A time to laugh. A day in 1985.
I was tired of policing up after the male child that day. When I got up from the sofa to fetch him a box of juice, I asked my mother if she needed anything from the kitchen. She glanced up from the television, as it blared, and shook her head, or nodded—or something. Sometimes you know a person well enough to decipher their nods and shakes—their yeses. Their nos. I stood there for a moment and looked at the two generations I was sandwiched between. The elder crunched her ice. The younger sucked the corner of a quilt, bleached from use.
A pair of underwear lay dead in the middle of my pathway. I called out for the owner to retrieve their underpants. I didn’t turn around to watch his head shake from left to right, and it was by rumor only (from the ice-crunching Granny) that I heard him say, “Her will get them.”
I stopped on my way back from the kitchen and rescued the Teenage Mutant Ninjas. Size three.
A time to cast away. Delayed Entry 2001.
Throughout the course of his nineteen years, I was there as he volunteered and unvolunteered. He’d join, get the uniform, throw a few karate kicks, sprint several hundred meters, or catch a few footballs. He enlisted. Knowing full well he had a bad back. Courageous, perhaps. Then, he changed his mind. I asked him, couldn’t he at least join long enough to get the uniform?
But right away, I gave his back x-rays to the recruiter (a rescue of sorts). A year later, he went anyway.
A time of war. A day in 2003.
The news blared on the television inside my apartment. Peace had resided there. But I couldn’t—no—I would not rescue myself from the blare.
Another Marine. It wasn’t the brass of the trumpet, or some such music (was the trumpet in my head?) that quickened my heart. It was that thing beating against the flagpole. What was it called? A chain? A flag raiser? There must be some noun for it.
Lance Corporal Gutierrez was the nineteen year old the tether (?) clanked for. Killed in action. His family earned their citizenship through the clanking of chain.
Later that night, walking, crossing back and forth through the neighborhood, expending energy to ease my mind, I wondered about the sort of mother Gutierrez might have had. I questioned flags, crosses and burdens. God. I wondered how much was enough and how many too many.
When I passed an elementary school, I heard the clank. The wind blew.
Many Marines shipped home.
When the wind is high in this West Texas city, and when I stop at the red light of a certain intersection (where the teenagers cross to school), I hear that same sound, as the flag waves, high in the dust.
A time to die and a time to be born.
Captain Teague and Gunny Sergeant Velasquez brought Aaron’s things to me on June 30, 2004. They entered my living room and placed before me the one remaining box of my son’s life, and then, on bent knee, took out a smaller box from within the larger. They handed over to me Aaron’s watch, the one removed from his body at the time of death.
June 30 was also the day Lea County Texas and New Mexico
I began to wear Aaron’s watch, which was still on Baghdad
This early alarm, its hidden meaning, meant only for him, for duty on a rooftop possibly, is 5:30 p.m. (the evening before) my time.
His watch became my watch. And this is the way my mind works now, as I watch out my window, watch up in the sky or into a sunset.
His watch stopped somewhere between late afternoon on November 28 and noon on November 30. Things happen when I quit watching. So the facts there: two bad days, no makeup, no jewelry, and personal hygiene in the strictest sense. I also learned a little more about technology. When the battery goes dead on a digital watch—it’s gone. Blank. Not even a zero. The watch now rests in the Americana
Poetic in a way.
It’ll be almost eight months before I’ll sit and purposefully watch a sunset. Oh, I’ve witnessed them since April 26, but I’ve not really looked at them, not regarded them. There are the times I’ve glimpsed one, almost accidentally, outside the small window in my entryway that faces the east, a window more inclined toward sunrises, not sunsets. This window welcomes the sun as it catches on the crystal suspended there, splashing purples, blues, oranges and hope, early, very early in the morning. By sunset, the parade of color has long marched past.
But one night I’ll realize how much more beautiful it is to go out my front door, cross the street, sit on a familiar but lonely park bench, and observe the real thing facing west. It doesn’t explode into sudden bursts of color, but eases into a full palette of shade, form and light. I watch as the same colors I sometimes noticed in the morning are given back to me full and in the evening. Purple, blue, orange. I’m not filled with the same hope I carried in the morning, but rather, burdened by memory.
