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ОглавлениеBefore Our World Was Shattered:
Two E-Mails from Pete
November 21, 1997
Dad—
Yesterday I got a call from my friend in Birmingham. He has a pretty good job opening that he would like me to come and check out. (This would be a pay increase of about $45,000 per year—an unbelievable thought to me). He would like Linda and I to come on 12/5. I am going to talk with him on this Saturday a.m. for more precise info.
Can you and Mom come down to stay with Chelsey that weekend?
By the way, are you coming down over Thanksgiving? Would you be staying here then?
I think I told you that I stopped in to see grand-father. You are very correct—he does seem to be declining rapidly. I am not sure that he knew my name. Pretty sad . . .
Pete
November 22, 1997 (in response to an e-mail from me)
Hi Dad—
Boy, a lot of thinking to do.
I think of the huge salary increase as a rainy day thing and as offering the possibility for early retirement—at least early retirement from the HAVE TO WORK ALL THE TIME standpoint. And also, “Gee, it would be nice to have Chelsey in college comfortably without a big mortgage,” so that if I want to work part time I can do that.
Tenure is a big question. But one thing I can negotiate is stock options. If we get bought the stock price increases fairly substantially. So I can get one of the “golden parachute” type of deals. I fully expect that to occur in 4 to 7 years.
Then there’s the matter of getting back to the NW. That is my biggest fear—having a tough time moving back. I really enjoy our proximity to the mountains, the coast, Bend, etc., and we have close friendships here. And it is tough to leave a good job that is going well.
And the toughest part of all is moving away from the family network. Even though we may go a month between visits, it is really tough to leave Tim and Sarah, and you and mom so far away. And Chelsey loves her cousins.
If we go, the bank would purchase our home and pay for moving, so there are no costs to the move.
The best part of the job we are thinking about is that it is a great senior level position in a company that is 10 times my bank’s current size—plus the perfect job. If I could choose a job, this would be it.
So it is a lot to think about.
I don’t know yet when we will go for the interview, but I will talk with you as soon as I know. Thanks for the thoughts and prayers.
Pete
From the Order of Service for Peter Karl Mayer, April 11, 1998
Hillsdale Community United Church of Christ, Portland, Oregon
Peter Karl Mayer was born to Donald and Lynnea Mayer on May 15, 1960, in Mexico, Missouri. He attended elementary school and three years of high school in St. Louis, where he played percussion with his brother Tim, pianist, in the high school jazz band. He graduated from high school and from Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois where he led the University Marching Drummers.
Beginning in high school, Peter worked for the First National Bank in Dekalb until moving to Portland, Oregon, in 1985, to continue his career in banking. Peter’s brother Tim, and Tim’s wife, Susan, had already moved to Portland. His sister Sarah followed after graduating from Iowa State University.
With their three offspring in Portland, Don and Lynnea answered a call to Eagle Harbor Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington, joining their children in the Northwest.
Peter met Linda Lacey while she and Peter worked in the same building. They were married April 30, 1988, at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Portland, with Peter’s father presiding. Their daughter, Chelsey, was born January 9, 1993.
While working consecutively with the Oregon Bank, the Bank of America, and Pacific One Bank, Peter with Linda was involved with many volunteer services. Peter served on the Board of Habitat for Humanity in Portland.
At the time of his death, Peter was beginning a new position as Senior Vice President with the Compass Bank in Birmingham, Alabama.
Boating, skiing, volleyball, golf, and fine woodworking projects were among Pete’s many enthusiasms. Above all, Peter was enthusiastic about people and life.
Peter was killed in a one-car accident Sunday evening, April 5, in Birmingham, at the age of thirty-seven.
Peter’s brother Tim played three pieces during the service: Summertime, St. Louis Blues, and Margaritaville. His sister, Sarah Skutt, read three scriptures: Psalm 23, Isaiah 61:1–4, and Romans 8:31–39. The Reverend Jim Halfaker, a long-time friend and colleague of Don and Lynnea, presided at the service, and read this letter from Don addressed to Peter.
Dear Peter,
I am writing this on Wednesday afternoon, April 8, as a draft for something which might be read at your Memorial Service. I do not want to be doing this. I have always liked writing about you. I’ve had nearly forty years of writing for memorial services and I’m good at it. But, as Jim Halfaker said to me a couple of days ago, “Its just for the wrong person, isn’t it.”
He’s right: fine memorial service but for the wrong person.
