Kirkepiscatoid

Random and not so random musings from a 5th generation NE Missourian who became a 1st generation Episcopalian. Let the good times roll!

This time of year, there's always a point I think about R.

R. was born in May 1949. He was my mother's half-brother, born to her mom and her stepdad, my grandpa. I was born in March 1960. R. got killed in a hunting accident in Nov. 1960, at age 11, about a week before Thanksgiving. He went squirrel hunting with an older boy, Ro., who was like 15-16 at the time, and R. got his .22 rifle hung in the brush while crossing a fence. He made the mistake of not handing the gun over to Ro. when crossing the fence. Somehow as he was pulling it out of the brush by the barrel, it moved the safety to “off” and then the trigger got hung in the brush and it went off, going through his temple.

Of course, back then, no one thought anything about a 15 or 16 year old taking an 11 year old squirrel hunting, and no one ever had to take a gun safety class. But Ro. ran back to the house to get my grandpa and R. was unconscious and they carried him back to the house. Of course, there were no real ambulances in Macon back then, the “ambulance” was the hearse from the local funeral home, and it was just “scoop and run” with no treatment on the way. They took him straight to MU Hospital in Columbia, and took him to surgery to open a window on his skull b/c his brain was swelling. But back then, there was not much you could do about an injury like that. He died the next day.

So the very first Christmas of my life was in a house with a huge pall over it. I obviously don’t remember any of this, but in my mind’s eye, I had to have perceived something that stuck with me the rest of my life.

What I do remember, though, about subsequent Christmases is that R. was always “there” somehow. For that matter, R. was “there” all the time, just more at the holidays. I remember there was a box of toys in the basement that I was never allowed to play with, or, for that matter, even look at. I remember when I did something different or funny, or new, that it was never original—it somehow reminded my grandparents or my mom of R. There was an ornament on my grandmother’s tree that was R.’s, something he made at school one year, and I knew not to mess with “R.’s ornament”. So even the Christmas tree had a ghost hanging on it.

There was a LOT of guilt about R. My grandmother blamed herself b/c she had bought the box of .22 cartridges that killed him. My grandfather blamed himself b/c he did not have time to take him hunting. My mom blamed herself b/c earlier in the day he had wanted to go to the movies with her and she blew him off and told him she didn’t want to go see a Saturday kid movie, she wanted to see a different movie. My great-grandfather blamed himself b/c he had loosened the safety on that rifle b/c his small thumb could not move it well. Lots and lots of blame. No one blamed each other, they all blamed themselves.

My grandpa took it the hardest, because R. was his only child; my mom was his stepchild. He went to the cemetery every week until the day he died. Some of my earliest conscious memories are that I realized I was both a blessing and a complication in my family’s lives. When I was a young adult, my grandpa told me once, “I don’t know what I would have done if you were not around. I think I would have killed myself if not for the fact you were in my life, and I had to be there for you.” But I was a complication in that it made my grandparents want to “parent” me, and they and my folks would frequently go at each other where how I should be handled was the object of discussion.

When I was born, my grandmother was not quite 43 and my grandfather was 35! He wouldn’t turn 36 until December! So it really was like having "two sets of parents." But everyone was just too young in this scenario.

There was also a little bit of the attitude of “St. R.” around the house. R. would have eaten his vegetables, that kind of stuff. He was always "there" somehow. I was not jealous of him, but I did wonder why I had to have someone around all the time I did not know.

It put strange ideas and fears in my head even as a very small child. When I got sick as a child, I used to worry I would die, and I wasn’t so much worrying about dying as I was that I knew if I died, everyone would be REALLY messed up b/c they had already lost R. I carried with me a fear of “dying young” clear into adulthood, and I still worry now and then about it, but I think the only reason I don’t worry so much about it anymore is I ain’t so young anymore. But unlike a lot of kids, I already knew children can die.

I also carried with me the realization that, had he lived, he and I would have been more like brother and sister instead of uncle and niece. Being an only child, it was interesting at times to wonder what that would have been like. Again, no big loss, just a wonderment.

