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It’s Not You, It’s Me: On Attending the Funeral of a Friend and Saying Good-Bye to Social Media

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Last Sunday afternoon I drove under gray skies, through rain that was soon to be sleet, to the funeral of a young man I went to high school with. His name is Peter. The calendar said spring was less than three weeks away, but there was another snow storm on the way. Canadian geese circled the fields, uncertain as to whether they should be heading north or south, which was kind of how I felt, driving to a funeral being held for a 35-year-old father of three. I felt disoriented, unsure which way to fly. These things aren’t supposed to happen. 35-year-olds shouldn’t die of cancer, leaving their wife and children and parents behind.

The Lutheran church was packed and just as I walked in they set up an extra row of chairs at the very front, which is where I sat. Then the family came in. Peter’s father was my music teacher in middle school. Peter’s uncle was my first baseball coach. We called him Mr. P. He taught me how to keep my elbow up, how to pitch with my fingers along the seams, how to turn my glove so the ball wouldn’t skip off my palm and hit me in the face.

Peter’s cousin, Johnny, was one of my closest friends, someone I’ve known since I was six years old. We grew up playing baseball together. He was the catcher and I was the pitcher and we created a series of signals – one for a fastball, two for a curveball, and three for an off-speed (even though every pitch I ever threw pretty much did the same thing). I remember how the seams felt against my fingers, rough and spinning out of control. I remember how I accidentally hit my fourth grade girlfriend in the hand while she was batting for the opposing team. I remember how she came to school with a splint on her finger. I gave her a jar of root beer barrels for Christmas later that year.

While I was never extremely close to Peter, his family always formed a backdrop to my existence, like the mountains do for those who live in California – always off in the distance, always there. Peter’s older brothers were the cool upperclassmen. His father introduced me to John Denver. His uncle taught me the great American past time.

I saw them all walk in, single file, and sit in a pew across the way from me. All of them with their families and their children. Then Peter’s wife came in and sat down, her two little girls dressed in beautiful dresses, one of them looking exactly like Peter. They didn’t cry. They were too young to understand the weight of such a moment. They giggled at something, then sang with all their hearts when the hymns were sung. At some point in the service they got down on their knees and colored on papers, the pew serving as their desk.

She’s a wonderful mother who lets her children smile and draw pictures at their father’s funeral. There was so much I learned in that moment about life and death and creativity. So much.

* * * * *

One of my favorite scenes from The Lord of the Rings movie is when Frodo offers the Ring of Power to Lady Galadriel. He is already tired of carrying it, and the mission feels impossible to him.

Have you felt that before, the weight of life, the heaviness of being? Perhaps you feel it right now, this very moment. The downward pull of discouragement or sadness or death. Pain. Hopelessness.

Galadriel seems intrigued by Frodo’s offer, and as she imagines what it would be like to wield the Ring of Power and be in complete control of everything, she grows large and ominous.

“You offer it to me freely?” she asks. “I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this…In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”

It is so easy to convince ourselves that great power would not tarnish us as it has so many others. I am different, somehow. My resolve would hold. I would be fair and wonderful.

Just as she is about to take the ring, something inside of Galadriel changes, and she seems relieved as she turns down Frodo’s offer.

“I have passed the test,” she says. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”

* * * * *

At one point during Peter’s funeral the Lutheran clergy led us through communion. It was a beautiful moment, watching so many of my old high school friends and teachers and absolute strangers walk to the front.

“The body of Christ, given for you.”

A small piece of bread.

“Amen.”

“The blood of Christ shed for you.”

A sip of wine from a single cup.

There was something disarming there, walking slowly in a long line, taking part with so many others. There was a healthy diminishing, a coming back into line with who I truly am, not who I’m so often striving to be. There was, for the briefest moment, an understanding that I am not the center of everything.

I sighed, and I looked over at Peter’s family. They watched the crowd receive communion. There was wonder on the children’s faces, as if all of these people were doing this for their father. And in many ways they were right.

