young woman I would never have realized I NEEDED to know.

Sunday morning, September 28th, I got the news that Micah had been up with all night. My mom told me that she had found him asleep on the living room floor beside his laptop computer at 5:00 a.m., which was when she learned the news. One of the girls on the forum had died. For some reason I may never know, I asked “how” before I asked “who.” I don’t know why. Some foreknowledge that on some, painful level the answer to that question would be harder to accept than the answer to the other? I don’t even know if that is true. How do you measure the weight of grief or even where it comes from? My mom answered with a grave, serious face, “She was killed. They don’t have all the details. She was out for a walk.” I felt the wind squeezed out of me. My mind went blank. For a single moment as long as eternity, panic welled up in me as I thought through every possibility. In that moment, I had lost every one of the kids that had come to mean so much to me, but I could not ask the question. As soon as I did, regardless of the answer, I would have lost the one that meant the most.

Emily.

My mind must have been short circeting. In a single moment I could not quite remember who she was and yet was flooded with memories. I remembered, which is more than I can say for most of my friends from TPS, the very first time I really met her: a little over a year ago. Micah had pushed me into one computer chair as he took the other. He wanted me to meet his friends on chat. I knew a few of them already--most of them infact--and Emily and I had even seen each other around the forum, but she didn’t know before that moment my connection to Micah or “belly button lint,” as she liked to call him for some reason neither of us will ever understand. She dove into an escapade of secret-sharing, as she divulged information that all of the others present already knew, but the “big sister” wasn’t supposed to know. To her dissapointment, the information wasn’t so much the surprise to me as the fact that she knew it. It was something that Micah never talked to ANYONE about—not even me—but he’d shared it there in chat with her long before. That blush-inducing moment for Micah actually lead us to find a wonderful place for he and I to have real heart-to-hearts: over private chat. We could sit side by side at separate computers and share things that we couldn’t bring ourselves to say to the other’s face. That was the first, of many times, Emily brought me closer to another soul . . . I suspect, though she’s gone, I have yet to experience the last.

I hung out with her in chat several other times, bumping into her in the forum as well, and always laughing when I ran across a post with Emily’s name on it with a P.S. on the bottom reading something to the gist of, “This is actually Josh, her brother, posting under his ‘psuedo-Emi’ by mistake.” Her account profile made me laugh and cry the morning I learned of her death and opened it to send her a goodbye over private message: “any odd occurrences in my avatar, title, and sig tend to occur from my brother hacking my account—please tell me if you notice, because I usually don’t.” Even after her death, she’s EVERYWHERE. That girl was so darn proud of her status as the lead poster, and boy was she ever—with or without “psuedo-Emi.”

I tried to go to work that morning. I went in, filled out my goal card with my manager, and then slumped down into a chair near the lobby, trying not to loose it or vomit when someone offered me a breakfast bar. I thought I was going to be able to suck it up and make it through my shift, but as soon as I saw my sister walk through the front door, I melted into a puddle of tears on the floor, and the simple news that I had lost a friend to murder gave me the day off. I got in my car and numbly drove for a while along Tyler Loop 323. I stepped on the gas for the green light, on the break for the red light, and drove with the windows rolled down. I had nowhere to go, but I needed to drive there. Finally, I turned around and headed back into town. When I stopped my car outside of Barnes and Noble, I blessed my messy habits as I discovered my journal still in the backseat from a trip I’d taken a couple of weeks before back Home, the farm where I’d grown up.

So there I sat alone at an empty table for two, writing anything and everything that flitted through my mind. Slowly, a wave of disbelief started to mount in me. When it had built to a tide, I gathered up my things and rushed home. As I darted up the stairs of my mother’s appartment, I harbored the fleeting, comforting belief that it had all been a prank. We’d had our share of April Fools pranks in the past, not all of which had QUITE landed on April Fools. I couldn’t remember that Emily or Josh had been in on any of them, but Emily had liked a good joke, though through my hope that that was all it was, I knew I was going to seriously kick her butt if my hope was true! I figured that if the chatroom vigil through the long night hadn’t brought her around, my tearful goodbye letter in her Inbox would do the trick. Honestly, whoever said ignorance is bliss didn’t know the sheer wonder of stubborn disbelief. I unlocked the front door, made a dash for the computer, logged in to chat, and the illusion was shattered. No appology. No Emily. Just a chatroom full of crying kids spread clear from Washington, to Kansas, to New Jersey, to Korea.

Emily was gone.

Over the course of the next couple of hours, the kids continued to join the chatroom that was quickly becoming an online wake between kids whose hearts were joined across state lines, nation’s boarders, and even oceans—now stretching all the way to heaven. We sat together and shook. We shared links to a few articles that had picked up the story, giving us details we hadn’t had before, but still remaining silent as to “the victim’s” name. Josh had asked us to keep the matter private and try to deflect media attention. No blog posts, no public foruming, no facebook updating. Because of the lack of identifying features in the news articles, a few of the kids refused to believe it was Emily. Slowly, with horror, we traced the growing knowledge of the newspapers as they first found her father’s blog, photos of Em, and even our school newspaper’s student spotlight from June 2007, and we began getting more information as to what had happened as they gathered information from us regarding who she was.

Denial was over.

