Grieving and Mourning

It has been nearly a year since she turned her last page.

I staggered through a eulogy, my niece sang a song, and the preacher was kind. Afterward, we all drove to the hillside where they lowered her into the ground next to Dad. We had all done our best. She deserved so much better. Back at the house, someone asked if I'd ever be back. I wasn't sure if it was a joke or a banishment. I still haven't cried. Not for her. Not for myself. Not for anything. And I haven't been back.

I didn't shed a tear that whole week. You don't cry at your own funeral. 

Grief comes and goes. You grieve for things decades old, then the feeling passes and life goes on.  

Mourning sticks to your clothes and tangles your hair and gums up your eyes till they barely open when the alarm goes off. Merciless fingers mold and mis-shape you into something you no longer love or even recognize. Your apartment is full of books that used to open, clothes that used to fit, and prayers that used comfort. At midnight, you rise from tortured dreams and curse as you jamb your toe against Hope's feathery remains on your way to the bathroom.

A mourner is insulated from love and isolated from life. Invitations are gratefully declined. Excuses are made. Messages ignored. 

Want a ride? Catch a movie? Meet up for a run? Need to talk? Anything?

No, thanks. He's good. Don't worry. He has no desire for death, he simply lacks hunger for life.

Lately, he has been wondering if maybe one year is enough. Maybe it's time to roll up the black veil in tissue paper and mothballs and return to life. He wonders if he has the strength or even the desire to go back to a world without his mother. What's out there? Disappointed lovers? Abandoned friends? Neglected family? Wasted possibilities. The silence of the phone that should be filled with her laughter and stories. The cruelty of a God who betrays trust and tortures the ones who love Him most, leaving the rest of us with questions He dares not answer.

If she were here, she would know what to say. She always did. Simple, honest words that were not always easy to hear, and never failed to land with love. But she is gone. The best of him is with her on that Pennsylvania hillside, next to his father. 

Grief passes like time, like life, like water flowing downstream. Mourning is the river's bed, carving banks and bottoms as the shapelessness above ebbs and crashes, pools and floods. Grief happens. Mourning transforms. The view from the shore has become home to him. He is not the sailor he once was.

More than a decent interval has passed. A year in black armbands was surely enough. She would never want to see her son tangled in the weeds, numb from the cold, lonely and content to be alone. Surely it is time to paddle back out into the channel.

But he doesn't believe in it any more. He can see other people's boats paddling along. They carry their loses and their victories. They suffer and survive. They find love and trust and faith and gather them in as they sail through sadness and loss. His own stores are empty. Love slipped overboard. Trust melted on the blazing deck. Faith frozen in the silent, starless hold.

In his darkest hours, he grieved for all his precious cargo. But every waking and sleeping moment, he mourns for it. Loss defines him as surely as sandbar and cutback define the river. He no longer believes in sailing. Not for him.

He does not wish to be known.

Wishes he could cry. Just once. For her. For all of us.

Goddammit. We miss her so.

"How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?" Part Two: Ablation

"Damn, there's a lot of y'all people up in here." 

That's what I noticed first, the size of the team. Nurses and techs and anesthetists and people staring at screens and one big hulking dude whose main job, I assume, was to muscle me off the table and back onto the gurney when the time came. And that was just in the operating room, before the electrophysiologist made his appearance.

I arrived via Lyft at around 6;00 AM. Registration went smoothly. They accepted a comically small payment on a bill that will be around for many years, as will I. A lady with terrific looking hair (everybody I met had such great hair,) walked me to the room that would be my home-base for the day. Another strip down. Another robe. Another pair of those fuzzy socks with the rubber stripes on the bottom. A tiny lady with great hair came in and took my vitals. Put on stickers for an EKG. Fitted me with a disposable blood pressure cuff. Then, in a voice that was just perky enough, "OK, Mr. Johnson. I'm going to shave your groin, now." I knew this part was coming and I had been dreading it, not out of modesty, but because I knew how brutally itchy this site was going to be in a few days. She covered Little Bob with a towel, which I thought was a kind touch, and used an electric shaver on my thighs, groins, and lower belly. As she finished up, the nurse who would be looking after me all day, whose real name was Barbie, came around the curtain with a toss of her hair and a stack of papers to review. We went over my list of drugs and my medical history. She told me how good Dr Ross was and how I was going to do great.

