Over And Over
The older I grow, the quieter I get. Silence brings with it some benefits, but one often unpleasant side effect: a constant and sometimes clamoring inner dialogue.
My reading and experience tells me that the interior conversation of most men my age centers mainly around a sense of time slipping away, a sense of loss, a sense of regret for opportunities missed and chances squandered, a sense that they have spent a lifetime attempting to build a legacy, only to realize near retirement age that their legacy is carved in sand with a windstorm approaching.
But this is not what my mind chatters about. I am consumed with thoughts of the eternal, of the transcendent, of God. Perhaps it’s because I know that I am growing closer to my post-life encounter with Him that my thoughts go to Him and to His ways so frequently in the course of my waking hours. I’ve heard that much can be deduced about a man by examining what he thinks about when he is free to think about anything at all. My free thoughts inexorably drift to the maddening eternal questions. Who am I? Why am I here? For how long? What comes after?
And another one: does He hear me?
Some years ago, I knew for a brief period a troubled young man, a pleasant, gentle soul who hung himself in his bedroom one weekend. My wife and I attended his funeral, and I spoke to his mother and tried to tell her how fond I was of her son.
She was a cried-out husk, all nerves and icy skin, and she held onto my hand with both of hers as she told me some details about her son’s death. She and I had never met before, but she felt a need to tell me some things while we stood next to the box containing the cosmeticized remains of her only son.
She told me of finding her boy’s body, hanging in the bedroom where he had fashioned a noose and attached it to the frame of the top bunk bed there; though in his late twenties, he apparently still lived with his mother and slept in the room in which he grew up.
His mother told me that when she found him, he had a song playing on a loop on his iPod, attached to speakers. I cannot recall the name of the musician, but I do clearly remember her telling me that the lyric of the song, repeating endlessly, was “Help me, Jesus….help me, Jesus….help me, Jesus….”
She peered into me through wet lashes and broken hopes, and she said, “I think he was asking Jesus to help him not kill himself. I don’t think he wanted to do this. I think he was scared. I think he was hoping that Jesus or God would stop him. I think he was waiting for God to rescue him. But God didn’t. So my baby hung himself.”
I have never forgotten her son, and I will never forget her anguish. Her anguish–you must understand this — became mine at the moment she shared it with me. It is inside me even now.
Why didn’t God stop her son? Why didn’t He save Him? We are told that God answers prayer, that He wants the good for us, that He hates death and killing, that He’s always there for us if we call on Him. How does a grieving mother, sobbing as she looks at the body of the baby she bore, reconcile the glib Sunday-morning words with the reality of the son who will never again in this life speak to her or hug her or eat breakfast with her?
The image of this young man with a cord around his neck, listening to a song like a holy chant, begging the God he was taught to believe in, asking to be stopped, to be saved, to be the Isaac in this Abraham play, and thinking of him finally weeping and saying to himself, “I guess He’s not listening,” and taking that final step into darkness…..the image drives nails of pain into me, and I cannot pull them out, not with any hammer.
I have fewer days ahead of me than I have behind me. As I approach my own time of leaving, I ask myself if I am heard. If I matter. If my prayers and pleas land on loving, listening ears. And I remember this young man in all his tragedy and his lonesomeness in that room with his childhood things, and I wonder if there will ever be any resolution, any firm answer, any settled moment?
I do not know. I do not know.
~ S.K. Orr