I could just about hear his voice as I sat there. As other teenagers and youngsters gravitated toward each other in the street, strolled toward their homes, or drove by me without really looking, the bass beating in their cars, cruising, their voices triggering an image of my own young teen, then sixteen, laughing, full of hope, a very temporal hope—mostly, a mind busy with a new strategy on how to con Mom out of something tangible, name-brand shoes, or jeans, something costly, cool, sweet.
A time to love. July 26, 2004.
Imagining a gift for me, one to be treasured, one for the three-month mark of time, my sister and best friend, Lisa, the one who really pays attention to what someone says, what time it really is here in the world we are meant to live in today, this moment, what day an appointment is on, what a person talks about, important details my mind escapes most of the time…. My sister must’ve listened, I mean really listened to me. She heard my obsession with time and sand and she brought me a perfect gift.
Fashioned from crystal, its body, filled with sixty long minutes of khaki-colored sand. The head and foot of the hourglass are supported by Mahogany; its delicate form protected by three spines of hardwood. Turned and lathed. Three spines. Symmetry without center. On a circle of gold that crowns the head of my hourglass are the words Lisa claimed for me. Psalm 147:3. He Heals the Broken Hearted and Binds Up Their Wounds.
I’ve just this moment turned the words upside down. Another hour will go by. The passage of sand will mark it for me.
A time to get and a time to lose.
On April 2, 2007, I wrote a message to my family and friends.
Hey All,
I hope everyone is good today. I am.
We lost Shane thirty-four years ago today. It was raining in Lubbock
Speaking of little, I’m getting a kitten soon. She’s only about ten days old. Will stay with her two brothers until they are quite a bit older. Right now, they all sleep in a little ball, rolled up together in a box with a heating pad underneath it. One of our veterinarians here is also in my Monday morning Bible class, and she brought them to our study today. Their mother was wild and the good doctor got them from the Humane Society. She’s good at that. Finding puppies and kittens a home.
Aaron once worked for Dr. Kelly and her husband, Dr. Andy, also a vet. Hennessy came into our lives during that time. It was then Aaron discovered how loving pit bulls could really be. He judged right in the case of Hen. Training matters.
I’ll never forget Aaron’s day of rescuing puppies. He’d been talking earlier in the week about the possibility of searching for a new job. He was tired of cleaning, tired of poop rescuing. But that day changed things for him, for a while anyway.
He came home so excited after work. “Mom! Guess what I did today?” His voice was loud as usual, and the animation of his body started at the toes of his Nike’s and worked itself up to his cap. His arms flailed. “Me and Andy had to resuscitate some puppies who were about to die. Man, I got mucous all over me when they started to breathe again. They coughed all over my face and I loved it!”
As I watched him, I grew excited too. I learned the puppies’ mother was an expensive dog. The breeder must’ve been desperate when she thought of the possibility of such a future loss. The litter came into the clinic as an emergency. I can’t remember now how many there were, but I warned Aaron, “Not everyday will be like this.”
“I’ll never quit,” he said on his way out.
Aaron finally did quit the veterinarian clinic. No more puppies to salvage, the restlessness of his nature, the necessity for greener pastures, his sometimes-combative attitude with authority, those “qualities” (that drove even a smitten mother crazy) finally won-out in the end. Aaron found a different job. He went to work at Alco. There he cleaned up after people instead of puppies.
Oh, well. Live and learn.
When I called Dr. K, I told her I wanted the female, but that I couldn’t take her until Thursday.
“Oh, but she won’t have anyone to sleep with …” Kelly was saying.
I interrupted, “No, no, I’ll sleep with her.”
Dr. K. laughed, and said the brothers and sister slept all bundled together for warmth. “I wouldn’t worry for the two, but I would for the one who’s separated.”
And then I understood. Of course.
Lisa has told me the better kittens are those who stay with their mother for the first eight weeks, so the little darling already has one mark against her. I hate to separate her from them at all. But she’ll have it made here. Of course, I’m not sure how the rest of the crew will handle it—meaning Sarah and Isaac. Sarah’s not particular in who she hates, so I’ll just protect her from Sarah and Isaac the Jealous. Hennessy will probably want to be a mother to her, until she hisses at him, which no doubt will occur. So any suggestions on names? It should be a name full and rich in meaning…. Much love to all, De’on.