Then the great man himself made his appearance. We had met once in his office, the day he scared the shit out of me by describing all the things that could go wrong during the surgery. I remember how his face fell when I told him I had a fiter installed into my inferior vena cava after my blood clot during cancer treatment, 12 years ago. The IVC filter could pose a real problem. If they couldn't get their equipment around it, they would have to stop and try again later by opening my chest. The possibility haunted me all week. By Thursday night, I was twisted up in knots only a drunken boy scout could have tied. A friend posted this on Facebook for me:

     Yes, it's scary as hell to think about what they're doing, but so is the thought of a potentially lethal arrhythmia that stops you dead in your tracks when you least expect it. 
     It’s good that you have an “easily” curable problem that should be a thing of the past after you awaken from the nightmare that exists before tomorrow at 6:00AM. Go to sleep and rest well tonight, knowing that you have the blessing of making a choice.
     Cruel as these words may sound, they’re not meant to be. My prayers will include you tonight, Bob.

I'm not sure what Mike imagined might sound cruel in his words, but they gave me just the courage I needed. I had a choice. I could choose life, something so many other people I've loved and lost did not have the chance to do. I really was blessed.

So I was feeling relatively peaceful on Friday morning as a young anesthetist with a bald scalp and an African accent as comforting as warm sorghum talked me through the procedure for the hundredth time. He checked out the site of my cancer surgery and my throat to make sure there would be no trouble intubating me. He gave me a long list of drugs they would pump into me to let me sleep and keep me from being nauseous after. He also warned me that I would be flat on my back for four hours after leaving surgery so the incisions on my groin could have a chance to close up a little bit. (That was where they would be inserting the catheters that would carry all the cameras and sensors and magic wands that would do the work inside my heart. Hence the shave.) 

I'm sure I had lots of other visitors, but the last one I remember was a young woman whose name escapes me, but whose form reminded me why so many boys harbor fantasies about nurses. She was wearing a surgical gown and head cover, but I'm sure underneath it, her hair was perfect. She disconnected me from the monitors and rolled me down the hall, then asked the question I had been fearing most of all.

"Have you ever had a Foley before?" For you surgical virgins out there, a Foley catheter is a tube that the run up into your urethra so you can pee into a bag while you are unconscious. Mercifully, they don't put it in till you are asleep. But you will never be as awake in your life as you are when they remove it. 

But I am ahead of myself. As we rolled down the hall, through the hundredth set of automated doors, I was feeling a little flirty toward my shapely Florence Nightingale, and joked that I felt like the title sequence of Get Smart. No response. "That doesn't mean a thing to you, does it?" 'I've heard of it,' she replied sweetly, "but I never saw that movie." God  love her. My shoes are older than she is.

Once in the surgery, there was nothing but action al around me. People were focused and professional, like I imagine the team that gets an astronaut strapped into the capsule before lift off. One guy seemed to be the morale officer and we just sort of joked back and forth as he shaved my chest to place more stickers. A voice over my shoulder warned me, "OK, Mr. Johnson, I'm going to give you something now that may make you feel tingly or you may taste metal. It won't last long." She lowered an oxygen mask over my face. I felt someone arrange my left arm beside the gurney. "What do you know," I thought, "that tastes like..."

Then I woke up."You're done," Barbie said. "You did great." Dr Ross came in and told me that everything went according to plan. The IVC filter barely slowed them down. He'd see me in a week. I realized that he wasn't wearing a mask. I had never seen his face before. He had a goatee.

For the next four hours, it was just me and Barbie. She brought me ice water. Ordered lunch for me: Fruit salad and an indigestible grilled cheese sandwich. She brought me more blankets when I got cold, and more water when I got dry and I was so grateful for her kindness that I forgot to notice her hair. 

Speaking of hair... The time finally came for her to remove the dressings and take out the single stitch that held each incision closed. "Oh dear," she said. They've stuck tape right into your pubic hair. I'm sorry. This is really going to hurt. Better to just get it over with. RRRIIIIPPP! 

