Death is Not the End, Daddy

by Nate Allen

myself, like many hands are coming from the house and trying to pull me inside. But, it’s not my body that’s being pulled. It’s something inside of me. I’m detaching from my body. It just stands by the car as I am pulled away, pulled into the house. I am pulled through the wall and up the stairs. The speed is incredible. I close my eyes for only a moment. When I open them again, I am standing in my childhood bedroom. My childhood self is lying in bed, Teddy tight to his chest. Everything is the way it was, from the blue color of the blanket on the bed, to mom’s memoriam card on the floor. I remember reading it every night for days.

  Mom was buried on this day. I know, because May 12th isn’t blacked out on the calendar in my room yet. I did it on the thirteenth. I remember what I was thinking, laying there. I remember the hate I was trying to deny, but couldn’t. Dad’s tears only hours before made me hate him even more, because he was gone again. He was out with someone else only hours after burying his wife.

  It’s late into the night. My clock was always slow, but only within a few minutes. It says it’s 11:45 pm, so it’s closer to 11:50. I can see by the wide eyed expression on his face that twelve year old John hasn’t slept. He’s been counting the ceiling of white spots.

  “I can’t sleep, Teddy.” he whispers.

  “Just close your eyes, John, and you will.” I can hear Teddy again.

  He just nods his head. He closes his eyes. That’s what I remember about that night. I finally fell asleep, and woke up the next day. But, that’s not what happened. His eyes are open again. He’s sitting up and walking toward the door. Teddy isn’t tight to his chest anymore, but held firmly in his hand.

  I am nothing but a set of eyes following his steps. I can’t grab handles, pick up objects, or speak words. I am back in this moment, because the truth is here.

  His steps are Teddy’s. He’s halfway down the stairs and he hasn’t looked over at the living room to see if he can still feel mom. I always did. There is no weakness to him. He is without expression. His steps are hypnotic. Emotionless. Soulless.

  We are downstairs now. I look over to the living room, but it’s completely white, like it never existed. I can only see what he saw. He opens the door, and walks down the deck steps toward the shed. The light is on. It’s the only thing lit in the darkness, but even that’s dim.

  His steps are the same lifeless pattern. He doesn’t wonder why the lights are on in the shed, when dad is supposed to be gone. He just keeps walking. I look back to see if dad’s car is parked. There’s just a gray smudge, close to the white nothingness of the living room, but dirtier, like the streaks a bad eraser leaves behind.

  He has stopped in front of the shed. He doesn’t survey. There is no chill that shoots into him. No hesitance. He just pulls the door open.

  Dad’s body is hanging. And I am just a pair of eyes, who can only watch. I don’t even know what I feel. I don’t even know if I do. I’m separated from my body, yet I know that if I was attached, the pain would be the worst I’ve ever known. All I feel is pressure, building, and pulsating, like I’m an object filling with too much air. I can’t scream. I can’t cry. But, I need too. Desperately.

  A bright orange extension cord is wrapped around dad’s neck. His eyes are lifeless and pained. His feet dangle about a foot off the ground. A piece of paper is duct taped to his dirty white dress shirt. I try to read it, but it’s white. Just like with the living room, my childhood self never looked at it.

  He’s just pushing past dad’s body, entering the shed. And now I am too. I am no longer choosing to follow him. But I’m tethered to him, like a balloon in a child’s hand. He has stopped at the tool wall. I try to look back at dad’s body, but even my eyes are now pinned in place: held by hands I can’t see. The pressure is nearly unbearable. I feel like I’m in a body where my skin is vacuum sealed, suffocating my insides. This is the beginning of a hurt that I can’t yet feel. It’s only growing.

  He grabs a dark gray box cutter from the wall. He sits Teddy on the table we were held against and then climbs up himself. Even standing on the table, he is barely tall enough to reach the cord wrapping dad’s neck. But, he does. And he begins to cut. The wire is exposed before it snaps. Dad’s feet hit the floor, tossing his dead body face first onto the ground.

  My eyes are pulled left. John isn’t standing on the table anymore. He’s sitting on the edge, digging inside of Teddy’s back. Teddy’s eyes are lively deep red swirls. This is the Teddy I know too well, the Teddy I wish I could forget. John has pulled a piece of paper from his back. He unfolds it. There are only two eyes drawn in blood. He gets down from the table and walks over to dad’s body. I know what’s going to happen. He’s going to cut him. He’s going to draw two more eyes on the sheet of paper in dad’s blood.

