Chapter 3: Time to Say Goodbye

W h a t happens when you die? Are you magically transported through a tunnel of bright light and taken to the Promised Land? The land of peace, joy, and happiness. Is St. Peter standing at the “pearly gates” to review your life and tell you what you have done, both good and bad, right and wrong?

D o you come face to face with your creator, who, with the wave of a hand, welcomes you to his kingdom or banishes you to hell’s  fire for all eternity?

D o your sins and transgressions of this life follow you to the grave and beyond, or does it just end?

I s there a heaven? Is there a hell? Or, do we just cease to exist, a microscopic footnote in the history of mankind?

Wh a t if this truly is all there is? For what would we actually be living? To what purpose would any of this mean? Life would be as futile as a hummingbird trying to fly into a hurricane. In the end, it just wouldn’t matter, the end would come and life would go on, with no one ever knowing what the hummingbird tried to do.

 *  *  *

As they sat in the pews at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, colorful beams of light descended on  the  congregation of mourners  from  the stained glass murals that resided above. Staring up at the larger than life crucifix that hung ominously above the lifeless body of Nate and his casket, Bill couldn’t  help but wonder where Nate was at that exact moment in time. “Is he here, in the church, watching us suffer over his death and our loss?” Bill wondered. “Is he in heaven, purgatory, or even hell, paying for the sins God never forgave? Is he just gone?.”

Looking at his soulless body, lying motionless in the mahogany casket with make-up caked on to make him presentable, Bill knew for certain that Nate’s spirit was no longer in that shell. He is gone from this world forever, and it was time for Bill to take it on faith and the words of Father Bob that Nate was now in a better place.

Across the aisle Bill glanced at Nate’s  widow Melissa, their children, seventeen-year-old Nate Jr., thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, seven-year-old Savannah, and three-year-old Taylor, and the family he left behind. “Is this some sort of cruel joke?” Bill asked himself. “Come on Nate, walk in and tell us this  has been part of some ridiculous TV reality show and that you had to convince all of us that you were dead so that you could win a million dollars. Please don’t  be gone. For God’s sake, what kind of God allows us to suffer like this?”

Then, he looked up at the crucifix, nails piercing the flesh, the hands and feet of Jesus. There, Bill saw God himself suffering, much like the suffering Nate endured in the final weeks of his battle to live here on earth.

Bill reached over and clasped Cassie’s hand, and she leaned in, hugged his arm and softly whispered, “I love you.”

Bill closed his eyes and thought of those words. He clung to them as though they were a gift. He gingerly leaned over to her and said, “I love you, too. I really needed to hear those words right now.”

She looked at him a bit puzzled, and he added, “I’ll explain later,” as he gently smiled at her and lovingly squeezed her hand.

The little glimpse of love during such a dark moment  of their lives brought a glimmer of hope back into a moment where Bill could see none. Through a small, simple gesture, Cassie, as she had done so often in their life together, brought clarity to a moment when he was having a hard time seeing.

Under the shadow of the crucifix, Bill looked back at Melissa and her four children, and saw the hope that Nate left behind.

*  *  *

“God, I can’t  wait to get out of this place,” Dan thought  to himself sitting in the pew. “This stuffy church, pointing  out  all your mistakes. Trapping people, letting them fucking die without living.”

Dan hasn’t been inside a church since he was in high school, praying for something not to be that was. Forced to make a choice that he didn’t want to make, and now eighteen years later, he was still haunted by those demons.

Looking at Melissa, with her and Nate’s kids looking at their dad, dead in a wood box, all he saw was a life ended far too soon.

“Now what?” he thought. “Do they all go on like nothing happened? No way. A lifetime of pain and questions lie ahead.”

Dan knows the questions and the pain and doubt they bring. The choice was his, and he bares that burden. But for them, they are cogs in the machine of life that rolls on regardless of their choices. This was not their choice, but now their burden, whether they chose it or not.

But Dan wasn’t going to wait for fate to roll the dice for him. Whatever happened would be by his choosing, because he had no one to rely on but himself. He was sure that fate would catch up to him one day, but it would be on his terms.

Dan thought,  “This will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But they need to find a way to move on. We all need to. Why live for an afterlife you have never seen, when there is plenty to be had here in this life. I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun. I like the sound of that.”

*  *  *

Walking up to the closed casket, getting ready to carry his longtime friend out of the church, Joe looked at the other pallbearers;  Bill, Dan, and Tom along with Nate’s  dad Robert and younger brother Pete. When his eyes met Robert’s, Joe gave a slight smile and nodded his head as if to say, everything is going to be alright. Robert, with tears streaming down his face, nodded back and turned his attention to the casket that held his dead son’s remains.

As the hymn Amazing Grace began to echo through  the chamber, each of the six men grabbed on to the casket handles and began the procession out of the church. There wasn’t  a dry eye in the church, and Nate’s wife Melissa, sobbing as she wrapped her arm around her youngest child, was barely holding on.

Joe thought  back to the night of his motorcycle accident and how close he came to being where Nate is now.

Fate had a way of evening the score. Joe remembered seeing a bright light and dying the night of the accident. He had never been the same since. Every day, his body ached and  his soul felt empty. Joe quickly thought back to those nights when the sins of his past crawled out from the shadows and he stared down the barrel of his gun, ready to end his miserable existence.

Then “…that saved a wretch like me…” echoed through the church and brought Joe back to the task at hand; saying goodbye to his friend.

*  *  *

Tom stood at the gravesite watching Father Bob offer the final blessing on  Nate’s  remains. He looked around  and marveled at the family and friends that surrounded  Nate’s final resting place, as they all represented so many points in Nate’s life. There was his grandmother, his parents, his wife and children. Friends from high school, work, his church and neighborhood. Such an outpouring of sympathy, support, and regret for a man who was taken far too young.

Nate’s children were now left to move forward without their father, the man who is supposed to be there to protect and support them, to show them the love that only a father can provide. And now he’s gone, and these four must shoulder the burden of not having a father and face the reality that this world can be so unfair.“Tabitha, my little princess. She doesn’t deserve the shit we’ve put her through,” Dan thinks to himself. “Now I am partially out of her life. So fucking unfair. But at least I still have a chance to be with her.”

Tom knew what it was like to grow up without a father. His father abandoned him and his mother when he was 12 years old, just at the time in life when a boy so desperately needed the direction of a stable and loving father; someone to show him what it truly meant to be a man, not just pretend to be one.

He remembered the pain he felt when his father left, and in some ways, it was like he had died. For a while, there was a piece of him that held out hope that  his father would come walking through  the door  again one night. But that hope soon disappeared, and Tom was faced with the reality that he wasn’t ever coming back. .

As the burial service came to an end, people began to turn and walk away from  the  gravesite. Melissa and  the  children, along with  Nate’s parents and siblings, remained seated, not yet wanting to say their final goodbyes, as that would mean this moment is real and Nate isn’t coming back. It was as though they were waiting for Nate to walk in and say there was some sort of misunderstanding.

Joe knew that kind of hope, and he knew how devastating it could be when reality finally set in.

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