Tim gave us the news, you know. I fumbled for the phone in the dark bedroom, snorting about middle of the night wrong numbers, but then Tim got right to it, with wordsounds forever chiseled deep into my soul:
“. . . very, very bad news. Peter was killed tonight . . .”
When we stopped for gas about 3 a.m. on the way from Bainbridge Island to your place in Portland, I doubled over with the convulsive sobs which go on and on whenever the reality of your death penetrates my protective denial. Your Mom held me with I suppose the same comforting tenderness with which she held you when you were little and frightened. My vocalized sobs were saying, “I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want . . .” The little child in me as well as the mature adult does not want your death, Peter.
Dammit Peter, why didn’t you wear that seat belt?!
You know, of course, that ever since the news got around we’ve had practically a continuous party at your house. It is odd to call it a party because whenever somebody arrives we are convulsed with sobs all over again. But then we start talking about you, and pretty soon, we are convulsed with laughter. Same stomach muscles involved, I’ve noticed. And we are going to party again right after this service and again for you and Linda’s 10th anniversary and again for your 38th B.D. I am telling you this because I know how much you love parties and you are going to miss all this. Serves you right. But we’ve got to party because you are missing, and we need to throw all the bright resources we can martial against the dark powers of death to which your death has left us so vulnerable.
Earlier today, mom and I saw your body. It was the first time we’d seen your body since that wonderful family weekend you arranged for us at Sun River. My favorite image of your body from that weekend is of you and Chelsey coming down the slope at Mt. Bachelor, you holding your ski pole out as a tow bar for Chelsey. It never entered my mind that I would ever see your body when you were not in it. Your body looks pretty good, considering. Mom remarked that you had become more bald than we had previously noticed. I thought you looked a little older. But it was unquestionably your body because it had your particular smile, that smile you always had when you knew something. Naturally, there are all kinds of opinions going around about why you are smiling, some of which are crude, rude, and even lewd. But as soon as I got back to your house I knew why you were smiling: there was your brother Tim, shirt off, sweating profusely, worn out with mowing your lawn.
Until then, of course, given my clergy background, I had a more theological reason for your smile.
For example, I could imagine you saying, “Dad, you remember how often you pointed out that some people criticized Jesus for being such a party-giver? And that time when the wine ran out at the wedding party and Jesus changed the bath water into the best wine ever? Well, Dad, wait till you see what a party Jesus throws here for us newcomers!”
From my Christian faith perspective, I am assuming that you are aware of all that is going on with us, Peter. I figure I’d best make all the use of the faith that I can. So I suspend all my disbelief, and assume that you are present with all of us with your characteristic warm, gentle, robust love. But dammit, Peter, you are such an absent presence.
You absence is an awful black hole which keeps sucking at your presence in our lives, so that we must keep talking about you, and holding to each other.
I never realized before this week how much you and Tim and Sarah are virtual Siamese triplets joined hip and shoulder, and now you are torn out of the middle. Dammit Peter, we had three children, and we loved it that way. And you and Linda having become one, and Chelsey—God, Peter, what gaping emptiness you’ve left all over the place.
So in your absence, we keep telling stories about your presence. Mom was just remembering the time in St. Louis, that Sunday morning, when I was already at church, and as usual Mom was going through the hectic work of getting you three out the door and you saw the cat about to escape and you helpfully slammed the door, unfortunately not quite quickly enough to avoid nearly amputating his tail. And I got this frantic phone call from Mom describing our bloody Siamese cat orbiting our living room at somewhere near the ceiling level and could I manage to come home and do something about it?
And I remember that weekend in the Ozarks, when you were about 12, just around this time of the year, the warm night air perfumed with spring, frogs croaking down at the creek, campfire glowing near our tent, and I will never forget the way you said, “Wow, Dad, this is really neat!” smiling with surprised delight at how unimaginably good the time was. It is like the smile which your body is wearing now, Peter, perhaps because you have once again discovered an unimaginably good time.
I’ve said it thousands of times, but this time I’m asking it for us: “Now to the One who by his power at work among us is able to do far more than we ever dare to ask, or even imagine . . .” We are daring to ask God for all the love God can pour out for us. We need it. And we need each other so much. Of course, we believe that you are okay now. But we worry about the rest of us—because we loved you so much. You loved us greatly too, in ways which were only yours Peter. There was no love like it ever before nor will there ever be another love like it, because nobody else will ever be you among us.