You know the sound a puppy makes when you accidentally step on it's tail? Yeah. I made that sound. I'm pretty sure my eyes watered a little bit, too. Oh, did I mention that I have two legs? RRRIIIIPPP!!!

St. Joseph's Hospital has a delicate silver crucifix hanging in every patient room, and I was glad to have Jesus so close by so I could beg for a quick and painless death. It may have been the Fentanyl, but I'm pretty sure he was laughing at me. I mean, it wasn't like i was nailed to the wall or something.

Barbie snipped the stitches and pulled them away. She replaced them with two, more carefully placed dressings. Then came the awful moment.

"You're going to take it out now, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"I hate this part."

"It isn't fun."

She held Little Bob tenderly in her gloved hand and began to slide the catheter out. I don't know why they would make them out of salty barbed wire, but that is the only explanation for the way that jagged fire hose felt as she pulled twelve feet of it through the tenderest part of my tenderest part.

This time, Jesus was definitely laughing.

"I'm pretty sure I'm still peeing."

"No, you're not. But I'll get you a urinal, just in case."

After that, everything happened pretty fast. A nurse at the desk outside my room threatened to chew her leg off if they didn't let her go home soon. A young nurse in scrubs and hair styled to the same salt and pepper ponytail as my own leaned over the counter and whispered something about someone, probably the funny old man in room seven who kept cussing out Jesus for laughing at him. Barbie brought me lots of papers to sign, one of which was a paper warning me not to sign any legal papers for the next 24 hours. I got dressed. Ordered a car. Salt and Pepper girl escorted me to the door to wait for my Lyft driver.

"Do you all get your hair done at the same place? Everybody here has such great hair."

"Wow, thanks," she glowed. "That's really funny."

Just then, and I swear this is true, a big-bellied fellow in a bright orange safety vest and hard hat came out of the door and approached us from behind.

"I just wanted to tell you," hand to God, this is what he said, "I really like your hair. It's very striking."

She laughed a laugh that made me notice how good the spring air smelled as she replied, "That's what he just said!"

Big belly looked at me with a smirk and an eye roll. "We're idiots."

As he walked away I noticed that his own ponytail could use a little touch up with a brush. I was back in the outside world.

I don't remember the ride home. Or dinner. Sophie the cat and I curled up and slept all the sleep I had missed the night before. 

Today?

Today, I have started to itch on my legs, my crotch, and my chest. It's just about time to remove the dressings from my groin. 

I have a sore throat from the breathing tube. And a foggy head from what I can best figure was four hours of surgery under anesthesia.

And hell's fire it hurts to pee. 

But at least I have a choice now. Lots of them. I'll raise a glass of cranberry juice and try to make some better ones.

Peace, y'all.

Pennsy

"How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?", Part One: Cardioversion

 We've known for a couple months that something was wrong. My heart rate was getting really high on my runs, but quite low on my off days. My blood pressure was no longer responding to the meds, so when my doc ran out of ideas, she referred me to a cardiologist. The cardiologist added fists full of pills and they finally started bringing the numbers down.

Meanwhile, a routine blood test indicated anemia, so my doc ordered a colonoscopy to look for a bleed. Nothing unusual except one benign polyp. Then came the endoscope to check out the upper bowel. No bleeds, no goblins which left one more magic trick. 

There is this thing called a pill-cam. It's a big, big capsule with a light on one end and a web-cam inside that you swallow and carry around for a day. It talks to a belt pack that records what must be the most boring video in the world. It takes a couple weeks for some poor schmuck to assess the whole thing. No troubles found, no answer to the continuing mystery of the anemia. On the other hand, you get to keep the camera. I elected to simply let that opportunity pass.

But part of the prep for this robot magic was a sonogram. We had to be sure i had no blockages that would trap the camera. They found none. But what they did find, by accident, I suppose, was a weird little hop in my heartbeat. The report caught my cardiologist's attention, and her EKG revealed that I had developed atrial fibrillation or A-fib. It's a skip or flurry in the rhythm of your heart that makes all kinds of evil stuff much more likely. Stroke. Heart attack. Embolism. She immediately put me on blood thinners and scheduled an appointment for something called a cardioversion procedure. This was several weeks ago, so my memory may be blurry, but here is what I remember.