We couldn’t bury our heads anymore. We had been robbed of a heart that had touched each of ours so deeply, and nothing could ever make it okay. The next stages of grief swept over us. We cried. Sharing stories. Laughing at Emily’s sense of humor through our tears. Then rage hit us as we started thinking about the man that still walked free as examiners were determining the “cause of death” of our friend. I had sent a private message to my friend, Grace, at the beginning of the day, warning her that her job as forum moderator was about to get harder, as I expected tempers would flare in our grief. I guess I hadn’t assumed it would be MY temper. I called out for capital punishment, falling back on the good ol’boy attitude of my home state and wishing all of this hadn’t taken place in Canada, so we could inflict the death penalty. John, our friend in Korea who was up in the middle of the night his time, told me to stop and think—would Emily want us to be thinking all of this right now? I wanted to tell him I didn’t care; she wasn’t here to correct me, and as the thought sunk in, restraining my fingers from speaking it out loud, I wanted to cry.

John finally talked me down, and I melted again into the pain that had fueled my anger, and started appologizing profusely, realizing that regardless of if Emily were here to tell me to change my focus, it wasn’t what any of us needed to be thinking about right then. As I settled back down and started to cry, they all gathered around me, and it was like we were sharing a group hug, crying on each other’s shoulders--wishing they were tangible. We fell to laughing about our memories, picturing Emily on the other side of Glory. “You know,” John said. “I can just picture her realizing she’s in heaven, looking back at the rest of us and saying, ‘YES! I got here first!” We all laughed through our tears, grateful we had each other. We couldn’t quite shake the feeling, though, that Emily should be there with us. For such an important moment in the life of our shared friendships and the forum where she had lived with us, she should be here and her absense was startling.

As the end of that long, aweful day came upon us, many of us had cooled from wild grief and bouts of rage into a dry, sullen ache. Watching news footage from Alberta—showing her community and the spot where she had died . . . for some it was harder, for me it whispered a closure to the day. The details we were given as to how she was killed calmed the racing images in my head of every possibility into one, monotonous image that played over and over again, but at least I knew more of what had really happened. I realized as I went to bed that, while I had reminded the others all day that they had to eat, aside from a few random things throughout the day, I hadn’t eaten all day. I couldn’t. I was sick to my stomache, and the thought of putting food in my mouth brought up a wave of nausea. I went to bed and tried to sleep.

Over the next few days, the grief and shock wore on. I never felt fully awake nor ever really asleep. It was like walking through a dream while wakeful. Almost like sleeping with your eyes open--you don’t realize you’re doing it until someone points out the light in your pupils is gone. I discovered so few people that could relate or even handle my grief, and tucked away among their ranks, I found a few that could listen to anything and everything I needed to say. I have learned that angels are everywhere—even heavy-drinking, hard-living, atheist ones. Just a few days ago, as a wave of grief washed over me and I slumped to the floor of the drink station in the restaurant where I work, one of the guys got down on the floor with me, to talk, and to listen. He had asked me several days before what was wrong. “I lost a friend to murder too,” he had said. “This too shall pass,” he quoted with a knowing look in his eye.

Yet over the course of th at first week, I felt, very distinctly, a sharp separation between “us” and “them,” those who had known Emily, and those who hadn’t. We cried, we remembered, we reminded each other to eat. We dealt with the pain of having wasted time with her. Slowly, I came to realize that, though I had had so little, I had been given all the time I needed. God knew I NEEDED to know her, and I hadn’t missed out on anything I had been intended to have with her. As one of the girls said, “God knew how much loss each of us could handle.” So I worked during the day, comforted by the knowledge that when I got home, I could sit back down to chat, or curl up in a ball with the phone to my ear—knowing that while I walked through my day, as a washed out girl that no longer trusted mascara, there were others just like me all around the world.

I began to feel the universality of the Church. My horizons were broadening. Just as Josh and his family were receiving letters and flowers coming clear from Shri Lanka, I was feeling bound and united with Christians living all over the world. As we sat in the chatroom day after day, we began to share the striking sense of heaven that we had never had before. It was REAL--so very, very real to so many of us. One of the girls told me over private chat, “I can see heaven now . . . now that someone I know is there.” Another shared with me over the phone, “If God took me tommorow, I would be okay with it,” and I understood. It’s not that we wanted to die or were in despair. It was that we were, and are, at peace with God—completely.

Last Saturday was a hard day for all of us, being the one week anaversary of Emily’s death. After work and school almost all of us gathered back together in chat for a special night. Grace had asked our school administrator to come and speak with us, to answer any questions we had after loosing Emily. I was INTENSELY uncomfortable with the invitation. Our forum isn’t exactly the “official” forum for the school. Several years before, the free-thinkers of the school had separated onto a knock off forum, which had received a fair amount of hostility from the school’s administrator. (I marvel daily how I somehow manage to never be the new kid and always be the rebel.) I felt hugely territorial of our space, but I knew that Grace had been going through a lot and, in the midst of her own grief, had had to continue in the role of “Forum Mommy” and everything that entailed, so I decided I would not opose Mr. G. coming—if she needed to hand the reigns over for a while, I would support her in that. I would go because of Emily, because of the other kids, and for Grace--even though I didn’t much care what he had to say. My deepest fear was that he would come in, not having known Emily as we had, and turn this into a theological dissertation or at the very least say something meaningless and churchy like, “Emily wouldn’t want us to be sad—she’s in a better place.” What we received from him that night . . . I could not have anticipated. It was another instance in which Emily has brought people together.

