Saturday began just as it always did. The beginning of yet another weekend, a mundane day of relaxed obligation. Morning coffee with my wife. Beer and pub food with a friend or two. The anticipation of a casual get-together for a cooking competition that had become a monthly tradition with the men of my life. Men whose friendships I counted not in years, but decades.
It was November 9, 2013 and one by one they arrived, just as the sun was setting. There were smiles, jokes, food—but above all there was camaraderie. A sense of belonging. Men of high character who simply enjoyed the company and presence of each other.
That evening, as darkness began to settle in around us, food preparation seemed to abruptly end and we began to fill our plates.
I was standing at my bar next to a friend, looking at the stack of green ceramic platters, trying to decide exactly what I would try first, and in what order I would try each dish, so that I could offer my vote for the winning entry.
This was the nature of my evening that night. Nothing could be more commonplace or uneventful, which is exactly how I planned my life. Uneventful, domestic, plain. Everything about my existence in my retrospective view was, in a word, unremarkable.
As I shifted my weight to walk into the kitchen to retrieve a simple plate of food, my phone rang. I looked at the display and read the name. It was my ex-wife.
She had called me only once before since our divorce and the reason was to announce the news of Tim’s last arrest. Even so, I thought nothing of it because of the mindset that I was living a good, yet, unremarkable life. Knowing, however, that it was probably important, I left the group and walked into my unlit front living room and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Guy. It’s Dawn.”
“Yes; I know. What do you need?”
“Guy. Tim unintelligible”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t catch that. What about Tim?”
“panic tone He died.”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“He was driving my truck, driving to Austin with Donna. It left the road and hit a tree. There was a fire. They didn’t survive.”
On she went, revealing details, even the most basic of which I was having trouble grasping. I repeated the story back to her twice to make sure I understood what happened, apologizing awkwardly for making her repeat the news, hung up the phone, and stood there in the darkness with my head in my left hand.
An eternity later I turned and walked slowly toward the gathering, and with each step, my mind began to empty itself. All the things I knew began to leave, as though my entire life up to that point was disappearing. It was as if the Almighty, himself, were scrubbing my mind with some terrible, intergalactic eraser, completely eliminating any previous sense of who I was.
In the following few minutes my entire identity, the person I knew as me, completely disappeared. Such is the link between our own identity and that of our children.
And with the sanitizing of my memory came the sanitizing of my lexicon. To this day I tend to refer to the events of that November Saturday not as the day my son died. I instead refer passively to his accident, as though it is somehow less real if I refer to the facts of the circumstance rather than to the painful reality of his passing.
And this is how I spoke to my wife as I directed her away from our guests and into our bathroom. My head was spinning as I said the words.
“Tim was in an accident. He was with Donna. There were no survivors.”
“There were no survivors.” The comment echoed through the vacuum of my mind and I was unable to describe the event in any other way—like some kind of bizarre religious incantation that might somehow reverse a circumstance too terrible to contemplate.
“I can’t make this announcement. I can’t interrupt and say this thing. I need you to do this for me. Please.”
Wiping the tears from her face that burst when I told her the news, she simply left the room in silence, touching my chest with her right hand.
I stood there for yet another eternity, unable to cry, unable to speak, and unable to think. There was nothing; only the cold, constricting numbness of inaction. And then, instinctively, I found the wherewithal to come out of the restroom and address my guests who had remained, each equally paralyzed from the news, staring at me and unable to speak, themselves.
“Tim was in his mother’s truck with his fiancée, traveling from Fort Worth to Austin, on highway 281. Just North of Hamilton, his truck left the road and struck a tree. There was a fire. There were no survivors.”
And with that, life as I knew it began to die a little bit each day, as the new truth of my life began to unfold, little by little like a vine entwining a tree. As I came to understand this new reality with each passing day, it drew itself around me, growing ever tighter, constricting my very breath at times.
Kind words caressed me without effect. Physical and virtual embraces were offered to no avail. Those I held dear stood by helplessly and watched, sometimes in grief, sometimes in frustration, and sometimes in anger.
Like my son in the pit of his addiction, I began to construct a dark prison of anguish from which no one—not even my most ardent supporters—could fashion an escape.
Patiently they waited, hoping on my behalf, just as I had hoped on my son’s behalf. Just as I watched my son, with dismay at times, spend the precious, little time he had left on Earth abuse street drugs and alcohol in unbridled binges, my wife and friends watched as I climbed into a whiskey bottle every night and publicly cursed the God of my faith for the injustice I felt.
In many cases, this circumstance will end friendships and marriages. The burden often becomes too heavy and the temptation to leave becomes greater than your ability to resist it—just as I had to walk away from my son for a time.
Why they stayed, I don’t know. Perhaps they simply understood that I was a person in great need; perhaps God impressed upon them great empathy for my situation; perhaps they were simply inspired to offer the greatest gift a friend can offer.
Whatever the reason, they waited, they hoped, and they prayed.