Fortunately, we believe that God knows what it feels like for us to lose you, God knows how much we disbelieve that we can get through it all without you. We trust that God understands how it is with us. God went through his own holy week once and surely God hurts for our hurt. But after the horror of good Fridays, and the black emptiness of those Saturdays, there are Easter Sundays. We trust that in time, with the comfort of God’s compassionate, life-giving spirit, we will come to know about Easter more fully than ever before.
We trust you already know about Easter, Peter, more fully, personally, and wonderfully than you had ever imagined. And maybe that is another reason for your smile.
Unbelievable Absence
April 16, morning
Dear Peter,
As I write the words “Dear Peter” I find myself shaking my head. I discover myself doing that a lot, while I’m sitting, walking, and driving, quite without being aware of it at the time. I suppose that means that I still can’t believe that you are gone, forever, irrevocably out of our lives, and that you have been out, gone, for eleven days. I can’t take it in. I suppose I shake my head because I don’t want to take it in.
When we drove away from the church Saturday morning, having brought pictures of you and the stone oil lamp and the candle, I saw the hearse bringing your body up Capitol Highway. It was quite a jolt. Later, I thought your body looked less like you than it did when Mom and I saw it on Wednesday. But it certainly looked enough like you to set Chelsey and all the rest of us into long, heavy, wailing sobs.
Today, it seems unreal all over again. Less real than last week. Perhaps that’s why the sobs which convulse me have not happened for a while. This is now more of a shadowed time, a time when we experience everything from the shadow of your death.
But not all the time, Pete. Sometimes we just seem to forget that your death has happened. The world goes on doing its daily stuff and we go on doing it with the world which does not seem to know that the world has been irrevocably changed. Better to say, the world ended just after ll p.m., April 5 and a new world began so quickly that a lot of the world never noticed. But there are some in that world who notice. A letter came today addressed to “the estate of Peter Mayer.”
All of us wish the change were revocable, that the world had not ended. It was a much happier world with you in it, Pete. How often in our fantasies we wish you had had your seatbelt buckled and airbag deployed, allowing you miraculously to escape death.
Chelsey’s wish is expressed differently: “Isn’t God strong enough to bring my daddy back to life?” It’s a question which is far more significant and logical for the season than questions about the Easter bunny. God brought Jesus back, why not Daddy?
The shadow of your death, Peter, falls on everything and often we are angry about it. Sarah sheds tears of rage about the now shadowed joy in the birth of little Peter, because you are not here to hold your namesake.
And what a party we planned to have at Sarah and Jim’s new house, celebrating the new place for them plus your move to your new home in Birmingham. You know, not one of us wanted you to go in the first place, but you converted us all with your excitement about it. We will still celebrate at Sarah and Jim’s new place but it will be a shadowed celebration.
We all went with Tim and Sue on Easter Sunday afternoon to see the new bed and bath addition to their house. Tim expressed the mood for all of us: “Now we really feel the anger—all the parties are over.” Right. And we are left with your deadness, Peter.
Having said that, it was an unbelievable party after your memorial service. You really missed a good one, Pete! It was wonderful for Mom and me to meet and talk with a multitude of your friends. People came down from Bainbridge Island. And two of your best friends from your high school days traveled way across the country—how wonderful to see Kathy and Lisa again!
You must have been a great encourager, Peter. We keep hearing personal testimonies about that. “I’d never be doing such and such if Pete had not got me going with it.” We love it that you were so loved. Because you had a love affair going with the world, there is no sting in your death, no venom. That’s not to say we are not angry about you leaving us the way you did. There is a sting in your abrupt forever gone-ness.
Since the big party, it’s been getting more and more quiet. Few visits, calls. People leaving one by one. I don’t feel it so much now as at some other times, but God, I already miss you Peter. Even if I can’t believe you are forever gone.
Love, Dad
Auto Reliquary
April 16, later in the day
Dear Peter,
The auto insurance agent in Birmingham called this morning. Paperwork is slow there because they are loaded with claims from the tornadoes. But they will send your stuff back, and the police report. With pictures, I think he said.
He said you had a lot of stuff in your car. Golf clubs, etc. It’s odd: it did not occur to me that you would have a lot of stuff with you in the car that they would send back. It’s like your stuff survived but you didn’t.
As I said before, Pete, each of us at different times gets pretty steamed about your carelessness. We sometimes felt anyway that you didn’t pay enough attention to family stuff.
