It started to snow again ever so lightly, my mind wandering off with each flake that gently fell form the darkening sky. Directly in front of me car brake lights flashed, squinting my eyes, thinking a car must have slid off the road, I gently slowed down. Ahead of me I could see a majestic procession of deer crossing the road.
Both sides of the traffic had stopped as if saluting in presidential honor as the magnificent creatures passed. They appeared strikingly instinctive never deviating from their trail as they stared blindly into the headlights of the cars. Why did they not stop? Why don’t the blinding car lights cause the heard of deer to turn around and head somewhere else?
How is it that they never strayed from their route? I love and hate the month of March. I use to only love the month of March. I recall a quote I once heard…it went something like, “Listen as if you were being told the mystery of the universe”. And for that moment which transcended into eternity I sat watching these, marvelous, grand animals while listing to the mysterious silent universal mystery of the Hush.
Tears began to flow down my checks, as I felt oddly at one with the mystery, peace, and agony, which were all flowing in sequence through me. Here in up-sate New York deer’s crossing the road is not a rare occurrence. But, I had never heard the healing sound of the Hush. Nor had I felt its mysterious contentment in such a profound deafening world. I could feel the energy and for that moment I was alleviated from the harsh sounds of my life. Sitting at one with the silent mystery of the Hush, I sat alone… just listening.
The abrupt awakening of a car horn from the inpatient jackass behind me startled me. I hit the accelerator with my right foot and moved slowly forward mumbling to myself how I clearly disliked the month of March. Yet, I loved it as well! Bad things happen in March, just ask the guy that they called Caesar. In William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” he was warned by a soothsayer to “beware the ides of March”.
Sure enough, the ides were very unkind for the political dictator. Caesar ends up getting stabbed in the back with daggers while hanging out on the floor of the Roman Senate. Makes you wonder about those politicians that go for hours doing political filibusters. I guess that will never happen in the Washington Senate…or will it?
So, the story goes that Cesar had a pal called Brutus. Caesar returns from a victory tour and begins strutting his stuff through the streets of Rome like the Grateful Dead in a come back tour. The Senate, in Rome was a lot like the Senate in Washington today but without the filibusters. So, the establishment starts freaking- out about Cesar and his rising influence with the people.
I always found it interesting that the poor Roman folks of Cesar’s time sound a lot like the immigrants, blacks, homosexuals, and poor whites of todays America, “the others”. I recall that these commoners all called into work so they could celebrate Caesar’s jubilant return. Then they all went to the festival of the Lupercal. In my mind it looked, something like a classic scene from Woodstock or similar to a very large college frat party.
So, Caesar is hanging with some of his groupies when a soothsayer walks by and says, “Beware the Ides of March” which I translated as, (watch your back man). Caesar looks at the guy and says, something like, “Sure whatever dude”.
But why didn’t Caesar listen? I found the soothsayer’s warning, thought provoking. It has always prompted me to ask the typical questions, around fate and free will. If Caesar had listened to the soothsayers forewarning to “beware the Ides of March,” might he have altered the course that led to his assignation?
Or was the advice about his imminent death only a clue that the dictator’s fate had already been decided? Yet, why would the soothsayer take the trouble of forewarning Caesar if there was nothing he could do to stop his death? I use to love the month of March but now I see it as only one of the longest months in the calendar year. Poor Caesar…reminds me of the deer staring in the headlights.
Only in Upstate New York can it rain, sleet, drop 13 inches of snow, and be 65 degrees all in one day. I use to love March. I gave birth to my first son Joshua, he was the result of a gang rape that left me for dead. I choose to keep him; I wanted him to know he was loved. Josh changed my life around for the better. I would take him for hikes in the woods when we lived in Pennsylvania near the Susquehanna trails. He was so young that I often would carry him on my back. I loved him.
