Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

by Beth Hoffman

I read as fast as I could, gobbling up pages until the wild thumping of my heart subsided, until the story on the pages became real and my life became nothing but a story—a story that simply wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true.

every day was a beauty. I think she was just happy to have woken up on the top side of the earth.

“Well, what I don’t understand is why people get all dressed up and drive to church so they can sit there and get scolded. Seems to me it’d be a whole lot easier for them to just stay home in their pj’s, eat pancakes, and get yelled at over the radio.”

Even the most ornery, stern-faced men in our town turned all happy and grinned like fools as they looked over the long tables lined with homemade cookies, pies, and strudels.

Books became my life, or maybe I should say books became the way I escaped from my life.

“But, Mrs. Odell, I’ve never even heard of a Life Book.” “It’s not a book you can see or touch. It’s a book that’s held deep within your heart. It’s guarded by

your spirit.”

Nineteen words. I counted them. That’s all he had to say to me. Nineteen meaningless little words. And that’s when my father died to me—right there in the driveway. I was, as of that very moment, an orphan. Both my parents were dead, and if I was to be honest with myself, they’d been dead for a long time. It just took me awhile to figure it out.

Mrs. Odell once told me that forgiveness had a whole lot more to do with the person doing the forgiving than it did with the person in need of forgiveness. She said holding on to hurt and anger made about as much sense as hitting your head with a hammer and expecting the other person to get a headache.

I made up my mind that my father was just a chapter in my Life Book that finally came to an end.

It seemed that no matter how far away I moved or how hard I tried to forget about all that had happened, my past would always be lurking in the shadows, waiting to drag me down.

There’s the kind of grief that leaves you numb, and the kind of grief that rips your world in half. And then there’s another kind of grief that doesn’t feel like grief at all. It’s like a tiny splinter you don’t even know you have until it festers so deep it has nowhere left to go but into your soul.

“That’s life out there. See how it’s movin’? Even the leaves on the trees is movin’. Life don’t wait for nobody, and even as special as you are, it ain’t gonna wait for you, neither. So it’s time to make up your mind that you’re gonna join it.”

“It’s what we believe about ourselves that determines how others see us.”

Don’t go wastin’ all them bright tomorrows you ain’t even seen by hangin’ on to what happened yesterday. Let go, child. Just breathe out and let go.”

“It’s how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.”