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.

Still easily broken

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images

It’s pretty rare that I ever get into anything truly personal here.

Family and the issues we face are usually dealt with in a funny or poignant way (at least that’s what I hope), which can sometimes give the impression that we in the mountains have this business of living down pat. I’m about to buck that trend.

The past month or so has been pretty hard on our family. I’ve had loved ones in the hospital for the flu and another whose body has all but given up. The word “cancer” has gone from being whispered about in private company to being acknowledged at the kitchen table. It’s been a trying time, a scary time—the sort of thing you start thinking only adults should have to handle and maybe you aren’t as much of an adult as you thought.

It’ll all be okay, of course.

The days will right themselves. It isn’t lost to me that everything I’m feeling is considered old news to a great swath of folks. Life’s only given is that we must all pass from it. Nothing of this world is made to be permanent, which is a lesson that comes early on in the Appalachian foothills. Things wear out, get tired and used up. Crops and seasons both rise up and bloom before being cut down. Our woods are filled with forgotten graves and the foundations of old homes left now to hold only memories and ghosts. Even these mountains, tall and solid as they are, wear away with the eons a millimeter at a time.

I know this. You know this. And yet they remain the hardest words to speak and hear:

each of us were born for leaving.

From an early age I was raised with the knowledge that each of us hold two parts—one temporary, the other eternal. Our shell of bone and muscle will decay at some point, freeing that holy spark within us to burn bright elsewhere. My mother’s parents drilled this into my head often, as the Amish usually do—all this world is for is getting us ready for the next. George MacDonald once said that “We should have taught more carefully than we have done, not that men are bodies and have souls, but that they are souls and have bodies.” My grandparents would have agreed.

But somewhere between the ages of nine and forty-four I seem to have forgotten that knowledge, or at least set it aside. Those thirty years or so had the opposite effect by convincing me life was a solid thing, wholly predictable, and if not permanent then at least long-lasting. There were reminders of otherwise along the way. My grandparents died. Several high school friends. I remember holding my daughter when she was born and my son a few years later and feeling a mix of awe and terror at how fragile and easily broken they were. Then all of that went away again, muddled by passing years which held nothing but the same old, the everyday.

Until this past month. These last weeks. Until the time came when the thin curtain over my life and my family’s lives was eased back a bit to reveal the truth on the other side. That’s why I decided to buck a trend with this post, because the truth I’ve seen is one we should all start holding a little closer to the heart—we don’t ever get stronger. Not really. We come into this world children, and I think that’s how we stay. We can pretend otherwise. We can lean on our intelligence and the strength of our bodies, we can seek shelter in the things we collect and the jobs we have and the dreams we count upon, but we’re still kids. Still fragile. Still easily broken.

Still sure to wear out.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve started paying a little more attention to that spark within us all. To the soul. It’s the one thing of us the ground cannot one day claim, the fire burning ever upward, pointing us on.

“There’s rest for the weary, a rest that endures.
Earth has no sorrows that heaven can’t cure.”
— David Crowder

The grace cup

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images
Before I tell you what is sitting at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 of the local elementary school, I want to talk about rules.

Yes, I know: rules stink. Ask anybody. Ask me. Much of what drives us—the little devil at our shoulder that most times shouts a little louder than the angel sitting at the other—has rule breaking at its core. Rules are made to be broken. Color outside the lines. Right?

I don’t know anyone who likes rules. Then again, I don’t know anyone who thinks the world would be a better place without them.

In Room 304, this rule reigns supreme: you must have a pencil. No excuses. The pencil is mandatory. In an age when computers and tablets and smartphones rule, the world inside Room 304 is much more tangible. More basic. Work is done with paper and pencil. Every subject, every day. And as these bits of wood and graphite are both plentiful and exceedingly cheap, this seems like a rule easily enough followed.

You would be wrong.

These young elementary school kids, they don’t care about pencils.

Pencils don’t even enter into their minds. And so class must be interrupted each day as thirty children scramble to beg and borrow and steal something to write with in order that they may learn all about nouns and fractions and Chief Powhatan. And the teacher must punish the most egregious of offenders by sending them to a lonely back table for a punishment known as Think Time, which includes the filling out their name, crime, and reason for committing said crime on a single sheet of paper.

They never forget their Nike shoes. Or their Pokemons. And don’t even think they’d come to school without their iPhones. But a pencil? Please.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

The worst of these offenders is a little girl who sits in the back of the second row. Quiet kid. Average student, though barely. She struggles. Doesn’t seem to study for her tests, and you can forget about any homework assignments. Jesus will come back before she remembers to bring a pencil to class.