* * * * *

Every so often, I read through Brennan Manning’s book, Ruthless Trust. Maybe once a year. This time one particular quote pierced me to the marrow.

“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future…The reality of naked trust is the life of a pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.”

I realize that there are areas of my life where I do not trust God. One of them is my writing. I am determined to follow any predetermined, clearly delineated plan that I can find. I listen to all the gurus who say this is how you build a platform, this is how you gain an audience, this is how you get a book deal. I resist obscurity. I want future guarantees.

But I’m tired. I’m tired of promoting myself. I’m tired of relying on my own ability. I’m tired of trying to convince people to read what I write.

So, for a time, I’m walking away from the clearly defined path. I’m going to take a break from social media, the main driver of traffic to my blog, and I’m going to simply write. No sharing. No endless Facebook promoting. No mind-numbing Tweets.

I don’t say this to criticize what others are doing. There are some excellent bloggers out there making an amazing difference in the world, and receiving their status updates and reminders has always been a pleasure. I think that by being on Facebook and Twitter they’re making the world a better place. But for me, the time has come to walk a different path, even if it doesn’t make sense or appear to head in the direction I’ve always wanted to go.

I’ll still be posting here every Wednesday, so I hope you’ll join me. I’ll still occasionally send out emails to those of you on my list, updating you on my latest projects or letting you know what some of my writer friends have been up to. I’d love to get emails from you, anytime: shawnsmucker(at)yahoo.com. But after today I won’t be on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, at least not for a little while.

It’s actually a huge relief, the diminishing. The trusting.

What unorthodox path are you being called to follow?

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Why I Wanted Our Fifth Child to be a Girl

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“If you don’t want to know the baby’s sex, now is the time to look away from the screen,” the ultrasound tech said, so Maile closed her eyes and I looked down at the tiles.

“Would you mind writing down the sex on a piece of paper for us?” Maile asked, her eyes still squeezed shut. When she closes her eyes like that, she looks like a little girl, I thought to myself. I thought of Madeline L’Engle’s words:

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

“No problem,” the man said. He was a straightforward man with a kind voice and very little expression.

“Do you ever, you know, is it always easy to tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” Maile asked, trying not to express any doubt in the man’s unquestionable abilities as a magic waver of the ultrasound wand. He looked at her and waited just a second before answering. The pause gave his words added effect.

“At 20 weeks, it’s easy to identify the baby’s sex,” he said, matter-of-fact, like an elementary school teacher answering a child as to whether or not one plus one always equals two.

So that was that. He folded the slip of paper and put it inside an envelope. Written on it was either the word ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ My sisters would take the envelope to a friend of ours who makes cupcakes, and she would open the envelope and then fill the cupcakes with blue if it was a boy or pink if it was a girl. On Sunday at my parents house some family members would gather and we’d count down and bite into a cupcake and there it would be, boy or girl, the new shape of our family.

We never did these sorts of things with our other children. We always waited to find out until the final push, the first little wail, the anguish-ecstacy of a life breaking into the world. But these are new days. New times. And we are, all of us, changing.

* * * * *

“So what are you hoping for?” everyone asks, and in the past I would have said “A healthy baby” or, if I was feeling particularly ornery, “A human.” But now that I’m older I hold myself to a lower degree of scrutiny. I am less affected by what I used to consider weaknesses of character. I am who I am, and while I still strive to become a kinder presence in the world, use a softer voice with my children, and be more sensitive to the needs of my wife, I also understand that God loves me deeply, just as I am.

So when people asked me what I was hoping for, I answered in a straightforward voice without hesitation, “A girl.”

And I did hope for a girl. At first I wasn’t sure why. I love my sons fiercely and tenderly, so the thought of another son wasn’t something that filled me with bad feelings. This made me even more curious. Why do I want a girl? Then it came to me, through the foggy cloud of self-awareness and personal history.

I didn’t know if I had it in me to be a good dad to three boys. Two already stretched me. I remembered the amount of time my dad spent playing ball with me, the only boy. I remembered growing up with a sense of uniqueness, the only son of Merrill Smucker, the oldest child. I have a very good father.

