Billy Coffey

storyteller

The last thing I’d ever write

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The note above was penned by an eighty-five-year-old man named Robert. One day last month, he drove his car down a steep rural road to look at a pond. When he tried to drive back the way he came, the car rolled off the path and became mired in a ravine.

Robert was unable to walk out of his situation due to back problems that left him only able to get around with the help of a walker. He had no food. The only water he had barely filled an 8 ounce bottle. He honked his horn until the car battery was depleted.

Robert sat there, alone in his car, for two days.

With no food, little water, and temperatures in the upper 90s, he realized things didn’t look good. So he grabbed a pen and began writing on the car’s armrest.

Look closely and you can make a bit of it out. The first—and Robert said the most important—was that he make sure everyone knew it was an accident. Robert didn’t want anyone thinking he committed suicide. He wrote that the car’s wheels spun out. He asked that his family give him a closed casket.

About forty hours later, Robert was found. Turns out that final note wasn’t needed after all. As you can imagine, the whole ordeal changed him. Robert has a new outlook on life. He understands its delicateness. He knows every moment is precious.

It’s a good story with a happy ending. But me, I can’t stop thinking about that note.

What would I tell my family? What would I tell you? What would I say if I could never say anything more? Those questions have preyed on my mind since reading Robert’s story. I figured the only way I could start thinking about something else is to go ahead and write my letter.

So here it is, the last thing I’d ever write:

Dear All,

I don’t know how I managed to get myself in this mess. I think a lot of times you can’t see the trouble that’s coming until it’s on you. This is probably one of those times. I guess I should hurry. I never used to think much about time. Suddenly, time seems pretty important.

To my family, I want to say that the very last thing I want to do is leave you behind. You need to know that as much as I’m ready for heaven, I’m thinking the angels will have to drag me there. But don’t worry, I’ll find me a bench somewhere near the gate and wait for each of you.

To my wife, I’m sorry I was never the man I wanted to be. I’m thankful you overlooked that. Take care of the kids. Raise them to believe like you and fight like me.

To my son, there are few things more difficult in life than knowing how to be a man. I’ll give you a quick summary—work hard, laugh much, pray often. Love dignity rather than money. Face your darkness. Let your word be your bond. You’ll do well in life if you cling to those things. Know that I will always be proud of you.

To my daughter, you’ve taught me more about faith than anyone I’ve ever known. Remember this: we seldom have any choice as to the wars we must fight, we can only elect to face them with honor or cowardice.

To my friends, I know it may appear at times that I prefer silence to speech and solitude to company, but you mended the gashes I had rent into my own heart. Whatever goodness is in me was fostered by you.

I ask that you dispose of my remains as you see fit. I have no preference. Whatever flesh and bone is left behind is not me, it is merely an empty house that God has deemed I’ve outgrown.

Do not mourn, laugh.

Do not look back, look forward.

Live intently.

And last, know that all that separates the two of us is but one stroke of heaven’s eternal clock. Life is but a dream. Death is simply when we wake.

Can’t wait to die

image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com

Dear Ms. Elementary School Counselor,

Chances are fair that I really don’t need to do this, not with the great number of other tasks that need to be crossed off what I’m sure is a long list. Still, a part of me expects your call at any moment.

I imagine your voice would be kind but grave, telling me in the most professional way possible that my son is afflicted with suicidal thoughts. You will probably suggest several courses of action, all of which should be immediate and most of which will involve varying arrays of medications and counseling. If that call should indeed come, I intend to put you at ease and email you this short note as an explanation, hoping you are of a mind to understand. Because, yes, my son did announce to the half-dozen or so of his classmates at the lunch table that he couldn’t wait to die, but that’s not what he meant. At least, not really.

Like most things, context is what’s important. That’s what I’ll give you. And if by some chance you haven’t received the full account of what my son and his friends were discussing, he said they were all ruminating on death. I’m not so intelligent, nor am I a licensed school counselor, but I would imagine such a topic wouldn’t raise too many red flags. It’s been my experience that children do not shrink from the thought of dying, that they see it as something what will always come sooner rather than later. It’s only when we grow up that death becomes a menace, something that should be ignored lest it be considered.

I say all that so I can say this—my son was merely stating a fact. He has told me often that he cannot wait to die, and I must confess the idea is not wholly his own. I was the one responsible for planting that thought in his head. I can’t wait to die, either. Nor my wife, nor my daughter. Nor, in fact, most of our friends and acquaintances. Before you panic and think you’ve just stumbled upon some hillbilly suicide pact, let me assure you that’s not the case. We—my son and his family—simply believe there isn’t death at all. There’s only life followed by more life.

I realize this may come as no surprise to you, and that you in fact may share this conviction. In a town in which there are nearly four times as many churches as stop lights, the odds are good that’s the case. And yet I am realistic enough to know the changing times—even here, many of the pews in many of those churches are emptying, life has grown too busy for the Sabbath, etc. If that’s true in your case, I’ll do my best to explain in greater detail.

