The Shrapnel I Carry

For O.R.

I buried my first friend in a field beside our house when I was four.

Her name was Arf-Arf. She was the family dog. I dug the hole myself, or I helped, or someone let me feel like I did — memory at that age is generous — and before we covered her back over I placed a small microphone into the grave with her. I wanted her to be able to talk to God better. (And no, I’ve never used her name as a security-question answer. Anywhere.)

I laugh about it now, and I think God laughs with me. But I have thought about that little boy a lot in the years since. A child who had never heard of justification by faith, who could not have told you what sola scriptura meant, who could not even spell eschatology — that boy already believed two things a lot of grown men have to learn back to: that his friend was still somewhere, and that God was on the other end of the line, listening.

The microphone was the theology of the whole rest of my life, buried in a field in Mississippi, forty-some years ago. I just didn’t know it yet.

A living-room wake

A year or two after Arf-Arf, my great-grandmother died at ninety-six. Her wake was in her daughter’s — my grandmother’s — living room. That is what people did then, in that part of the world. You did not send the body away. You brought it home and sat with it for a night.

I remember the room more than I remember her. I remember the quiet. I remember the smell of coffee and cigarettes that seemed to hang in every room of that house. I remember that no one seemed afraid, and no one seemed shattered. She had lived a long life. She had gone home. The adults spoke softly, but they spoke, and some of them even laughed a little. There was grief in the room, but it was the shape grief is supposed to be — the shape it takes when a person leaves right on time.

I did not know at five or six that most losses do not arrive on time. I have spent the years since being taught that lesson in installments.

A brother, months from a jersey

My younger brother was going to walk on at Ole Miss as a defensive tackle. He had the body for it. He had the film. He had the tape measure the coaches had already run down him. He had months.

He did not have the miles.

An accident took him before he ever put on that jersey, and the family got the double grief of it: the boy we loved, and the man he was about to become. You do not just bury the person. You bury every version of them that was on its way. The engagement he had not yet made. The wife he had not yet met. The child who was not yet born. The Sunday afternoons in the fall when he would have called us all after a game. All of it went in the ground with him, and it stays there. Time does not fill it back in. Time just walks around it.

A few years later, my stepsister died the same way. Another crash. Another family car turned into a family altar. And the specific horror of a household that has now lost two young people to two roads, in two different chapters, is a horror I do not have language for and would not use it here if I did.

Some families have one of these. Ours had two.

Grape jello

My mother went in for surgery to remove a cancerous lung, and she never really came back out.

The complications came fast. The infection came after that. She was in a coma for two and a half months before her body finally let her go.

The last meal I fed her before the coma took her was grape jello.

I have not been able to eat grape jello since. I do not have to explain why. Any son who has fed his mother a last meal knows why, and any son who has not, God willing, never will.

A folded flag

My stepfather served in the Air Force during Vietnam. When his terminal illness finally finished what it had been doing to him for years, the family asked me to deliver the honors to his oldest son.

I put on my own uniform. I stood at the position I was trained to stand at. I made the folds I was trained to make. I turned, and I walked, and I presented the flag to a man who is not my brother by blood but is my brother by the man we both lost.

I have folded a lot of things in my life. That flag was the heaviest.

His death was, in the strange grammar of long illness, a mercy. That is a word Christians use carefully and I use it here on purpose. When suffering has gone on long enough that the person you love is asking to be released, the release is not a defeat. It is an answer. It is just an answer that costs the family everything.

My father, whose mind went first

Last year, my dad went home.

Alzheimer’s took the mind before Jesus took the man. That is the part of the story a lot of families of Alzheimer’s patients recognize immediately, and if you are one of those families I do not have to say the next sentence. You already lost him once, in pieces, over years. The final loss is a second loss, and it is also a mercy, and it is also the thing your heart has been rehearsing without permission for a long time.

My dad had a son on the other side already. He had a Savior on the other side already. His mind was gone ahead of him, and his heart was gone ahead of him, and by the time his body finally caught up I think he was already halfway home.

I am glad he is home. I am glad he is with my brother. I am glad he is with Jesus.

I miss him most in the silence of my telephone — the one that used to play a ringtone only he had. The Sanford and Son theme. It fit him, for reasons the family understood, and it reminded me of a show he and I used to watch together and laugh at. Nobody else on earth got that ringtone. Nobody else ever will.

A Christmas Eve

We used to have dinner at Chili’s on Christmas Eve. It was our tradition. Then a miscarriage ended it, and I have not eaten at a Chili’s on Christmas Eve since.

That is all I am going to say. Some losses take a tradition with them when they go.

The end of a first marriage

Divorce, like death, is always unexpected. There is no marriage insurance. You cannot underwrite the covenant. And whatever people tell themselves in the aftermath about “seeing the signs” — and some of them are telling the truth — the moment the thing is actually gone, it is gone the same way any dead thing is gone.

They are still around, maybe. You see them at the graduations. You wave at the wedding. But the thing is not there anymore. What was — is dead. And what was is not the same as the person who is still alive across the parking lot.