His first words as he came into chat, our names lining the sidebar as if we were standing with locked arms, were, “I am so humbled and honoured to be here.” He said he had not expected the invitation to speak to us. He said that before joining us in chat, Grace had given him access to view our forum, all of the memorials we had set up and the tributes we had written, and the avatars and signitures that had simltaneously been changed to photos of Emily or quotes she had left behind. “Seeing all of this,” he said in shock. “I realize what you all lost, what this place meant to Emily.” He let us talk for much of the time, asking us leading questions and then letting us answer. We talked about who Emily had been, what she had meant to us. We talked about the hardest things about loosing her. It was a special moment, since many of us hadn’t had the courage, or perhaps had been so busy trying to comfort each other, that we hadn’t shared with each other the thing that was the hardest. I had voiced it to Grace, and she to me, that we had the image of Emily’s death playing over, and over, and over in our heads. We all said the hardest thing was knowing that Emily was alone in that final moment. And then he said the words that could have come from God Himself, they have been so comforting to each of us. I think they will be in our hearts forever.

God grieves Emily even more than we do—and she WASN’T alone.

One of the girls said something about Him being at her side through it all, and Mr. G. corrected her. Not at Emily’s side, but ACTIVELY INVOLVED. I am so grateful to him for bringing us to that realization. I talked to several of the others after Mr. G. left, and we were all floored by the realization that the thought had never occurred to any of us. We had seen her in our minds alone, afraid, in pain—and no one came. And now, the picture I hold in my head of that moment is the struggle, the rope around her neck, the man infront of her—and God standing behind her, her leaning back against Him; Him holding on tight in a strong embrace from behind; Him stroking her hair, crying, whispering in her ear, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And then finally, “Okay . . . now it’s time to go home.”

All of you reading this have known me a long time. You’ve either known me from infancy, or young childhood, some grew up with me . . . I tell you truthfully, I have never felt God so close before. Despite my grief that still comes in wild, uncontrollable surges, I feel His presence closer. I have often felt God with me in the past—but never standing at my elbow, never in the passanger seat of my car as I drive. One tribute to Emily read, “She walked with God until it came time for Him to carry her Home.” I have never known what it meant—what it TRULY meant--to walk with God, never read it and understood it as anything more than poetry. Now . . . I feel it. I understand. I am overwhelmed by His presence. As I sob, as I cry out for help in this grief, as I reach out to others for companionship as I mourn, as I am weighed down by the burden of Emily’s death, I feel Him all around me. I see Him everywhere. I have no fear. And in taking one day at a time, I find what a true marvel each day is. Even in moments in which I am at an utter loss and wish I could just pull the plug and end the world right now, I am aware of eternity. I am aware that if I live to be ninety-one . . . that is still only seventy years. Such a short time before we are all together, and not just with Em, but everyone I ache for. Heaven feels so real.

It seems so strange to me . . . Emily seemed to understand all of this. Reading over things she wrote to hers and my mutual friends in the week before she died, notes on how to put God first, quizzes about what she believed, her final words to another friend the morning of the day she died, “I’m praying for you” . . . she seemed to get it, and, oh, I wish I could talk to her about it all. There are so few in this world that seem to TRULY understand the boundlessness I feel about life and eternity, the intimacy I feel with God. And yet I am aware of the irony that I have this—all this—as a result of loosing her. If we could hit a rewind button and I had the chance I had then . . . I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about all of this. I understand now what it means for God to work all things together for good. It’s not that it’s “worth it.” Honestly, I would give it all back in a heartbeat. I would return to my cynicism about religion, my lack of use for Scripture, return to the way my friendships were then, my inclination to harbor enemies—storming off from the computer when Alan said the “wrong thing,” while muttering about “highschooler’s immaturity” and missing my own. I so wish I could go back to being diffecult, go back to having enemies over stupid things, go back to hostility towared Mr. G., go back to everything I was before . . . if it meant somehow none of this could have happened. Yet as I recognize my own preferences, I recognize the good God has worked anyway out of a situation I so desparately wish could be changed. But it can’t. Instead of thinking fondly of Grace, I call her when I am in tears. Instead of growling at the thought of Alan’s views on politics and religion, I think of him as a friend. Instead of being afraid, being in a race against time, being distant to my Heart and His calling . . . I am who I didn’t know I wanted to be.

Emily happened.

"I'M HERE"

I had so many plans for my next post. So many amazing, exciting, and thought-provoking things have happened this week. Instead of it leaving me with facination and an awe of the world and the people in it, the very end of this week has left my good friends, my little brother, and I wishing we could find a cosmic Ctrl-Z button.

I got up early this morning to meet my sister and a good friend at Starbucks before we all had to head our separate ways for work. I was a little worse for wear—my honorable plans for going to bed early being devoured in a good book—but feeling confident I’d been fine after a nice, hot mochachino. I stopped into my mom’s room to say good morning and goodbye when my mother told me something that will leave all of us reeling and trying to cope with the traumatic aftermath for months, some of us years to come.