I went to the cardiologist's office, was escorted to a dressing room where I stripped and put on a robe. A nurse put an IV port in my arm, drew blood, and after a brief consult with the the docs who would be knocking me out and running the show, I was rolled to a lab that looked an awful lot like somebody's office. There was a desk at one end, and several nurses were placing pads around my torso, while several others had a fairly animated conversation about schedule changes and the length of their shifts. Finally, the big cheese came in and explained once again that they were going to try to shock my heart back into rhythm. Somebody injected something wonderful into my IV and I heard an electronic voice advising the team to connect the pads. It was the same fellow as the one in the AED we use at the Y when somebody had a heart attack. "What a gig," I thought, "doing voice overs for machines that save people's lives." I wondered how long it would take the drugs to knock me out.

Then I woke up. "All done, Mr Johnson." No wonder people take drugs for fun. 

Everything went fine, just like it was supposed to. I was back in rhythm and as soon as the glorious chemicals wore off, I took a cab home.

The next few days went wonderfully. I had meds to keep my heart on the beat. I had energy, My depression lifted. People in my classes noticed that I seemed like my old self. Then on a Tuesday night, I started to drag. I finished teaching my last class and was gasping at the front desk waiting to close down the Y when my Apple Watch buzzed. My A-fib had returned.

The cardiologist said it was time to meet the electrophysiologist. The next step? Cardiac Ablation. That's what they did to me yesterday morning. I will tell you that story in Part Two.

Island Living

What is grieving? It is losing. It is being without. It is the longing for what once was and the dread of living without it. Grief is a cycle, a puzzle, a wall, and a prison.

Grief is an island.

Here on the island of grief, we wander alone. On those rare occasions when we do catch another's eyes, we nod knowingly and move on in silence. What use would speaking be? Words echo like stones skipping on the water, then sinking to the silt below.

I have sat on this shore, beneath this tree for hours, days, weeks on end. I watch the river flow around and past, carrying its cargo of life and death. Branches blown loose by a storm. A lost doll. A pair of kayaks paddling silently in the sunshine. There is laughter out there. Tears of Joy. Weddings and births and graduations and all the tiny, daily celebrations that the mainlanders take for granted. I hear them, but they are more like a memory than a moment. Grief segregates me from today. 

There are daily tasks to be done. Floors to sweep. Dishes to wash. Laundry to fold. A stranger I barely recognize moves quietly around my island home, doing the chores that will keep life moving until I am ready to live again.

What is it to grieve? It is cursing in the middle of a half-dialed number. A million "can't wait to tells" or "wish they could sees." It is knowing what it means to die alone and that seven last words are far too many but not nearly enough. It is the pain of meals unshared and hands un-held. The days that feel normal until the sight of a cardinal or the smell of mown grass pulls the rug out and your are digging your nails into the back of your hand to try to hold back the sobs again.

The visits are hardest. Visitations, maybe. You play music or the television so you aren't alone with your thoughts. Impossible sounds wake you in the night, long gone voices calling your name that sound so real you have to reach across the bed to make sure. Dreamed faces that smile and comfort or accuse and blame. The twilight moments before waking when you'd swear that thieves came in the night and emptied your chest. The glare of sunshine on an unfilled chair. 

Here on the island, we grieve things stolen and things wasted. Opportunities missed and regrets unforgotten. We are waiting for redemption. We are waiting for the courage to forgive God.

What is grieving? It is losing. It is being without. It is the seam between light and shadow. Between now and then. Grieving is Holy Saturday all year round. "He descended into Hell" they taught us in church. And so he did. And here we are. On an island. In a river. Under a tree. Waiting for the stone to roll away in the morning.

Crawl Bob, Crawl

 PROLOGUE

Been a long time since I felt like writing. Hell, I havent felt like doing much of anything for a long time, to be honest. Years ago, Run Bob, Run helped me to navigate through some rough seas in my life. I guess I'm hoping writing might do that for me again. At least it will help me to create something besides belly fat.

I caught myself preaching to a friend about grief today and realized that I'm the last person to pretend to have any insight into that old monster. It seems like all I've done for months is to grieve or to bury my grief in empty activity and empty calories. None of that is helping me to heal and my physical and mental health both show signs of fatigue and failure.

