Billy Coffey

storyteller

Blessed are those who mourn

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Winter scene

So, here’s what happened—

My wife was diagnosed with leukemia. Our daughter continued on with her mostly up but sometimes down battle with Type 1 diabetes. Our son broke his wrist. Mom’s health took a turn for the worse and then the very worse. It all got so bad there for a while that people at work started referring to me as Job. But while things by far have yet to settle down, it is Christmas—my favorite time of the year—and I do have a new book coming soon. And I really missed popping out a blog post every seven days. So here I am, doing my darnedest to get back into the swing of things.

The problem with taking so much time off from a blog is that you have too much to say when you get back. It all tends to get muddled up in the mind. That’s a little of what I’m feeling right now. So instead of one story about one thing, I thought I’d take this bit to share some of the things that have been on my mind.

You remember the story of John the Baptist being put in prison? Herod had reached the limits of his patience with this hillbilly out in the desert and so tossed John in jail to rot (and ultimately to have his head literally served on a platter). While there, John hears reports of all the things his cousin Jesus is doing and sends his disciples to ask Jesus one simple question: Are you really the Son of God? Because I’ve been spending all this time telling everyone you are, and I could really use your help here. For his part, Jesus told John’s disciples to go back and say that the blind now see, the lame walk, the lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are being raised, and the poor have good news preached to them.

And then Jesus adds this, saving it for last because it’s so important.

Tell John, he says, that “blessed is the one who does not fall away because of me.”

I’ve probably read that story a hundred times in my life, yet it never really clicked with me until these last months. John had faith enough when his life was just chugging along—great faith, even—but there’s something about a prison cell and the threat of death that can bring doubts to even the most faithful soul. You sure You’re up there, God? Because I kind of need a miracle right now, and it seems to me You’re just not paying attention. And God says Of course I’m here, and I’m there, and I’m doing things so wonderful that you can’t even imagine it all. But don’t lose faith just because I’m not fitting into the little box you made for me. Don’t stumble because you don’t understand why things have to be like this for now.

A hard lesson for sure, but one my family is learning.

I was walking through town one morning a while back and happened upon an honest-to-goodness professional singer. You wouldn’t know him. He plays a few of the clubs across the mountain on the weekends, that’s all. But he gets paid for doing it, and in my book paid equals professional. I was one street up along a little hill, walking parallel to him and minding my own business. No traffic, no people. That’s when I heard him sing. Rich baritone, smooth as butter. Enough to make me stop and watch. What I noticed is that he would sing when walking by the buildings, then stop whenever he came to an open space like an intersection or an alleyway. It got me so curious that I bumped into him accidentally on purpose a few blocks later to ask what he was doing. Testing his voice, he said. You can’t tell how strong your voice is if you’re singing out in the open. But when you sing while surrounded by something like brick and stone built up so high that it dwarfs you, then you know. Things like that bounce your voice right back to you. You hear your true self rather than the noise in your head.

Maybe that’s a little of what John the Baptist was doing, and me, and maybe you. Testing our voices up against things we can’t move. Finding out who we really are.

You know you’re getting up there in age when all the stars of your childhood start passing on. That’s the first thing I thought when I heard that David Cassidy had died. The Partridge Family ended when I was two, but I grew up with the reruns. Was there anyone cooler than David Cassidy? Nope. He had the looks and the hair and the voice and got to travel around the country in a funky school bus. I remember him on magazine covers and being mobbed by girls. Rich. Famous. What a life.
And yet I read an article last week that mentioned his final words to his daughter. Know what they were?

“So much wasted time.”

Kind of hits you hard, doesn’t it? Especially when you realize everything that man had is everything the world says is necessary to live a good life, and everything most of us are either chasing after or wish we had.
I’ve heard he suffered from dementia at the end. Maybe that was the prison cell David Cassidy found himself in, like John the Baptist. Maybe that’s what allowed him to face the hard truths of his life. Or maybe he just found himself singing into a wall too big and wide for him to get around, and he finally heard his real voice for the first time.

Maybe.