Growing up very isolated on a farm, my younger brothers and I turned online for our social life and close relationships. We got started on an online highschool, and were active in their forum and the knock off created by one of the students, and there my youngest brother and I have been for the last five years, discussing deep thoughts, chatting, hanging out, sharing our good and hard moments, writing stories—pretty much sharing life—with a bunch of kids from all over the country and about a dozen internationally. In a way I don’t expect any of my face-to-face friends or coworkers to really understand, that group of kids, though only a few of us have met in person, came to be very close. Because there were none of the trappings of social stereotyping, age didn’t matter much. I am several years older than the average age, and I forget on a regular basis.

My brother found out first what my mom told me later: one of the girls died yesterday afternoon—she was killed. I stood there in shock for a minute before asking who. When struck with a horror like that, before you know which of your friends, there is a moment when you run through all of the possibilities and the bile in your stomache starts to churn. In any group of friends, especially highschool kids it seems, there are the ones that seem most susceptible to violence, those who live in sketchy neighborhoods (or in the case of the international kids, countries) or diffecult situations. Then there are those that never cross your mind as vulnerable—the untouchables. And as is always the case, the answer to the question, when you finally ask who was lost, seems to come at you from left field.

The family wanted to keep the matter private, but as the day wore on the media got ahold of it as they so often do, and we watched the progression of events as the story began showing up online, first without her name, then her name and photograph, even with quotes from our school newspaper. For some these articles brought home the truth they flat out denied to be true. For me it feels even more surreal. (For the sake of the originally desired privacy, I won’t post the links to any of the articles here or any identifying information. Any of you here who trust in Jesus’ salvation, please pray for us and for her family as well.) I tried to go to work this morning anyway but melted into a puddle on the floor two minutes before we opened. I just got in my car and drove. I didn’t have anywhere I was going. I just wanted to drive for a while. Finally, I turned around and headed to a nearby bookstore and journalled for a few hours until I could work up the nerve to go home. When I came home my brother was already online, and I joined him there in the chatroom shortly. There we’ve been on and off for most of the day, along with almost everybody who knew and loved her from our group. The news will continue spreading throughout the forum over the next few days as people come in and see the memorial that has been posted. Sadly, for some, that was their first news that something was wrong.

The chatroom has kind of been an online wake since late last night. For the most part I’ve been really proud of everyone and how we’ve handled our grief. Everyone has their differences in how they confront a tragedy, especially one as senseless as this, and as my mom predicted, we’ve had a few hot tempers as grieving styles clash. My own not withstanding. One of the hardest things for all of us to swallow is the fact that because we only know each other online, the rest of our corners of the world won’t really understand. We’re all apprehensive about telling anyone that the friend we’re grieving was from the Internet, afraid that their attitude will be, “Oh, so you didn’t REALLY know her.” Yet at the same time, even though she meant so much to us, the very fact that we are spread all over fifty states and beyond, we won’t have any of the traditional outlets for mourning. None of us can go to her funeral or even simply sit in each other’s presence. In her death, we will only have what we had in her life with us—virtual chatrooms and forum threads. Yet even in that, there is a strange opportunity—I PMed her this morning to say goodbye. I was in the middle of doing it when I suddenly thought, “I wish none of this had ever happened,” and then before I realized it, the rest of the quote from one of her favorite books continues in Gandalf’s gentle voice, “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.” I don’t know if loved ones can send comfort from heaven, but it sounds like something she would pass along.

I realized today that the question you hold in the back of your mind when your friends are online—I wonder if the first time we meet will be in heaven—has already been answered with this young friend. . . long before any of us expected or wanted. As the manhunt for her killer mounts, we sit infront of glaring screens, trying to hold onto some semblance of yesterday, some little bit of before . . . We remind each other to eat. We tell each other how much we mean to each other. We wonder how to go on. Occassionally, one of us will write “THIS SUCKS!” in the chatbox to let off steam, which is usually greeted with a chorus of, “agreed” or ironically, “amen!” We share funny stories, and try to handle her own edioms with delicacy. For a while there was a discussion if we should leave her nickname as she had—reserved for the use of only two in the group, my brother and one of the girls. In the end they decided they were cool with sharing, but not to blame them if she slugs us when we get to heaven for calling her “that” all this time without her permission. We try to keep our tempers cool. We’re not yet trying to make sense of it. I think most of us recognize that we won’t ever be able to. Oh, God, this hurts! Only having a scrap of information on how she died, and that bit of information being not enough and way too much at the same time. Our “little handful” left behind her own quirky, fourteen-year-old humor as our best medicine, as one of the guys so valiantly pointed out by saying, “You know, I can just see her finding herself in heaven, looking back at the rest of us and saying, ‘YES! I got here first!!!” For now, that has to be enough.

But I think what will remain the most precious to us in these last twenty-four hours was a guesture from the moderator team by locking the thread where she last posted to leave her as the final participant there. At 2:30 yesterday afternoon, only an hour and fifteen minutes before her attack and death, she had popped up on the chatbox thread where kids would post saying they were on. Nothing but the smiling face of a little girl on her signature image and two words, "I'm here."