You see, we believe there is more. More to life, more to the universe, more to everything. That all we know is but a sliver of what is actually true and real, and that hidden behind all we can perceive is a single thread that traces its beginning to a God beyond all understanding. That holy, loving God imbued us with more than a mind to ponder and a heart to feel. He gave us a soul as well, and he placed inside us all a spark of eternity that not even death can destroy.

I know—that might not make much sense. It sounds a bit irrational. Even childish. That’s fine. Much of what we believe seems as such to those who don’t. We’re used to being misunderstood and even mocked, but this is who we are, and this is what we will forever be.

I’ll only say this: yes, we are looking forward to that greater life beyond. We see that world as much brighter and more real than this tired and frail one we live in now. But that’s not to say we are eager to leave. We have much to do here, much more to grow. We have a purpose and meaning. So I ask that you not worry about my son. He’s in good hands. Worry instead for those who believe this life is the end, and only darkness waits hereafter.

With kind regards,

The heartbeat of this world

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
My uncle has passed. The cancer took him.

He left the world at five o’clock this morning. Saturday morning, it is. January 11. As I write this I glance up to a cold rain falling through the fog that rolls down from the mountains. It seems right that death should be greeted by such weather. We know where he is, and we know that place is fine and beautiful and has no cancer in it, but that does not mean there is no grief. There is grief for my family. And there is heartache for my aunt and two cousins.

He was a simple man who lived a simple life. A farmer who spent much of his time tending to land that has been his kin’s for generations. A devout man, a hard worker, a provider for his family. When you are from my part of the country, such qualities lead people to call you Good. He was a Good man.

The cancer had been in his family, felling several. I suppose the thought that he could meet a similar end was in my uncle’s mind. He abhorred doctors. He chose to ignore the pain that began months ago rather than have it investigated. He knew, I think. I think in some way he always knew. By the time there was no choice but to seek help, it was too late. The cancer was everywhere by then.

To the end, he rose each morning to feed the animals with a strength none of us can fully fathom. The land was his life, all he knew. Several days ago, as the cancer spread into his brain, he wandered outside without a shirt in below-zero temperatures. My aunt and cousins let him, too wearied by their long fight against the death that stalked him. He stared out over the hills and fields and came inside when he finally grew too cold. So far as I know, it was the last time he gazed upon his tiny part of the world.

The pain was too great for him last night. No amount of medicine could ease it. Death saved him from more life. That’s how I’m trying to see it.

Upon his death, my cousins washed his body and dressed him in a suit. The simple cherry box he will lie in was handmade by a local Amish man. He will go into the ground today in a family plot that overlooks his home, watched over by a preacher, my aunt, and her children and grandchildren. It is the way my uncle wanted it, and how the country and mountain folk have buried their loved ones for hundreds of years. You may think that strange, backward almost and excruciatingly difficult. That’s fine.

We do not choose how we are born into this world and we do not choose how we leave it. It’s the wide spaces in between that are ours to live and do—to craft something of worth, something that will last, something that will honor the God who blesses us all.

My uncle did that in his own quiet way, and that is why I write of him now. Because on this and every day, there are many more like him in the hills and hollows of our country. They grow the food you eat and the cows that give you milk and beef. They live by the whims of weather and the grace of God. They are the heartbeat of this world, and they should be remembered.

Giving up on God

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.

Dying well

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

The shot hits me just below the chest, shattering some important organ. A lung, maybe, or an intestine. My left hand goes there. I feel the wetness through my fingers and fall to my knees—my death pose. My eyes are open (they should probably be closed, but no way am I going out like that), as is my mouth. My face holds a look of shock that says This can’t be happening, and I think that even as I drop to the grass. I’m still. I don’t even move when the grass pokes into my mouth and tickles my gums.

A skinny shadow falls over me then, and a loud voice says, “Cut.”

I raise my head. “Good?”

My daughter stands there, one hand on her hip and the other holding the camera. “That wasn’t very good, Daddy.”

My son stands next to her. He’s holding the water pistol at his hip in much the same fashion as he imagines Doc Holiday once did. “Nope,” he says. “That weren’t too good a’tall.”

“I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong,” I tell them. “I grab my shirt like you said, I tumble over like you said, I lie there like you said. You want me to close my eyes?”

I don’t want to, but at this point I’ll do whatever it takes to have this over with. We’ve been out here in the yard for two hours. Making a movie, my daughter says. This week, that’s what she wants to do when she grows up. I said fine, let’s make a movie. I figured it couldn’t be worse than last week, back when she wanted to be a veterinarian. I don’t even want to talk about that.

My son was more than willing to participate, especially when my daughter informed him of the plot: Bad guy captures the princess, good guy shows up to rescue her, bad guy gets it in the end. It’s all gone smoothly until this last scene. The final showdown isn’t going well. The dialogue is crisp, the action top-notch. That’s not the problem.

The problem is me. I’m not dying right.

That’s what they keep saying. “You ain’t dyin’ right, Daddy” from her and “The way you’re doin’ it’s the sucks” from him. He says if this keeps up the camera batteries are gonna die, and they’ll do a better job of it than I am.