But this I know for certain now, and maybe you know it, too—life can sometimes be a terribly hard thing to endure. Sometimes the things that happen make no sense. But that’s no reason to stumble. No cause to throw your hands up and say it’s all for nothing.

I know it true.

When the grey seeps in

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images

I blame the writer in me for the messes I sometimes get myself into, all of which I tell myself were begun with the best of intentions. Label something as “research,” for instance, and a writer can give himself permission to do almost anything. “Education” is another good example. We should always be learning something, growing, both in mind and in heart: becoming both better and more.

That thought was running through my head several times over the course of the past couple of weeks, when I decided to sit down to watch three of the most celebrated television shows to have come along in a while. The writing is spectacular, I heard. The ideas immense. Deep characters. Deeper mysteries. All things that appeal to me in my own work. The best way to improve your own craft is to immerse yourself in the craft of others. That’s what I was thinking when I sat down to watch marathons of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and True Detective.

If you’ve yet to see any of these shows or only a couple, I’ll say they are at their core the same thing: Broken people doing some very bad things. Their worlds could not be more dissimilar—the monotony of suburbia, a feudal Dark Age, the stark backwater of the south. And yet the view of each of those worlds is much the same in that each show portrays the world as ultimately meaningless and empty, therefore power is the only means to safety. The critics I’d read and the friends who had recommended those shows were indeed right. The writing really was spectacular, the ideas really were immense. The characters were layered. A few of the mysteries were nearly imponderable.

But still: yuck. After all of that, I needed a shower.

Here’s the thing, though: given bits and pieces of those shows, I don’t think it really would have been a problem. I’m no prude when it comes to entertainment; I’ll admit I sometimes enjoy my share of a gray worldview, though I’d much rather see it from my sofa than in my own life. But immersing yourself in it? Watching over and over until it seeps into the deepest places inside you? Well, that’s a different thing all together.

Yet that’s our culture now, isn’t it? There really doesn’t seem to be any hope out there, whether it’s in music or television or literature. There was maybe a time when the arts existed to prod society onward, to inspire and lift up. More often than not, they now serve as a mirror, showing what we’ve become in a series of melodies or flashing frames. Television, movies, music, and stories have grown increasingly dark because we’ve grown increasingly dark, not the other way around.

The other day, I came across an article written by a neuroscientist that affirmed much of what our mothers once told us: garbage in, garbage out. The article cautioned great care in the sorts of stories we allow ourselves to be exposed to, whether it’s the nightly news fare of war and recession and political meanness, or whatever slasher film is playing down at the local movie theater. Because those stories all carry meanings, and those meanings will, consciously or not, impact the way in which you view life and the world around you for good or bad. If you don’t know how to draw something positive out of what happens in life, the neural pathways you need too appreciate anything positive will never fire.

That’s evolution, the neuroscientist said. Maybe. I’d call it human nature.

It’s easy to succumb to the notion that everything is random, meaningless. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the world is too big and too far gone to ever be able to make a difference in it. The key is not to rise above, but merely survive (which, by the way, is my theory of why the zombie culture is so prevalent now). What’s hard is to believe. What’s hard is to carry on. It is to find purpose in where you are and in what you’re doing, no matter how insignificant it seems. It is to find dignity in this thing we call life, and to bring beauty to it.

Getting the pain out

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earThe local convenience store offers more in the way of convenience than most others. Yes, you’ll find the staples of modern life—snacks, tobacco, alcohol, and lottery tickets—but you’ll also find just about anything else. Including a story or two.

A case in point:

I stopped by one afternoon last week to stock up on the necessities (bread, milk, and beef jerky). Standing near the coffee pots was Bryan, an old high school friend who worked construction for one of the builders in town. Bryan had come to the store for some supplies as well, though of a different sort. He had managed to talk the lady at the register into giving him a Styrofoam plate and a sheet of aluminum foil.

“Hey, Billy,” he said. “Can you hold this for me?”

I took the plate and foil from him and said, “Okay. Whatcha doin’?”

“Fixin’ my ear. Hold still.” He pulled out a knife and punched a hole through the center of the plate.

I wrinkled my brow and decided to let that go. And then decided not to.

“What’s wrong with your ear?”