Parenting girls has never weighed on my mind. Perhaps because I grew up with three sisters, or perhaps because some of my best friends as a child were my female cousins. Whatever the cause, I feel relaxed with my girls, sufficient. I feel that the love that I have for them will be enough.

The arrival of  our fourth child, and second son, Sam, was a surprise to me. I think I always assumed I would have one son, that I could be the same father to my boy as my father was to me. But as Sam grew up, I found myself fighting off feelings of inadequacy. I didn’t have time to play ball with both of them, separately, every day, as my own father did in my memories. I didn’t have the energy to be what I felt Cade and Sam needed me to be. I couldn’t be the same dad to them that my father had been to me.

So at the thought of having another boy, I felt myself shrink back. The voices in the back of mind stepped closer to the foreground.

You should be a different father than the one you are.You could be a better father to your sons.

“So, what are you hoping for?”

“A girl.”

* * * * *

On Wednesday night, four days before the planned revealing of baby number five, we got snowed in. Our half-mile lane was blanketed in two feet of snow. There was no way we were going anywhere, at least not for a few days, so we holed up in the house. I stacked wood outside the house for the woodstove and Maile made all kinds of delicious food for the stretch ahead of us.

On Friday, I started getting a toothache. A bad one. And not only were we snowed in, but we had no pain reliever in the house, nothing, and my dentist was closed for the week. I spent Friday night soaking my mouth in ice, then miraculously drifted into a long night, a fitful sleep.

Maile would dream that we had a boy, but that by the time he was a toddler we still hadn’t decided on a name for him. A little boy walking around, nameless, us still undecided.

On Saturday things didn’t look much more hopeful. My neighbor usually plowed our lane, but his plow wasn’t large enough for this amount of snow. My friend who had a plow had been plowing for his business for 48 hours straight and couldn’t get all the way down to our house in the southern tip of the county. The revealing for Baby #5 was 24 hours away. My sisters threatened to go ahead without us. Then my dad swooped in.

“I’m going to come down and see if we can figure something out. Plus, you need some Advil,” he said. He called me 45 minutes later.

“Hey, I’m out here at the end of the lane and I can’t get the Jeep in. I’m going to ask around and see if anyone has a plow.”

He called back thirty minutes later.

“Do you know your neighbors?” he asked. “You’ve got some really nice neighbors. I talked to the couple in the house at the corner and she’s calling around for someone to come plow your lane. Then I met a little old lady who lives in the small house across the road. They’re trying to help, too.”

Let’s be honest – I’ve lived at the back of that half-mile lane for a year-and-a-half, and I’ve met one set of neighbors. Now my dad comes down to our area and in the span of 45 minutes he was best friends with everyone on the block.

As I hung up the phone, it hit me: I am not my dad. I would have been content to wait until the snow melted, or to sit tight until a friend found the time to come down and help us out. But my dad was canvassing the neighborhood for help. I could have lived in that house for ten years without meeting our neighbors, but my dad got to know them all, and remembered their names, in less than an hour.

And that sentence flashed through my mind again, like a bolt of lightning.

I am not my dad.

A burden the size and weight of a two-foot snowfall lifted from my shoulders. My dad was a wonderful example to me of what a dad should be: loving, accepting, encouraging. He challenged me to make good decisions and to accept responsibility when my decisions were off-kilter. Those are things I can do for my boys. But I don’t have to be him. I can be the dad I am to my sons (and my daughters).

In fact, I have strengths as a father that my dad did not have. If I have a third boy, it will be okay. And I will be enough.

* * * * *

We sat around the table and one of my sisters counted down from three to one. Everyone took a monster-sized bite out of their cupcake (except me – you know, that toothache – so I just pulled mine apart). And then, unplanned, unrehearsed, everyone shouted out together.

“It’s a boy!”

I found myself getting unexpectedly emotional. And so happy. Because I will be a good father to this third boy, of that I am determined. I will be the father he needs.

I looked at Maile and she was crying and I smiled.