It all got to be too much three days ago. Math class, and would you know it—no pencil again. To the back table she goes to fill out her Think Time report (she’s an expert at this, trust me).

She fills in her name, first and last.

Under “Reason”: I forgot my pensil.

Under “Why”: I got up lat. I had to get my bruther up. I had to get my sistr up. Mommie at wurk. Daddie don’t life with us. I had to get the dog up. The dog puked. My bruther cryed. My sistr spiled her milk. I cleened it up. I cleened my sistr. My dog puked agin. We went on the bus layte. I forgot my pensil.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

I don’t think I need to tell you what went through the teacher’s mind when that confession was turned in. Teachers know. They hear the stories of students too poor to eat and with mommas hooked on meth and daddies gone to jail, fist-sized bruises blamed on rickety steps and half-shut doors. Teachers know, friend. They know and it breaks their hearts. I know this as fact, because I’m married to one.

That is why you will now find at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 a ceramic container daily stocked with dozens of freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils, and a note taped to the front that reads “Grace Cup.” Because we all need rules, but sometimes those rules must be forgiven.

Today you will walk out your door into a world teeming with people carrying worries and wounds you will never see. A great many of those people will be so kind of heart that they set aside their troubles long enough to nod or smile or say hello. A few will even help you in some way large or small.

But there will be some as well who won’t follow the rules of Please and Thank you and Have a good day. They will be grumpy and mean. They will do horrible things. They will make you mourn the state of things.

That’s why my advice to you is carry a Grace Cup of your own. Dip into it frequently and as needed. For others, and for yourself, too. Because it is a hard business, this thing called living. Sometimes the dog pukes.

And that is a thing worth remembering.

A case of The Feels

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images
My daughter is fourteen now, and in about three weeks’ time she’ll be off to her first year of high school.

It’s a tough thing for a dad to know his children are growing up. Harder, I think, when it’s your little girl doing all the growing. You get to feeling at times that something precious is beginning to slip away, and do you all you can to staunch that flow.

Which was why this past Saturday, with her brother and momma away and only the two of us and the dog to hold down the homestead, I thought it high time to have a little father/daughter afternoon in the best way possible.

I was going to let her meet John Coffey.

If you are unaware of that fictional character from Stephen King’s The Green Mile, I won’t spoil things for you. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, then I expect nothing more needs saying. The story is one of the few I often return to whenever I need a reminder that there is still light and goodness in this world, even in the dark places.

We sat on the sofa with the dog and a giant bowl of popcorn between us as the opening scene unfolded—an old man in a nursing home, crying over a song. From there we made our way through the first act, acquainting ourselves with the main cast and supporting characters. It was awful silent in that living room when John Coffey made his appearance on the Mile. My daughter never moved once he set about doing his quiet sort of magic.

We’d gotten to the final scene when old Mister Jangles peeks up from his cigar box when I noticed my daughter looking at me. Her cheeks were red, her mouth caught in something like a grimace. Two eyes red and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the matter?’ I’m CRYING.”

I squeezed her knee. “That’s okay, you’re supposed to.”

“I know I’m supposed to,” she said, “but what about you? You’re not crying AT ALL.”

“I’ve seen this movie a hundred times. Read the book maybe a hundred more. After that many times through a story, all the emotion in it’s been wrung out.”

She would have nothing of it: “You HAVE to cry.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives you The Feels.”

Ah. I nodded then, understanding things better. Because of The Feels. I don’t know where that expression first arose, whether my daughter picked it up at school or she read it somewhere. Maybe she made it up on her own. Regardless, it’s been a buzzword in our house for going on quite a while. It comes whenever one of those SPCA commercials shoot up on the TV or when my daughter stumbles upon an Internet video featuring either soldiers coming home from war or a litter of puppies swarming some unsuspecting child. It came as our family strolled the neighborhood on the night of July 4, gawping at all the fireworks.

Spoken in whispers and in shouts, when things are quiet or still. Day, night, afternoon, evening. First thing in the morning:

“I got The Feels.”

Sitting with me there on the sofa, she asked, “When’s the last time you really got The Feels?”

My answer was the one she dreaded: “I don’t know.”

She grabbed the remote and turned off the television, looked at me. “You seriously don’t know.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I used to, I guess.”

And in her best Mommy voice, my daughter then said, “Well, you better go someplace quiet for a while and try to figure out why.”