“Got something in it,” he said. “Been about a week now. Can’t hear a thing, either. I tried the drops, then a hot rock, then smackin’ my head. Nothin’. It’s killin’ me, it hurts so bad. So now I’m trying this.”

He held up what looked to be a long, hollow piece of honeycomb.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “I’m supposed to stick this in my ear and light it, and the heat’s supposed to act like a vacuum and suck out whatever’s in my ear.”

I stared at him.

“Seriously,” he said.

“You’re gonna stick that thing in your ear and light it on fire?”

“Yep.”

“What’s the plate and the foil for?” I asked him.

“I’m gonna hold that against my head so I don’t get hurt. I’m not an idiot.”

“Of course not,” I said.

I spent the next ten minutes trying to convince Bryan that his best option was to perform this particular kind of redneck medicine right there in the store so I could watch. He refused. Evidently modesty trumped desperation. Still, it was amazing to me what people would do to get the pain they held inside out.

I was still trying to convince him and still not quite doing it when Stanley Sours walked by on his way to the beer cooler. He snatched a case of Budweiser and passed us on his way to the register.

“Hey, fellas,” he said.

“Stanley,” I said.

“What’s up Stanley?” said Bryan.

Stanley looked at the plate in my hand and the honeycomb in Bryan’s.

“What in the world are y’all doin’?” he asked.

“Bryan’s got something clogged in his ear, so he’s gonna light his head on fire,” I told him.

Bryan nodded.

“Can I watch?” Stanley asked.

Bryan shook his head.

I explained the process to Stanley as well as I could remember it. He was as just as impressed and just as doubtful as I.

“You’re gonna light your head on fire to suck the pain out?” he asked Bryan. “You ain’t all there, are you?”

We all laughed. Stanley slapped both of us on the back and made it way to the register, where he paid for his beer and left.

“He ain’t all there either, you know,” Bryan told me.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. Because he was right, Stanley wasn’t all there. Half of him was in the Ford truck that was pulling out of the parking lot. The other half was about two miles away in a small cemetery plot that held his four-year-old son, a victim of cancer.

That’s when the drinking started. Slow at first and not often, as it always seems to be. Then more. And more. And then Stanley found himself stopping by the store every evening on the way home from work for his case of Bud.

I stood there and watched Stanley leave, then looked down at Bryan’s contraption.

Yes, I thought.

People would do almost anything to get the pain out of them.

The John she used to know

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images

Dorothea will tell you she and John would have been married 47 years come June. That’s how she always puts it—“would have been” instead of “will be”—past tense instead of future, even though John is still alive and they are still married. They still live in the same brick house two blocks from the Food Lion; are still seen driving the same gray sedan, though these days it is Dorothea driving John. He still gets around, she’ll tell you that as well. She’ll say her husband still reads the Richmond paper each morning and still takes his coffee strong and black and that both are absolute. What is not absolute, and in fact what Dorothea now questions every day of her life, is where her husband has gone, and who has taken his place.

They have four children, each of whom are grown and two of whom have moved away. Ten grandchildren, four great-grandchildren. The entire family gathers twice a year at the old home—every Christmas and Fourth of July. Those are festive times. Dorothea says there must be some special magic when the whole family is together, something about the sound of conversation and giggling children, that makes her husband feel like her husband again.

Those other 363 days can often be long. Sometimes they can be frightening, such as the afternoon last November when John went to check the mail and never returned. Dorothea found him three blocks and fifteen minutes later, sitting in the middle of the road, his bathrobe open and tossed by the breeze.

It began sudden, a year ago now, the same way so much bad in the world begins—with something small and ordinary. John had a history of migraines, and while the headaches that had plagued him for weeks were neither strong nor lasting enough to be called those, they were enough of a nuisance that Dorothea scheduled a doctor’s appointment. Tests were done. The doctor called them both back into his office three days later with the news. There was a tumor on John’s brain. It was inoperable.

The doctor said three months, six at the most. John’s outlasted both of those predictions. He always was a tough man, Dorothea will tell you. That’s how she’ll put it—“was” rather than “is.” Because she doesn’t know if the man she would have been married to for 47 years come June, the man who has given her four children, a brick house, a gray sedan, and a good life, is really John at all. She thinks that person left. Most of us in town would agree.

