I had the feeling that I was being watched. I sensed it, which made me even more uncomfortable. I didn’t know from where. I’d experienced this moment endless times before, so I knew exactly how it felt. Followed through stores. Pulled over by police. Even face down on the pavement at gunpoint, only to be reconciled by the halfhearted apology of a law enforcement officer. But this time, it was very different, because it couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was mentally drained and broken like never before, and I wasn’t handling it well. Never in my life had I been emotionally bested. But now, my anguish was more than the sum of all my former trials. My composure was dwindling by the second, and I thought it was beginning to show.
Paranoia gripped me like a vice as I locked eyes with the TSA henchman on my left. He was stoic as he peered at me with arms crossed from fifteen feet away. Why me? I didn’t do anything. I had the urge to turn and leave, but the line was long and I couldn’t afford to miss this flight. Unnerved and out of character, I dropped my driver’s license and then my pen, which decided to slide across the linoleum floor. As I stepped out of line to pick it up, I felt all eyes on me. I could feel them piercing my soul. Get your bearing soldier! Suck it up! Whatever the problem is, you look guilty of it, I chided myself.
Minutes later, I was nearing the end of the line as the officer whispered to the agent checking tickets and then gestured my way. Yeah, here we go again, my paranoia confirmed. When I finally reached the agent, he took my plane ticket and said, “I see you have a one-day turn around.”
I answered back with a single word.
“Funeral.”
And after a moment of contemplation and a hint of understanding, he nodded, handed back my boarding pass, and I continued toward the gate. With a sigh I began the second worst day of my life. The first, by far, was the day she died.
I really don’t like photos. Least of all my own. I’m not sure why, but I never have. I think maybe I just prefer looking forward instead of looking back. Too much drama back there perhaps? But on a rare occasion, I’m drawn to my photo album from mom—a decorative compilation she made for me many months before she passed. Her photograph is one of many on the first page. Pages of memories, like distinct whispers from every image. And then the voices vanish with the close of a cover.
Two weeks prior to my airport TSA experience, the phone rang at our home in Issaquah, Washington. My older sister said, “I think you should come to see mom.”
That’s all she said, but I got the point. The so-called minor surgery did not go well. Mom had always been sick since I was a child, in and out of many hospitals. I knew this day would come too soon. I had dreaded the thought my entire life.
Like my anchor in a storm, she held me in place. She was the only one who believed in me as I grew up. The only one I trusted as a reckless youth. The first set of eyes I’d seen upon opening my own eyes in the delivery room.
All my life, everyone had said, “You shouldn’t.” But she always said, “You should—but just do it with God.” That was mom.
I hoped this was a false alarm, but I knew it wasn’t. A tear from nowhere rolled down my cheek at 41,000 feet. I peered through the window at the Rocky Mountains below, and whispered, “I’m coming.” And in my slowly crumbling mind, I heard her say I know baby. That would have been exactly what she would have said. To this day I’d like to think she heard my plea.
At two in the morning, I held her hand and whispered in her ear, “I’m here. It’s your son.”
Her heart stopped just a few minutes later, and everything changed. The world was no longer roses. My pride, ego, grandiose dreams, and secular ambitions had no more priority than a breath on the wind. Such self-serving goals were now mere dust, cast at my feet.
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” Mark 8:36
This experience was rather unique. I’d been tested before and always passed. But this time, I was drowning in distress. My thoughts seemed abstract and confused. I tried to tell my other sister what had just happened moments before, but my mind had failed. My mouth simply couldn’t articulate such earth-shattering words over the phone. I was vulnerable, with my mouth frozen in time. As if my subconscious wouldn’t acknowledge what had just occurred. I faced off against some form of subconscious denial, and I felt utterly betrayed by my own cerebral frailty.
There was no meltdown, just silence over the phone as my sister kept asking, “Where’s mom?”
My silence in return resonated louder than any words possibly could, and that void in time was all she needed to hear as she kept crying out my name. I was deeply ashamed of myself that night as I hung up the phone with my grieving sister. I still am. Those words never came. Simple words really. “Mom died,” was all I had to say, but I just couldn’t utter them.
I don’t remember much of anything else. Just that I was alone, sitting on the floor and staring into the darkness of a hotel room. I don’t even recall the flight back home the following day. None of it. It’s as if my mind deleted those events from reality. Our minds are curious things, and this one had failed me. Or perhaps it protected me from myself. I really can’t tell.
What I do remember is my grandmother’s love. Nobody told her. But like only a mother’s love can know, she already knew. She called my younger sister the next morning and said she had a vivid dream that mom had passed. How that works I do not know. Perhaps love transcends time and space. Later that week, dad died from terminal cancer. My mother-in law had died the month before. My cup was full and my burden was truly complete. These catastrophes were followed by events that led me to understand that spiritual warfare is quite real, and that we all need to choose sides today, and not tomorrow.
“And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15
I’ve closed my album for now. Brushed off the cover. The remaining memories will have to wait. Life is calling, and there is still much work to be done. A side has been chosen. No need to wander. I can see my destination from here. A Light at the end of the path ahead. The entrance to the great reunion. I know she will be there waiting.
“And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire, and those who have the victory over the beast, over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having harps of God.” Revelation 15:2