That is its own kind of grief, and it does not fit inside any of the other categories, and I am not going to pretend it does.

Two nineteen-year-olds

I was nineteen years old in Air Force security-police training when a fellow airman in the training class ahead of mine died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Training accident. Nineteen years old.

He and I were the same age. I have thought about that fact for more than thirty years.

Later, at my first assignment, I was on the recovery detail for two aircraft that came down with pilots inside them — men with wives, with children, with somebody waiting at home. Searching for remains. Marking remains. Standing watch over what was left so the coyotes and vultures and javelina could not get to them before the recovery team could.

That is not a detail I tell often. It is the detail that matters.

I told the target-fixation piece a couple of weeks ago because there was something in that Lieutenant Colonel’s death that would not stop preaching at me. Mostly I do not tell these stories, because they are not mine to spend. I carried the flag. I marked the ground. That was the job.

The job leaves marks anyway.

The uncle’s funeral

I was asked, once, to preside over a family member’s funeral with one condition: leave faith and the Bible out of it.

I did no such thing. I have made no apology since. I would do it again tomorrow.

If you are grieving and you want a memorial that does not name the only thing that actually reaches into a grave, you have a lot of officiants in the yellow pages to choose from. I am not one of them. I do not know how to stand at a casket and lie about what is on the other side of it. I do not know how to comfort a room full of mourners with anything less than the resurrection. If you ask me to preside, you are asking a Christian to preside, and the Christian is going to preach Jesus.

I have led other funerals since. Family and friends. Some were easy — a life well-lived, a homegoing. Some were the other kind. All of them cost something. A minister’s grief is a strange animal, because it is not all his, and yet he carries it out of the sanctuary and into his car and home to his wife anyway. You cannot preside over other people’s losses for very long without accumulating some.

I have accumulated some.

The airplane and the hangar

A favorite uncle promised me an inheritance once. An airplane. A hangar. All I had to do was give him a couple of family burial plots so he and his brother could be laid to rest with the rest of us. Fair trade, I thought. Family for family.

He got the plots.

I got the shaft.

I am not writing this to relitigate a will. I am writing it because the shape of that loss is the shape a lot of readers know and cannot name — the loss of a person who is still alive. The uncle you thought you had. The friend who ghosted. The mentor who used you. The parent who chose a new spouse over their kids. Not every grave is a grave. Some of the deepest cuts come from people whose heart stopped for you long before their body will.

He was still my favorite uncle. That is the part that will not stop hurting.

The shrapnel

Here is what I have learned, having accumulated the above.

You do not get over any of it. Not really. Anyone who tells you they have gotten over the death of their mother is telling you a story about themselves that is not quite true. You do not close a chapter on your brother, or your stepsister, or your dad, or the boy in your training class, or the pilot in the desert, or the person across the parking lot you used to be married to. You do not close those chapters. You learn to live around them, the way a man learns to live around a piece of shrapnel too deep to safely remove.

That is the honest word for it. Shrapnel.

Some of it is small. A phrase, a smell, a song, a Chili’s on the corner. Some of it is large. A dress uniform in a closet. A grave in a field in Mississippi with a microphone in it. A box of grape jello on a shelf you cannot walk past without stopping. You do not remove it. You cannot. Removal would take more of you than the shrapnel does.

You just learn how to walk with it.

And — because this piece would be a lie without saying this out loud — you get help. You go see somebody. You find a counselor, a therapist, a pastor with training, a support group, a psychiatrist if the shrapnel is pressing on something the therapist alone cannot address. You do not tough it out. You do not white-knuckle it. You do not preach it into submission alone at four a.m. with your Bible open and your jaw locked.

I have. I still do. Get help.

Christians of my generation grew up in churches that treated mental health care like a lack of faith, and it is one of the doctrines I have watched a lot of my brothers and sisters lay down over the last decade, and thank God for it. Mental health care is not a substitute for faith. It is one of the ways faith takes care of the body faith lives in.

And then the last thing

Here is what the little boy with the microphone knew that the grown man had to learn back to.

The line is open.

Every grave I have stood over — and I have stood over some — has been a grave with a line running out of it, up through the ceiling of the funeral home, past the ceiling of the sky, into the presence of a God who is listening. My great-grandmother. My brother. My stepsister. My mother. My stepfather. My dad. The airman in my training class. The two pilots in the desert. The child who never made it to Christmas morning. The marriage that ended. The uncle who chose the airplane over me.

All of them.

The line is open. Not because I placed a microphone there. Because Someone else did, two thousand years ago, on a Roman cross, and the microphone He placed is not made of plastic and wire but of scars in wrists and feet and side. He is the microphone. He is the line. He is on the other end of it and He is also the one making sure the signal gets through.

I am not immune. I am not oblivious. I am not over any of it.

I am just a man who has learned, over forty-some years since a little boy buried his dog with a microphone, that eternity is not the absence of loss. It is the presence of the One who bore it first.

The shrapnel stays.