Crying for Mom Part 3: Fall
In the first two installments of the this four part series (going through all the four seasons), I shared a couple of moments where I felt a cosmic closeness or strong presence with God and mother, the cosmos and the world. For lack of better better language or explication, I was attempting to qualify some sentiments and feelings in order to sum up the way we feel about not just a child's relationship and posture towards his mother (in this case mine), but how we might fit into some bigger system, some bigger context of existence. People of Chile, South America, people of the distant Bible and the Middle-East, even Europeans of the 20th century. All of humanity, all of us individually and collectively. How do the connections work? How do we come together? Do we?How do I fit? Do I fit? What makes sense? Does everything have to make sense? What do I remember of the past? What details of the past shed light on the present and the future? Do other people feel these small or grand emotions? I would wager that yes, we all feel these things sooner or later. We all have mothers. We all experience wonder and love and longing for loved ones of varying degrees. But our relationships are different, and therefore informative as we figure out what moves us, touches us, leaves us in a new state of appreciation or understanding.
This Fall portion, Part 3, will deal with the death of a father, which happened tragically and pre-maturely; it really did happen in the 1990s. I was a third person observer of it; I will try to convey a sense of how this tragedy affected the mother involved, and of course the concomitant children, and the small window in which it affected me. This small window gave me insight to a story of a mother that I believe is worth telling.
The Fall -- Oftentimes Equated with Death. The time of the weather cycle when, in most world climates, winds and temperatures become crisper and leaves turn brilliantly for a short period on their deciduous hosts and literally fall to their demise, to be swept up or convert into ground cover for future growth. Death finds us all, like the seasons of the earth we can count on that. What we cannot count on, or perhaps cannot or difficultly account for, are premature deaths. Leaves and growing buds, branches or saplings, ripped from their stations before their time.
I became friends with Jacy during my last year of attending Brigham Young in 1995. I use "Jacy" as a pseudonym to protect her and her family's identity and personal situation. While living in Utah those first three years I had dated a few young ladies to various degrees of closeness or distance, however you might rate that meter, but also important to me were platonic relationships that I developed with a few different young women (and men, too) of college age that I enjoyed good and sometimes bad interactions and fellowship. Associations teach us so much, especially if we are able to reflect and make inferences along the way and afterward, to inform us on how we perceive and deal with things. Jacy and I enjoyed a unique platonic friendship.
Jacy was really cool; I found her friendship and conversations as easy, comfortable, and enjoyable as if I were with my sister Jenny. By then my young married sister and new mother Jen had left Utah and was living in the East Coast. I suppose I missed that sibling connection and friendship that I was able to experience my first two years in the Beehive State, and fondly all my upbringing. Jacy seemed like a little sister to me the more I got to know her.
For those who are unaware, Brigham Young University organizes its students, both married and single, into wards of students and non-students, meaning geographic church congregations of people who are mutually connected to the university based on where they live. I first got to know Jacy in that context; what struck me personally about her was that she was dealing with her father's untimely death, making it known to a large group of us in a church setting: that is how I originally found out about this devastating knowledge. She was dealing with this awful occurrence, a struggle for sure, but in that emotional and sacred environment of our faith she felt compelled to share that she still had faith in God, a higher purpose in life. Life was hard, but she was doing okay. By chance, a few weeks later I found myself talking and joking with her at an unexpected place where we were stuck in transit.
There are only a few people in this life, I have discovered, that you can truly feel at ease being silly or creative and foolish, which is something I was able to do with my own mother, my aforementioned sister, my wife and kids, and a few select others in two and half decades then as as a youth, and another two decades since in my maturing years. There have been a few other people with whom I can achieve this state, but those friendships and opportunities are so gratifyingly rare and somewhat fleeting. This type of "let down the mask" or release time is very therapeutic to me, I believe it is accurate to say that it helps me to be me, to deal with "serious reality" a bit more. Comedies have their place and purpose, silliness seems to be a constant way to lighten what otherwise would be burdensome and drudgery of existence. The opposite of joie de vivre, if you will.
Jacy and I learned that we fed off each other's sense of humor, sense of creativity and and spontaneous foolishness, because while we were certainly engaged in a world of real consequences and serious matters, there was time for breaching the calls of formal etiquette, making up songs or raps or silly sentences, without a bunch of "serious-minded people" or "too-cool-for-school" cohorts or others brow beating us into submission or embarrassment. Perhaps it can be compared to improvised jazz versus stoic classical pieces of music: in jazz, the freedom of making up things as you go has a beauty all its own. Jacy and I connected, and then it came into play as I was transitioning into my post-graduate life. And yes, it was always platonic, but it also bordered on a long lost sibling catching up with each other, or perhaps, in a few key ways, like a daughter searching for her old self, her old family, her old sense of being, which was good, but missing at that time.