So I did. I sat on the front porch and watched the sunshine and the deer and tried to figure out why it seems I don’t get The Feels much anymore.

Granted, I don’t think there is anyone who can come down with a good case of The Feels so often and with such power as a fourteen-year-old girl. Such a thing isn’t possible, especially when you are a forty-four-year-old man.

But it did bug me then, and continues to bug me now, that I can go long stretches of months and even years without being struck by awe or passion or beauty, much less all three at once. Which sounds pretty bad especially considering I spend a great swath of my days writing stories that revolve around the very things that have long gone unfelt in my life.

If pressed, I would say I’ve been this way for quite a long while now. Life can do that to you.

At a certain point you move away from the innocence that defines your childhood and allow other things to take over. You become an adult with adult troubles.

But more than that, your view of the world tends to morph into something wholly different. With age comes experience, and with experience comes the shedding of the rosy caul that so long covered them. We go from seeing the world as a place of wonder to knowing it to be a place of ruin. We begin to see people not as souls but as bodies in possession of every awful thing. We see hate and avarice and violence. Maybe we even come to a point when we feel those very things in ourselves.

Living becomes not a thing to experience, but to endure.

We spend so much of our adult lives wanting only to be children again. For me, that desire had little to do with growing back down to a boy. It was more to reclaim once again that childlike state of belief and hope. To see again that all things hold a beauty and wonder.

Somewhere along the line, I lost all of that. I’ve let a wall grow around my heart as a means of self-protection, a shelter against the storms I saw raging around me each day. It was better doing that. Because constantly seeking out the good in others was to invite only disappointment, and risking belief in the good of the world only meant subjecting myself to constant hurt. And that is love most of all, is it not? It is hurt.

According to my daughter, that’s the The Feels really is, too. Deep down at its most basic level, this constant buoyancy of her spirit is not owed to joy, but a kind of pain that stings your heart and leaves behind a tiny bruise that remains behind long after the hurt of it is gone, keeping the best parts of us soft rather than hard, pliable instead of brittle.

That hurt, it seems, is necessary. That hurt you have for others and our world says that you still care, that you are still alive, and that because of those two things, there is yet time enough to start making things better.

I think we could all use a good case of The Feels right now. Hate may be the safe way to go and anger may never put you at risk, but both of those only work in the moment. But in the after, once all the destroying has been done and all those nasty words spoken, we find that the bridges between us have been reduced to mere fragments and made near impossible to put together again. To be made stronger than they were.

We can each view this world as a place of threat and fear and so look upon it with only a measure of gloom. Or we can seek to smile and search out the light that remains even as a closed-fisted hand seems ready to strike.

That choice is a big one. It’s also like every other choice there is—one entirely up to us.

But I know this. I’ve gone far too long opting for the first. It’s high time I seek out the second.

Trapped between worlds

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blue ridgeFor a while all the news was about the woman gone missing in the mountain wilderness two counties over.

It is rough land, beautiful for its remoteness and dangerous for the same. Hundreds have been involved in the search. Pleas have gone out from her family. Her car was found near a trail, abandoned.

Days passed. People hung onto hope, though that hope moved from one buttressed by faith to one guarded by optimism to, finally, a fragile sort of assurance.

Her remains were found last week, deep in the woods. Authorities have now said a suicide note had been found in the car.

It is a sad end to a sad story told too often. Those closest to her are now left to grieve and mourn and somehow move on. No doubt they will be haunted by questions of what sort of despair could wrench itself so deep and thoroughly into her that suicide came to be the only option, and why she felt she could not lean upon those closest for help. The pictures I’ve seen on Facebook show a bright smile and vivacious personality. They serve as a reminder to always approach others with equal measures of grace and kindness, because we may never know the battles they fight or the struggles they face.

Reading about this woman has gotten me thinking about all the others who came before her.

It may surprise you to know just how many people here have committed suicide over the years. It may surprise you more that a great many of them have chosen to take their lives not in their own homes but in the mountains that rise above our peaceful valley. They will often leave without a word or under some small pretext of an errand and drive, making their way along our streets a final time, passing friends and neighbors. They will climb the narrow backroads of the Blue Ridge and find a lonely place to walk, a spot to leave behind a world that somehow left them.

I’m not sure if anyone has ever questioned why it so often happens like that.

Ask the old timers around here, they’ll tell you folk have always gone into the mountains to die. Ask the farmers, they’ll say it’s proof man and woman aren’t so different than the animals, who themselves oftentimes sneak away to lonely places so they may breathe their last.