He was always a nice man, a kind man, easy with praise and concern about how you and your family are and if you’re still going to church every Sunday. In all their years together (much more than 46—John and Dorothea dated five years before they married), she had never heard him cuss. Three days after that fateful doctor’s visit, John came inside the house and said the damn key wouldn’t fit in the damn ignition of the damn car.

The cussing has grown worse since—horrible words that Dorothea never thought her husband capable of uttering. He’s grown impatient with the world, cursing the neighbors and the government and “the whole damn thing.” Once, he grew violent and pushed Dorothea against the kitchen sink, screaming at her, wanting to know what she’d done with his wife.

Though she remains strong and faithful, Dorothea has said she often wonders why she must sit idly by, watching as what remains of this man’s life slowly slips away. She wonders too how it is that a mass of deformed cells pressing against her husband’s brain can turn him into someone else. In all outward ways, he is still John. It is still his face and his body, the same hairline and mole just below his right ear. And yet he is no longer John. He has become someone else. He has become a stranger.

And Dorothea is left to wonder this: What makes us “us?” What is that quality that defines us and renders us unique? Where does that quality lie? And perhaps most important of all, where does that quality go when it appears to be taken away?

I don’t know the answer to that question. It breaks my heart that John and Dorothea must endure such a thing, and that there are so many others who must endure it as well. It hurts. It’s not fair.

But Dorothea isn’t angry. That’s what has struck me most about her these last months. She’s not mad at John, nor his tumor, nor even the God who doesn’t seem interested in healing them—in bringing her husband back. It’s remarkable to me, though not to her. To Dorothea, the question now isn’t Why. It isn’t How. It’s only What.

“God wants me to take care of him,” she says of the man who used to be John. “That’s all I need to know.”

And so she will, until some near or far-off day when Dorothea will say goodbye to him for now. Only for now. And the faith she has that God will equip her to care for her husband now is the very faith that allows her to know that when they meet again, it will be John she sees. The old John. And he will thank her.

Giving up on God

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Tony would tell you he still believed in God. “Hey, I still believe in the Lord, bro,” was how it usually came out, and as he said it he would raise his palms up and lower his head, like he was surrendering. I think maybe that’s what Tony really was doing—giving up. I think maybe he started doing that a long time ago, back when his wife first tripped.

That happened about twelve years back. Tony can tell you exactly how long it’s been (he always had it down to not just years and months, but weeks and hours). It was at Myrtle Beach on their honeymoon. They’d spent the first day down in the sand and were heading back to their room when his wife stumbled. Just like that, no reason. There wasn’t even anything there for her to trip over. They laughed (Tony would tell you that, too) and shrugged it off to being punch drunk on love.

She tripped four more times that week. By the time they packed up the truck to head back to Virginia, Tony’s wife was still laughing but Tony was not. It was like a voice started whispering in his ear, telling him something was wrong. It was a heavy whisper, thick and deep with what sounded like a chuckle buried deep down in the words. Tony would say that voice was God’s.

He asked his wife to go to the doctor. She laughed, he begged, she relented. They found the tumor in her brain a week later. Six months after holding his wife’s hand on the beach, Tony stood in front of her casket.

Tony would tell you about those six months if you asked him. I think that was part of giving up, too. You come to a point where you’re tired of keeping all your wounds covered and you think they’ll heal better if they get some air. You think if you do that, all those hurts will dry up and peel away.

He’d talk about how his wife knelt by their bed and prayed through tears for healing, and how he knelt there with her, crying more. He’d tell you how the church pitched in with everything from housework to meals and how both of them truly thought everything would be okay. And if you had the time and the inclination, Tony would describe how the cancer made his wife forget who he was in the end, and that one of the last things she said was, “I don’t understand.”

She’d gone crazy by then, but Tony swore his wife was in her right mind when she said that. I think he was right. Sometimes a bulb burns its brightest just before it flickers out.