In future posts, I'll dig more into all that has happened, is happening, may happen in my world. You may find it engaging. I may find it useful. Or it may turn into an exercise in self-indugence we can both do better without. If all I can do is moan, i'll moan to my cat, Sophie. She's a good listener and isn't afraid to set clear boundaries. I could learn a lot from her. Whatever happens, it feels like a step forward today, and that is a direction in which I long to travel.

Too soon to run. Maybe Crawl Bob, Crawl will be a good working title for a while.

Peace, y'all.

Pennsy

Bailing with Thimbles

What would we say to you, if we could find the words?

It's not easy to say its name. No, not COVID. That's become much to easy to speak. I'm talking about Fear. It never really goes away. It doesn't paralyze me, but it catches me up a few times every day. A passing smile. A masked laugh. The brush of elbows or the bump of fists. Most of all, when I am doing my most important job: when I am moving through the Y, spray bottle and towel in hand, cleaning and wiping down the equipment. What if I come in contact? What if I carry it to someone I love? What if another person dies because I was just not careful enough? Its name is Fear. And I am afraid for you.

Yesterday, I realized that I've been becoming more distant at work. I am usually a hugger. The warm smile, the booming welcome, the comfortable embrace: those are what I do best. And the virus has taken all that away. I don't want to get too close, especially to strangers. I might have it, or they might. The thing might use me to transport and spread it every time I breathe or touch another person or another piece of equipment. 

There are people I love so much whom I've kept away from. Family. Friends. I encounter hundreds of people every day. I am a risky person to be around. I have the bravado of a cancer warrior. I am genuinely not afraid of any sickness or infection. I've already whipped the biggest of them. I don't fear for myself, but I'm not willing to gamble with the health and lives of the ones who mean so much to my heart.

I wonder about the other warriors. The cops who responded the night my security alarm went off while I was out walking because I didn't set it properly. The ladies at the gas station and the grocery store who keep me in caffeine and fresh produce. The people stocking shelves at Wal-mart and Target. And those angels in blue plastic smocks and clear face shields who do their best to bring comfort through rubber gloves to the sick and the dying. I'm sure they know the fear, too. The fear of getting sick, yes, but also the fear of hurting their kids or parents or lovers or anyone else who might catch the damned thing because a stranger chose to ignore the consequences of indifference. I know it doesn't paralyze them either. But I wonder how it has changed them. I wonder if they have the words.

"I want you to know how much I love you. How much I miss you. How much I want to fold you to my breast and weep into one another's hearts. I don't feel like a hero. I feel like a round peg in a dangerously square hole, totally unprepared for all this, and I'm doing my best to help without hurting anybody else. I stay away because I love you, and that's the opposite of everything my soul cries out for me to do. But today, I can't trust my feelings. My mind has to win this argument. Every damn time.

"Please know that I'm doing the best I know how. For you. For myself. For all of us. The hurt of separation and the fear of losing you makes me want to run and hide sometimes, and sometimes I do. I sit alone in my chair or my room or my office and I pray that I haven't killed anyone today. I pray every time the phone rings: 'Dear God, don't let it be news of another death.'

"The little I can do seems so meaningless in the face of so much loss and sadness. But it's all I can do. And I want you to know I'm doing all I can to bail the flood waters back into the river, one thimble full at a time. And I'm determined to keep bailing till my arms stop working. I hope you know that. I wonder how often you feel afraid, just like I do. And I hope you're bailing too."

That's what we would say to you, If we could just see your face and touch your hand again. 

But I am too risky to be around. So all I have are the words. 

Tiny thimbles full of my love for you. They won't satisfy either of our thirsty spirits. But please, take and taste them. For now, they are all I have to offer you.

Call him Gideon

Love in the Time of Corona #8

For the last 10 weeks, I have had the honor of serving the families of essential workers by helping the YMCA provide emergency child care to hospitals, first responders, the VA, public transit personnel, and other people who had to be in harm’s way during the stay-at-home phase of Kentucky’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As I met the kids, I noticed right away how many of them had names from the Old Testament. In the last few days, I’ve been watching parts of my nation burn, once again placing many of those same families in harm’s way. Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, I woke with all of that knocking around in my brain.  I want to tell you some of their stories, but to honor their privacy, I’ll create a composite and choose a name that wasn’t on the roster. 