As Tim said you’d go out of your way to help any family person or friend in need—as long as we were up on your screen. But if we dropped off . . . (I think he was remembering the time you were supposed to pick up Miles for the weekend and completely forgot.) So sometimes we thought your peripheral vision was a little limited. We would have loved to have had you and Linda along on Maui last spring. But you’d just changed jobs, and geez, you needed to make your own decisions. Nobody else was in your shoes. But along with all your caring and enthusiasm for people, we wish you could have realized how critical your self-care, self-protection was for all that—so you would have habitually, unthinkingly always fastened your seatbelt. As it is, Linda above all feels cheated out of the future. Helluva deal.
And yet when we saw your body on Saturday Mom and I noticed your smile had faded. I am thinking more and more that you too are grieving for having left us, and feeling guilty about your carelessness—if indeed it was a matter of carelessness, we really don’t know.
I had this vivid image of you the other night, looking so sad.
So we imagine you too being held, hugged, patted, and comforted, Peter, encouraged just as you were such an encourager to everybody.
God shall wipe away all tears. Yours and ours.
Love, Dad
Comforting the Impoverished
April 16, still later
Dear Peter,
Jesus talks about the poor man who after a hard life on earth is comforted in the bosom of Abraham in heaven. You were certainly not having a hard life, Pete. But there can be no greater poverty than yours now, Peter, having lost seemingly forever all family and friends.
Our incredulity about your death has almost been matched by an unbelievable outpouring of comforting love and prayers. I suppose we are now experiencing what Jesus said would be true: the strange unworldly blessedness of those who grieve: a seemingly limitless compassion, a tenderness which seeks to tend to our wounds, a kindness (something like I remember Linda speaking of your kindness so unique in her experience,) a gentleness which patiently continues to soothe and heal.
We love you so much, Peter. We trust that such comforting is for you as well.
Love, Dad
Becoming Acquainted with Deadness
Tuesday, April 21
Dear Peter,
I find myself thinking a lot about your deadness. I guess I have never experienced dead before, at least not like you are dead. I find your sudden deadness prompts expletives from me like “crazy,” “stupid,” “God, so dumb.” One moment you were alive, the next you were dead. Thud. Dead. Bonk. Dead. Like swatting a mosquito. Whine. Slap. Dead. A click of a switch. Light. Dark. Alive. Dead. Crack of a limb. Shatter of glass. There. Gone. Like the snap of a seat belt. Alive. Dead. And none of us were there. We weren’t even close. We didn’t even know. Nobody knew. Alive. Snap. Dead. Just like that.
It is so sudden, Peter, so final, that today I can’t take it in. I hardly feel it at all today.
That is one reason I am writing to you. I am trying to reach down into the elusive reality of your death. It is so hard to catch and hold the permanent presence of your forever absence from us.
You’ve been out of our house anyway for twelve or fifteen years. For ten years you’ve been with Linda. So your absence for me is an absence of your potential presence, your anticipated presence, vacations, visits, email, phone, promised times, assumed times, dreamed of times, times imagined, fantasized. On screen. Delete. Like the picture frame Mom borrowed for the memorial display to hold that candid shot of you when you were about 11—you were in it and now it’s empty again.
But today, forgive me Peter, I don’t feel so much saddened as bewildered, a head shaking don’t get it, can’t get it.
Love, Dad
Shadowed
Tuesday, April 21, later
Dear Pete,
I assume you know that we did gather at Jim and Sarah’s new house Sunday night. Susan, Tim, Miles and Erin, and Linda and Chelsey. The kids had a ball exploring the new territory. We did celebrate my birthday, but it was a shadowed celebration. We all knew we had expected it to be combined b.d., new house, and farewell celebration for you and Linda. We probably would have had some tears about that anticipated absence from Portland, an absence which would have had you wonderfully present in Birmingham, however.
Instead Linda reported she had found an apartment in Lake Oswego, indoor and outdoor pools for Chelsey, great bike riding areas. We rejoiced. And as you know, we cried. Too much, Pete: an apartment for two instead of a spacious new home for three.
Monday we went to the zoo. Mom and I, Linda and Chelsey, Sarah, Hannah, and Peter. We bought grandparent passes. We expect we will be here more often. They are good for all the kids, and at other zoos too. Guess which one tops the list? You got it—Birmingham. Damn.