He gave up on God. Believed in Him, but didn’t love Him. Couldn’t. Tony said it was impossible to love someone you couldn’t trust, and he couldn’t trust God. God took away the woman Tony loved and left him with only empty places.

He tried coming up with a label for himself. Tony couldn’t call himself a believer, but he couldn’t call himself an atheist, either. Nor was he agnostic. He said being an atheist or agnostic would be a lot better than what he was. It was easier to just think there’s nobody up there watching, that we were all stuck in some sort of cosmic accident and just had to make do the best we could. But Tony saw too much in his life before to think that. He’d rather have no God than a mean one, but he was stuck with the mean one.

I don’t understand. That’s what Tony’s wife said. And those three words pretty much define how he lived his life after. Tony thought his wife was in heaven. Thought, too, that he’d get there one day. He’d been baptized (“Washed in the blood” is how it came out), and he was counting on that to make up for the gulf that had grown between him and the Almighty. He wanted to see his wife again, but he’d prefer God to keep away from them once he got up there.

Tony moved away a year ago. The town had too many memories, and he had too little patience. I heard at the post office yesterday that he’d killed himself shortly after. I guess he didn’t have patience for living anymore, either.

I wonder where he is now. I don’t know. But I like to think Tony’s with his wife now. I like to think they’re walking upon a greater beach in a greater place. His wife never trips, and the light upon them is one that never fades. I like to think he found God again in that very last instant, and he found that God had never left. That God had been loving Tony just as much his joys as in his empty places.

Mabe Man

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guangdongI read an article last week about how scientists are just now getting results from tests they ran on a 126,000-year-old human. Mabe Man, they call him, because he was found near Mabe in China’s Guandong Province.

Not really the sort of article I would be interested in, but I had some time to kill and it was either that or stare at the wall in front of me. So I kept reading.

I’m glad I did.

Seems Mabe Man had a rough go at it. That in itself isn’t surprising—I would imagine life back then was fraught with all sorts of peril, not the least of which was where to find the next meal. Life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Our place in the food chain was somewhere south of saber-toothed tigers.

When Mabe Man was first discovered in 1958, his bones were cataloged, shoved in a museum basement, and promptly forgotten. It was only recently that he was rediscovered again. Fortunately, science has progressed quite a bit over the last 60 years. There’s a lot we can know about him now that could only be guessed then, and a lot of fancy tests that can help bring out the humanity in our ancestors. Things like a simple CT scan, for instance. When the scientists did just that, what they found was morbidly interesting in the same way as witnessing the aftermath of a car wreck.

To break it down to a level I could understand, Mabe Man had gotten the hell beaten out of him.

His skull had been fractured. Scientists concluded it was the result of blunt force trauma. Not your everyday sort of blunt force trauma, either. This poor guy didn’t receive his injuries by tripping over a rock in some primeval forest. No, he was beaten. The conclusion was that his wounds could have only been given by some sort of clubbed weapon.

The scientists seemed surprised at that finding. Not me. And I doubt that deep down you’re not very surprised, either. Recorded history is full of violence. Full of war and hate and bloodshed. I read once that when all the annals of every nation’s history are combined, what you get is a total of seven years of peace. Seven out of tens of thousands. We’ve always hurt each other. We always will. It’s a basic tenet of the Christian faith—we all sin and fall short of the glory of God.

Mabe Man’s story could end there, but it doesn’t. There’s more. His wounds would have caused excessive bleeding and a severe concussion. Brain damage would have been likely. He was helpless. And 126,000 years ago, being helpless meant you were dead.

But he didn’t die.

His wounds healed.

And not only did they heal, but he lived for years afterward.

Why? Because he was cared for. He was nursed back to health. His wounds were bound and his stomach was filled and he was given shelter.

Scientists seemed even more surprised at that. Mabe Man survived because he was loved.

Me, I find a beauty there, and also a profound truth. It means love has always sought to put back together that which hate has broken. It means that our hands have always been able to heal as much as harm. It means that since the dawn of humanity, each of us contains three people—the angel, the demon, and the one who decides which we will obey. That’s what it means to be human.

That’s a basic tenet of the Christian faith, too.