But what R.’s death did was it made it so no Christmas could ever be completely happy for my grandparents. He would come up somewhere, and my grandmother would get all teary-eyed and my grandpa would get all sullen. You knew R.’s ghost had visited. They had to have imagined “Christmases that would never be.” You could tell that was on their mind once in a while. My grandmother used to rationalize some of it by saying things like, “Well, even if he had lived, he might have had to have gone to Vietnam, and we still could have been burying him, and that would have been just as bad.”

There were two weird things I remember well. One year for Christmas, I wanted one of those little tin miniature gas stations with the cars and the little gas pumps and the garage with the lift where you put the little cars on to “work on them”. I had gotten one from my grandparents but there was something “not right” about it. It didn’t look like the one in the Sears catalog...and the cars seemed more like “older models”. I pretty quickly figured out that was one of R.’s toys. Another year I wanted an .027 gauge train set—you know, the bigger ones, not the HO gauge ones. Again, the boxes looked “not quite right.” I realized again this had been R.’s train set. I enjoyed those toys, but it was a little creepy getting a dead kid’s toys for Christmas and realizing they are a dead kid’s toys, and all the adults not saying a word like they could put this over on me. Oooooo....another round of “Let’s pretend,” huh? I never told any of them that I knew.

I have no memories of him, obviously, but I found out things later...mostly when my grandmother was in the last few months of her dying of cancer. She got to talking a little about R. one day, and she got to talking about those 8 months we were both on the planet together. She told me that they were all worried about he would handle my arrival and they all got quite a surprise.

She said, “We were all worried he would feel left out and it was just the opposite. He was crazy about you. Kept wanting to put his ear on your mom’s belly, and put his hand on her and feel you kick. When you were born, they would not let kids up to see the babies and he pitched such a fit we had to get permission for your mom to bring you out on the porch of Samaritan Hospital and he stood on the lawn because the nurses would not let him get close b/c back then they thought little kids had germs or something. Then when your mom brought you home, we had to get after him b/c he wanted to walk around with you and play with you instead of let you sleep. He wanted to take you everywhere with him. He would put you in the basket of his bicycle when we weren’t looking and we were scared shitless you’d fall out, but he would just ride around with one hand on you and you weren’t a bit scared, you just laughed. He wanted us to bring you to his Little League games. He would even change your diaper, and your grandfather wouldn’t even do that. The day he died we had to get after him that morning because he put you in his wagon and was dragging you around the yard and you kept falling out.”

Then she started talking about how at 8 months, I was not really “talking” so much as babbling but I had my own little language and I sort of had names for everyone that weren’t even close to their names, but she knew I was talking to a certain person b/c I used THAT word for that person. She said I called R. “Ghee-ghee”. After R. died, she said I crawled around the house looking in all the rooms going, “Ghee-ghee? Ghee-ghee?” and looking confused and that just tore them up.

I had never been told any of this stuff. I was not sure it was real, or whether she was just playing the “St. R.” card.

Then, after my grandmother died, and we were getting ready to put stuff in the sale, I ran across a small stack of black and white pictures that were buried in a drawer in my grandmother’s bedroom. They were pictures of R. holding me as a baby, and I realized my grandmother wasn’t making that stuff up she had told me. Some of them, he was cradling me as an infant, some of them I am a little bigger and he his holding me up on his hip with my arms around him, and one of them was in his wagon. But in all of them, he was simply beaming. He had a little resemblance to me, and the best way I can describe it is, if you have ever seen me beaming, there is a lot of that look in there in him, and “me as a baby” looks perfectly happy with the whole arrangement.

Last night, I was putting myself in R.’s shoes. Now, I have no clue what we all do when we end up where “light perpetual” shines on us. I have no idea how that fits in a plane where there is no pain and suffering. But all at once, for the first time in my life, I got to thinking about things that “never happened” with R. and me. Would he have taken me sledding, down hills that would have scared the bejezus out of most kids my age? Would he have hassled my first serious boyfriend? Would he have been the person I would have “debriefed” with on the phone when weird things happened? How would it have been having cousins that I will never know in my life, if he had lived, married, had kids? Have there been times, from his vantage point where he is now, that he wanted to “check in” on these insignificant moments in my life? Since I never really KNEW him, I have no fantasies of him. But HE knew ME...maybe it is different from his vantage point. Has he been at some time what we casually call a guardian angel and I never even knew it?

