Colors of Goodbye

by September Vaudrey

  “Thank you. Yes, it is pretty awful,” I said, smiling to reassure her I was okay. “I’ve been wanting to visit here ever since she died, just to see this place that Katie had been so excited about.”

  Our waitress was relieved that I was not going to fall apart. “I’m so glad you came. It is a really fun place to work. We have a creek and a fountain out back—it’s beautiful. In the summer it gets hopping here. We bring in local bands to play rock and roll on Friday and Saturday nights. But I love working Sunday afternoons. We bring in jazz musicians, and the music is wonderful.”

  I’d figured our pink-haired waitress for a Friday-night girl. But she loved Sundays. Her pride in this place was endearing.

  She disappeared with our order. Soon we smelled fresh coffee brewing, and she returned with two steaming mugs.

  “How is it?” she asked, watching as we sipped.

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Extra Frangelico—that’s the secret,” she said. “Can I add some chocolate syrup?”

  We willingly accepted. She fetched chocolate syrup from the fridge. No fancy drizzle, no whip, just a heavy stream of chocolate that sank to the bottoms of our mugs.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  “Even more perfect!” Lynne said.

  She smiled and left us to enjoy our drinks.

  The afternoon sun dipped low on the horizon, and a chill began to creep through the old windowpanes, but the fireplace and our coffee kept us warm. Shadows drifted across the outdoor tables, creating dapples of fading sunlight that danced across the deck. I could just picture my girl waiting tables out there, chatting with customers, working her magic as she made people feel valued over their Coronas and burgers. I could hear her laughter, envision her quick steps, her flashing smile.

  This was one of those moments—the conversation, the atmosphere, the drinks, the friendship—everything was perfect.

  “I love this place,” I said. “It feels so . . . right.”

  “Me too,” Lynne said. “You know, there is something about having a place. In the Bible, people built markers—piles of stones—to remember what God had done for them at different times in their lives. And the crash site has served as such a place for you. But you never did feel at home visiting that spot. You never knew quite what to do there. And now the cross is gone . . .” She paused, letting her words sink in before continuing. “Perhaps today was another turning of the page. Perhaps moving forward, Bandito Barney’s could become that place for you. A place to gather with family or friends and remember the joy and fun that was Katie.”

  I let her words ruminate in my mind. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s time to retire the crash site.”

  As we retraced our route toward home that afternoon, we passed that spot one more time. Lynne’s bright bouquet of flowers suspended against the oak tree caught my eye. They were all that remained to mark the spot where Katie had died. Perhaps there was a new tradition for the days ahead—a better one—filled with friends and laughter and good food.

  That fall, I sensed we were entering an easier era. We were approaching the third holiday season since Katie had died, and the slap of her absence was not as raw, though we still felt its sting. In many ways, Thanksgiving and Christmas held a richer poignancy now because of Katie’s death. How deeply we treasured one another around the Thanksgiving table. How vividly aware we were of the blessings that had come our way in the past twelve months—and of the benevolent Hand that had delivered each one.

  As we decorated our Christmas tree, I lingered a little longer over each ornament, recalling its origin and the story it told. I hung Scott’s med school ID badge and the dog tags from our farm dog, Lloyd, who’d long since passed. I hung the melted plastic measuring cup I’d accidentally ruined while making hot chocolate one Christmas Eve when the kids were little. I had set the cup on a still-hot burner, and when I lifted it, dozens of clear, shimmering strings pulled from its bottom. This set the kids to giggling—and the cup found its way onto our tree as an ornament that year (thank you, Scott) and every year since. I had tried to throw the cup away numerous times, but it kept coming back from the dead like some sort of relentless Christmas zombie. Every December, it would mysteriously claim a place of prominence on our tree. One year I found it hanging from a branch on a spinning mechanism, spotlighted for all to see. Another year, Sam had taped the cup to the top of the tree in lieu of the Christmas star. Such was our family. Memories like these filled me with irrepressible warmth.

