Across The Border

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Only twelve hours after celebrating Hope in Franklintown last Friday, a significant member of our community became a victim of one of the most debilitating factors of poverty - stress. Not the kind of stress we consider healthy for performance sake. Nor the kind that we confuse with irritability or inconvenience. But the kind that implodes inside your heart, causing a kind of pain that no amount of morphine can subvert. The kind of stress that some of us carry down from generations of emotional and physical abuse. The kind that poisons the mind, causing us to say the right thing, but keeping us from doing it, because of the old voices from beyond the grave never cease in belittling us into a powerless child.

His heart could endure it no longer, and he felt the pain of every second of his 54 years. It threw him into a conscience convulsion, and they called for a code blue. Maybe they could have saved him in a normal/typical emergency type-of situation, but they simply didn't know that the evening before, he had already told his wife that he was "done", with tears welling up in his eyes, as if in preparation to leave and seek rest, seek peace. How could they have known that his will to survive had diminished?

Since he was just 16, he had been out on his own, crawling away from Jackson County with nothing but an urge to live differently - to work, to love, and to provide. He was currently providing for his second family to whom he was dedicated and committed - while still staying connected to an adult son from a previous fourteen year marriage. He worked hard to make ends meet until his accident prevented him from doing the kind of work that had sustained him for almost forty years. Regardless, he still took advantage of his unemployment window by going back to school for a business degree and a second career, rather than defaulting towards SSI for disability. The window, however, was not big enough, pushing him into a demeaning part-time job that kept him from his family in the evening, yet earning less income than his unemployment check had provided - all while still trying to finish school. Crazy. You can see how he, like most in our neighborhood, often look 10-15-20 years older than their actual age.

For all the abuse he was given from his father and step-father, he did not seem to impose similar abuses to the next generation. Instead, something of the women in his family had instilled empathy and affection in him that subverted the tendency to repeat the many sins of the fathers, though he carried their debts with him. The empathy was so deep at times, that he was literally (emotionally) disabled by the pain of his mother and aunt. It would cause him to have minor convulsions in various muscle groups as he lay in bed.

Sometimes when we confront our humanity in context of our families, it pushes into a darkness that will not allow us to find redemption - but only pain. Healing may only be found apart from this physical existence, I do believe. There are times when we are just simply "done", and code blue has no power here, nor is it even welcome. And though it sounds like a kind of suicide, it is actually the exact opposite. The will to survive physically, emotionally, and spiritually eventually ended him. His heart exploded.

And as the older son held his father's ghostly white face in his hands, I could see that it was finally his time to rest, somewhere across the border.

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Now we have a widow and two orphans at the doorstep of our church. Already we have raised almost three times the amount of money needed for the funeral costs without any kind of offering or ask. The overflow will meet other specific needs for them. But much more than money, they have a community that interacts with them every single day. We are supporting two young boys with special needs, and mom is currently learning to read - working towards obtaining a GED. A long road may have gotten longer, but my greatest hope for now is that we can alleviate stress at least momentarily, enough for them to grieve and gather up the pieces.

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When I hear Lucinda sing this song, I hear a kind of poverty and powerlessness in it - and it is a song of grief and loss - with just a tinge of hope - seems appropriate.

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