MY JOURNEY TO NOW . . . TO BE CONTINUED

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs of other families who have or are in the process of adopting from China and it makes me so impatient! When I was eight years old (back in 1995-96), and I overheard my mother talking with a friend about China. Being the child that I was, I wanted to know what the conversation was about. Though the memory has gotten worn around the edges, I still remember her explaining the one-child policy in China to me and the cultural preference for boys. I was a fiesty little kid, though with a big heart (my mom got me to give up my pacifyer as a four year old when she told me that there were some little children that didn’t have any pacifyers—she then proceeded to take my carefully wrapped gift of my “suckers” and put them in my saving’s box), and I told my mother right then and there that someday I was going to adopt, “Ten little girls from China.” And my mind has never been changed.

Through most of my highschool years it was really put on the back burner, so much so that as as a junior, I didn’t remember ever saying it until a long time friend who hadn’t seen me in a few years asked, “Are you still going to adopt those ten little girls from China?” Between that question and another conversation with a close family friend that had adopted three children from Vietnam, I started to research adoption. At first it was just international adoption in a general sense, but I found I sat up straighter and paid more attention to the articles I read on Chinese adoption. After a few long days, maybe a week, I gave up all pretenses of researching adoption as a subject and started devouring everything I could get my hands on about Chinese adoption. Check out this site: http://www.tussah.com/lara/chinasto.htm, you’ll find the website that really started the ball rolling for me.

About half of the links were disconnected, but in the page after page of links to family blogs and adoption journals, I got a better picture of what it actually looked like to take the journey I had been so adamant about as an eight year old school child. They were touching, thrilling, exciting. Each story became a fast passed, page turner for me. Yet in many stories there was a reference to British journalists that had found something about Chinese orphanages that was appalling. I remember pausing in one story, halfway intent on finding out what these references was about—my finger poised over the google search button at the top of my screen. “No,” I decided. “If it’s really bad--really, really bad . . . it will only drive me out of my mind. I’m seventeen, and there is nothing I can do to get those kids out. I have another thirteen years before I’m even old enough to submit a dossier (formal request to adopt). It will only drive me out of my mind.” So for three months I made a very concious choice in favor of ignorance. I continued to read, to research, to pray, to swallow up everything in sight, but I would not go looking for the story behind the vague references. I didn’t want to know.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. The same little spark of curiosity that had first asked my mother what she was talking about nine years before, that had brought me to this place of obsession, got the best of me. I had to know. So I started with simple google searches, typing in the pieces of information I DID have to try and locate the pieces of the story I didn’t. What I found broke my heart. Whoever said that ignorance is bliss must have had the same journey to discovery I had that day. I read about Kate Blewett’s documentary, The Dying Rooms. I read about the conditions she had discovered in the mid ‘90’s in China’s orphanages. Most heartrending of all--I saw my first photograph of Mei Ming. I can’t explain it all. She does it far better than I could. If you want to hear her story, go to this link and watch Blewett’s documentary: http://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/the_dying_room_player.html. I warn you that it is upsetting, but important. Too much of what happened to those children happened because the rest of the world looked the other way. It is important to remember them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and twenty six letters can conquer the world, than this video is more important than any amount of writing can convey.

This was my first experience with shocked, horrified grief. I didn’t speak of this discovery for months. I felt that hollow empty feeling you have when you wake up to the world and discover there is true evil in it. Evil so far above your own painful experiences that getting up in the morning almost seems futile. In the midst of all of these emotions came the realization of the year the documentary was made—1995. I had been eight years old. THIS publication, making China the talk of the Western world, had most likely been what had started my mother’s conversation (when I finally did mention my discovery, my mother already knew about it), which prompted my inquiry, and lead me—nine years later—to discover the story and the children that had started it all.

Kate Blewett later said she could never return to China—if she did she would never be able to return home. But because she went that one time, thousands upon thousands of other Westerners took up the next stage of her journey. The children who came after Mei Ming and the others who died of sheer neglect had the alliance of soccer mom’s and every day dad’s on their side. Many of them were adopted, and those left behind have receieved better care than their forebearers. That’s the only way I can live with what was done to Mei Ming—knowing that what happened to her made a difference to her abandoned sisters.

To this day I carry her memory with me everywhere. From time to time I’ll look up at a girl (usually white, like myself) that is about the age that she would be now if she had lived and wonder where she came from before she was abandoned, who she looked like, wonder who she would have been had she survived. And then the real hard question—could she have made a greater impact than she did if she had lived? I read the blogs of others that have Chinese daughters, and see their children’s faces and think of the girl that brought their plight to global attention.

I can’t ever have the ignorance back, and sometimes I miss it. Four years later I still can’t escape the knowledge, but I don’t think I would choose to. I don’t think of it every day the way I did when I first discovered it, but I still think of my intent desire to adopt every single day. I am encouraged by others (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/ ) who have gone ahead and shared their stories. I laugh to myself sometimes that I have had the longest waiting period of any adoptive mom—I’ve been waiting for thirteen years and have at least another eight and a half before I can even submit a formal request, at which time the REAL waiting will begin.

Being just old enough to start to see a pattern to my life, start to discover what was REALLY going on that I didn’t see at the time, and how quickly the last four years have gone by since I first started researching everything on Chinese adoption I could find, INCLUDING blogged luggage lists,:-) I can only imagine how I will feel when I look back at myself ten years from now when I’m making my own luggage lists and freaking out about all of the things adoptive China mom’s seem to freak out about.

