Waiting For The Ram

I didn’t know Terry well, but what I did know of him I liked. He was gentle, good-humored, a careful listener, and had large, expressive eyes that watched the world without cynicism.

I also knew that he was troubled, with a history of admissions to psychiatric wards and rehab facilities. I used to watch him and wonder how one so young could be so weary. Terry always seemed to be fighting to suppress a wince, as if his interior bruises were being palpated by an unseen and uncaring hand.

And so while I was dismayed, I was not very surprised when I learned of his death by suicide. The day I got the news, I sat outside on my lunch break and watched the robins tug worms out of the grass and thought of the last thing Terry had said to me at our last encounter about a month earlier. “You’re an awesome dude, S.K.,” he had said, those big eyes smiling at me under his impressive head of tousled brown hair. He was teasing, but he was sortakinda serious, too.

When Terry’s humble little obituary was published in the local paper the next day, I asked my wife — who had never met Terry — if she would accompany  me to the funeral home. “I just have a feeling that there’s not going to be many people there, and I want to tell his family how special I thought he was.”

We arrived at the funeral home on that sun-washed evening and I was pleased to see more people there than I’d anticipated — at least twenty. We got in line and moved slowly up the center aisle to where Terry’s mother waited next to the open casket. Because I have a deep dislike for open caskets and the funeral industry in general, I kept my eyes on the bier when I was not watching Terry’s mom.

She was an emaciated little wisp who looked as if she’d had a hard life. I recalled Terry telling me that she was the only family he had, and that she’d struggled with demons of her own throughout her life. She was wearing something that would have pleased her son: a large sweatshirt bearing the colors and logo of his favorite college football team. It hung on her frame like a bathrobe. Her eyes flitted around the large room as each mourner stepped up to speak to her, and she had a handkerchief knotted in each hand, and she was trembling hard enough to make her legs vibrate, and she was crying, and she hugged each visitor as they departed.

When we reached Terry’s mother, she looked at us blankly and attempted a little smile, waiting. I introduced myself and my wife, and told her how I’d known Terry. My name meant nothing to her, but she rubbed her eyes with her handkerchief-wrapped knuckles and said how sweet it was that we’d come. I told her that we would pray for her, and I said, “I know this is one of those things that people say out of politeness, but if there’s anything we can do for you, we’re at your service, ma’am.”

Terry’s mother sobbed hard for a moment, wiped her eyes again, and stepped up close to us. “I wish there was something you could do. I wish you could tell me why he died.”

“I wish I could, too, ma’am,” I said.

“He hung himself. Did you know that?”

My wife and I looked at each other and shook our heads. She looked at us, back and forth, and then wiped her eyes again and took a breath.

“He hung himself in his room. I knew he was feeling bad. Just bad about all kindsa stuff. He had been up almost two days, and he was playing music on his stereo. Not too loud, but just nonstop. He was playing stuff by Johnny Cash and some other people, and he came out and got a Mountain Dew and asked me what I was watching on television, and then he went back to his room.

“Not too long before I went to bed, the song he was playing was some kind of loop, where the same part keeps playing over and over. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t say anything to him about it. It wasn’t too loud. I started to go to bed, and I thought I’d see if he wanted anything to eat before I did. I knocked on the door and he didn’t answer, so I knocked again. When he didn’t answer that time, I tried to open the door, but it was locked. I got me a coat-hanger and punched it in the knob and opened the door and that’s — ” She broke off in sobs again.

She gathered herself quickly and went on. “He had hung himself from the top bed. He still had bunk beds in there from when he was a little boy and he was hanging with his knees under him, and I knew he was dead as soon as I saw him. And that song playing on his stereo, it was somebody singing ‘Help me, Jesus, help me, Jesus, help me, Jesus,’ over and over again.”

We weren’t sure how to respond to what Terry’s mother had told us, so we waited. And she continued on.

“So what I want to know is this: why didn’t Jesus answer his prayer? That song was a prayer. That song was my boy begging God. He didn’t want to die. He was looking for any reason not to hang himself. But nobody stopped him. Nobody stopped him.”

She wiped her eyes one more time and the most pitiful moan escaped her lips. “I didn’t stop him. I didn’t know what he was doing in there. I knew he had been low, but I didn’t think he was that bad off that night. But I didn’t stop him.” She looked over at her son’s body in the casket. “I’m not Jesus, though.”

We hugged her and said the best goodbyes we could manage. We stopped at the casket to pay our respects, and when I looked at Terry’s face, I wish I hadn’t. The industry had done its work on him, and it was not how I wanted to remember that sweet young man.

***

I lack the earnest confidence I once had when it comes to things spiritual. What I once professed in a firm voice I now explore with a shrug and mostly silence. Because I don’t know anymore. I never really knew, but I don’t know the way I thought I knew, the way I came across, the way others thought I knew. The meaning and utility of prayer, whether God is completely omnipotent or instead resembles Someone out of an old Joan Osborne song. The purpose of suffering, if any. What comes after this life, if anything. I once had all those answers, and sometimes if you catch me on a good day, I might have ten percent of one of those answers in a heavily-footnoted, carefully-worded, noncommittal response. Might, mind you. But the next day, you might walk away from me trying to decide if I’m a Catholic or a deist or a cowardly atheist or the last holdout of Heaven’s Gate.

What I do think about all the time is Terry and the recorded, looped song that his poor mother thought of as her son’s prayer. What was Terry thinking in that last hour, alone in his room, insulated by music and a sorrow so intractable, so overwhelming, while he tied a knot around a bed railing? Was he looking around the room, waiting for the miraculous, hoping that someone or something would show up and stop him from what he didn’t want to do but felt that he had to do? Why didn’t Jesus stop Terry? It’s an honest question and a legitimate one. Why no divine intervention?

Was Terry waiting for the ram caught in a thicket? I don’t ask this question of men. I am utterly uninterested in how they would respond. I would like an answer from someone who knows the answer. But I do not think I will get one in this life, if ever.

Right now, the “whys” seem overwhelming.  If I were smart, I’d re-read the last few chapters of Job, clap my hand on my mouth, and whisper, “That’s right…I’m not supposed to question.” But I’m not that smart. The questions remain. And I no longer apologize for them.

~ S.K Orr