“It’s a boy,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, laughing, because it was the kind of joy that forces you to respond.

* * * * *

On Monday morning my dentist fit me in for a quick visit that turned into an on-the-spot root canal. The difference I felt in my mouth before and after was unbelievable. It was the difference between pain and no pain; pressure and no pressure. It was the difference between downhill and uphill, the trajectory of a life.

It was the distance between trying to be someone else, and then suddenly discovering that I am sufficient.

(I’m going to begin posting once a week. The posts might be a little longer, but I’m going to settle into this rhythm for a bit while I work on some other projects. I hope you’ll keep coming by – look for new posts every Wednesday morning.)
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What I Found in Los Angeles

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Anything could happen here, I think to myself as I drive into Los Angeles, down from those rugged hills. The sun sinks into the Pacific behind the motionless outlines of palm trees and the solid, flat black of square houses filled with people who are remembering and forgetting. They try to keep out the wildness, hiding behind gates and shrubs, lining perimeters with chain-link, pulling down heavy gates over storefronts facing out on to uneven sidewalks.

But the wildness cannot be contained.

Anything could happen here.

As I speed south on Route 5 and see signs for Fullerton, Anaheim, and Santa Ana, I experience the magnetism of Los Angeles, this sense that by morning I could either be starring in a film, searching for something important hidden in a storage unit, or overdosing on Skid Row. I look up under the long shadows cast by the lights that line the highway, I look up under the overpass, deep into that netherworld, and I see a disintegrating backpack, a few plastic trash bags, and I realize someone is living there. People are making homes even under the very roads we drive on.

Anything could happen here.

I could find my fortune, hidden among the rubble of the lost and withering things, or I could find my destruction. For some reason the latter feels much more likely.

There’s something about Los Angeles that makes me feel alive, that reminds me of the myriad directions this life could go. I think again about the people I saw through the windows of the houses sprawling all over the mountain. I think again about the person I didn’t see, hidden under the overpass. I think about all of these people, how they are forgetting and remembering, and while I’m thinking all of these things, the palm trees melt into the sky, now dark.

* * * * *

I sit in a shoebox-sized motel room and I can’t sleep for whatever reasons (they are legion), and it feels the same at 2am as it does at 5am. The walls are thin and I can hear others coming and going, doors slamming, latches clicking into place. Then the air conditioning unit roars to life and there is nothing else, just a humming, a rattling that reaches deep inside my mind and puts me to sleep.

I dream about the stories I heard earlier that night when I sat with women from Iran, the stories of so many lives, so much searching. The stories of finding and losing, of running and coming home, of wanting to live and being desperate to die. The stories that leaked from the eyes of those women were like tears, or liquid joy.

For just a moment, clarity. All of my own desires for fame, for being known, for money and talent and all the other things that will make me feel good…all those desires bow and move to the side. They part like a resistant body of water. I see clearly (for the first time?) that this thing I do, this telling of stories, is all that I have.

I have nothing but stories.

The knowledge of this is both a relief and a burden.

* * * * *

We are ruled by the narratives we chase. We see the narrative of the famous and the wealthy and we see happiness there, and fulfillment, and we wish that could be our story. We see the narrative of the powerful and we want that story, too, because we’ve felt so insignificant, so weak and used up, and we want to be the person at the other end of the abuse. Do we want to be the abuser? I don’t know but, dear God, anything but the abused, anything but that again.

We want to live the story of the family that hasn’t had to battle cancer, the story of the family with healthy children, the story of the single person who finds someone and lives happily-ever-after. We want the smooth story, the easy path. We reach out and grasp at so many other narratives, anything but our own, and we hold them close and they leach into our skin like ink, like a burn.

But then, in the midst of all that longing and striving and ceaseless desire to be “other,” that man with the voice I cannot forget says, Pick up your cross and follow me.

I stare long and hard at my cross. It seems rather rough and unpleasant. Not like all those other crosses that other people are asked to carry.

He says, Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed.

And the death I’m asked to die seems so much more deadly than the death my friends are dying.

He says, No greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend.

