The Christmas I Turned Eight
March 12, 2004
The Christmas after I turned eight, I asked my mother for exactly two presents—a dictionary and a bible. But when I awoke Christmas morning and looked under the tree, I found no such thing. Instead, I found the sorts of things normal eight-year-old boys wanted to find in those days—Matchbox cars, a baseball glove, and little plastic army men. If I was disappointed at all, I don’t remember it. I only remember a nice Christmas.
The scene says a lot about my mother and me. The previous two years had been extraordinarily hard for my family. My mother had finally thrown my alcoholic and abusive father out and had gone back to work as a teacher. We were living with her father while she resumed her career and started graduate school. No sooner did some normalcy start to return, though, when my grandfather died, and my mother was left with no help, raising four young children alone, working, and facing an uncertain future.
It’s crystal clear to me now what I was seeking that Christmas and how my mother undertook to help me find it. At that young age, Christmas was to me the holiday for hoping—of asking for and perhaps realizing the things you wanted the most. The dictionary and the bible were an eight-year-old Catholic boy’s idealization of wisdom and comfort.
I’ve never asked my mother about why she ignored my request and in fact came up with a better answer. Part of it was perhaps her practicality. We already had a dictionary and a bible; why get another? But I am quite sure that the bigger part of it was that she knew exactly what I was up to. That I was asking for some understanding of why all these things had happened, and some reassurance that things were going to be all right. The simple toys she responded with were her answer: “Go back to being a child,” she was saying. “Have some fun”
Now, decades later, I am in the midst of a trying time. A year ago this month a dear friend was murdered steps from my home, and over the last many months I have watched my mother and stepfather deal less and less well with my mother's advancing multiple sclerosis. But I have decided to use this time to grapple with the questions such challenges raise, and not run away from them.
Back to that Catholic boy.
When I was young and believed everything I had been taught, my religion was a great comfort to me. No matter how bad things were, no matter how much worry, I had prayer. Lying in bed at night, I would wrap prayers around long silent conversations with God, asking for his protection, detailing long lists of family, pets, and friends that I wanted secure in the eyes and arms of God. I was quite sure at those moments that everything was going to be OK. That my grandfather was safe and happy in the kingdom of heaven. That my father would stop drinking and become my father again. That my mother would arrive home safely from her late class in Boston. That the Red Sox would win the World Series.
One holds onto such ideas for only so long. And so it seemed natural to me somehow that the unquestioning faith of my childhood became a sharply cynical atheism in my late adolescence and young adulthood. Faith seemed more like a flaw than a gift, something to be suspicious of and not to find comfort in. And it was in the midst of this atheism that life dealt its next blows.
I was a senior in college, perched on the brink of the rest of my life. I was finishing a period in my life that had been wholly rewarding for me. I loved college--loved studying, loved all my activities, and was enjoying some of the first successes in a publishing career I would come to really enjoy. In November of that year, though, my father committed suicide, and, two weeks later, one of my closest childhood friends was killed skimobiling. Nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming emotion of those two events.
One of my most vivid memories is from when I returned to campus after the second funeral. Walking across the campus, I was greeted by a friend, who said something comforting. I said the only thing I could say, "I feel a million years old."
Looking back on that time, I wish that I had fallen back on the good instincts I had had when I was eight--to turn to someone and ask for comfort and wisdom. But you don't do that when your father has committed suicide. I am no expert on this, but I am sure my reaction over the next many months and years was typical of someone in my position. I simply didn't talk about it. Except for my girlfriend at the time, and later a therapist, I didn't confide in a soul. It wasn't until years later--nine to be precise--that I took some of the feelings and shared them with people in a group. And here it is 20 years later, and only now am I finally able to speak about it openly.
I am not that devout boy anymore, nor though am I that cynical young man. I am 41, myself a father of boys, 7 and 9. And while I certainly no longer believe everything I was taught, I am also no longer so smug in my non-belief. The combined forces of having children and joining this church have led me be open to almost anything. Though, perhaps typical of UUs, I have arrived at very few conclusions, even in seven years. At the bottom of it all, I waver between humanism and a kind of hopeful agnosticism.
