to clean my glasses.
Geez Pete, when I think of never seeing your face again—Damn!
I wish I could have observed you in your working world. As we get more and more testimony about your way of working, I see more clearly how delighted people were to find a person such as yourself at a senior v-p. level. And I understand why they wanted you at that level. Maybe Mom and I will yet make a pilgrimage to Birmingham sometime before the memory of you there fades. One of the women who wrote of you so warmly also reported that you knew exactly how many days you had been away from Linda and Chelsey and how many days it would be before you went back to Portland and brought them to Birmingham. As you probably know, you only had fifteen days to go when you hit the tree. God, so close. And now, never again close.
Love, Dad
All Sad
Thursday, April 23, in flight, later
Dear Peter,
Fred, the human resources guy from Compass Bank, was so proud to report that he had recruited you twice, once for Bank of America, and again for Compass Bank. He explained how he had told people in Birmingham that you were really happy in Portland with your work, family, and the Northwest and that they would really need to up the ante to get you away. So, as Tim says, they kept throwing more money at you. In light of what happened, Fred has no idea how much he sounds like the serpent in the Garden, or the boa in The Jungle Book: “Trusssssssst me,” and “you will not die.”
But the Garden tells of the inescapable risks of being fully human. And there were risks you and I talked about, Pete, in this opportunity for you to be more fully you. We just never thought about your habitual risk in not buckling your seatbelt, dammit. There is still a lot of anger here, Peter, about you not buckling down for your family responsibilities—like Sarah’s tear-filled rage because your death has shadowed the joy of little Peter’s birth.
The other night, in the middle of the night when visualizations of you are particularly vivid, you looked so sad. A kind of guilty sadness, I thought. God, Peter, we may be really pissed at you for not using the seatbelt, but you know we love you, Pete. We did and we still do. You know we forgive you. We don’t want you to be sad. It hurts again to think of you as sad, just like I suppose it hurts you now to see us so sad. God must be sad for all of us.
Talk with you later, Pete.
Love, Dad
Love Letters from Dad
April 23, SeaTac Airport
Dear Peter,
As you can see (can’t you?) my breakfast croissant has cooled because I have been writing, so absorbed am I in the process of crafting words to deal with this multi-multi-faceted reality of your deadness, Pete. It is apparent that in the times when I am alone with your absence, I’d rather write to you than eat. But this sandwich cost five bucks and its getting cold!
So why do I want so much to write? All day long and in bed too, I am always thinking of what I want to write to you. Perhaps filling this yellow tablet with my not long legible scrawl is a careful or cautious way of releasing some of the frightening pressure from my grief-filled heart. I know God heals the broken hearted but I resist the breaking.
It’s like I used to say about bread in communion: “Notice how the bread resists the breaking.”
Perhaps my writing to you is my way of taking control of my grieving, escaping the breaking, avoiding the awe-filled power of those deep sobs. I know that the tears and the wailing are good for us. I just don’t want the pain that produces them.
Forgive me, Pete, forgive us for the ways we try to escape your death. We love you so, and we still do not want your irrevocable, unending, never again with us, absence.
Love, Dad
Window Pain
April 23, in flight
Dear Peter,
The tears are here. I’m trying to hide them. I’m sitting next to a young mom with an eight-month-old boy. Cute. Both mom and boy. Warm exchange of information. “I have five grandchildren.” “Yes, all in Portland.” “Yes, how good they are all nearby.”
She didn’t ask and I didn’t say how many children I have living in Portland. And I try to avoid revealing the thought of how much l ache to have had four grandchildren in Portland plus one just moved to Birmingham.
And the tears just started to flow. They slid down my cheeks like the occasional raindrop slides down the windowpane eight inches away. I turned toward it so that the young mom next to me will not see and will not ask and I will not need to explain. Explain pain. Pane. My Kleenex is wet, frayed, balled. Bawled.
I don’t want her to see me and ask for the story. For a young mom, your death is a horror story, a too easily imagined impossible possibility. I don’t want her to think about it. So I hide. I’ll hide for a while in theology, huh Pete, that long proven useful means of avoiding life. Okay, I am getting a little sarcastic.
There is nothing quite so powerful as your death, Peter, to force us to face our theology.
Take Linda for example. The other night, as you may have noticed, she said she was angry at God. “Of all people, why Peter?” she complains. I deeply appreciate her complaint, but I’m not afflicted with that question. I guess I noticed long ago that there are no exemptions granted good hearts like you, Pete, to the general laws of gravity and motion, and the damage likely to occur to any head caught between an irresistible force and an immovable object. I think you must have unwittingly assumed an exemption based on your thriving, hearty, lusty, raucous love for God’s gift of life. When Linda or anybody else asks, “Why Peter?” I say, because you didn’t buckle your seat belt.
Yes, I know I’ve often pointed out to others that about half the psalms are complaints to God about God’s mismanagement of fairness issues. I love the passionate, candid anger of those complaints. A long time ago when I heard Walt Brueggemann talk about Ps. 35, my anger-stress induced hemorrhoids disappeared. Right, Pete, so much for the healing power of the Word!
But with your death, I am so convinced that God grieves with us that complaint is not in me. Except toward you—and that too is fading, Peter, as I feel you are grieving as well. We love you Pete. We grieve with you as well as for you.
Love, Dad
God Does Not Take
April 23, in flight, later
Dear Peter,
I’m still taking refuge in theology. Fortunately only a couple of people have suggested that God “took” you, Pete. I hope nobody uses that kind of profanity around Chelsey.
Of course I know people who say such things mean to be kind. But what blasphemy. God as kidnapper. For what? To take you hostage in order to teach us a lesson, demand a submissive faith, only then to renege on the contract to give you back?
Yes, I can see death as God’s servant. Years ago James Weldon Johnson’s preacher poet spoke eloquently of that. When the suffering is too much, God calls Servant Death.
But that’s different from the notion of God taking you for some divinely foreseen, inscrutable purpose. This is not to say, thank God, that God does not invite us to find some life-giving values in your death. Fred is not the only one, for example, who is now committed to buckling his seatbelt. I am sure there will be many more much more profound redemptive values in your manner of death—although a life saved from your fate would certainly be a wonderful redemption.
God does not will everything that happens. But I trust that in everything which happens God works with us for life-saving good. Yet for all the redemptive good we may find from your death, I would rather have you alive, Pete.
There is such burden-lifting helpfulness in those opening lines of our United Church of Christ Statement of Faith: “God calls the worlds into being.” God calls, invites, evokes, and creation says “yes” most of the time. But as toddlers, you and Tim and Sarah