* * * * *

In the morning I take a shower and then I get dressed and brush my teeth while reading things online about Philip Seymour Hoffman. I decide the room feels too small in which to spend another entire day, so I walk down the street to a bagel shop, planning on working there for a little while.

I sit down and get out the laptop and stare at the screen and everyone in there is very friendly. The shop is busy. The employees smile and work quickly. I wonder where all of these people will go after ordering their Western Omelette on a Bagel and their Hummus on a Bagel. I wonder what narrative they will pursue out into the traffic-filled streets of southern California, the streets that run long and straight under tall palm trees, the streets the hit the mountains and then turn in on themselves. I wonder what stories these people are chasing.

And I realize the stories I’m trying to write are too shy to come out in a place like that. They want to drip slowly out of my veins, to well up slowly, ruby-red, but in all of that speed, all of that commotion, they withdraw, fish darting into the shadows. I finish the breakfast I bought, and I realize I’ve lost the art of sitting. I go to cafes and I get out my laptop or stare at my phone, but I never just sit anymore. I never just look around.

When I do simply look around, I feel embarrassed, as if others might think I’m looking at them. As if the other people in the café will look at me and wonder what kind of a strange creature that is, just sitting, just looking, just thinking.

I walk back out into the cool morning, passing under palm trees, their shadows fading as the sun moves back behind the low-hanging clouds.

I go back into my room, the small room that is starting to stretch with me, the room where the stories are. And again I pick up my cross. And again I fall to the ground. And again I lay down my life. The words emerge and begin to drip like sap on the first warm day.

This is my story.

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A Naked Confession: I Have a Problem With Lady Liquor (A Guest Post By Seth Haines)

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Today’s guest post is brought to you by Seth Haines. I first came across Seth’s blog while following the story of his son Titus. Seth is a true gentleman, a deep writer, and the kind of Christian I hope to be someday. After reading this guest post by him, head over to his blog and check out some of his other poignant writing.

Welcome to a naked moment.

Today, I reckon it’s time to let you in on a little secret, and I won’t talk much about it again for a while. I hope you’re okay with that. We’ll call this a hit-and-run confession. I reckon I should tell you to “listen up,” or “pay attention,” but since this is a place of semi-permanence, I’ll just come on out with it.

I have a problem with lady liquor.

I reckon I could spin the whole story for you; I could tell you the moment when my drinking went from something resembling social to something resembling moronic. I could tell you about a sick child, or the pressures at work, or the burnout of living a typical American life, or the plaguing doubt that nags, that makes me feel like the finest of Christian frauds. The precise excuse for my over-indulging ways, though, isn’t really the point—not for this particular piece, anyway. The point is this—I’m not so much different than some of you.

Am I?

Do you know this pain? Perhaps you’ve been stung by loss of the runaway father, the dead mother.  Maybe you’ve felt abused by the church, or otherwise accused by it. Maybe the Christian clique had at you. Perhaps you’re friends turned tail. Maybe you’ve been singled out for your sinner’s ways. Maybe you’ve been abused, raped, or murdered in some small way (there are a million ways to die alive, you see).

In any event, I don’t suppose I’m special among you. I reckon there are more than a handful here that sing the hymns of the risen Christ on Sunday morning and drink, or eat, or spend, or puke, or sex, or systematically theologize their way into the icy numb during the rest of the week. It’s such a convenient escape from dealing with the underlying pain, such an awful comfort. Isn’t it?

I had a therapist once ask me why I ran to the bottle. He asked what I heard in the quiet moments. I told him that I heard the accusers, the accusations from all the perceived injustices. They were in the cave of the soul, he said. I know he is right.

Sit for a moment in the silence. Listen. Do you hear them, too? Are the accusers in the cave of your soul? Do you deal with their voices, or do you avoid them? Do you confess it to your husband, your wife, your friend, your therapist? Or instead, do you shrink deeper into your most favored coping mechanisms?

Don’t make a deal. Nothing to see here. No eyes on me.

Shrink violet, shrink.