  I hung Katie’s ornaments, one by one, finishing with her little sterling cradle. There was no hanging that ornament without a few tears. But this year, I found her ornaments—and Christmas as a whole—to be less of reminders of our loss and more of welcomed triggers for cherished memories to be savored and replayed in our minds once again.

  The new normal will always be this for us: undaunted joy seasoned by irreversible loss. Both/and. Holding on and letting go.

  47

  EARLY FEBRUARY brought our first true blizzard since moving to the Midwest—and the third-biggest snowfall in Chicago’s history. School was canceled for Tember, and we hunkered down at home, watching for the snowplows that would come unbury our street.

  I had been waiting nine years for a real blizzard, and at last the wait was over. I marveled at the beauty outside—each fir branch bowing under weighty blankets of white. The house across the street looked like a Currier & Ives print, the angles of its roofline softened by the snow and its mailbox at the end of the drive wearing a snowy top hat.

  I’d always loved a good snow. When I was growing up on our Issaquah farm in the mild, maritime Pacific Northwest, snow was rare. Waiting for snow each winter was practically a career for my brother and me. Anytime the red line on the thermometer dipped into the thirties, we crossed our fingers and raised our eyes skyward, asking each other, “Do you think it will snow?” And if flakes began to fall, we would worry and ask, “Do you think it will stick?”

  One snowfall in particular stands out in my memory, circa 1974, when I was eleven. Greg and I awoke the day after Christmas to find snow falling heavily across the valley, blanketing twigs and fence posts, cedar shakes on the barn roofs, and winter-deadened blackberry brambles along the creek. Even the twisted barbed wire fence lines that crosscut our pastures had become tightropes for precariously balanced blades of snow. The wait was over! A real snowstorm!

  Still in my pajamas, I yanked my rubber boots over bare feet, grabbed my brown barn coat, and ran outside. My boots sank ankle-deep in the snow, and the rapidly falling flakes showed no sign of letting up.

  By noon, the snow stood nine inches deep. The horses stayed in our barn, munching contentedly on their morning pads of hay, but our cows lived outdoors year-round, and the snow was no fun for them. We’d given them extra rations at breakfast and broken the shell of ice that coated their water trough. They now huddled, hind ends to the wind, beneath an ample cluster of firs at the far side of the pasture, their sweet, steamy breath creating a foggy haze under the snow-laden shelter of the trees.

  The kids in the valley—my brother and me, neighbors Kathy and John, and Chris and Tim, whose parents boarded horses at our farm—spent the morning grooming the sledding hill in the back pasture, taking run after run on aluminum discs to flatten down the dry thistles that peppered the steep hillside. Kathy and John owned a real wooden toboggan that could hold three of us at a whack. And my brother’s Radio Flyer, a Christmas gift from two years back, was christened on that hill and did not disappoint.

  By the time our parents joined us in the afternoon, the run was lightning fast, curving around old stumps and taking full advantage of every rise in the sod that could constitute a jump. My dad sized up the scene, then meandered back toward the house, returning with his GMC pickup. He pulled up next to us at the end of the run. “Want a ride back up the hill?”

  “Awesome!” we said. (Or maybe “Far out!” It was the seventies, after all.) We scrambled into the back of the
pickup. Dad threw it into four-wheel drive, and up the hill we rumbled—our own private chairlift, country style!

  Around dusk, the dads scavenged the woods for downfalls and built a huge bonfire from their dry, dead limbs. My mom took the truck back to the house for food. We kids cut sapling branches for marshmallow sticks. I pulled out my Swiss Army knife—these were the days when pocketknives were tools, not weapons—and sharpened my stick, as well as a few spares for the grown-ups. I popped the caps off their Rainier beer bottles, too, proud to have the right tool for the job.

  My mom arrived from the house with a kettle of beef stew, a giant pan of fresh corn bread, and a pot of steaming black coffee. For the kids, she produced a jug of Tang (“the drink of astronauts!”). We served up dinner from the tailgate of Dad’s pickup, then ate together, warming ourselves around the fire. We gorged on roasted marshmallows that tasted faintly of fresh maple branch.