“I don’t understand what you want me to do,” I say. “I’m telling you, this is how people die. I watch a lot of TV.”

“It ain’t right,” my son says.

My daughter nods. “I don’t know how they do it on the TV, Daddy, but that ain’t how you die.” She turns to her brother and says, “C’mon, let’s go see if we can figure out something else.”

So I lie there in the grass while my children conduct and impromptu director’s meeting, which most likely revolves around what sort of sandwich they want for lunch and how hard it is to find quality actors these days. Me, I’m just thinking about how to die right. It’s a heavy subject. And like most heavy subjects, pondering it brings all sorts of thoughts to mind.

Because that’s what we’re all doing, right? We’re dying. We don’t like to talk about existence in that term. We say we’re growing, maturing. Living. But an argument could be made that our first peek at this world—that first cry when we emerge from the womb—is the only moment we are truly alive. All the moments that come after are spent in the shadow of death.

And I wonder: Is that why I can’t nail this last scene in my daughter’s first movie? Is that my problem? Have I gotten life all turned around, thinking the things I need to do and say don’t need to be done today because there’s always tomorrow? How much time have I wasted waiting for God to act, and all this while He’s been waiting for me, telling me to embrace my days, to ravish them?

How much time have I wasted trying to figure out how to live right instead of how to die right?

“Hey,” I say. “Let’s do this again.”

My daughter says no, there’s been a change of plan. My son’s going to be the bad guy now. He thinks he can do a better job.

“No,” I say. “One more try.”

He smiles and attacks, I laugh and defend. We brawl and battle and wail. Each squirt of our water guns brings joyful laughter. Finally, I lunge into the nearest bush, clutching my mortal wounds, and then collapse with a flourish into the arms of heaven. I embrace that scene. Ravish it.

My daughter yells, “Cut! Wrap!”

It was a glorious death.

Kicking and Screaming

image courtesy of washingtonpost.com
image courtesy of washingtonpost.com

My friend passed the newspaper across the table and pointed to the article in the bottom corner. The headline read, “Georgia claims it has world’s oldest person, 130.”

“This is who I want to be.”

“You want to be an old woman?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “Read it.”

I did. Antisa Khvichava is her name. Has a son, ten grandchildren, twelve great grandchildren, and six great, great grandchildren. And according to local authorities, she was born on July 8, 1880.

The article went on to say that a birth certificate was lost and so would not be forthcoming. Proof, it seemed, had been reduced to a few old Soviet documents and the word of local officials, neighbors, and descendants. She lives with her seventy-year-old son in the mountains near her birthplace.

I looked up at my friend, who was in the middle of a sip of his coffee. “That’s what I want,” he said. “To be that old.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Can you imagine being the oldest person in the world? How cool would that be? Do you have any idea how much wisdom that lady must have?”

I wasn’t sure. About any of it.

“She’s a hundred and thirty,” I said. I checked the article again. Ms. Khvichava’s fingers were cramped and deformed by age, but people said she continued to have a sharp mind. Somehow, that didn’t bring me much comfort. “You really want to live that long?”

“Absolutely,” my friend said. He picked up the sports section and thumbed through the baseball scores. “I wanna live a full life and then be dragged kicking and screaming out of this world.” He folded the paper and placed it in the middle of the table. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a full life?”

He shrugged. “Wife, kids, good job, retirement, grandkids. Maybe some golf.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll buy that. But still…a hundred and thirty?”

“Why not? How old do you want to be when you die?”

It was a question I’d never been asked, and one I had never thought to ask myself. “I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me and sneered. “Better start thinking about it, then,” he said. “You ain’t getting any younger.”

He was right. I wasn’t. It could be said that I was now officially middle aged. I’d never thought about that either. And maybe it was time. We never know how long our lives will last, but most of us at some point reach a place in our lives when we believe we’re at some imaginary halfway point, that our next step will mean there’s more behind us than ahead.

I did want a full life. I had that much figured out, which was good news. And I thought I was well on my way to one. More good news.

My friend had picked up the newspaper to read the article again. “Wonder what she knows?” he asked. “Bet that’s a wise old lady.”

I was silent.

“Yep,” he said, “kicking and screaming. That’s how I want to go.”

The article didn’t include a picture, so I just formed one in my mind. And then I imagined what she’s seen over her nearly century and a half. Two revolutions. Two world wars. Hunger. Strife. Stalin. Death and destruction and hopelessness. It didn’t matter how long you last in this world, things weren’t going to get any better. You couldn’t wait on people to suddenly wake up and realize they’re a mess, because most never have and never will. That’s what I think she’d say.

I used to think about death a lot. I don’t much anymore. I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that I once thought of it as a period but now I think of it as a comma.

A waking up.

Kicking and screaming, my friend said. That’s how he wanted to go. He’d made up his mind about that. Maybe I should make up my mind about that, too.

My mind wandered to an old Native American saying I heard once. Smart people, those old Indians. They knew how to die well. And it wasn’t by kicking and screaming.

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

Yes.

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