Tag Archives: life

More Time

When I was eighteen years old, I thought I was going to die.

There was a diagnosis (cancer).  There was a prognosis (favorable).  And there was a treatment plan.  

The doctors and nurses reassured me every time I had an appointment, that the type of cancer I had was, as of the last few decades, very responsive to treatment.  Despite the reassurances, I still remember the overwhelming and crippling fear of being able to see, for the first time, how quickly the feeling of living can turn into the feeling of dying.  

I have been thinking about that a lot recently.  That had I been born a half a century earlier than I was, I most likely would have died before my twentieth birthday.  I think about how every person ever diagnosed with my same type of cancer, whether they were born before or after me, most likely did what I did in the aftermath of diagnosis: beg for more time.  

I imagine we were all united in that prayer…the asking for more time to live.  But I know that only some of us actually got it.  

This last year, it really hit me: that the past few decades of my life were actually the “more time” I had pleaded for.  How I’m actually living out the hours, days, and years which, at some point, I was terrified I would never get to see.  

I was given the “more time” I asked for.  And within it, I was given more experiences, and more travel, and more friendships, and more laughter, and more tears.  And I was given you.  

You were a part of the life I so desperately pleaded for on the floor of my bedroom all those years ago: meeting you, loving you, losing you, and, yes, even grieving you.  All of those moments  of  “you” etched into minutes I longed to see and now hold as memories.  It begs the question: how could I view any of this, any of you, as loss? 

I didn’t want to die at eighteen.  I didn’t.  

And I know you didn’t want to die at twenty eight.  Yet you did.  

I know no part of you could have believed that by the time you were finally old enough to drive a car, you had more years behind you than you did ahead.  

I know you didn’t want to die, but it happened.  You died first, and the rest of us can only follow. 

I haven’t died the way you did, not yet, but I have died in other ways during the “more time” I’ve been given.  That time has been punctuated by a different kind of death: the dark nights of the soul kind of dying.  

I haven’t died like you have, but I have had my world go black many times since you did. The kind of dark brought about as quickly as a camera shutter closing: each disappointment, each struggle, each loss and unexpected twist of life reducing my life to the black square found in the center of a Polaroid before details of a new image begin to emerge.   

I haven’t died like you have, but I have gotten better at the dying part of living because of you.  

I know how to  let things and people go now.   I no longer cling to the image I have of myself, or cling to people that walk in and then walk back out of my life.  Those small hurts that always seemed so big…I can shoulder them now.   I can let life go black now because I have seen that new images can only develop in dark places.  

I can do all of these small dyings now because of you. In a way, you showed me how to do it: how to die.   But also how to live out the rest of the “more time” that I asked for all those years ago; the “more time” that I got but you for some unknowable and heart-rending reason did not.  

And to finally see it for what it is: a gift.

Roll Call

In the military, there is a ritual for almost every major transition in both career and life.  

The traditions and rites of passage practiced and passed down within the branches of our military serve  almost as time capsules which contain remnants and reflections of days long passed.  There is an antiquity to them which also carries with it a unifying element which  elicits a kind of nostalgia in anyone who witnesses or participates in them.  

To name a few: for a pilot in the Air Force there are dollar rides, namings, and fini flights which serve as landmarks as they move through their career.  

And then there’s the missing man and the piano burns for when they die. 

And though there is a vast difference of traditions amongst the various communities, one that is common across most of them is the roll call.  

A roll call can take many forms: 

There is the standard roll call which is very similar to what I, as a teacher, do when I take attendance. A formality that carries with it very little emotional importance.  

But then there are the roll calls which happen in a squadron bar. These are the ones that I would hear story after raucous story about.  

I always thought that squadron roll calls were nothing more than an excuse to gather and drink; all I knew was that the day after one,  John would have nothing but murky details to share and a hangover to nurse.   He’d describe them as best he could: the pilots would gather together, their call signs would be called out, and they would respond. 

A call and response.  

(And then…they would drink.  And sing.  And tell stories.  And drink some more)  

It wasn’t until John one day mentioned that the names of his deceased friends were also called out during roll call that the tradition began to carry with it a new resonance which even I as a civilian could appreciate.  There was something about the vision of an entire squadron listening for their  fallen friend’s name, and then sitting together in the brief silence or the “here-here’s” that followed that was profoundly moving.

(This moment would of course be followed by drinking.  And  singing.  And the telling of stories all the while drinking some more)  

The exact structure of a roll call varies across military branches:  Sometimes the deceased’s name is called three times, sometimes just once.  Sometimes it is their rank followed by their full name.  Other times, in the case of squadron roll calls: it is simply the fallen pilot’s call sign.  

Trojan, Stuck, Pyro…

Despite the differences, there is one consistent detail  that all roll calls share: no matter how many times a fallen soldier’s name is called, or what name they are actually called by, their voice will never be the one to respond back to it.  

The one consistent detail is that, for a split second, all of the deceased’s friends sit in that moment and exist in it without them. 