I was caught in a living limbo when I returned to Provo after my graduation while overseas. Upon returning to the United States at the end of summer of 1995, I spent some time visiting family in New York City and Indiana, but found myself pursuing a few professional opportunities in the more familiar confines of Utah, one being a talent agency that engaged me in some work right away, and another marketing ploy that had some strong personalities swaying me to try my attempts at sales. Besides that ill-fated money making venture, one close associate offered back-up work in the way of window washing. So my housing situation was ambiguous, and while squatted in the basement of my sister's in-laws near the Provo Temple, it became more apparent that I had to make a decision as to where to live with a college degree suitable for a working lifestyle. I didn't have the answers for many days. Being warned that my time at the in-laws (not my family directly, but a close family all the same) was short, I found myself speaking with Jacy on the phone. We had only recently known each other, and I was surprised at the trust or friendliness that existed between us.
Again, twenty years later, I can see forces that might have drawn her to me or me to her. On a side note, I lost my mother two plus years ago (2014): I know how death feels very final and poignant and like a large pill to swallow, in my own way. However, I was 43 when my mom died and had a wife of 13 years and five children. I cannot imagine how Jacy felt with the recent loss of her dad, being a senior in high school when it happened. It seems through her and her family I saw a bit more of how this works. Jacy, asking me about my quandary of where to live, gave me a temporary fix: "Hey, Eddie, we have room at my house. Why don't you stay here?"
I knew it wasn't the long term answer but it made sense. Their house in American Fork was a half hour closer to Salt Lake City, the place where most of my television and film jobs were taking place. I think back, reflecting on the phone conversation and proposal to stay at her mother's house; she also mentioned having a spare car, something I had not yet procured.
I agreed.
Her mother was Janeva*; this recent aggrieved young widow with three children. The first of hers that I met, being the one offering the invitation, Jacy the college age daughter, meeting her by happenstance just months prior to my own college exit. Jacy was the eldest, a vivacious sophomore beginning her second year of college. Next was the 15 year-old grieving son, Hyram*, and finally there was the five year-old little girl, absent of her daddy, Lilian*, all living in a federally protected home in American Fork, far from the immediate danger of those who took the life of their dad and husband on the West Coast. There were dangers to them still; while I was not permitted to know the specifics of how their breadwinner and head of the household, Eddie, was killed related to his duties in the government, I knew that justice did not seem right to them and that their lives were irrevocably altered. They were wounded spiritually and emotionally. Hanging on, like holding your breath for a long time and the quest for air becomes choking. Floating in a type of cold vacuum. But they were clinging, and showed signs of adaptation, resilient as they were built to be, as their beloved father would have them be.
Jacy had reached out to a few of us spiritually and emotionally in a religious setting a year plus after his passing, trying to deal with the grief of her lost father. I then had the chance to follow up as a closer friend, she being kind and generous in offering me a place in her world, giving me a chance to come in contact with her family. I hope she found in me a little presence of someone good, someone kind. One buoy in a sea of crushing waves.
All of these people were kind, all of them were coping with their new transplanted lives. They were one unit, unified as a remaining team, but there was an obvious hole in their lives.
I was a visitor, an interloper, an observer; hopefully a helpful or palliative distraction. While they offered to help me in a time of some life transition on my part, all of them were desperate for any rope or preserver in a sea stripped of sure moorings.
I got to know Hyram as I stayed there at the house in this new development of the town, a half hour from my former college. Skinny, soft spoken, interested in martial arts. The only "man" of the home, with one recent college graduate, yours truly, dropping by for a few weeks. He was trying mightily to make it, as he tried to fit into a Utah small town high school where new friends and acquaintances might be aware of his situation, but not really allowed to know. I was turning 25. My folks were alive and well. This guy was 15 and had lost his pillar, his source of nearly everything. Hyram was very-- I think the word obsessed works-- with a movie where the famous son/child actor Brandon Lee dies tragically in real life while making the movie he was working on. And stranger still was the fact that the theme of the narrative fit into Hyram's story.
The Crow. The dark avenger: this was who Hyram was conjuring, morphing himself into. I cannot blame him.
Hyram saw the character of the Crow in himself. Brandon Lee, action hero son of the iconic martial artist superstar Bruce Lee of China and the immortal silver screen, played a spirit seeking vengeance upon the evil men who had killed his family.
Very dark. A dark story and film. Vengeful and delivering some sense of justice. But ultimately, a pyrrhic victory. And this had become a large part of Hyram's life.
This type of hope in justice costs too much.
Young or old should not have to bear it. But we do. I know it. I saw it. I felt it.
Little Lilian was doing her best to be normal, a five year-old clinging to her remaining family. I knew that after I had been there a few weeks in October and she called me Daddy a few times, I needed to find my new place to move to. This attachment, to me anyway, was not needed for her or me... She and her family would possibly find someone to fill future voids, but it would not be me. I hope and pray that things have gone well for all those described in the two decades since.
Janeva, stoic in her own right, was bravely attending law school, with one purpose being to seek out some of the missing justice that she had felt transpired in the awful vertiginous loss of her husband. Again, I was not privy to the details, but the way that the death occurred was not according to any type of plan, but rather was a breach of protocols, something that Janeva felt should be redressed.