He loved Pennsylvania and would tell me as an adult they were some of his fondest memories as a child. His ashes are there somewhere on the side of a mountain where we lived, scattered by his wife. Its what he wanted, it was her personal ritual, perhaps symbolic of letting go and moving on. What was will never again be the same in all of our lives.
Yet every March since his death I feel trampled on and unable to breath. Sometimes I think she feels the same…what an incredible person she is. I use to half jokingly tell Josh after their marriage if I could have chosen a wife for him it would have been Stacy. She loved him unconditionally, what more could a mother ask for?
When he was very young we were really poor. One Christmas all I could afford for him was a dollar bag of green army men. He had one of those cheep plastic toy guns that you could slide the arrow into a chamber and a spring would shoot the arrow across the room. We spent that Christmas day lining up the toy soldiers on a cardboard box that I used as a coffee table, shooting the soldiers down, and lining them up again.
We had a Christmas days feast of bologna and cheese sandwiches, oranges, and a Hershey’s chocolate candy bar. We laughed, and played till we both feel asleep. Years after he had become an adult he told me it was his favorite Christmas memory. I hate the month of March!
March…that’s when the accident happened, March of 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania sprung a leak. When we took our walks you could see the nuclear plant stacks from the side of the hill where we lived.
The authorities said the accident was the result of a combination of stuck valves, misinterpreted gauges, and bad decision-making. The result was a partial meltdown of the reactors core subsequently releasing radioactive vapors into the air. Wow, we had no Internet, or television, all information came from those who ran the Christian Drug program that I had been probated to for drugs and weapons trafficking.
Subsequently, any information we received was often second hand and slow in coming. Half of the plants fuel melted on March 28, 1979. The “powers” that be at the time, and the “regulators” said that nothing happened. Those snakes continued to negate what happened until eventually a robotic camera reveled otherwise.
When the test confirmed that radiation did empty into the atmosphere the powers that be argued that they had no knowledge of how much radiation escaped, but denied it was of any significance human threat. When asked about the dosimeters that were set up to register radiation leaks in the air, “we the people” were told that they were defective making any accurate reading impossible.
Though stack monitors failed and dosimeters indicated high releases we were told to not worry. The “experts” assured the public that the radiation doses that moved downwind were comparable to getting a single x-ray, while disregarding well-founded findings from individuals like Dr. Alice Stewart and others that a single x-ray to a pregnant woman could double the chances of childhood health problems in her offspring.
Why did I believe them? I didn’t know that all x-rays were not the same. Hell, at the time I only had completed the ninth grade. I didn’t know about capitalism, corporate greed, and cover-ups. It was only after scientist, Dr. Ernest Sternglass, and others made public the possible damage this radiation could do that I began to feel panic!
There were roomers and reports of animals in the surrounding areas that suffered mutations, multiple stillbirths and death, but it was all denied. However, we were there, and I remember…I will always remember, I was scared, like the deer blinded by the lights of a car, the capitalist headlights blinded my world and me. I was a young, poor, uneducated, single mother with a drug and anger problem. I believed nobody cared?
Even after the Pennsylvania State Department of Agriculture and the Baltimore News-American, confirmed the disturbing wave of animal deaths and abnormalities, it was still denied, and I still wanted to believe. Even when I began to taste something strange in the air…I wanted to believe them. They argued that any damage to live stock and vegetation could not be related to a radiation leak.
When major outbreaks of cancer, stillborn deaths, Down’s syndrome, and other bazar health issues in down winded neighborhoods began to surface, it was again denied, but interestingly the apathetic corporate giants did pay $15 million in out-of-court settlements to “affected” families on the condition they not speak about it in public, but why?
I have always wondered if the death of Josh and my own health issues were connected to the accident. These are dark stain glass shadows of my pass, memories from the dark. I hate the month of March. I was in the early months of a three-year Masters degree program in Seminary at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School when Josh died. We knew he was ill, had been for over ten years, just never knew it would come so soon. You’re never ready when a child dies. When Josh was born I was young, no family support and suffering from PTSD.
