once, “Hear it? Why is it saying ‘Bernice is rocking, Bernice is talking, Bernice is . . . ’” It drove all sense away from her, she really couldn’t live alone anymore, and she was put into a nursing home.
Bernice still looked happy when I walked into her room. We might converse a little, then her smile would go a little odd, her eyes search above her, and she would ask me if I could tell where the voices were coming from. She wouldn’t repeat everything they said, sometimes just ask “Why would they say those things about me?”
It’s hard to sit there when you’ve known the person in better days. It’s hard to leave them when you have to go, and you have some idea of the world they’re in.
Finally, I was no longer sure, when I visited, that Bernice knew who I was. There are people who call that a mercy, but I’ve never been able to. Those lost to our world aren’t senseless: they just don’t sense us, the order of the human world that’s trying to reach them and care for them. They’re sensing something else and, unless you’re certain it’s not horrible, don’t talk about mercy. In this case, I’m pretty sure it was horrible.
You could say the real mercy was when she died. I can just about make myself do that, though I can say it more easily about physical suffering than about the suffering of the spirit. But the hard truth is, it really doesn’t matter what we say. We’re just trying to make ourselves stop thinking, come up with an excuse to make ourselves feel better, get rid of the gnawing memories. It makes no difference to the suffering.
Most of the time, we do stop thinking, feel better, get rid of the worst of the memories, or at least their sting. I still took the same walk to the post office each morning, still turned by her trailer, still thought about her, but less wrenchingly as the weeks and months went by.
If you live long enough in the same place, you start to see its layers: new things coming along, old things gone. You see the physical strands of its life in space and time: this person, that business, this house, that empty lot, in all their relative permanence and impermanence. In rural Minnesota, when I served, it was the impermanence that came most strongly to you. And something more than impermanence: when this town and the farms around it were first built, they were built in hope, to make a life, a future; now—for those still here—it was a matter of hanging on, hanging on here because there was nowhere else to go.
Older people would tell me they used to walk down the street and be able to name all the people they saw, tell you who their parents were, and probably what they had for lunch. Since I was a child of Chicago, this wasn’t something I could ever do or ever want to do. But it was a way the people here had wanted to live, a way they treasured, that made them feel at home on the earth, and it was gone.
Bernice’s trailer stayed empty for a time, then some young people I didn’t really know moved in. There were a number of young people drifting around the area, renting rundown trailers, houses, rooms over empty stores. Leaving high school might be the last significant event in their lives. They were usually, if distantly, related to one or more of the older families, but they kept away from regular contacts with the community. You’d see them for a while, then you wouldn’t, and they’d be in some other trailer in some other town. You’d glimpse a couple and a child, then only the woman and child, then no one.
As I recall, I was vaguely aware someone was occupying the trailer, vaguely aware there might be a small child, but I can’t say I ever saw them in the yard or ran into them on the street or glimpsed any sign of living going on, happy or not.
Then one night I woke out of wild, violent dreams. Our bedroom was at the back of the house and I saw light filling the room, rippling on the walls, blazing through the curtains. I looked out and saw a great, living fire across the yard, with the trailer dark inside it.
I told my wife to dial emergency, grabbed some clothes and ran outside, round the church to the trailer. If I had any thought of getting someone out, the fire crushed it immediately. The heat was so powerful I couldn’t step from the street to the yard. It was like hitting a wall that started to turn your skin into something else and pull it off you. I looked around and thought at most I could offer shelter if anyone had managed to get out. I stared at the fire, the way you always stare at fires, only this one was rising far above my head and many times my size, and my stomach turned with the sure and certain knowledge that it was as impossible to leave that fire as it was to enter it.
The fire siren was wailing. I thought maybe I’d hang around until the fire department arrived, just in case anyone did stumble out of the darkness.
Then someone did. She came strolling up the street as though she were taking an afternoon walk. Standing next to the fire in the middle of the night, I could see very little else, so she gave me a start when she materialized.
She was another of our church members, a strange woman, daughter of one of the men who did odd jobs in town, who still lived with him. I’d heard some rumors of her past but you hear lots of things as a small-town pastor, not always told with the best of motives or much concern with accuracy. She showed up at church services and events, and she struck me as just one more town character, maybe a little harsher than most.
She walked up to me, looking from side to side, not meeting my eyes, nodded in my direction, then stood next to me, her arms folded.
I was about to ask her if she knew if anyone had been in the trailer when she said: “I hope they burn to a crisp.”
Then she nodded at the fire, turned back the way she had come, and disappeared in the dark.
It was like being next to another, greater, more overwhelming fire, but a fire of another order than physical. I’ve thought of something like napalm, that sticks to your spirit and you can’t get it off. I truly can’t remember anything else that happened that night: the fire trucks arriving, talking to the volunteers, walking home, telling my wife what happened. The encounter with the woman has darkened everything else for me.
I found out the next day that no one had been inside the trailer during the fire. Whoever had been living there had moved on to another run-down dwelling in another town.
It’s that handful of words spoken by my strange night companion that stays with me. I’ve tried over the years to describe to myself what it was like, at that moment, to hear something like that: an image that comes to me is something like a trapdoor thudding open right at my feet, showing some dark well of human horror.
But all the comparisons seem weak. Nothing I say now that I felt or thought can capture what confronted me. I finally decided that’s because I really didn’t think or feel anything. When I probe that memory, it’s like I’ve gone numb, the way your body can go numb immediately at the point of an injury.
It’s the image of her, her words, the ugly passion, that stays before me. I can see her right now more vividly than I can see most of my life and service: the quick, affirming nod at the fire, turning away from me, walking out of the light, leaving me staring after her, alone.
What’s a Nice Philosopher like You Doing in a Profession like This?
When I first studied philosophy, my teacher was a Methodist minister with a passionate commitment to phenomenology and existentialism. Like so many twentieth-century thinkers (not only the existentialists), he gave the impression philosophy only began getting answers in modern times. The negative side of this teaching, of course, was that I had a lot of catching up to do, as well as prejudices to overcome, when I began seriously studying philosophy’s history. (I found it very profitable to read, when I was a serving pastor, Spinoza’s Ethics, which I would have scorned to open as an undergraduate.)
But the positive side of beginning philosophy with a Christian existentialist was that it cast the whole endeavor of philosophy as a way of living, not merely of learning (or, worse yet, unraveling logical puzzles). Not being able to teach philosophy, as I had hoped to do, didn’t mean I lost the point of studying it. You could say the point was sharpened.
In any case, this probably eased my way into working for the church and helped give my life a continuity it might not have had.
My