Perhaps this post is all too much for you. After all, don’t we all feel alone in our out-of-placedness? Yes, maybe some of you were quite comfortable in it, and then, along comes this stranger here at Mr. Smucker’s place, and he’s confessing the same things I’ve felt for years.  I’m here to tell you, you can hide behind your vices, pretend that I don’t see, but my vision is x-ray. I see through the drinking, the affair, the over-systematized theologies. I know that the thing, the addiction, is not really the thing at all. I know the addiction is a just a coverup, a ruse to hide the pain. And if you strip those ruses away, what comes screaming to the surface?

That’s right. The pain.

Ask yourself, in moments of clarity, of stone-cold sobriety, do you ask whether Jesus is a figment of your imagination, whether God is real? Do you have fond dreams of dying–not suicide–but of dying? Do you see the prospect of death as release?  Do you lust after money and power so much, that you poor yourself down and skinny yourself up to try and assuage that guilt? Do you have so much money and power that it scares you, that you wonder whether you are the rich man who’ll sooner be screwed than enter the eye of the needle? Perhaps you love your spouse, perhaps you don’t, but do you know whether God loves you? Do you know whether he likes you? Do you wonder whether God will ever speak again, and whether he ever spoke in the first place? Do you wonder whether it’s just your noggin talking to you? Do you hear your accusers casting aspersions, telling you that you’re unloved, unworthy, a thing to be discarded?

I know that the pain makes you ask these questions. How do I know this? Because you are my brothers and sisters. Because I’ve heard these accusations. I’ve lived with them, and by-God, I’ll live with them again unless a better way finds me.

See, the truth is, you can see through me, too. Your vision is x-ray if you let it be.

It’s been decided for me—I’m moving from a place of addiction to freedom. How you ask? I’m not running from the pain anymore. Instead, I’m sitting in it, I’m asking how it feels, and whether it’s true. The process hurts, there is no doubt, and I know I’m not finished just yet. The voices in my soul-cave are myriad, and the guano in here is hip deep. But if I sit with the accusers long enough, if I ponder the lost father, or mother, or the haunting injustices, if I still my soul, if I pray that simple prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” something magical happens.

Magic?

Yes.

I hear the echo of something still and small. It tells me that no matter the pain, no matter the doubt, no matter the addiction, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)

This is my naked confession.

Please take a moment and check out Seth’s blog.

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The First Time I Met Someone Who Had “Lost Their Mind”

7879731330Mostly, I was anxious because I was ten years old and I had never met someone who had “lost their mind.” Would I be safe? Would he kill us right there in Gap Diner? Would he, at random points in the conversation, fall to the floor, seize up, or foam at the mouth? I had no idea what to expect, and I would rather have stayed at home, but I didn’t have school that day and for some reason my mom was busy doing something else so I went with my dad (he was the assistant pastor at the church we attended) to have lunch with one of the parishioners who had recently been released from a mental hospital.

Today, I’m posting over at A Deeper Story. You can read the rest HERE.

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Searching For Signs Of Life (or, a visit to the midwife)

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We walk through the dreary, rainy day and into the small clinic. The last time Maile was here, they couldn’t find a heartbeat. The time before that, a little over a year ago, we found out the pregnancy wasn’t viable. Such a small place, that clinic, lost in the farmers’ fields. Such an ordinary place.

The midwife leads us from a virtually silent waiting room, down a short hall, and then into the examination room. I squeeze into a chair in the corner, beside the sink and across from a small, clear plastic model of a woman’s reproductive organs. It’s rather fascinating, all those tubes and passageways. I try not to stare at it though, because then the midwife might think I’m weird.

The paper on the examination table crinkles loudly as Maile climbs on and then lays back. She hikes her shirt up so that it rests on top of her slightly round, ripening stomach.

“This is going to feel a little cold,” the midwife says, placing a heartbeat sensor loaded with gel on to her white skin.