It must be really strange, being a child who dies, and have the sum total of the secrets of the universe thrown at you at the moment of death, and suddenly be imbued with knowledge “beyond adult”. I’m an adult, and a smart one at that, and that concept boggles MY mind. I can’t even imagine being handed all that information when you were an 11 year old!

When it is my turn in the barrel, will I recognize him? It won’t be like “making up for lost time,” but will there, when we are both in the same plane, a connection between us in some way? That is pretty mind boggling stuff!

His death left a hole in my family. It left a hole in me of which I have never really felt any sort of an “inheritance.” But I have a strong belief that among the people close to you, there are things about their “aura” that get incorporated in your aura, and we assimilate these things. I never knew this boy, but he knew me, and he interacted with me in a way that was very unusual for an 11 year old boy. Most 11 year old boys would not want to be dragging a baby around. Maybe it’s possible part of how I interact and respond to other people has a pinch or two of the “ground of his being” in me. I mean, I know people like my grandfather do. But I knew them. For someone that I do not really remember to have that power, well, that is big stuff. It opens the possibility that love that we are consciously unaware of affects us.

Ooooooo, and maybe that is (gulp) part of the power of Advent????? I think sometimes about “Jesus the person” and “Jesus the Christ”, and when it comes to Jesus the person, yeah, I know about him in a historical sense, but in a human relational sense “I don’t know the guy.” But maybe I do, and maybe somehow we are all connected by a pinch of the divine and he is able to love us in a way that most of the time, we are consciously unaware of it. Maybe we are connected to the Buddha, or Lao Tzu, or Ghandi, or Mohammed, or Mother Theresa in the same way, for that matter. I am not going to get hung up on any notions of Christianity having cornered the market on this.

But maybe one of the revelations for Advent for me this year is the recognition that a person I never knew can have influence on me. Maybe this is the modus operandi of Christianity. Who knows?

8 comments:

Thank you.

Ghee-ghee is nearby and I could see his smile beaming all the way down to Central America...the sky is huge and spirits are endless.

Love to you at Advent,

Leonardo

I'm simply stunned by this post. Wow. Someone is always is there yet who hasn't been for a while, what influence. Thanks so much for sharing.

Beautiful and stunning.

I love the Advent insight at the end. That's the kind of theological reflection that EFM, at its best, encourages. Wish you could come and do that one for my group!

Pax,
Doxy

I thought about this post many times today...I think you´ve shared a really beautiful Christmas Story that I will often reflect on...it´s about so many things: joy, simplicity, purity, love, good intentions, accidents (including you as a infant falling out of the wagon and being put back in for another spin around the backyard) but mostly the imprint of life and death in the REAL...there is still a heartbeat and I can hear it.

So many layers to this story. You portrayed so well the hole R's death left in your family and the impact that had on you. I also loved the Advent link at the end.

Thank all of you...and esp. love to my pal Leonardo!

I even thought a little about it myself tonight. Went to a concert of the community string orchestra, conducted by a friend from church. I have posted before about her 6 year old daughter, who is quite an adventuress herself. After the concert, she was wanting me to propeller spin her in the hall and piggyback ride around. I think I squeezed her a little tighter and piggybacked her a little longer tonight!

Forgive me. I not trying to hide this. It belongs here. But reading it is optional. It is long and boring and not at all interesting - just personal stuff. But it is something I really needed to write.
____________

Feel that I owe you a explanation about why I started to read your blog. Have felt guilty about not providing one long before this. Preferred you to think I was just snooping, or stalking you, rather then have you know the truth about just how crazy I really am. But your blog entries are so frank and honest that you have shamed me into making a full confession.

The truth is I found your blog by accident - was just randomly web surfing - something I rarely do - do only when I am waiting for a respond to an e-mail. Anyway, there you were. Reflecting back, I have been able to reconstruct most of the steps that got me there, so I know it was not by chance - but in my gut I feel I was led there by a ghost.