It was a beautiful day, warmest so far this year. At lunch, Hannah and Chelsey ran barefoot in that expanse of green grass in front of the stage. They were a beautiful sight—did you see them? Splendid as it was, Mom and I held Linda and told her how deeply we’d rather have been at the airport saying good-bye to the three of you, with the beauty of your flying-off day supporting our hope, our appeal for the three of you someday returning to the Northwest.
Linda and Chelsey came out to Sarah and Jim’s for dinner, bringing a ham that one of the comforters had brought. Again it was good to be together. We want so much now to be together. But it was a shadowed time. The always present shadow of your absence, Peter.
Love, Dad
Sudden Accidental Death
April 21,Tuesday, still later
Dear Peter,
Linda showed us a beautiful letter she received from one of the persons who worked for you those two brief months in Birmingham. It contributed to my growing appreciation of your work, Peter. I always knew you did well; I didn’t have much understanding of why. Apparently in addition to your business wisdom, you were a very warm, loving human being to the persons with whom you worked. “Pete was interested in us as persons, not just workers,” the letter said.
It occurs to me that you must have been the very opposite of my stereotyped image of a bottom-line-driven corporate exec. I have always believed that in the corporate world, justice and human concern could never be adequately legislated, but are finally dependent upon the grace of God, and the character—I would say Christian character—of people in policy-making and person-relating positions. It had simply not occurred to me just how much you lived a kind of calling which you may never have verbalized—a calling as a Christian businessman.
I hesitate to use the term “Christian” because for the last couple of decades it has come to be associated with attitudes which are narrow, bigoted, judgmental, and distrustful of the world. You certainly were the opposite of that. Okay, Pete, I promise I will continue to try to reclaim the term for persons such as yourself.
Well, Peter, the report of your accident should be arriving today or tomorrow. I hope it comes before I take off to my meeting in Cleveland. I want to see the photos, and read what the police said about your sudden accidental death. I suspect that deep in me somewhere there is a large lively mass of grief which needs to be expressed. More sobs to come, I think. Some laughs too, I hope. And, I am sure, lots of close tender moments with Chelsey and Linda, and Mom. And your siblings. And, I guess, close to you too, Pete.
Seeing evidence of your last moments may help me once again to touch and hold for a while the permanent reality of your crazy, instant, deadness.
Alive. Snap. Dead.
Love, Dad
Lots of Memos, but Never Again Close
Thursday, April 23,in flight, Portland to Seattle
Dear Peter,
So here I am on an AirWest express flying through the rain from Portland to Seattle. From there I’ll catch the flight to Cleveland for the meeting of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries. Of course I had planned to begin the flight in Seattle. But we’ve still been in Portland dealing with the aftermath of your death. This little extra leg is one of a million things we never expected to be doing, Pete. Because we never expected you to be dead.
It’s raining and we just climbed above a cloud layer. Once upon a century this would have been the realm where we would have expected to encounter you. Our picture of the cosmos is not so simple now. So where are you, Peter?
You have been dead now for eighteen days. For the first time this morning I counted the days. Only eighteen. My God it seems like months. Except often it doesn’t seem at all like you could possibly be dead already. Yesterday was my 66th birthday, as you know. Often in years past, I recognized that when they hit their seventh decade, our friends begin to die more frequently. I don’t need to tell you, Pete, that I never expected you would be dead before me.
My birthday celebration was shadowed as is everything else. The little ones—Hannah, Miles, and usually Chelsey—escape the shadow. Miles had wrapped a present for me, announcing with proud anticipation as he offered it, “It’s a joke, Grandpa!” It was. After two years of my laying teasing claim to it, he presented me with his blanket. When he saw how funny that was for everybody, he immediately took the box back and presented one at a time another half dozen presents, each of which fit his new category of “joke.”
Hannah also presented me with a gift: a card with a noble photo of a bald eagle and a caption reading, “With the recipient’s capacity for vision, fortitude, and character, who needs hair?” Well said, right Pete?
I recalled and then Sarah remembered the joke of our Indian Guide names. Remember, you were Flying Eagle and I, naturally, was Bald Eagle. We made a drum, remember, Pete? Out of a wooden nail keg covered with inner tube rubber on top, with a neat eagle painted on the side. We were both pretty proud of it.
Sarah and Jim gave me a couple of Segovia CDs, because they had played one the other night and we enjoyed it so much. And Mom remembered how we’d once heard Segovia in concert at the University of Missouri while Mom was expecting you.