Immediately the silence around us is replaced by a whirring, a rushing, a storm heard from inside the deepest parts of a ship. But it’s not constant, like television static. No, this rushing is alive and moving. It’s the inside of Maile, the sounds of her body magnified, sent rushing through wires and electrical equipment, then pushed through a speaker so that those of us outside can eavesdrop.

But that long whooshing noise interrupted by the occasional cosmic crackle is not the sound we are listening for.

Then we hear a slow, ponderous gulping noise. It seems odd and out of place, that steady rhythm emerging from the random, white noise.

But that’s not the sound we’re listening for either.

“That’s your heart beat,” the midwife says quietly, quickly, so that we will not mistake it for anything more. “Baby’s should be right around here somewhere.”

She slides the sensor back and forth slowly, and Maile’s heartbeat fades in and out of the whooshing noise. For just a moment I think about my struggle with silence, the way it batters me and soothes me. I think about the silence I encountered in Istanbul, and how it changed me. I think about the dying man I met there, the man who has since passed on, and I think about the silence of writing his story.

Silence is a thing that frightens many of us, because complete silence is death, and we have been taught to resist death, to fight it, or let it terrify us. But I’ve learned there is something behind the silence, something worth more than all the noise in the world. My true self waits there on the other side of silence. God waits there as well, emerging from that lack of noise like a whisper, or a heart beat.

Then we hear it. A sound not unlike Maile’s heartbeat, but smaller and faster and more urgent, like a tiny voice crying out, “Listen to me! Hear me! I am!”

As quick as it came into being, it was gone.

“Baby’s a mover,” the midwife says, smiling. “He or she is pretty quick to get out of the way when she feels the pressure from this.”

We wait, and we hear it again. Tears can be like a thin film on your eyes, a cataract.

* * * * *

Later, I go out to the waiting room while they take Maile’s blood. Sorry. Not a fan of that. For some reason I can watch a baby come lurching into the world, bloody and messy and all tangled in on itself, but I’d rather not watch a skinny vampire needle suck the life out of someone.

The lady at the front desk asks me to write down directions to our house from their other location in case of an emergency, but I have never been to their other location before so I stop and think about all those back roads, the winding ways from here to there. The unlikely paths we take. An Amish man, also waiting in the room, speaks up.

“Did I hear you say you’re from Holtwood?” he asks in that Amish accent, the one that sounds like English words are fighting with German words and the English ones are emerging victorious, but only just.

“Yeah,” I say. He goes on to explain the easiest way from the other clinic to where I live, or at least the general vicinity. I could take it from there.

“Thanks,” I say. “You from down there?”

“Well, I grew up in Nine Points, sort of down Holtwood way, but now I live over in Kinzers.”

“I grew up in Kinzers,” I say. “Across from the paint store, just down from the high school. Umry who used to own the paint shop? His wife is my mom’s cousin.”

“Is that right?” he asks. “My brother-in-law is Umry’s cousin. Sure is loud up this end of the county, at least compared to Nine Points.”

Now, Kinzers has a population of about 2,000 people, spread out over rolling fields and forests. It’s a large area. I had to smile when he said Kinzers is loud. But now that I live in the “southern end,” I know what he is talking about. Kinzers has its fair share of small businesses, and they draw large delivery trucks down their skinny roads. It’s downright silent in our neck of the woods – no one but farmers and writers and other such sedentary folk.

“Sure is quiet in Holtwood,” I say to the Amish man just as Maile emerges from the back of the clinic. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” he says, and he sounds surprised that he means it.

We walk out into the mist and I hold Maile’s hand for a moment. I imagine that I can feel her pulse in her hand, maybe two pulses, the deep reverberations of life going on, going on, going on. There’s something about the presence of a heartbeat that can sometimes make you think this life will never end. It seems like such an irresistible force.

But I’ve heard it, the silence, the absence of the heartbeat. I’ve traveled through that space, not unscathed, not unchanged, but I’ve traveled through it. We drive out on to the road and the sound of the tires on the wet asphalt is very much like the sounds we had heard inside of Maile in those moments when the midwife searched for signs of life. And I think that’s what we’re doing, all of us, most of the time.

Searching for signs of life.