When I found your blog, I had no intention of reading it. But your most recent entry, the one I found visible on the screen, was this Christmas ghost story. The title got my interest. I read it. As I told you before, you really have a gift for writing. And the story was so vivid and warm and honest in depicting the continuing influence of "those not remembered" on current lives that anyone reading it would have been touched. I was overwhelmed. I too have a ghost - someone I do not remember, but who has influenced my life, developed my character. He died before I was born. And like your's, was an uncle, my uncle John. He also died violently, died of a gunshot wound. Immediately thought that my reading your article was no coincidence. That somehow John had led me there. Wanted me to read it. Wanted me to know that other people had "ghosts". Course, I dismissed those crazy thoughts. I am rational. Do not believe in ghosts - have doubts about even the Holy one. Convinced myself that it was just a coincidence.

Nevertheless, I was hooked on your blog. Several weeks later I found your entry about the hand of God - the one in which you wrote about the significance of Father W.'s "Sunday Ring". I, too, have found a ring. Actually dug it out of the ground. When I was a kid, I was preparing the ground for another one of my mother's rose beds, when I saw something shining on one of the prongs of the gardening folk. When I brushed off the mud, I saw that it was a gold ring with a birthstone. Put it on my finger. It fit. Was young enough to think that I had discovered a buried pirate treasure. Rushed into the house to tell my parents. They told me that it was Uncle John ring - the ring he had been wearing when he was killed, the ring that had been buried with him in Africa. After World War II, his body was recovered and returned to the States. The soldier accompanying the casket had given my grandfather the ring. The ring was lost a few days after his reburial.

Stayed lost until I dug it up. Course after the ring's discovery others in the family wanted it. My grandfather, having lost it once, lost the claim to it. It should have gone to my father. He was closest to John in life - was his only full-blooded sibling - but my father was somewhat mystical, or, at least, was comfortable dealing with mystery - he had spent part of his life as a Catholic. He was impressed by the fact that it was I who found the ring and that I had found it at the right time. That summer I had had a major growth spurt, my last, and had attained my mature size. If I have found the ring a few months earlier, in the spring, my hands would have been too small. I could not have worn it. This was significant, conclusive for my father. Said the ring had been hiding in the ground, waiting for me to grow up. He really wanted me to wear it.

Course, I did not want it. No twelve year boy wants to wear a "sissy ring", especially one that belonged to a dead man, a ring that had been buried with him, had been on his finger while the flesh turned to bone. But my father explained that John had been just a young kid when he volunteered to fight for his country, that he died young, before he had a wife, before he had children of his own, kids to keep his memory alive - that even then, only twenty years after his death, only a few people remembered him and they themselves would soon be gone - that soon John would be completely forgotten - it would be as if he had never existed. However, if I wore his ring, I would keep his memory alive and, in the coming decades, there would be at least one person who knew that John had walked the earth, had given his life for his country.

So that is how I got my ghost. Have worn that ring ever - worn it decades for each year John had it -but it is still "John's ring". And every time I see it - every time I wash my hands - I think of him - and thinking of him constantly, the soldier, the kid dying too young, has formed my character - and wearing a "memento mori" has darkened it. And whenever something odd happens - a strange coincidence - I wonder if it is John's work - wonder what message he is trying to give me - wonder what he wants me to do. Know this is crazy. But I really feel that he led me to your blog. Wanted me to know that others suspect the existence of ghosts - that others are given rings - wanted me to know that, despite all my doubts, he really gave me that ring fifty years ago. And I have done my duty. Just by telling you this, his memory is being preserved.

Sorry.

Wow. I'm stunned--and grateful you have shared your story. It's touching and wonderful and so very, as I like to say, "non-coincidental." Things happen, I believe, to lead us to places we need to go. I am grateful that my story has brought you closer to the mystery of John's and your relationship that, perhaps, "wasn't, is, and still is yet to be." Thank you.

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Kirksville, Missouri, United States
I'm a longtime area resident of that quirky and wonderful place called Kirksville, MO and am wondering what God has hiding round the next corner in my life.

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