Call him Gideon.

I heard him before I saw him. He was crying, sitting in the lobby where the children who misbehaved in their groups were sent to be punished and cool down. “Time out,” I guess. Any engagement with him was met with argument and protestations of innocence. I heard the theatrical howling and imagined the crocodile tears. Later, I heard what would be a recurring theme. “Gideon is terrible. He’s a bad kid.”

During the first few weeks, before the Commonwealth closed the pools, I was the lifeguard. It was chaos. I’m very inexperienced in the chair, and found it more stressful than I could have imagined. Ideally, the guard’s job is to anticipate, prevent, and if necessary, respond to emergencies. It quickly became apparent that my job was going to be making sure none of these children killed each other. 

Gideon loved to jump. He was stronger, bigger, and more acrobatic than the other kids, and he loved to test the boundaries of what was permitted in the pool. They were not allowed to dive in the shallow water, so he would do summersaults in the air, landing feet first. They weren’t allowed to jump backwards, so he would leap high out and twist 180º. His worst habit was one that seemed almost unconscious. He always jumped toward the other kids. I tried calling him out, reasoning with him, making him sit out for 5, 10, 20 minutes. He would behave well for a few seconds, and then return to the very things he’d been punished before. It was almost compulsive with him. 

He loved to throw things. Hard. Sometimes across the pool. Sometimes at kid’s heads. I sometimes worried that I might miss a kid in trouble in the water because I had to pay so much attention to this one incorrigible child. One day, one of his good days, he made it all the way to the end of the hour without any misbehavior. I was really proud of him. I tooted my whistle and told the group to gather up the toys and return them to the basket where they were kept so that the next group could come in. Gideon dove to the bottom easily, retrieved a plastic diving stick, and whipped it across the pool, toward the basket, accidentally hitting a teacher square in the side of the head. She knew who had thrown it before even looking. With a sharp voice, she told Gideon that he would be sitting out the swimming hour the next day. Howling. Tears. 

The next day, he started the hour in street clothes, pouting on a bench in the corner. The teacher he had hit sat about 10 yards away, keeping an eye on him, and scolding him from time to time. I scanned the pool, watching for trouble. 5 minutes into the hour, I looked over and Gideon was lying on her bench, his head in her lap, while she stroked his hair with her soft, brown fingers. Each time my head turned their way, I saw this angry black boy being loved on by a woman who had watched and wept over many others like him. After the hour, I joked, “I think Gideon only acts up so he can have somebody love on him.” 

“Of course, he does,” she answered with kindness and patience. This old white man had a lot to learn about being a little black boy.

Once, I was called to the conference room. “I need to leave for a few minutes. Will you sit with Gideon? He hit one of the other kids and he won’t be going back to his group for the rest of the day.” 

We sat quietly for a minute, then I asked, “What’s going on, man?” Tears. Howling. The teacher hated him. He was just playing. He didn’t mean to hit anyone.”

“How did it happen, Gideon?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to hit someone. What am I supposed to do?”

“Well,” I tried. "Maybe you could find another way to use that energy."

“But I just have to hit sometimes. Don’t you?”

I didn’t know what to tell him. I could not imagine what could make an 8 year old child this full of rage. I don’t know when I’ve felt so helpless and ignorant.

Later, one of the more experienced teachers told me, “He was playing you. I could see it from a mile away.” Was she being callous? Jaded? Was she too busy to take the time to help the boy? Or was she right? Was he just playing me, telling me things that would get my soft old heart on his side? I’m still not sure if I know.

Sometimes, Gideon would run to me in the morning, throwing his arms around my legs in a bear hug. “Hi, Mr. Bob.” Other times he would be surly, angry and sulking over his latest scolding. Correcting him might result in tears, or it might send him slamming through the door and out into the hall, alone. 

“Gideon, what are you doing out here without a grown-up?” 

“I hate her. She hates me. It’s not fair.” Then he would stomp off in whatever direction necessitated the longest chase.