How then, do I use my faith to help me understand what has happened most recently? What does faith offer in the face of--of all things--murder? There is nothing redeeming in what happened to Michael Harding. Not for him, for his children, for his surviving brothers and parents overseas. Not for the dozens of friends and colleagues who were left to mourn. Not for the tortured man who murdered him and eventually took his own life. It was all senseless, all loss. A veil of tears.
No one expects to find himself thrust into such a situation. But, along with the police, I was the first person with Mike's estranged wife. I was there when she told his daughter and son, ages 11 and 7. Along with another friend, I cleaned Mike's apartment before his brothers visited it, making sure that nothing too upsetting from the murder was left over. I talked to his frail, devastated parents in England. In the midst of this, I wondered at times how I would hold up. How I would deal with this tragedy, be of service to the survivors, be present for my own wife and children, and eventually get on with my life.
But, I did. I held up. Why? Because unlike the cynical me of 20 years ago, I am more like the eight year old me, and know enough to ask for help. But I am also blessed now, and I use the word purposefully, with the ability to also help others. I had two instincts in the midst of the crisis--to help where I could, and to seek help where I could. So much of the help I sought was right here--from Phyllis and from so many of you. I thank you now for it.
So my faith has taught me to seek comfort in times of struggle, even when things are beyond comprehension. I will never understand Mike's murder, or my father's suicide. They will never sit right with me. My faith doesn't offer the simple answers it once did. If I were to pray about these things, I honestly have no idea what I would attempt to say.
This September, I ran a long leg in a relay race in a hilly part of New Hampshire. I was not looking forward to it. I had run the race the year before with Mike, and returning just seemed too bittersweet. I'm not nearly in the shape I was in when Mike and I ran the marathon last October. I was too busy. At the last minute, I tried to ask out. But my friends cajoled me into doing it, and I gave in.
The morning of the race I was nervous. I was convinced I would do poorly. It was 9.5 miles of sheer hills. The race brochure warned, "There isn't a flat stretch in the course." It was one of the last legs. The weather was turning bad. I had visions of suffering a heart attack and dying. When I grabbed the baton from a teammate, the skies opened up, and I was plodding through some of the hardest rain I had ever run in. Footing was bad. We were running right along side a fast road, and there was little shoulder. "What's next?" I yelled to a fellow runner. "Famine and plague?"
About a mile into it, I found myself relaxed, comfortable, striding well. My teammates were stationed every couple of miles with water and Gatorade. "Looking great!" I heard them say, and their faces told me that they actually believed it. I was eating up the hills. I would get to the top of a long grueling stretch and let out a loud whoop, expelling air in a kind of he-man Lamaze method. I don't know what came over me.
Coming down a long, tree-lined downhill, relaxed, almost gliding, I had a sudden and vivid sense of my friend Mike. I ran this road with him the year before. I have a great picture of the group of us, tired and happy after a race well done. I could picture his smile, his dark good looks. My heart surged. A warmth spread over my shoulders and arms. I picked up my pace some more and charged on through the last several miles. My friends and I agreed afterward: It may have been the best I have ever run.
Who knows what the vision of Mike was. A supernatural moment? A few well-placed endorphins? I don't really know, and I don't really care. I'm not inclined to worry too much about exactly what it was, because it was wonderful. I kept the good feeling well into that evening and the next day. Sitting in a New Hampshire restaurant that night with my family, I was a tired and happy man.
The challenges of the last year have crystallized for me what is important, and real, and worthy of my time and attention and devotion. It is in marital love. It is in my imperfect and single-minded devotion to my sons. It is in those precious moments of life when I find myself open to things. It's holding my wife's face in my hands. It's playing on the grass or on a beach with my sons and pausing, breathless, our faces to the sky. It is those calm and lucid moments when my mother and I speak and she recalls things in the thoughtful and wry way I admire so much. It is honoring what was good about my father but taking care not to repeat what was bad. It is that sensation of running with my friend again.
It is realizing what is worthwhile and good in my life, and holding onto it dearly.
So may it be.
Posted by Bill Trippe at March 12, 2004 5:12 PM
