Five Years Gone
In the liner notes (remember those?) of an old Jerry Jeff Walker album called Five Years Gone, Jerry Jeff writes about some advice he received from an old friend while on a late-night road trip from D.C. to Ohio. Jerry Jeff’s friend turns to him in that tired and punchy, too many hours on the road weariness and says, “I have found it very healthy in my life to sit back about every five years and evaluate my present philosophic outlook by what it was, what it had become today, what my goals were then and what they are now and just how truly on course I have remained. “
In today’s always on, always reacting, jacked-in, Twitterfied, Tik-toked, post-modern liquified reality we all scroll through every day, these words are probably truer now than when they were written over fifty years ago. It’s good to take a break every now and then to make sure you are standing on something solid and real and to make sure you are still walking in the right direction. It’s healthy to pause, breath, reflect, and take stock of things. I believe this is especially true now as we all begin to emerge from our pandemic-induced hibernation that strangely seemed to hinder thoughtful reflection. No matter how much time we spent isolated from all that was familiar, how could we possibly find the brain space to reflect on our current circumstance when we were simply trying to keep our head above water? The proverbial life raft seemed to be a socially distant six feet away or just a mirage in the virtual background of a Zoom call.
So I’m going to take slow and thoughtful breath and just be for a moment.
Today five years ago, I stood at the abyss, staring straight into the deepest darkest nothingness I could have ever imagined. I was sitting next to a hospital bed in the intensive care unit holding my wife’s hand as she slipped quietly away from me and from all she had ever known. It was in that moment that all hope of her recovery from a heart transplant was extinguished, and this hope was replaced with a gloomy cloud of sorrow and grief. The ground had given way, and I found myself falling into the darkness.
In the days and months that followed, I painstakingly worked through my grief in fits and starts. Sadness and sorrow filled every part of my mind and my body, and there were days that I do not even know how I got out of bed. With a lot of help and determination I confronted my grief, and in time I began to establish the new normal. Ever so slowly my disorientation turned into a reorientation and the darkness became little brighter. This work required me to make a choice every day, and that choice was fueled by hope. While I could no longer see hope, I had faith that it was still there.
In subsequent years, I met and fell in love again with an incredibly special person who loved me despite all my wounds and battle scars, something that I would have thought beyond impossible if you had asked me during my journey through the lonely tunnel of grief. Hope had brought me out of the darkness and this hope had left space in my heart that joy was able to fill. It was amazing to experience the return of laughter after it was so jarringly taken away years before.
Claire and I got married and a few months later found out we were going to have a baby boy. Charlie was his name, and, in my mind, he was the answer to the question about why my first wife, Shannon, was taken from this world much too soon. A new life was going to result from death and that thought helped give me comfort and somehow make sense of things.
However, making sense of things is not always easy. Charlie died unexpectedly at birth and I was once again enveloped with grief and unanswered questions. I not only had my own grief to deal with, but I also had to witness my wife grieve the loss of her first-born child. It is one thing to go through grief yourself, but it is all together another thing to see someone you love to go through it too. It is our instinct to protect the ones we love, and nothing is worse than when you are powerless to give the protection you so desperately want to provide.
But hope. Real hope; solid hope - hope you can stand on and feel in your bones and in your body; hope you can hold on to and that will be there when nothing else is; hope that does not rely on novel theories or make false promises of comfort and happiness; hope that is above you and below you and within you; behind you and in front of you; the kind of hope that comes from faith – that is what got us through such an unexplainable and unimaginable tragedy. Sometimes hope is hard, and it leads you down a difficult and gut-wrenching path, but we must force ourselves to follow it.
As a Christian this makes sense when you think about it. True hope sprang forth from a crucifixion, which is the most agonizing and hopeless way to end a life. However, when everything appeared lost, the most unimaginable thing happened three days later when Jesus appeared alive before his disciples. This event ignited a revolution of hope.
The year 2020 will go down in history as one of the most tumultuous in our country’s history. Not only did we endure the first pandemic of our lifetimes, the year was marked with fear, anger, resentment, political strife, economic uncertainty, and the unsettling of foundations that once felt solid. Everything was heightened to an almost surreal level because all our routines and lives had been disrupted in unimaginable ways. Families grieved over the deaths of loved ones from a new disease. We collectively became disoriented by the sheer volume of information and disruption we navigated every day. But life moves forward, and hope finds a way.
In December, hope broke into the chaotic year with the birth of my daughter. She was born two months early but arrived healthy and ready to take on the world. After losing a wife and a son in the past five years, Claire and I were terrified through the pregnancy but each day we resolved to hold on to hope and follow the path where it led.
As I stood in the surgical delivery room for the emergency C-section, I was once again surrounded by the beeps and whirrs of medical equipment. The antiseptic smell and murmurings of nurses and doctors were sadly familiar, and my nervous system has become wired to respond to this environment with heightened stress and anxiety. I have experienced when things go wrong too many times. However, this time it was different. This visit to the O.R. ended with the cry of a newborn baby taking her first breath. A newborn’s cry is the very embodiment of hope and all the possibilities that lay before a new life. Tears streamed down my face and relief washed over me when it became clear that mom and baby were going to be okay.
It was in this moment I said a prayer of thanks to God. Thanks for the strength to cross through the darkness when I was completely lost. Thanks for the light of hope that the darkness could not extinguish, and thanks for the faith that this light was still there even when I could not see it.
Five years gone indeed. I know the path forward will continue to zig and zag and be full of life’s ups and downs. On this path there will be more joy and happiness but also more tragedy, sorrow, pain, and grief. I have learned over the years that the road of life only makes sense when it is supported by the solid foundation that faith, hope, and love provide. These give us gratitude for the good times and the strength to endure the bad. As we travel our paths, we should all stop, take a breath, and look around every so often. Hope is all around us in thousands of ways large and small. Sometimes it can be difficult to see and at other times it is completely hidden from view. But it is always there before us, lighting the way.