  The heavy snowfall had laden the maples, alders, and cedars with a winter burden they hadn’t carried in years. Old, dead branches began snapping under the heavy weight of the snow, and we heard their repeated shotgun cracks ricocheting across the valley. And just as the sun winked its goodnight and dipped behind Cougar Mountain, the sky lit up with a brilliant explosion—red and blue and pink and green—followed by a thunderous boom. Every farm in the valley went black.

  “Transformer blew,” Dad said, pointing down the valley.

  “The power’s out!” We kids cheered. Candles and woodstoves would be our light and heat at bedtime. Could this day get any cooler? Exhausted but exhilarated, we headed for home.

  Inside our tiny farmhouse, Mom tucked us in bed by candlelight, piling on extra blankets to ward off the cold. I drifted off to sleep, knowing more sledding awaited tomorrow. The snow had been well worth the wait.

  As I looked out my kitchen window at the slowing flurries of this Midwest blizzard, I realized it wasn’t just the snow that had created such a memorable experience in my childhood; it was the waiting. If I’d grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, that snowy memory would have been just another winter day. But a sled-worthy snowfall was so rare in Issaquah that when it finally came, we were overjoyed. It was the wait—the longing and anticipation—that made the day so unforgettable.

  Farm kids have lots of experience with “wait.” Waiting for eggs to hatch, barn cats to have their litters, cows to calve, and horses to deliver their lanky foals. Waiting for bread to rise, for summer blackberries to turn from green to red to sweet purple-black, for hay to cure for baling—hopefully before the next rainfall. Waiting for Christmas—and for snow.

  Adulthood, too, holds its fair share of wait. The endless counting of months—and then days—for the arrival of my own five babies had far outstripped my childhood anticipation of foals or kittens or snow. But nine months of pregnancy and the work and pain of delivery became a mere distant memory once each long-awaited babe was in my arms. Some events are simply worth the wait.

  We cannot rush kittens, foals, or babies. We can’t force blizzards. By waiting, kids and grown-ups alike learn that there are things we cannot shoehorn into our time frame. But the waiting—though uncomfortable—is indeed survivable. And the anticipation actually heightens our eventual joy.

  As I stood at the window, I realized that three years earlier, I had entered an endless season of waiting—waiting to see my girl again someday. In faith, I believe this life on earth is not the end of us, that those who have passed will be seen again on the other side. I must wait for that day—and it is taking forever.

  The pain of separation feels unbearable at times—but it is not. These days of waiting will be nothing but a distant memory once my long-awaited girl is in my arms.

  Subconsciously, I was also waiting for our tragedy to be done. I was waiting for some sort of resolution to the mess. I want my old life back. This turn of events had barged through the front door of my life uninvited—this was not the life I signed up for. I loved my big, full, family-of-seven life! One child missing changed everything.

  When the kids were little and one of them would go to a friend’s house for the afternoon, the entire dynamic in the house changed. Even with four other lively, creative kids at home, everything felt off-kilter when one child was away. The siblings interacted differently. They insisted we put any special plans on hold until their absent brother or sister got home and could join in the fun. Our levels of energy and joy were more muted, as if we were all just . . . well, waiting. Waiting for the fifth child to come home so we could be whole once again and life could resume.

  I was still waiting for my fifth child to come home.

  I couldn’t seem to convince my psyche that this Katie-less life was it. This was whole. My missing child wasn’t coming back.

  At some point, I needed to let go of the life I had so loved and learn to fall in love with the life I now had, which was broken and yet still beautiful in its own way.

  I turned from the waning snowfall outside my kitchen window.

  She’s not coming back.

  I needed to stop waiting.

  48

  ON EASTER MORNING, Scott, Tember, and I headed for church. The theme of the service was how life can change in an instant, and before the message, a few people on stage shared their personal experiences of sudden change.