A time of peace. January 15, 2008.
A Pulmonologist in Hobbs
A time to break down. February 12, 2008.
Same doctor, different diagnosis. One month later, he doesn’t believe I have Pulmonary Fibrosis. This should make me happy, but I’m mad. I won’t see Aaron and I’ll suffer for many more years. Time for a new doctor?
I went back to Loretta, my gynecologist. I told her I’d cried when the Pulmonologist gave me a new diagnosis of COPD.
“I believe you do have some fibrosis. Perhaps it’s just a difference in semantics,” she said as she reached for the stethoscope draped around her neck.
My neck was stiff. “I think it’s time for me to get a second opinion.”
Loretta stuck the stethoscope to my back and listened to the very best of my deep breaths. “I don’t hear the crackles in your right lung anymore. So it’s up to you. Do you want me to make an appointment for you in Lubbock
I told her yes.
And I tried to live with the fact that I may live forever. Forever and ever. I will live here feeling like this for the rest of my earthly days it seems.
Her assistant called me later. My appointment in Lubbock
More labor.
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.
With Aaron, perhaps I wore my dark pain as sackcloth. Not to cover myself, but to expose myself. I didn’t want to hide from it this time, as I had with Shane. Sometimes exposure invites dark things and people into our lives. Perhaps they were never meant to be there. No doubt, I did that too. Then again, who knows? Maybe they came for a reason I haven’t fully understood yet.
But even then, I must forgive.
And find a time to cast away stones.
In the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, we read that to everything there is a season. The sub-heading in my King James Version: A time for everything. The eight verses below the heading tell those times. God’s time for our lives.
A time to plant.
Illustrated on a blog I dedicated to Aaron’s memory are eight verses from Ecclesiastes. Known as Gunz Up, the blog carried me through a hard time. My writing continued in some form. I believed it to be an energetic release and rescue board. A sounding board. For Marines, military, and supporters thereof. I believed my loss might echo another’s pain. Make someone feel less alone.
A blog’s posts are held in position according to date. When planted, I used the date of February 29, 2008 (Light Years Away!) to hold one of Aaron’s photos and a pictorial essay of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes on top. It was the picture window, the view, the resting place.
Tiffany snapped the photo during their last weekend together. In my computer files, I have it titled Leaving. The photo shows the back and length of my son. He stands on the balcony of a hotel in or near San Diego
A time to keep silence.
His thoughts. Only imagined. I can only imagine. No doubt, it was one of his last moments of quiet. He must’ve hurried only a short while later. Aaron had always energized every moment and then some. Perhaps plans for the future, planted then, maybe on that same balcony.
Conversations, short and long. Promises of a certain return, last minute phone calls. Goodbyes. Final footsteps in the land of the free.
A time to pluck up that which is planted.
On February 28, 2008, I posted my final words on the blog. What I hadn’t mentioned to my readers, I whispered to heaven. “Lord, I just cannot possibly do four more years like this.”
A time to rend and a time to sew.
On February 29, 2008 (“my last first”—Aaron left the United States on Leap Day of Leap Year, 2004), I buried many of the cards and flowers I’d received since April 26, 2004. Interment transpired within the hole Greg had dug a week prior. Not to bury the past, but for union. To sew our tears to the earth Aaron had once tread. After school, after work, after a walk with his dog.
As I labored, Hennessy and Isaac assembled on the other side of the chain-link fence they’d managed to break through when we were all younger. The fence they’d torn the day the Marines came to my door.
The boys (as we call our male pets), stared as I buried the dried flowers. The totality of four-flowered-years of garnish disembarked into a final resting place. Sympathy cards, purple-winged crystal angels and yellowed-yellow ribbons joined one another within the same hollow.
I’d fashioned a metal casket of sorts from frames of our local newspaper. By means of these frames, impressions of Aaron pressed into the lives of others. Multiple plates depicted Aaron as a Marine, a teenager, a track star and a war hero.
I pushed a tin frame into the bottom of the hard pit and lined the sides as best I could with what remained of the soft metal. As I traveled in and out the front door and back to the dirt, I reminded myself of the things. Things to carry. Things to bury. Don’t forget the metal coins in the window. The commemorations, the cross.