  The pressure is severe. I’m going to burst. I can’t feel any of this, but I need to. I have to. I have to! I try to close my eyes, and can. I squeeze so they won’t come back open. It should hurt! It should, but it doesn’t! It’s just pressure I feel! Pressure! And it’s only growing. I’m going to explode. This pressure is beyond words. It’s pressure without pain, but knowledge that the pain should be there. It should be severe.

  I hear something inside of me screaming. It’s detached from me, but getting closer. I can feel I’m being pulled back to my body. I can hear screams. My screams. And as I hear them grow louder and louder, the pressure becomes pain. I’m in my body again. I can feel my hands tightly pressed together, and my whole body trembling. It hurts.

  Matthew Mills

  I’ve been back in Payne for nearly thirty minutes. But, I haven’t gone home yet. I’m at the park down the hill from our house. The Escape is idling quietly, and the sun has almost set. There is a smear of bright colors on the horizon. It reminds me of Janet’s pallet when she is painting. But, she hasn’t painted in a long time. After the first miscarriage, she painted her pain in a piece she never named. She used a large canvas, bigger than most posters. She started with a murky gray. Then she added reds and pinks, painting our undeveloped baby, still in his embryonic sack. He was shaped like a broken heart, split down the middle. That painting is somewhere in our basement. Or, maybe she already threw it away.

  Janet threw a lot away after the second miscarriage: paintings she had spent hours working on, several bottles of paint, brushes, and varying sizes of blank canvases all ended up in the dumpster. Janet threw a lot of herself away after the second miscarriage. I’ve thrown a lot of myself away in the last eight hours, to a point where I hardly recognize the man I see when I look in the mirror.

  Home is just a left turn and a couple of blocks up the hill. But, I don’t want to go back. It’s a few minutes after 4:30. I’ll go home and my little girl will be gone. Even though I know she is home with Jesus, I don’t want to face this. I love my Marcy, more than I can describe—was Janet right when she said that I turned to our little girl instead of Jesus? I want the answer to be no, but I don’t think it is. When I think back to the first miscarriage, I read the Word constantly, but even then, I turned to her. If I was hurting, I wouldn’t close myself away in quiet and wait on the Lord. I would find Marcy and bury my pain in the joy of her company. Janet was right. I wish she wasn’t, because even with this realization, my eyes don’t want to fully turn to Jesus. I don’t know why.

  After dad died, I felt things too much. They almost destroyed me. Even though Jesus was right by my side, for years, it felt like I was completely on my own. When I came back to Him, I had to rebuild a relationship that had been unbreakable. I had to learn to trust Him again. And I did, from Marcy’s unplanned conception, to my temporary job at the factory becoming a management position.

  But, something changed after the first miscarriage. After the pain of losing dad almost killed me, I decided to avoid the pain of losing our sons. I haven’t wanted to admit this to myself, but it’s the truth. I have only trusted Jesus wholeheartedly when hurt isn’t involved, when things are easy.

  And now that things are hard
again, I don’t know what to do. What does it mean to trust with all I have? I did when I thought dad was going to come back to life, when I had that dream about his resurrection. But, he didn’t. I don’t think I have ever trusted with all I have since. I want to be able to give all of myself back to my Lord. But this question always meets me: what if it feels like He left again?

  Deep inside I know the Lord didn’t give me that dream. Maybe it was my own desires telling me a lie, or maybe the devil put on a fancy suit and appeared to me in a hopeful way. I know it was a lie, but I don’t understand why the Lord ever let it reach me. He knew what it was going to do to me.

  Or, maybe I was supposed to have the dream. Maybe I was supposed to turn away, so that when I came back again, my relationship with the Lord was that much stronger. But, I have never reached that point. And I don’t know how to get there, because I thought I was already there. I thought I had been there for years.

  “Jesus.” I whisper. “Dad died, and that part of me that trusts You with everything I have, has died too. But, I believe in resurrection. I believe that You can raise that dead part of me and let it live in me again. I want to trust You with everything I have, because