Yesterday, Tomorrow and the Time In Between

On a sunny day years ago, I talked to a dying man. He was tall and lean and spoke with a slow Texas drawl. Though his hair was faint and bone white, there was a clarity in his misty blue eyes. It was a clarity age could never touch.

I had failed. That's why I met him. Like a young, nested bird I tried to fly too high too soon. I ran out of College in Missoula. I ran back home confused, sick and furious. I ran back to Superior. It was time for my transfiguration.

We walked the road slowly passing houses and the high school until we reached the edge of the woods by the river. He picked an old pine stump half-torn from the ground and leaned against it. We talked about destiny and futures decided and incomplete pasts. I told him how lost and dead and cold I felt. I failed and I hated myself for it. Hated. I couldn't even look in a mirror for sheer desire to scratch the eyes out of the failure looking back at me.

It's strange how casually some of the most important lessons are passed from one person to another. Just conversing. In a coffee shop or a street corner or the edge of the woods in Superior. I needed to find a way to forgive myself but I also needed a direction to follow through the winds of uncertainty swirling around me. I needed something to make it okay for me to leave on that future day when I could stay no more. So, although I didn't ask, he told me a story.

He was a G.I. in the Korean Conflict. In the tent that he and another soldier stayed, he collapsed to the floor. Things got blurry and faded and mixed up. Then, like the picture on an old television, everything narrowed to a point of light, then, darkness. The awareness he said he had was impossible to rationally explain. It wasn't the same as the awareness he had while telling me this but there were no real parallels either. He said that the dark began to lighten and he felt warmth like when he slept in the sun. There was a cacophony of strange sounds like a group of people talking in an underwater echo chamber. Fear wasn't exactly what he felt. It was more resignation. Whatever was whatever. Then he felt a single strong whisper inside. It didn't say much. It just asked him one question: What have you given? Over and over it echoed. What have you given? In a kind of mouthless paralysis, there was no answer he could give. Then the darkness returned and swallowed him whole.

Sitting in the shade of the pines looking at the mountains reflect in the river, he let me interpret what he said in silence. All I did was let the question bounce around my skull. What have I given? What could I give? What was the right answer? I flashed through a thousand trite answers that you'd find written in the "Spirituality" section of Barnes and Noble. I got lucky, however, because he spoke before I was going to. He said that he woke up in a Japanese hospital. He spent 25 years in a Bourbon bottle trying to forget what happened on the battlefield. He ran too. When faced with something as overwhelming as yourself in the unchangable past, you run. It's what people do. But when the Bourbon wore off, the question was always there waiting. Finally, it occurred to him to maybe look for an answer. Travelling the country, getting married, having children...all the while trying to answer this riddle from his past. Then he said that an answer came one day and he didn't even remember when, where or how. He just had an answer that he was willing to bet it all on. What can you give that would ever be enough? Yourself. He left it at that for me to interpret. He at the point had spent years as a case manager for mentally ill children. I thought I understood and here's what it means to me: For my life to be acceptable to me at all, I had to give myself over to the purpose of allowing others to embrace life in this world of small miracles. I had to let the fire of empathy consume me. I could dedicate my time here to nothing less. I'd found the beginning of my path.

Now, I still fail, mind you, but I always try. I need to try at least, then failure can be an acceptable consequence. It is my path and on that day, my last day here, if I've tried and left this world even slightly better than if I'd never existed, I say let the wind erase me. And maybe I'll see you somewhere on the path in the future.