I've been praying and remembering the Chapman family... and remembering how we as a family, living through similar scenes, made our choice. For with each loss, staggering or common, so the choice comes: gratitude or resentment.
This all began at my beginning, when my head filled that tearing ring of fire and that glowing orb filled an August sky.
I seared virgin lungs with air, howled, unfolded from womb’s cavern. Then they named me. Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an “e.” Ann, a trio of curves and lines, meaning “full of grace.”
I haven’t been.
Most of my life, I haven’t lived up to the christening.
Maybe in those first few years my life curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts He freely gives. But I have no memories of then. For they say memory jolts awake with trauma’s electricity. That would be the year I was four. When blood pooled and I snapped shut to grace.
Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents huddled in horror, I wondered if they had held me, their firstborn, in those natal moments of naming, like they now held my sister in death. In sharp fall light, they rocked her in their arms, not with prayers for sleep but with pleas for waking and wholeness, miraculous and dazzling. It did not come, only the police with accident forms while blood seeped through blankets. I see that too, even now. Memory’s blazing surge burned deep.
The memory of her swaddling, the staining, scorches less than the blister of her uncovered. Her body, fragile and small, crushed by a truck’s load, the blood soaking into thirsty, track-beaten earth, that moment the cosmos shifted and shattered any cupping of hands. I still hear my mother’s strangled witnessing-scream, see my father’s eyes shot white in disbelief.
Memory flashes of her exposed, crumpled body bombed my dreams, haunted my days, my childhood. And sometimes, in the fraying place of night and day, I lay quiet while sleep ebbs and flows and we cradle the blanket wrapping of my sister’s wee body, her safely cocooned, and there await her rebirth with papery wings of shimmering life.
But instead earth opened wide and swallowed her up. We stood at grave’s precipice, numbly watching, feet scuffing the dirt and chunks of the firmament falling away. With the closing up of her deathbed, so our lives closed to any notions of grace.
For, really, could there be a good God? A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lay empty through long, stalking nights and bugs burrowed into a coffin of decaying dreams?
We grew full of bitterness, not grace.
Lord, today losses will come. What will I fill with?
To be continued... Part of this week's focus on choices...