  The first woman’s story was strikingly similar to our own. Her husband had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm that left him on life support with little hope of recovery. For two weeks at his bedside, she prayed—begged—and then, ta-da! Her husband awoke from his coma.

  “But God was merciful,” the woman said. “He healed my husband.” And there he stood, next to her on the stage, completely recovered.

  But God was merciful. Just four simple words—yet how they pierced. I fumed silently in my seat.

  I understood what the woman meant—and I was happy for her, glad that her life had worked out so well. I was guessing she didn’t mean to imply that God’s mercy was somehow measured by the outcome of our circumstances. But that’s how it sounded to me, and I cried foul.

  The God who had so lovingly embraced our family in every moment of this horror was not a flippant god who healed when he felt merciful but allowed your child to die on a gurney when he was not.

  God was merciful, period. It was part of His very character. Yet I couldn’t deny the paradox. If God was merciful, then why did Katie die? Was He helpless to stop it? I didn’t believe Katie had been snatched unwillingly from His grasp. I believed He could heal, and did heal, sometimes. Yet Katie had died.

  I had heard people utter sappy-happy words about their loved ones’ deaths—and we Christians could be the worst at this. We said things like this: “All things work together for good!” (a misuse of Paul’s teaching in Romans 8:28). Or this: “I just count it a privilege that her passing helped so many people find Jesus”—as if their loved one’s death were some sort of payment that was worth it because of how God used this tragedy for good. For me, that kind of spiritual commerce was thievery. Those types of responses smacked of emotional disconnect or blatant denial.

  I wanted God to bring something good from our tragedy, absolutely. I was glad that lots of people had been moved and marked by Katie’s death. Some connected with God in new ways, which was great. But I was selfish enough to want both/and. I wanted people to find Jesus, and I wanted my daughter not to die at age nineteen. I refused to force our tragedy into some sort of beautiful blessing without giving nod to our lacerating loss.

  No amount of positive outcomes made the loss of Katie worth it to me. It just didn’t add up in this mother’s heart. It was bad math. I’d have traded them all in a heartbeat for life with my daughter again. God had scooped her into His arms—but out of mine. And I hated it.

  “But God was merciful”? Yes, He is merciful. And this is His mercy—not that your loved one was healed (when mine wasn’t), but that this world is not the end of us. The years given us, be they nineteen or ninety, are but a blink, the mer
e welcome mat to eternity—a place where there will be no more tears, where God’s transcendent love illuminates both the day and the night, and where death, at last, will lose its sting.[5]

  I take comfort in accepting that my vantage point is limited to my handful of experiences in this life and to what I can see with my own eyes. But God sees the whole sweep of eternity, from beginning to end. I have found Him to be a relentlessly good and loving God. Because of my confidence in His character, I can rest in knowing that someday, someday, Katie’s short life and premature death will make sense to me. Someday God will scoop me, too, into His arms, and I will step into a world that until that moment I could only sense and never see. I will finally get it. And I will see Him face-to-face.

  And you know who else I will see face-to-face on that day?

  I will see Katie.

  Yes, God is merciful.

  49

  “HEY, SEPTEMBER,” said a familiar voice on the other end of my phone earlier that spring. “It’s me, Terry Franson.”

  Terry, APU’s dean of students, had stayed in touch with our family since Katie’s death, when he and Woody, the campus pastor, had flown out for Katie’s memorial. They’d been purposeful about checking in with our kids ever since.

  “Hi, Terry!” I said. “Good to hear from you.” We chatted a few minutes, and then he cut to the chase.

  “I’m calling on behalf of Jon Wallace, APU’s president,” he said. “As you know, this May is the commencement ceremony when Katie would have graduated.”

  “Yes, I’m . . . aware. We all are aware. It’s another one of those hard milestones.”

  “I can only imagine. September, I know your daughter attended here just one year, but she had such a profound influence on the student body during that time, and she continues to transform this place through the people whose lives she marked, many of whom are now in student leadership positions.”