I was just thinking last night as I posted about my Jewish flavored upbringing and read another blog (http://journeytojaden.blogspot.com/) about celebrating the Chinese Moon festival in honor of their son’s heritage. My poor kids are going to have such a weird, culturally diverse identity! After my upbringing with the Jewish holidays, I’m definitely continuing that. After experiencing the Mexican quensenara (the daughter’s coming out), I want one of those for my girls. And if my kids are going to be from China, and I’m going to be incorporating a lot of ethnic holidays that aren’t even part of MY biological history, I really ought to include the Chinese New Year or something. Wow, I’m having a culture shock just thinking about it.:-) In the meantime I’ve got a few books on Chinese history I’m reading, and I’m trying to get my eight year old “Chi-Mexican” friend (his father is Mexican and mother is Chinese, so he speaks Spanish, Cantonese, and English) to teach me a bit of the language. I think I’ve got enough to keep me busy before I can start my paper chase.

Thanks to all the mothers of Chinese children, especially Karen (http://always-in-myheart.blogspot.com/), for sharing your stories. You have no idea what an encouragement they have been to me. There is nothing quite like reading things that are written without the benefit of hindsight—people who write books can easily gloss over things or make them more palatable, because as they write, they know that by the end of the story everything works out alright. Thanks for your daily glimpses of joy and panic. I’ll try to remember them when my turn comes.

THREE WORDS OR LESS

I have written and rewritten this post so many times, trying to get all of the unusual, complicated pieces worked down to their most basic ellements to avoid this being an entire documentary of the strange pieces of my life that seemed to come to a head this weekend. Each little detail could be an entire post all by itself, but to tell it all right now distracts from the real impacting moment I had at, what I’ve been calling, “a family wedding.”

I have always felt like I was born into the wrong skin. My father, growing up in an old Southern family, was mentored, couselled, and really raised by the black staff that worked at his family’s home, so I have always grown up with an appreciation for the African American community, and in the dance community been called black a time or two. In my middle school years, I had felt it a crime my skin was so darn white! My mom grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in St. Louis, MO. So while she was not Jewish, all of her friends, classmates, and highschool boyfriends were. Coming from a broken home, she found a great deal of stability in her friends’ homes, and so she grew up celebrating their holy days, hebrew blessings, and traditions. So when she was married and started her own family, she incorporated the hebrew calendar into our formative years.

I had always felt a mixture of excitement and frusteration at this. I liked the holidays, the symbolism, the blessings; they had been part of my life since before I was born. The frusteration came in with having been raised in a culture I couldn’t claim. In all of my twenty-one years, I have never been able to explain in three words or less why “mossel tov!” comes to mind when a lightbulb breaks (reference to a Jewish wedding tradition) or why I feel excited at the scent of chopped parsley (part of the Passover sedar), or any number of other things that are completely foreign to the mainstream of the culture. Any time I dared to voice these thoughts to those around me, it was a precursor to a long explaination to which the general sentement was, “That’s . . . weird.”

In the last ten years something called the Messianic Movement has emerged as a subset of evangelical Christianity. The thoughts behind this movement are the same basic thoughts that pricked my dad’s interest in this culture almost about eight years earlier when he had a crisis of faith—Christianity is built on the foundation of the law and the prophets. But while many of my friends joined the bandwagon around the time this movement was born, it had already been alive and well in my family for over two decades, not counting my mother’s childhood.

My father, a controlling and abusive man, had studied the Old Testement, Hebrew, the Talmud, Jewish history, and the writings of the rabbis for eight hours a day all of my highschool years, ontop of work. When he left, I let him take some of my identity with him. I couldn’t celebrate the holidays anymore. We gave away our Passover plate to the close friends that had been celebrating the holidays with us for years and had moved into our old home. Slowly in the last two and a half years, I have been able to reclaim this part of my heritage a piece at a time. While my dad was with us, I had defined this part of my upbringing as something I wasn’t—I wasn’t Jewish, so I couldn’t really claim any of it as part of me. I think some of that had to do with my internal distancing from my father.

In the last two and a half years, and especially the last six months, I have learned to identify with yet another heritage other than my own. Working in the food service industry, I discovered I had a lot in common with the Mexican value system and family ideals. Several of my friends had called me a Mexican stuck in a white body. One started calling me "prima" (cousin), because he insisted I was really Mexican on the inside. I have worked alongside them, been invited to their homes, gone to their family events, their weddings, their quensenaras. In some ways it fit so well, and I looked past differences as best I could. Yet in the back of my mind, I was aware of the culture that raised me, most especially as I chopped parsley for a garnish alongside one of the Mexican women I worked with, and tried to explain why I would occassionally take a sprig of it and dip it in salt water before eating it (Passover tradition)—she didn’t understand; she just called me the Spanish word for cow.

Last Sunday night we went to the wedding of an old friend, one of the girls I had grown up with within this movement. Her extended family had kind of been an extended family to me during highschool, getting together every six months for Passover and Succoth for that week of time. I felt less threatened by my non Jewishness in that surrounding. We used to joke about the poetic redemption of having three of four surnames within her extended family as well as my father’s being German and speaking Hebrew blessings during a holiday of a people our people had pursecuted.

