Boy: Two Letters

Dear John,

When the call came, I knew it was about you. I wish you had let me talk to you, when I returned your call on Sunday, but by then you weren’t picking up for anybody. Even if nothing we could have said would have changed your mind, it would have been nice to say goodbye, dear friend.

There is a scream in the back of my mind that won’t articulate, something unintelligible and thick and bleeding that started the other night when I learned what had happened. I am not sure whether it is what I suspect must have gotten into your head, or whether it’s just my own reaction to the idea that you could do this. I haven’t cried yet, John.

Nobody is ever prepared for this one. I’ve seen people die of lingering sicknesses and of sudden accidents, but the wrongness of suicide leaves us hollow. There must be some mistake, we say. This was an accident; it didn’t have to go this way. Go back, we insist, go back to a few days ago when we still had him. Just let him talk and we will listen, and we will surround him with our love. There must be a way, we plead. This was a mistake.

But there is no way back from this. You have seen to that.

Suicide is the triumph of aesthetics over morality. They say that jumpers in San Francisco will walk all the way across the Bay Bridge so that they can fall from her more picturesque sister. By October 2003, twenty-six people had survived that fall. As soon as I cleared the rail, they say, I saw that all of the problems in my life that had seemed so insurmountable could be solved — except that of having just jumped off of a bridge.

Grace is an incredibly slow-moving thing. It is as if she is too powerful to be used except at the last possible moment, when all else has failed. In the past I have advocated letting people get all the way to the end of their rope and letting go so that they might finally fall into His arms. I found redemption at the bottom of a very deep despair, and I thought that it might always live there. For a time, I tried to stay in that despair so that I might be close to the redemption. But despair is always a mistake.

Grace never forces nor demands, my friend, but she coaxes and pleads and awaits our response. Grace is patient; that is to say, Grace suffers.

All of which is simply to say that I have some trouble imagining that she was there to greet you on the other side of the window; none of my experiences lead me to think that you could have been healed once you had made your leap, that your sweet kind heart could have bloomed once more on its way down. I have not seen that side of redemption’s power.

But it is clear that you were in a place that I have never truly been, thank God. It is clear that you needed a hope I have never asked for and have never seen. If He healed you, it was in a way that I cannot imagine. But that which is impossible to me is not impossible for God. We count on our miracles with every step, and we hope for just those things we cannot believe. And when you leapt, my friend, I don’t know how to believe that He leapt with you, but I hold on to my hope of exactly that.

The thing that I was the least prepared for was the anger. Among the emotions you have inspired, anger is the most ready to hand, as if it were a sore in my mouth or a stone in my boot: whenever I don’t know what to feel, I can at least make myself feel that . This surprises me: having spent as much as I have of my own time contemplating exits such as yours, I should think I would have been more sympathetic to your decision. I am sorry to tell you that I am not.

Whatever your circumstances, which I am deeply and profoundly saddened to imagine, you could have overcome them. You had countless friends who would have given you their strength, had you even hinted that you needed it. Whatever it was, dear friend, whatever you were trying to rid yourself of, was not so big as the love that you gave up on. No demon, no flaw, however magnified in the carnival mirror of self-image, was ever so fierce nor ugly as to overpower the grace He gives his lambs, and He does not try us past what we can bear. We fall by our own will.

Whence the anger. You did this to yourself, John. You chose to fall, and in doing so obliterated each person who cared about you, who wanted you to succeed, who saw you for what you are and could be. We sometimes give ourselves the luxury of thinking that we have fooled those who love us, imagining that they do so because they are blind to our shortcomings. But they are not so blind as we imagine, nor do they love us the less for being as we are and not as we know we should be. We did not love a mask, my friend.

Whence the anger. That you believed your own lies and saw no hope in your relationships; that you imagined we would not feel it when you fell. That you who were always ready to help a friend, to give yourself and your time, would not do us the courtesy of responding in kind when you most needed it. That you could call, and not be there when I called back.

I don’t know what else to say. When I heard, I could only say that I had no words for what had happened. That is still true. There really is no way to give an account of this, although for a week I have tried. You know we have to make narrative out of the stuff of our lives, or else it just stays stuff. One unredeemed thing after another. It is only after we’ve made sense of it that we can say goodbye to the past. My friend, I cannot say goodbye.

On Monday, May 9th, my friend John threw himself from a window. He was, I believe, 23. He was funny, and smart, generous and kind, and the smell of cigarettes reminded him of having ministered in prisons as a child. I cannot turn the boy in my head into the leap from ledge to sidewalk. Go call someone and tell them you love them.

—

Dear William,

For the few years that I have known your father, I believe I have known him well. When I have seen him wrestle with himself, I have only seen him wrestle alone; I have never seen him rely on nor draw strength from his friends or the many people who love him. It is his way, and I have come to accept it.

But when he wrestles with himself, I can always tell: there is an edge to him which grows sharper, there is something in the way he smiles that gives me to praying for him. Occasionally, I have wanted to shake him until he spilled, but I have learned better.

All of this is to say that although he is a marvelous actor, I believe I have learned to tell when he is hiding his demons, and when he has arrested them. And to say that I have never seen him happier than when introducing you.

When I met you a week ago, for the first of what I hope will be many times, you were surrounded by people who love you. Your grandmother Scroggins was there, and your mother and father. Your mother gave you to Steve, and he was pleased to hold you.

I have spent a little time with your family since you came into it, two different hours-long stretches, and never have I seen a baby who did not cry as you did not cry. You came into a world that I don’t think I have known, William, for a long time anyway, and you brought with you a brightness which is reflected in the eyes and faces of everyone in your life.

In time of course, this brightness will fade, but I wanted to tell you about it while it was still so fresh and clean and right. The God of sparrows and lilies does not make His lambs by mistake: you were placed just where you were meant to be. Whatever else happens, I want you to remember that.

It will never be an easy life, William, although it will become easier when you learn not to defeat yourself, but good will come out of it, good which in many cases you will never see. My uncle once said to me, You always compare what’s inside yourself to what’s outside of everyone else. From within, this world is deeply flawed. She needs our constant care and attention, and all the love we can muster. But William, because the world is broken, because of everything we learn from having to love her, she is perfect.

There are more people in your life than you will ever know. At times you will be utterly alone, and you will be unable to name a single person to whom you can turn for help. Know in that time that we whom you have forgotten to name are waiting to give you our help, to pray over you and to give you a quiet place, to speak and to be silent, to rest and to rage. Even if you never turn to us, we will always be ready for you. Know that you are more loved than you know.

Grow strong, boy.

The day I learned John had died, I had just returned from meeting the infant child of a dear friend. For me, there were two hours between celebrating a new life and mourning a senseless death. I cannot understand the range of feeling that lies hidden, present, latent, in every moment of the world’s existence.

gauche
19 May 05