And with other things. Better not bury this. You might need it again.
My final journey out the front door, I carried a container of dirt. With it, I topped-off the layered memories—four years of grief—with red soil I’d rescued from within the grave of my earthly father. Before. Before someone lowered his casket. While we were off somewhere. They lowered and covered. Survivors don't watch this momentous event. We only return. Find that the casket fairy attended and departed.
More than one car passed my home as I walked in-out-in-out. Time, labor and things filled the twenty-four-square-foot hole in my front yard. Perhaps my neighbors were relieved when trinkets dropped into the hole as opposed to my own body or the carcasses of my pets. They’d surely noticed Greg days earlier when he’d spent an entire afternoon with a shovel.
I was talking to the boys when our kitten began waltzing toward me. I shoveled caliche, one mound of chalk right after another, on top of a few red clots from Littlefield, Texas. I warned Hen and Isaac, “You’ll be buried right where you stand some day.”
Hennessy ignored my words and lost interest in the activity. The elder yawned while Isaac licked his hero’s dark eyes and nose, as if he alone understood the intensity of my words. A time to mourn.
Isaac has cried with me and comforted me at my heels. Empathy seems to be a part of his nature, but Hen, like his original master, big and tough, turns from my pain (though he’s been known to express his own without any problem).
Only Cady remained interested at this point. The point of no return. The burial of things. Cady’s made it through some tough times with me, but unlike the others, memory of Aaron has played no part. This little feline from the desert was so tiny when a friend brought her to me. Small enough to sleep in a half-full Kleenex box with enough room left over for a twin.
A time to cast away stones.
I had believed my heart would live in a swollen and bruised state all the earthly days of my life. As much as possible, I adjusted to the hurt and waited on my afterlife. I know there are people with God-sized holes in their chests, those who live with sorrow all the earthly days of their lives. I was satisfied enough to be one of them.
As I sit here at the keyboard today, I’m no longer one of those persons. In the hole’s place, there’s a scar. I imagine it will remain until I’m in heaven. Sometimes the scar makes itself known, burns, needs a little medicine. Sorrow may find me again, but just now, a little past noon on May 13, 2008, I live with the increase of good health throughout soul, body and spirit.
I’ve just now moved the sprinkler to a bare spot of near-Bermuda and a few patches of crabgrass. The topsoil gets muddy if watered too long and I’ve noticed more than one footprint across it in my haste.
Examination. Like Job, right now I ponder. What? Should I only receive the good God has given me and shrink from the bad? Today is a time of strength. God has promised His Word will not return void. I believe that. And while I wait for my promised place, I pray for the heart that beats within me. And for those many like me.
It’s been a beautiful spring morning, two days after the fourth Mother’s Day without my younger son, the thirty-fifth without my elder.
A time to speak.
Greg came into my life as a drunk on a Saturday noonday. In a chow hall in Panama
I hesitated. “I don’t drink,” I said. I’d believed this statement of fact might end the interest of my non-interest in the sport.
“Not at all?” he asked, only after he’d spent long moments and chewed, then swallowed some morsel of food. Greg’s table manners were, are, impeccable. An embarrassment to those of us who chew with a much faster jaw.
I almost offered the same explanation I’d so often given to others. A cop-out of sorts. To others, I’d explained I’d had enough of partying in my previous ten years. I was, after all, ten years older than most I shared rank with. But when Greg asked me, it was different. I sensed the Spirit within me. It was almost like a voice in my head: Speak the truth! I had a sudden feeling I’d be picking myself up off that chow hall floor by uttering something less than the truth.
I listened to my heart. “No, never,” I said, losing my healthy appetite for the full tray of meat, bread, veggies and desert before me. My appetite for food and drink was tremendous then, tremendous now. I’m a competitor in gluttony.
His eyes clouded. Beer and confusion made a fine mix. He slurred the dreaded question, “How come?”
Most of my life, I’ve escaped the words I uttered next. They sound so religious. I felt almost pious when I said, “For religious reasons.”
In that split second, without explanation, his interest in me intensified. I couldn’t get rid of him.
That night, I bowled with him and his friends. He got wasted.