We drove out to the nature reserve where the wedding was to be held, and we stepped into a sea of yammikas, tzit tzit, and “honorary family.” Her wedding had a remarkably Jewish flavor, complete with the glass breaking in remembrance of the Temple’s distruction, the Hebrew blessings, and the dancing—which was always the best part. I hadn’t realized how very much this was part of my heritage until I inwardly let out a sigh. For the past six months I have been attending weddings with just as many and just as foreign traditions and symbolism with my Mexican friends and loved every minute of it, but though these traditions would need just as much explaining as the Mexican ones had for me, they made sense to me and I understood many of the blessings even without the translations by my “uncle.”

I looked around and was struck with a sense of pride I had never had for this part of my upbringing. Jewish or not, this was part of my history, part of my heritage. I looked around at the others dancing in the circles with me: not a one, besides my own siblings, could claim twenty-one years of this. If anyone who hadn’t been born into bloodlines of this culture could claim it, it was me. The feeling was very similar to the feelings I had as I hugged and kissed the bride’s family. One of her uncles, the one that I have known since I was ten years old and have always had a very special relationship with, said to me during the reception, “Having you guys here . . . it’s like all of the cousins are back.” They weren’t my family any more than I was Jewish . . . I guess that gave a boost for my identifying with my own history.
Today, two days later my legs are killing me—too many pulled muscles from fancy footwork and high kicks—but I am finally feeling full, the first time in a long, long time. The inward struggle of “where do I fit” is diminishing. I am who I have always been, only now I can say it . . . but I still can’t explain it in three words or less.

CREATIVE WAYS TO CLEAR OUT THE GENE POOL

Okay, so my kid brother—He’s fifteen—drank hygrogen peroxide tonight. Teenagers.:-) For those of you that know him he’s not usually . . . maybe I should stop now.

It’s Saturday. For a family in food service, it’s more like week-highlight than weekend. All except for the last member of the Unemployed Sibling’s Club, so he was home alone all day. Apparently, to piece the story together after the fact, he got busy working on things around the house and forgot to eat or drink anything except for a bowl of cereal this morning. I’ve done it before, and it won’t kill you, except that when his friends came to pick him up for band practice tonight, he got a bee in his bonnet and decided to race their car. Why, I don’t know—he’s a boy, and he’s fifteen. Enough said. Well, at the end of the race he was feeling a fair bit sick to his stomache from excercizing that hard on an empty stomache and without fluids, so the mother of the family picked up the nearest water bottle in their car and said, “Here, drink this.” Well, apparently one of her three teenage boys had filled it with hygrogen peroxide (no idea how to spell that) for sports cuts. My brother ended up throwing his guts up.

He has thoroughly enjoyed having my sister and I tag-team babying him and making sure he eats and drinks all night to counteract the poisoning of his system. It’s almost as good as the time my oldest brother got “TBS” mixed up with “TSP” when he was taking Benadryl and overdosed. Teenaged boys . . . Poison Control is a wonderful thing.

The moral to this story, as observed by my other younger brother—don’t drink hygrogen peroxide.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Last Tuesday I’d had a hard day at work. Not one of those days with fireworks and explosions, more the slow steady drip of dissallusionment as “little things” started to pile up. About a month earlier, someone had stolen a tip from me, and I had no way of finding out who. A few days before, I had noticed someone had ripped a recognition that I’d done a good job on a project off of the wall. And that afternoon my boss had sat down to talk to me about something that wasn’t my fault, but rather a disorganization on her part. I felt like going home, curling up in bed, and not getting up for a long time. When I got home, I felt like I needed a good long drive to shake out all of the wrinkles I felt on the inside. Usually when I feel that craving, I get on the highway between my first home and my second home—my mom’s hole-in-the-wall restaurant, but I had a feeling that drive wasn’t going to be near long enough. Then I had another idea.

You know how we all have things we were always “going” to do? We may have lived in St. Louis and never gone up the arch, or in Houston and never seen the NASA museum. When you grow up halfway between Nowhere and Off the Edge of the Map, there aren’t a lot of noteworthy things to do that anyone would recognize you never did. But for me there was. I’d lived on a farm for the second ten years of my life, a good hour or so away from where I live now. Down one of the long stretches of a country mile there was an old cemetery you could barely see from the road, just a blue doorframe tucked in among the row of orderly trees trimmed back by the city. If you looked hard, you could see the outline of tombstones in the shady clearing under the trees. I had always wanted to stop and see the names, read the dates, wonder who those people had been. But I had never been the one driving, and whomever I’d been riding with on any given day had always had somewhere to be.

Today, I had a license, a car of my own, and a need to drive without a destination. So I changed out of my work uniform into something more comfortable, pulled a stack of computer paper out of the printer, dug around until I found the stash of crayons, and then drove down to the corner to buy three dozen locally grown roses--if I was going to do this, I was going to do this right. Then I got in my car, rolled down the windows, and weaved my way in and out of post-Ike traffic until I got out on the old highway my family had burned up for years, driving to and from the city. The closer I got to Home the more I started scanning the treeline, not remembering precisely where the blue doorframe was, and afraid I would miss it. It was a strange feeling for me. I’m in the middle of six kids, so the idea of doing something alone that no one had done before me has always been a sensation I have loved flirting with, however small an experience. Besides, of all of the kids, I have done the least traveling. Between my older siblings and my younger ones, we’ve hit every coast, and even both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, I’ve always been the midland kid for some strange reason. While they’ve been from California to New York to Galveston, Texas: I’ve been to Arkansas . . . but then, so have they.