I was only there in passing to give a little support. Perhaps I should have offered more in the weeks and months directly after, I remember getting wrapped up into old and new relationships back in the college life area by that November and the holiday season, those faces and warm but wounded hearts faded to the distance of my world relatively quickly.
One moment of attempted conciliatory anguish, I do recall, came in an unexpected fashion a couple weeks later. After moving to my own apartment, I received a call from Jacy and her two friends, who were sisters, originating from little Brawley, California, of the Imperial Valley. Most Californians themselves have never been there. This rural and remote county shares a valley with the inland Mexican city of Mexicali along the southern border. The idea was the three of them were going to make a quick visit for a time of festivities back in their home town called "Brawley Days". They would also make a side trip, walking to Mexico, and be back after staying maybe two nights with old family friends. They told me that they would appreciate an escort, and since I had no regular everyday job, why not go with? I didn't have a lot of money, but while just purchasing a new car I could leave that safely behind, and barely spend any expenses ... I agreed.
The trip was good, it was fun. At one point, when we should have been heading back east and north to return to Utah for all of our regular life schedules, we actually headed the opposite direction, which puzzled me. We were heading to the city on the Pacific Coast where Jacy's father had been killed, on the two year anniversary of his death. We didn't go all the way there, however.
At one point in the desert and sandy highway, in sunny and dry California, maybe an hour from the ocean, Jacy exited our car, then pulled over, and went walking through some isolated dunes. I believe she was fighting her emotions up unto this point, and me in the back seat could only do so much as ... I attempted to relate to her, talk to her. Things were not normal. The weight of the loss had her in a vice. Her friends were closer to her state of mind and soul than me; they had graciously explained to me that she was going to a place where I could not. Jacy and a sister disappeared over a berm. I don't know how long they were gone.
When you read stories in the Bible, you watch the anguish of Abraham for his only begotten son Isaac or Ishmael, (depending on the version), only anticipating their awful parting, or you see people mourn the dead with sackcloth and ashes, or weeping and wailing. When I saw this at funerals in South America as a missionary, I saw grown people cry aloud and turn into themselves, becoming a whirling upheaval of conflict and remorse, or anger or pure hurt, I saw and felt what people go through. I could not feel as they knew it, but I felt such tangible pangs of loss. Parents who lost their teenage sons in the treacherous river outside of town, only recovering their clothing on the sandy banks... Sitting in silence and sad hugs as family and friends came to pay respects in a memorial room vacant of the actual bodies, but so physically missing.
People in these moments vent their most inner emotions, and Jacy needed to do this, to take it up with God and the burning heavens of a desert sky that Sunday morning... In the somewhat harsh dunes of no where.
It may have been Sunday, we may have been attending our own church service that day in returning to our normal lives a day trip away, in a place of a new home called Utah. But some lives had remained in the Golden State. We were there then, that day. So close to what used to be. A place where some youth were living their normal lives. Where there had been happiness, togetherness, and hope.
But two years had passed, and normal was certainly not for Jacy.
Normal lives for many in 1995, but not for her.
No, Jacy, and her mother Janeva, and her brother Hyram, and her sister Lilian. Not normal.
Things were not normal. Things were not right.
These people would move on, they would survive, but the tears of these innocents left bereft of their pillar were palpable. Two years of not having her dad, preparing for a lifetime of longing, missing, talking, smiling.
I cry for this future mom, who will not bring children into the world knowing their grandpa Eddie.
Eddie. His name was mine. His cause was just, and then everything went sour. Not everything was lost, but so much.
And where has Eddie gone? While his wife fights for her education and his belated cause. Where do these children go? How much weeping must take place?
Perhaps not enough. Perhaps too little. And time will weed out memories...
Perhaps we all need to cry for them. And smile in the face of a future reunion, as many pray fervently that this occurs. If for anyone, it will be them.
Cry out in the desert. Cry out for your father. Cry for your mother and children.
Cry out for these, your little ones.
Laugh and cry, be silly then morose, your crying will sometime, someday, in some glorious way, be converted to cheers. And embraces.
I failed to mention, Eddie, from the pictures I saw, looked like a Lamanite warrior. A noble fighter. An eternal hero. He had the blood of a thousand champions before him. If you have not read the Book of Mormon, if you have not lionized the sons of Helaman as a child or recounted to your own generations, perhaps you cannot know how valiant a fighter can be. Eddie was. Eddie is. His son and family are too. A stripling warrior, like unto Captain Moroni, Teancum and others.
The love of the father and mother that formed you, raised you ... Formed us, raised us.
That love will not end. Always the champion of your soul. Our souls.
Thank you father, and mother, for your infinite sacrifices for us.
I thank you Jacy. I thank you Janeva. I thank you Hyram and Lilian. I thank you Eddie, the strong.
This is a cry out for you.