Later, in my barrack’s room, I looked up at the ceiling and said, “Thank you, Lord, for showing me what I haven’t been missing.”
I went a week without speaking to him. After seven days, Greg told me, “If you’ll go out with me again, I won’t drink.”
I did. And he didn’t.
Greg had spent every night since he was seventeen years old with spirits of some kind. Beer, scotch, whatever. But he put it all down on that August day in Panama
A time to dance. A time to heal.
The Desert Lynx kitten is a fair match for the meaning behind the name Karen picked for her. She said the name meant “simple happiness.” Cady is simply happy about everything. She adds youth to all our tired bones. She’s not at all like Sarah, my cat of some fourteen years. A decade plus hasn’t mellowed Sarah’s nature one bit. She’s just not physically able to act out anymore.
Like me, on that February day, Sarah was weary.
In Ecclesiastes 3:11-13 of the King James Version, the author writes, “He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.”
The astonishing beauty of God’s time came for me in an unrecorded date sometime in March of this year. It was then I perceived the God of heaven and earth still required my services.
Later, on March 26, 2008, I received my diagnosis of “possibly a little, a very little bit of asthma” from the Pulmonologist in Lubbock
I had tried to drink away the sorrow of my heart with the grapes of God’s goodness. God’s grapes turned into my Merlot. The balance God meant for my life impelled far beyond my control. I know God’s strength carried me through the dry days after. But until that mid-March day, He’d not yet sealed the hole in my chest.
A time to build up.
On the fourth anniversary of the day I buried my Hero son, May 3, 2008, I left a note on Aaron’s message board. A message of healing, both physically and mentally.
My precious Marine son,
Four years ago today your precious body was committed to the earth. Should God delay His coming for long enough, someday your dad will be buried next to you. I never thought the day would come where I could laugh and be merry on such an anniversary as this one. But today was just such a day. I spent half the day at Heart’s Desire, or rather at our new building that we’ll be moved into by August 1.
I know you know all this already, as I do know you’re there beside our Father, beside the God of Heaven and Earth Who came in the physical form to live among us and be tempted as we are, and then even doubted upon the cross. For that time that God turned from His Son, from Himself as it were (because God the Spirit cannot look upon sin), it was the first time, the only time, the Son was separated from the Father and Jesus cried out and asked His Father, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” and then Jesus died on the cross so that your mother can live with you and Shane and your Grandpa in Eternity. I’m so anxious to live with all of you there and meet others of my family I’ve never met before. And as you know, as short as two months ago, I was more than ready to join you. But God had other plans for me and rather than just heal my body, He healed your Mother’s heart first. And you know my Warrior son, He healed me by showing me how strong the fight still is on this earth.
Like you Aaron, I’ve always HAD to have something to fight for. You told me once that your switch only had an ON and an OFF. Nothing in between and no volume control. I guess I’m a lot like that and I see the fight in our tiny community here for FREEDOM. While your Warrior Brothers fight for our freedom, I volunteer here for freedom from addiction.
Heart’s Desire is a medium-sized thrift store with a huge vision of someday providing a Safe House for those fighting to recover from addiction. Meth is a huge problem here and I thank God you’re not here to be tempted by it. You come from a family that has fought addiction problems for as long as I’ve lived among them and though it’d be nice to believe that you’d not ever be involved in that, I have no way of knowing for sure. Your heart was always so full and maybe your pain might have pushed you further into a dark world that is ruled by that arrogant devil (who already knows he’s defeated). He fights a bitter fight right now for the lives of our children and for the lives of future soldiers. This war affects us all, just as the War on Terror does. Like the War on Terror, we must stand up and call it what it is. It is Light against Dark and the fight is fierce.
I’m just a little clerk four hours a week at this store. On Monday nights, they hold a program and it is a Christian Recovery Group. I don’t attend these meetings and I’ve never joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Your life and death bestowed so many Honors on our family and everyone always said how well I was doing. Many just saw me in the daytime before Happy Hour began. And even then, those who saw me at night either looked away or forgave me or who knows what.
There are times I’ve wished I hadn’t abused such a thing as wine that the Father gave, just as He gave us food, but I did and without His intervention and the hope and prayers of the beautiful family He gave me, I don’t know how it may have finally turned out. Thank God, I don’t have to know that today. Thank God for July 8, 2006—the night of my last glass of wine thus far.