And then they drink…

And they sing… 

And drink some more… 

So yes, the roll call is just a part of what takes place in the middle of a rowdy squadron, and yes the moment where their friend’s name hovers in the air before quickly evaporating into waves of squadron songs and tall tales is short lived, but their name was spoken nonetheless.  Saying their name is important, even if they can’t say it back.  Their name and all the energy and stories threaded into it is added to the air the entire squadron breathes for one night. 

That’s why when you ask someone how to honor one of their fallen friends on Memorial Day, the most common response is: just say their name.  

So this Memorial Day, do just that.  

In the middle of whatever bar-b-q, bar, or pool party you end up at, in between the songs and the drinking and the story telling,  take a page out of a flying squadron’s playbook…and say their names.  

A New Story

“When you and I met, the meeting was over shortly; it was nothing.  Now it is  growing as we remember it.  What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what our meeting inspires in me all my days ’til then: that is the real meeting.” –CS Lewis

I would ask John to tell me the story of how we met because I loved hearing him tell it.

There’s a feeling I get whenever I’m hearing or reading something profound; it’s a feeling that is only brought out through direct contact with the words; almost like the friction from a match right before the flame appears. There are moments in life that feel like that too: they hold us transfixed, almost in a sort of pleasure when we recollect or share them with others. Those are the good moments nestled within the good stories that allow us to breathe a little easier.

Hearing him tell the story of us meeting was like that for me.

How we met was such a chance encounter that I would refer to it as almost magical. And the feeling that would come after could only be described as “magic.” There was no other word I could think of to describe what the story of us meeting was.

It wasn’t until I found myself reading JRR Tolkien’s ideas on the difference between “magic” and “enchantment” that I realized I had picked the wrong word to describe what meeting John brought into my life, both when he was alive, and now long after.

Magic, Tolkien believed, is used to bend the reality of this world in order to match our desires.  It is done with the intention to dominate those around us and make them submit to our whims, manifestations, and ultimately, to our will.  

Enchantment on the other hand doesn’t attempt to bend and distort reality.  

Rather, it calls us into another world, leads us away, and weaves us, little by little, into another story. A world connected to the one we were in, yet still all together separate. To enter an enchanted world is not an act of our will, but rather a submission of it to another’s.

Enchantment involves a choice.  It is a call which invites us to leave where we are and venture onto another land. 

Unlike magic, whether or not we choose to answer and surrender to that that call is up to us.

In the world of enchantment, if you allow it to do what it wills with you, you somehow become both more and less of yourself at the same time as you are cross-stitched into a reality inhabited by all the stories, histories, and myths that came long before. 

Enchantment takes the story of John and I out of this common world of space and time and life and death and places it on higher ground into a world of “story” itself. The world where all good stories begin.  

There, he and I are no longer two people who met one another seven years ago; he is no longer someone who died two years after that or someone whom I have grieved ever since. 

In the enchanted world our story didn’t start seven years ago: It started the very first time a young man and a young woman ever caught one another’s eyes in the middle of a crowded room and felt the whole world around them disappear. It started the first time two people fought the odds, fought expectations, and fought the world as they knew it in order to be together.

We become an extension of every couple who ever gave up “land and title” for love and of  every person who ever charged the gates of the underworld in an attempt to grasp a loved one’s hand just one more time.  We become characters in a story where fiction and fact battle it out and leave people wondering what is true, what is exaggeration, and what is the fantasy of a grieving mind.  

So it wasn’t magic after all that our story contained. And telling it does not reshape the fundamental reality of a world which I still inhabit yet he does not.

If I did have the power to reshape it, I would have willed our story to conclude with “and they lived happily ever after.”  I would have willed us both long lives free of disease and discomfort. And I would have willed that for the rest of my life, I would get exactly what I want when and how I wanted it.

I don’t though. 

And I thank God for that now because that ending, though it would have been a fine one,  would have been confined by the limits of my own mind and imagination. It would have been an altogether different story, and though it would have been a longer one, I’m not sure if it would hold the same level of transfixion.

When he lived, I loved our story, but after he died, I couldn’t find it within myself to love or even understand the story of what would come after.

So I clung to our old stories and revisited them over and over, lighting match after match without knowing what to do with the few seconds of flickering flame that followed. It was only when I let the sparks do what they willed that I found they lit a way to enchanted places.

So I have followed them and allowed myself to be enchanted by the story of “what came after” instead because that is the story that called me from a death-scorched Earth into an upside down kingdom where graves are hallowed and all good stories go.  I have allowed what I cannot love here to enchant and mystify me there instead. 

And maybe one day I will be led to a place where we get to live and rest in that profound feeling which only comes when something worth being said is being said well. And I will re-meet John and we will remember one another in a new way. And instead of asking him to tell me the story of how we met, I will be the one with a good story he will ask me to tell.

And I will tell it.

I will tell him a new story, this story, of all that came after.