There were other kids who acted out. Rebecca was almost aggressive in the way the would pee her pants. Staring defiantly at the adult who had failed to recognize the warning signs as the urine flowed down her legs, soaking her shoes. Ezekiel was punished almost daily for hitting, grabbing, or kicking. He was finally banned from the program the day he stabbed another child with a pencil. Esau tormented and fought with his brother Jacob constantly. Their dad just sighed and shook his weary head after another long day’s work. 

Ruth and Naomi were sisters who would not stop touching one another in inappropriate and what I thought were really disturbing ways. 

“Is that a red flag?” I asked a more experienced teacher. “Should we do something about that?” 

“They’re fine,” was the answer. I deferred to her expertise, but am still not sure if I did the right thing.

Gideon’s final straw came when, at the end of a class session, he was told to put his toys away. Furious, he grabbed one and threw it into one of the large mirrors on the wall of what is normally an exercise studio. The mirror broke. Had it been a young skull instead, we would have been sending a child to the hospital. Gideon was suspended for 12 months. No child care. No summer camp. No after school care. His granny was called to come pick him up, but she could not leave the hospital without losing her job, so Gideon sat at a table the lobby for the next 6 hours. Waiting.

It broke my heart. I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept waking up, imagining the things that could happen to him on the street. Wondering what I could have done differently. What should I have said? Not said? Did I spend enough time with him? Did I over indulge him? Did I have any business being around these children at all? And how did this little boy get so god damned angry?

A teacher who knew him well told me some things I didn’t know. Gideon’s mom had been trapped in an abusive relationship with his dad. She was also an addict. When she finally found the courage to escape, she refused to move back to her parent’s home. So she and Gideon spent a year living in her car. God only knows what that boy saw and did over those months. When his grandparents finally learned where their daughter and grandbaby were, they sued and were granted custody of the child. They are loving, hard-working people, but so much damage had been done. No wonder my little sermons had no effect. What words could heal a soul that had been that battered?

I missed my grown-ups. There are things in this world that are much more terrible than cancer. And I do not have the tools to help heal them. I remembered something my ex wife used to say about social work. “We can’t save them all. But we can love them all.” That, I could do. For what it was worth.

Last week, I learned that I would be transitioning to new responsibilities when the Y re-opens on June 1. Predictably, I started getting sentimental about the kids. For 10 weeks, they had driven me crazy. Now I began to think about how much I was going to miss them. 

On Wednesday, I walked into the gym. Ostensibly, my morning visits were to check in and see if the teachers needed anything. But the truth is, I just liked hearing the kids shout, “Mr Bob!” I wasn’t one of the teachers. I was the fun uncle who comes to visit and plays kickball with you, before sending you back to the people who have to make you behave the rest of the day. So they love me.

In the corner, all alone, coloring, I saw Gideon. The Big Boss had given him another chance. No one else would have dared to. I waked to him. He glanced up, but didn’t acknowledge me. I gave him a hug, and whispered, “Welcome home, little brother. I missed you.” He hugged me back. Tentatively. Silently. I waited for him to give me his eyes. “Be your best, Gideon. I believe in you. Be your best.”

I went and found the Boss. “Thank you. For Gideon.”

“You’re welcome.” I knew she hadn’t done it for me. But she knew how much he had meant to me. I would walk through fire for that woman.

Gideon had a pretty good week. He hadn’t miraculously transformed, but he softened his behavior. He made it to Friday without being sent to the office. 

And I came home to prepare for my return to the adult world. You know, the one where old people break their hips and young people have strokes an everybody gets cancer and people are murdered on the street and angry crowds set fire to police stations. 

I think of all the old white people trying to reason this out. Talking about how the rioters are just bad, how they need to find another way, how they are hurting the very people and places that they need. And I think about Gideon. An African-American boy with a life I can never imagine and a rage burning inside that I will never be able to feel. I pray that God will protect him from the evil killers on the street. I pray that someone will be able to love him in a way that I could not. I pray that nothing I said or did made things any worse for him. Because, I don’t know what will happen the next time he acts out.

But I do know that when he is old enough, he will experience injustice. He will feel racism’s knee on his neck. And he will want to hit someone. Please, sweet Jesus, keep him safe. I love him. But I can’t save him. Please, save him.