The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

by Robert Dugoni

For one, I never understood how my mother knew God’s will. When I would ask her that very question, she would answer with another of her stock refrains—“Have faith, Samuel.” I realize now that this was circular reasoning impregnable to debate.

We’re told we can do anything we set our minds to, that the world is our oyster, that all we have to do is shuck the hard shell and pluck the rich, nourishing meat inside. I realize now, however, that the shell is a lot harder than I appreciated, and that I never could have controlled or even predicted the things that would happen in my life.

Life is either a collision of random events, like billiard balls during a break careening off and into one another, or if you are so inclined to believe, our predetermined fate—what my mother took such great comfort in calling God’s will.

The first recollection started as a trickle that, as soon as I attempted to block it, found another path to weep through, the way water will always bleed through concrete, no matter how many times you patch it.

“There comes a time in every man’s life,” he’d said in the halting, ghostly voice his stroke had left him, “when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.”

When it came to my life, my mother acted as if she were preserving the legacy of a future president for his presidential library.

Whether my mother’s diligence was intended to document the extraordinary life she was convinced I was destined to lead or simply the result of her having too much time on her hands, I cannot say,

“All I can say is that Samuel’s eyes are very rare.” “Not rare, Doctor,” my mother corrected. “Extraordinary.”

That my parents’ first encounter with intolerance would occur in church is less a commentary on Catholic hypocrisy than it is a testament to the frequency of their attendance.

I convinced myself these were not real lies—not the kind that caused a person to burn in hell, anyway. These fit squarely in the category of lies my mother had once explained were okay if they were intended to avoid hurting a person’s feelings.

I had a strong sense that I was different, and not in the extraordinary way my mother wanted me to believe.

“And that guy, he’s not the guy you have to worry about. The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.”

“You’re only a square peg if you allow yourself to be treated as one.

I reached out and hugged her. The tears we shed that morning were our silent acknowledgment that while the years might not have been extraordinary, as she had so diligently prayed, they had been ours.

I recall this moment as the moment I became a man. It had not been my first beer or hangover, or the first time I’d gotten laid, as I had thought. It had not even been earlier that day, when I’d tossed my blue graduation cap into the air. It was the moment my mother needed me, and I was there for her.

I’d long ago begun to question my faith, or perhaps my mother’s faith. After all, I could not recall any occasion when God had stepped in and helped me, despite smashing my prayer bank repeatedly.

“Your father worked so hard all his life, and for what? He’s going to end up here? It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” It truly did, and that was as close as I’d ever come to hearing my mother question her faith.

Mickie recognized it as an opportunity for me to begin not just the process of accepting who I was, but liking that person.

Their presence gave me back my identity and validated my existence beyond the role of the unknown grieving boyfriend.

There are moments, I believe, when we are capable of communicating with those we love without using our voices, moments when we think of someone and the phone rings, or we speak the person’s name and suddenly they are standing beside us.

“You never forget what’s beaten into you in Catholic grade school,” she whispered.

I realized that by forgiving them all, I had forgiven myself.

while we tend to remember the dramatic incidents that change history—Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Nixon’s resignation, and the Loma Prieta earthquake—we live for the quiet, intimate moments that mark not our calendars but our hearts: The day we marry. The days our children are born. Their first step. Their first word. Their first day of school. And when our children grow, we remember those moments with a touch of melancholy: the day they get their driver’s license, the day we drive them to college, the day they marry, and the day they have their children. And the cycle begins anew. We realize it is in those quiet moments that each of us has the ability to make our lives extraordinary.