That’s the way it is, Pete. Reminders of you all over the place. Even National Public Radio last Saturday featured a guy from Todd, NC, talking about Bone Sucking Sauce, the great stuff we brought you from that old general store. You loved it and we loved the way you loved it.
This morning is one of those times when I am really sad. Missing you. Saddened that the promise of your life with us was so abruptly canceled.
I seem to be more sad about you when I am alone. Two rows in front of me are three guys in business suits talking enthusiastically about some venture in fifty million dollar increments. It is so easy for me to see the trio become a quartet with your presence. From the back, one of the guys even looks like you. But from the front, you’ll be glad to know that I think you were a lot better looking. I probably would never have said that out loud to you when you were alive, unless I would have qualified it by saying I’d forgotten to clean my glasses.
Geez Pete, when I think of never seeing your face again—Damn!
I wish I could have observed you in your working world. As we get more and more testimony about your way of working, I see more clearly how delighted people were to find a person such as yourself at a senior v-p. level. And I understand why they wanted you at that level. Maybe Mom and I will yet make a pilgrimage to Birmingham sometime before the memory of you there fades. One of the women who wrote of you so warmly also reported that you knew exactly how many days you had been away from Linda and Chelsey and how many days it would be before you went back to Portland and brought them to Birmingham. As you probably know, you only had fifteen days to go when you hit the tree. God, so close. And now, never again close.
Love, Dad
All Sad
Thursday, April 23, in flight, later
Dear Peter,
Fred, the human resources guy from Compass Bank, was so proud to report that he had recruited you twice, once for Bank of America, and again for Compass Bank. He explained how he had told people in Birmingham that you were really happy in Portland with your work, family, and the Northwest and that they would really need to up the ante to get you away. So, as Tim says, they kept throwing more money at you. In light of what happened, Fred has no idea how much he sounds like the serpent in the Garden, or the boa in The Jungle Book: “Trusssssssst me,” and “you will not die.”
But the Garden tells of the inescapable risks of being fully human. And there were risks you and I talked about, Pete, in this opportunity for you to be more fully you. We just never thought about your habitual risk in not buckling your seatbelt, dammit. There is still a lot of anger here, Peter, about you not buckling down for your family responsibilities—like Sarah’s tear-filled rage because your death has shadowed the joy of little Peter’s birth.
The other night, in the middle of the night when visualizations of you are particularly vivid, you looked so sad. A kind of guilty sadness, I thought. God, Peter, we may be really pissed at you for not using the seatbelt, but you know we love you, Pete. We did and we still do. You know we forgive you. We don’t want you to be sad. It hurts again to think of you as sad, just like I suppose it hurts you now to see us so sad. God must be sad for all of us.
Talk with you later, Pete.
Love, Dad
Love Letters from Dad
April 23, SeaTac Airport
Dear Peter,
As you can see (can’t you?) my breakfast croissant has cooled because I have been writing, so absorbed am I in the process of crafting words to deal with this multi-multi-faceted reality of your deadness, Pete. It is apparent that in the times when I am alone with your absence, I’d rather write to you than eat. But this sandwich cost five bucks and its getting cold!
So why do I want so much to write? All day long and in bed too, I am always thinking of what I want to write to you. Perhaps filling this yellow tablet with my not long legible scrawl is a careful or cautious way of releasing some of the frightening pressure from my grief-filled heart. I know God heals the broken hearted but I resist the breaking.
It’s like I used to say about bread in communion: “Notice how the bread resists the breaking.”
Perhaps my writing to you is my way of taking control of my grieving, escaping the breaking, avoiding the awe-filled power of those deep sobs. I know that the tears and the wailing are good for us. I just don’t want the pain that produces them.
Forgive me, Pete, forgive us for the ways we try to escape your death. We love you so, and we still do not want your irrevocable, unending, never again with us, absence.
Love, Dad
Window Pain
April 23, in flight
Dear Peter,
The tears are here. I’m trying to hide them. I’m sitting next to a young mom with an eight-month-old boy. Cute. Both mom and boy. Warm exchange of information. “I have five grandchildren.” “Yes, all in Portland.” “Yes, how good they are all nearby.”
She didn’t ask and I didn’t say how many children I have living in Portland. And I try to avoid revealing the thought of how much l ache to have had four grandchildren in Portland plus one just moved to Birmingham.