I worked all kinds of jobs to support my son and myself. I cleaned toilets; worked roofing houses, shoveled snow, picked apples one fall in Virginia, you name it, and I most likely did it. I remember how excited I was when I finally was able to obtain my GED and eventually go to school in 1993. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse, then received a B.A. in Social Theory, and eventually enrolled in Seminary to receive a Masters in Divinity.
Joshua wasn’t just my oldest son, he became my friend, teacher, and peer; someone I respected, and genuinely admired. Before his death, we would often have lunch or coffee, and discuss religion, politics, music, parenting skills, and life, and death issues. What I miss the most is the grace that he gave me as his mother.
The death of a child is anomalous, and once you’ve been indoctrinated into the club of the surviving parent, “you never get to change your membership”. I think that’s what I hate the most about the month of March. Truly, I lost more than a son. His death taught me that we never truly know ourselves until we experience deep agony.
As Paul Tillich put it, “suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were”. After the funeral I went immediately back to my Seminary classes, asking for no extensions or time to grieve.
Simply, surviving took all the energy I could muster up, I was in shock, numb, confused and broken in a way I had no ideal a human could experience. I had known brokenness…but never like this. Much like the deer staring into the headlights, frozen, I was blinded in my own ocean of mourning. I hate the month of March.
Dr. Burton Grebin an advocate for children once said, “To lose a child is to lose a piece of yourself.” So true, and while I had lost a child years before, this was different. The only way I knew how to get through the silent darkness of the loss of my son was to keep moving forward looking blindly like the deer looking into the headlights of the cars.
Except, I couldn’t hear the sound of the Hush; at that time I just could not hear the sound of the Hush. My prayer was that returning to business as usual would help keep me focused. In some ways it did, but it was also Hell. Seminary was Hell, at the very least; I wanted to think that people would understand that the playing field at the time wasn’t level. I wanted to believe that I was in the right place, I took for granted that those around would allow me to catch my breath, of course they could see that I was barley breathing! Didn’t they?
Yet, if I had it to do all over again, I would! I would take on all the pain just to spend those precious years I had with him rather than to never have had the honor of being his mother and experiencing the grace of my son. Why didn’t those around me give me grace? Why did I not move? Why did I just freeze, staring into the headlights like the deer?
Iv learned that grief is like any deep wound, and must be tended to. If we don’t feel it, it will be persistent in its decomposing. If we ignore it, it will show its ugly face uninvited or not. If we don’t clean it, it won’t heal. If it isn’t opened and released, it will fester and manifest in many horrific ways.
With my grief one day I would be making progress, and the next I was back in the early throes of my darkness. I have learned that some days are more difficult than others. Birthdays become more important not less significant after a child’s death. Major life events take on new added meaning. Every year on his birthday in March I pray others will pause and recall that Joshua truly was a gift to all of us. I don’t want him to be forgotten!
The sound of the Hush on that awe-inspiring day felt like I’d had a connection with a remarkable divine energy. I felt lifted up, yet I was crying from the depth of my soul, for the first time since his death I felt opened up. It was this experience meeting the heard of deer that marked a beginning of a connection more deeply than I could ever imagine.
It was a new beginning of many beginnings in my spiritual formation. These creatures shared their gentle movements and reminded me to slow down and feel the caress of Spirit touching my wounded soul. For the first time in years I was confronting my own critical attitudes toward myself. So much of my physical, emotional, and, spiritual wounding in this life has been self-inflicted. The gentleness of the deer’s that day spoke to me in the mysterious sound of the Hush, gently whispering to me, that it was time to heal my wounds.
Seeing the deer that day taught me the sacredness of the Hush. And for that moment in eternity I sat watching while listing to the silence of the Hush, I thought at one point I heard Joshua’s voice, singing gently in that beautiful soulful voice he had. And, so I sat at one, with the silent gentle mystery of the Hush, I sat alone listening…
Undefined