But I’ve always thought a deeper reason lay inside the broken hearts and exhausted souls of those who wish their living done.

To me it is as if they seek the bosom of the woods because the woods always embrace, and each step taken deeper into those ridges and hollers is a step away from their trials. And perhaps it is that they climb these mountains so they may glimpse a heaven they never imagined or never believed.

They say our mountains are filled with the spirits of those trapped between worlds, whose deaths were lonely and violent. Sometimes I believe those stories. But I pray that tired woman who passed on among the oaks and mountain streams has found a peace she somehow came to lack, just as I pray a bit of her remains behind to aid those who come after. To take their hands and gaze into their eyes and ask that they turn back.

For it is a hard world that holds us all, and broken, but there is beauty in the cracks.

Eddie’s story

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Screen shot 2013-10-07 at 10.15.27 AMI see him raise a hand out of the open passenger window and think he’s shooing a bee at first. He’s allergic to bees and swears the little buggers can smell that in a person. But no, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s instead waving to the bum who has taken up residence at the guardrail abutting the interstate onramp. That isn’t so surprising. Neither is the fact that the bum waves back, flittering his cardboard sign (HUNGRY, LONELY, TIRED is printed in black Sharpie on the front) and grinning back.

“That’s Eddie,” he tells me.

“Eddie.”

“Yep.”

I keep my eyes to the windshield and nod. “And you know this because—”

“—I stopped to talk to him the other day—”

“—Of course you did,” I say. Because that’s what the man beside me does. He talks to people. Talks to anyone. Anywhere. He’s a property owner by day, running a mini-kingdom of rented homes and apartments. I think he’s secretly a combination of St. Paul and Andy Griffith. To him, there are no strangers, there are simply people he isn’t friends with yet.

“And he’s Eddie?” I ask.

“Yep.”

He turns and sticks his head out the window. I look in the rearview. Eddie’s still looking, still shaking his sign. A blue SUV stops beside him. The driver hands him something that might be a dollar bill.

“Did you give him something?”

I’m nodding even before he says, “I bought him lunch,” because that’s what the man beside me does, too. The HUNGRY and LONELY and TIRED are the people he tries to love most because those are the ones he says Jesus loves most. We both love Jesus, my friend and I. Sometimes I think he might love Him a little more.

I smile and ask, “What’d you get in return?”

“What I always get.”

And here is my favorite part, it always is. Some say no act is truly altruistic, that there is a bit of selfishness in everything. That might be true, even with my friend. Because he wants to help and he wants to love just as Jesus said we all should, but he always asks for something in return. He always asks for their story. They all have one—we all have one.

“Did you know Eddie’s been to every state?” is how he begins. I just drive and listen. “Born in Cleveland, but he didn’t stay there long. Parents were awful, that’s usually how it goes. Drunks that beat on him. He ran when he was sixteen. That was twenty years ago.”

“So what’s he do?”

He shrugs and says, “Just drifts. Went west first, all up and down the coast, then made his way east slow. Even went to Thailand once. Worked on a steamer. Only job he’s ever had.”

I don’t say anything to this and wonder for a moment if it’s a trap. We’ve had this discussion many times, my friend and I. I’ll start by saying people like Eddie really could find work. Menial work will still bring money. There’s help out there if Eddie wants it, I’d say, but a lot of people like him live the way they do through choice rather than necessity. My friend agrees in principle. He also doesn’t think that matters much.

“He was married once,” he continues. “She died. Had cancer while they stood in front of a justice of the peace. Eddie knew it and married her anyway. Told me he loved her, and that was reason enough. That was eight years ago. He came east after that. I think he’s trying to run from the memory.”

“I think we all do that,” I say.

“Eddie’s smart. Not with that,” he’s quick to add, “I mean smart like other people are smart. He has dreams.”

That’s the last my friend says of Eddie—“He has dreams.” We end up at the Lowe’s to get what we’ve driven to town for. By the time we head back, Eddie’s gone. I don’t know where he’s gone. My friend probably does, but he doesn’t offer.

I’ve told him many times I wish I could do what he does—stop someone, notice them, help them. Ask them their story. I guess such a thing just isn’t in me. I’m a shy person. Maybe I don’t have enough Jesus.

Still, I think we all need the reminder that all those lost souls we see and read about—those people we sometimes lie to ourselves and think aren’t like us at all—really are. They’ve loved and lost. They’re still searching. We’re all people, and in many ways we’re all hungry and lonely and tired. It’s such an obvious statement, and maybe that’s why it escapes us so often.

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