And the tears just started to flow. They slid down my cheeks like the occasional raindrop slides down the windowpane eight inches away. I turned toward it so that the young mom next to me will not see and will not ask and I will not need to explain. Explain pain. Pane. My Kleenex is wet, frayed, balled. Bawled.
I don’t want her to see me and ask for the story. For a young mom, your death is a horror story, a too easily imagined impossible possibility. I don’t want her to think about it. So I hide. I’ll hide for a while in theology, huh Pete, that long proven useful means of avoiding life. Okay, I am getting a little sarcastic.
There is nothing quite so powerful as your death, Peter, to force us to face our theology.
Take Linda for example. The other night, as you may have noticed, she said she was angry at God. “Of all people, why Peter?” she complains. I deeply appreciate her complaint, but I’m not afflicted with that question. I guess I noticed long ago that there are no exemptions granted good hearts like you, Pete, to the general laws of gravity and motion, and the damage likely to occur to any head caught between an irresistible force and an immovable object. I think you must have unwittingly assumed an exemption based on your thriving, hearty, lusty, raucous love for God’s gift of life. When Linda or anybody else asks, “Why Peter?” I say, because you didn’t buckle your seat belt.
Yes, I know I’ve often pointed out to others that about half the psalms are complaints to God about God’s mismanagement of fairness issues. I love the passionate, candid anger of those complaints. A long time ago when I heard Walt Brueggemann talk about Ps. 35, my anger-stress induced hemorrhoids disappeared. Right, Pete, so much for the healing power of the Word!
But with your death, I am so convinced that God grieves with us that complaint is not in me. Except toward you—and that too is fading, Peter, as I feel you are grieving as well. We love you Pete. We grieve with you as well as for you.
Love, Dad
God Does Not Take
April 23, in flight, later
Dear Peter,
I’m still taking refuge in theology. Fortunately only a couple of people have suggested that God “took” you, Pete. I hope nobody uses that kind of profanity around Chelsey.
Of course I know people who say such things mean to be kind. But what blasphemy. God as kidnapper. For what? To take you hostage in order to teach us a lesson, demand a submissive faith, only then to renege on the contract to give you back?
Yes, I can see death as God’s servant. Years ago James Weldon Johnson’s preacher poet spoke eloquently of that. When the suffering is too much, God calls Servant Death.
But that’s different from the notion of God taking you for some divinely foreseen, inscrutable purpose. This is not to say, thank God, that God does not invite us to find some life-giving values in your death. Fred is not the only one, for example, who is now committed to buckling his seatbelt. I am sure there will be many more much more profound redemptive values in your manner of death—although a life saved from your fate would certainly be a wonderful redemption.
God does not will everything that happens. But I trust that in everything which happens God works with us for life-saving good. Yet for all the redemptive good we may find from your death, I would rather have you alive, Pete.
There is such burden-lifting helpfulness in those opening lines of our United Church of Christ Statement of Faith: “God calls the worlds into being.” God calls, invites, evokes, and creation says “yes” most of the time. But as toddlers, you and Tim and Sarah too illustrated the truth Hosea had noticed: “When Israel was a child, I loved him. Out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them the more they went from me.”
So God is like a good parent—like you were to Chelsey, Pete. God calls, cajoles, encourages, warns, affirms—but does not coerce. Sarah said it so well the other night: “God does not intervene; God invites. Invites all drivers to wear seatbelts, especially husbands and fathers.”
God knows we say no to God a lot. Remember that Jacques Barosin portrait of Jesus Mom gave me, which I always had hanging in my office? A picture of Jesus with tears in his eyes, looking out over the city of Jerusalem. When I get home, I’ll look at it again.
Love, Dad
Recalling Then, Recognizing Now
April 23, later, in flight
Dear Peter,
I am still on the plane. The captain just pointed out Glacier Park off to our left.
Remember that trip? You and Tim playing around the portable bear trap cage in back of our campsite? And remember how on the way there, in some campground in Wyoming, you characteristically made friends with a couple camping in a big powerboat they were towing to Lake MacDonald? And sure enough, thanks to you we spent a marvelous day on their boat, with each of you kids taking a turn at the wheel. It was such a great time that after about six beers, the boat owner and I each finally confessed to our occupations: me, clergy, he labor-union organizer. Neither of us had wanted the stereotypes of those jobs to spoil the day. Maybe your love of power boating came from that time, Pete.