In recent weeks I have tried to sit on a craving to just start driving and figure out where I’m going when I get there. To drive across country, to see something, but I have had no idea where to go that would feel exciting enough to quench the thirst—or how to pay for the thirst of my gas tank. For now, all I could do was squint along the treeline for the marking of a cemetery full of strangers. Finally I saw it and pulled off to the side of the highway. I gathered up my crayons and paper in one hand, and my bunches of roses in the other. I was alone in the middle of nowhere in a place I’d never been before—it felt so good.

I walked up the steep incline and passed through the blue arch, only to discover that it wasn’t the true entrance into the cemetery. Walking a few more feet I unlatched the gate and stepped in among the stones. I set my bundles down for a moment and stood over the nearest stones. Two, modern-looking, tan, marbletop stones lying flat on the ground. At first I was struck by an imagined request by an anceint man or woman that must have requested, recently, to be buried in the family plot, but then I looked at the date of death for each of them: 1918 and 1948. Then a new possibility struck me. As I glanced around the little plot, reading a few stones with similar dates, but much more weather-beaten—someone must have returned to this old plot to replace the fading stones. These two were surrounded by ancient stones whose words and secrets were fading fast. I reached down to the grass where I’d left them and picked up a sheet of paper and a blue crayon. Holding the paper up to one of the nearest headstones, I began to rub the crayon over it back and forth, and slowly the words started to stand out white against the waxy smear. I saw a name, a set of dates, and an inscription. I continued this down the row of tombstones, making note of the ages at the time of death and any little details I could. Many were young, forties, fifties, sixties. One of the younger men had written below his dates, “Born in Alabama.” I wondered why this was important to be remembered by those that had carved his inscription.

As I moved on to a new row, the ages became even younger, I pushed the weeds, grass, and moist earth away from the base of one, small headstone and discovered a ten day old infant lay beneath, and had for over a hundred years. Moving on the next I read the name “Aline,” discovered by the dates she had only been five years old, and then beneath it lay the inscription faded by time and illuminated by my rubbing, “Darling we miss thee.” Beside her lay a four-year-old boy of nearly a hundred years. They had probably known each other briefly. He had the little poem that had touched me so deeply the day I had gone with my family to my mother’s old family graveyard—“Born on earth. Bloomed in heaven.” Beside him lay another infant, curving over her name--I could only guess had been Ida--were the words, “Gone but not forgotten.” I stood there for a moment more down than before I had made the drive and yet strangely uplifted. Here I was, a young woman who had driven past their resting places, walked the fields where they had once lived, grown up alongside them, returning fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years after their deaths to remember them—Gone but not forgotten.

The last one on the end of the line of lost children was another marbel stone in the same fashion of those I had assumed to have been replaced, and I assumed it had been as well. It was small, about the size of both of my feet side by side, I guessed. It bore no name, no date, no inscription. One simple word—Daddy. Why? I yerned for some reason, some answer, some explanation, but the very lack of one made it beautiful, intimate—made me envious. Someday when I bury my father, I won’t call him daddy. I don’t call him daddy now. Who knows how long it will have been since I spoke to him last or he spoke to me. I assume I’ll be contacted, but where from?

I looked up. I had missed two towering headstones off in the corner of the graveyard. I knelt down beside the first. I had to use my crayons for this one. “Clemma Dean Kimler,” I read . . . she had died just before her twelth birthday. Beneath her dates, like a few of the children, she had a slightly varied form of the born and bloomed verse. I sat in silent respect for her. Remembering that I had been her age when modern research had saved my life with the insulin injection. What if undiagnosed diabetes had been what cut her life short?

The tombstone beside her was by far the most intricate of any I had seen. It was curved on top of a square base, but that wasn’t what struck me so much as the intricate and almost completely faded carvings almost filling the top of the curve. I did a rubbing to find lacy scrollwork surrounding a hand pointing upward as if to heaven. Beneath it in better defined cut stone was the name “Daisy” and then a recognition for the husband that had burried her. Beneath it near the base of the stone were rough ridges that I recognized had once been clearer words. I worked hard with corners of pre-used paper (I didn’t have any more) to get the jist of what was written there. Something about a happy spirit and a pure heart. She had been twenty two years old, only months older than me. I felt a strong connection to this woman, the creativity of the tombstone, the words of love written about her—she had been my age.
I got up and unbound the roses from their newspaper trappings and walked the graveyard once more, placing roses at the graves. I had wished so much I’d had enough to place one at every grave—even the ones whose stones had been so beaten by time there was nothing but a worn, broken rock marking the fact that someone lay beneath it, but I didn’t. The sheer wonder of it all thrilled me. The stories that I could only guess at, the fact that I would never know these people, and more quieting still—that they would never know me, the strange girl that walked among them now, decorating their graves. It made me wonder if anyone would ever do that when I was gone and everything about my personality had been lost by the world, perhaps by everyone—completely forgotten. What of the people who didn’t even have any words on their headstones, just inicials or nothing at all. I was still here wondering. The thought of that comforted me. I wondered who the children had bloomed to be. The parents that had lived their whole lives without them, seeing them again for the first time, fifty, sixty, seventy years later as another child, perhaps fifty or sixty years old themselves, buried and morned them. I wondered. I wondered. They were long gone but not forgotten.