I know wine is not Meth or Crack, but addiction is addiction. Though I might not have stolen outright from someone else’s home, I stole from my own family for over two years. I stole their peace and many times I broke their hearts with my words and actions.
One day, Aaron, on a day that I worked at Heart’s Desire, we got a call from Adult Protective Services. They were sending someone to us who’d called and begged for someone to help him stop. To stop the drug that was destroying his life and the lives of his children. You can’t imagine my surprise when in walked the most beautiful Hispanic boy, well, not a boy really, and certainly not as handsome as Cruz, but a beautiful young man that went to school with you. He’s one I’d seen baptized in Dr. Bob’s swimming pool and one I’d watched full of the Spirit in church. His three kids waited out in his vehicle while he spent an hour in the office with our Director. He told Debi that the drug he’d experimented with years ago was now cut in such a way that the user is immediately drawn into the dark side…. For that long hour, he cried out for help and then we’ve never seen him again.
It broke my heart. Absolutely. And it took me two weeks to figure out what happened that awful day that turned out to be the start of the day that God’s manifestation of the healing he’d been doing all along brought me to. For just a short hour or so, he lifted the veil and showed me how absolutely fierce was the work left here on this earth. The fight against the Dark.
I’m not in Iraq or Afghanistan Lea County
So today, son, while I painted on a big old building, I did think some of that 21-gun salute four years ago. But this year the tears didn’t stream. I just lived and loved and laughed and watched the teenagers drive down the road. I thought of you all day long just as I have every day since God gave you to me, but I mourned for nothing. I didn’t even mourn for the teenagers who drove past me or wonder if they were free or slave. I just thanked God for your safety and His Miracle of Life.
Thank you, Aaron and the many like you who continue in the fight before us all. And may the God of Heaven and Earth strive with us yet a while longer so that all those we love can be filled with His Mercy and His Grace.
I love you, more…
Mom
A time to kill.
This message was my first public confession of the chink in my Gold Star. Though a few people at church and those in my Bible study group knew, this was a big move for me. Stripped of honor, killed of glory.
There’s never been a time in my life I’ve held on more to God’s Word than since I’ve lost Aaron. During those first two years when I was drinking heavy, even more so.
My drinking didn’t start with the war. It started (again) in school. A little here. A little there. By the time my son was killed, I was a full-fledged alcoholic.
It took over four years for me to even say “alchoholic” Before that, I said, I had a drinking problem. There are those who still believe that’s all it was. But even now—even today, if I were to prose the ingredients and the mix of a really good Bloody Mary, my mouth would water like Hen’s does when he smells chicken or spaghetti.
Though the meetings at Alcoholics Anonymous are not something I’ve ever attended, I wrote something about them when I was around nine years old. Or nine and a half. There’s something about that “half” in my memory bank. The title was “What A.A.’s Means to Me.” And I do have a couple of their books. My mother gave them to me. I remember a few things about our life together during the time she must’ve first came into possession of these books. The small black one was her dad’s. Her hero’s.
I thank God for His grace. For His unmerited favor. For the Blood of Jesus that covers me even when my heart must be so very wrong.
Nothing but God’s grace enables me to spend eternity with Him. With Him, His Son, my sons. And others, who patiently wait for me there.
A time to mend. A time to keep.
Near me sets a new bouquet of purple and pink daisies and tiny mums. Baby’s breath sneaks through green leaves that protect the arrangement on all fronts. To the rear, a stronger guard stands in the shape of a large purple heart. The attached card reads, Happy Mother’s Day. I am so proud of you. Aaron—and I know the flowers and card are from someone else, but I hear that loud voice when I read it and it resonates true.
The former will one day pass away, but there truly is nothing new under the sun.
Minutes. An hour. Some measure of time has now passed. I need to move the sprinkler from a somewhat bare grave in my yard, over to the bed covered in buds of Bluebonnets, Snapdragons, and Four O’clock flowers. If I’m to finish, it’s important to make haste just now A spring wind from the west is kicking up. A serenade by the birds and the secrets of heaven and earth’s wind chime remind me of a day not long ago in mid-March, an afternoon on my porch, another rear-march in my life.
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