I’m driving forward into the next 12 hour stretch of highway, into the next sunset. The road, like the days, a metaphor for coping with difficult times, stress, sad news, transitions, loss, feelings—just worry about the 12 hours before you, not about tomorrow. When I was little I travelled with Papa and Grammie long stretches of highway to get from whatever military base we were stationed at to Lee, Maine. “If you lie down and sleep a little it will make the trip go by faster,” Grammie would suggest. She was right. Now that’s all I want to do is lie down and sleep, hoping that the days before me will go by faster as I try to deal with the feelings.
“Good-bye, Killeen,” I whisper to the rising sun. “I think I shall not be coming through this way again. I breathe you in, hoping to catch a scent of Joel upon the wind. I’ve visited you three times in the past year or so: first with Joy to say good-bye to Joel before he deployed in Oct.; then in July when Paul and Luke came to the military memorial service; and now in February to fulfill my promise that I would drive up from Monterrey and be waiting for you when you returned from Iraq. That was the last thing I said to Joel the Thursday before he was killed, and I couldn’t move on without finding my way to you. Your soldiers have returned to their families, their problems, their lives; they have moved on, trying to live: Nate is getting out and going to North Dakota; Jason will attend Drill Sergeant School; the others are already on leave visiting with families, reacquainting themselves with their babies. I am trying to move on, to live. It’s a little bit art form, a little bit technique—there’s no book on how to do it. All Joel wanted was to return from Iraq, get out of the Army, move on, live. . .
Instead of meeting you at the airplane as I have so many times before, I met some of your buddies and we went to IHOP for Sunday brunch. Jason invited Kandy and me to watch Super Bowl 42 at his in-laws’ house. The Patriots v. the Giants. The Giants won. It feels like the “giants” in my life are winning a lot lately: my health, my faith, my determination, my dreams. I’m trying to occupy that promise land of dream-pressed grapes, tearless milk, and bitter-past honey, but the giants are just too huge. You didn’t come back from war, Joel! I kept my promise to be there for you when you came back, but all that returned were stories over strawberry-stuffed French toast and coffee.
“He died like he lived,” Sgt. Ayala whispered to me. “He didn’t complain. He was just quiet. I kept moving between M. and Joel, taking his pulse, trying to do something, anything.” I squeezed Oscar’s hand.
“LT and C. were killed instantly in the explosion. We called for the medic. He usually rode with Joel’s Hummer, but that morning I told him to ride with me and sent the translator with Joel. He was dead, too. It all happened so quickly. M.’s pulse stopped, so we put all our effort into Joel. We did everything we knew how to do. He never said anything. Joel was called last.”
“Do you think he knew what was happening?” I asked, afraid to hear the response, afraid to hear that he suffered.
“No, I don’t think so,” he answered, but I’m recalling the same scene in the World War I movie, All Quiet on the Western Front, where Paul Baumer tells the mother of his friend Franz Kemmerich that he didn’t feel a thing, even though Franz suffered horribly. Maybe it is better if I don’t know the truth.
Joel, you were so strong. You didn’t want to die. You battled that giant so valiantly. You tried to get home. You tried to let me fulfill my promise to you. “Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.” Surrender it all to Jesus and walk the last shadow with Him.
“Thank you, Sgt., for being there with my son,” I dug deep for something to say that might help this man move on without guilt. “I know it’s a tough burden to carry. No guilt. You did your best and Joel’s dad and I are forever grateful.” We were the first to hold him when he came into this world, Wednesday afternoon on November 21, 1984. I had spent the night laboring to bring Joel into the light of day and by afternoon, I said I didn’t want to be moved to the delivery room because it was too stressful. Grammy Nancy and Aunt Ruth had come to check on your progress. You came into this world surrounded in love by your family and we must learn to accept that these brothers called soldiers stood in our place to usher you to the next world. All the honey in the world has not made that bitter taste better, but sharing this moment with your new “brothers” has helped.
“The baby’s coming,” I announced. Paul and Nelly Stevens, our nurse, looked up from the fetal heart monitor in disbelief. I was too calm to be delivering a baby. So I just layed there, quiet, not complaining. I breathed in a few more deep breaths and defied everyone else for not believing me. “The head is coming out!” I announced, and Nelly looked up with an “oh really eye”, saw that little black head of yours, and ran out screaming for Dr. Ocana, whom Joy later dubbed in the Penobscot Valley Hallway, Cookie Monstah. So you went out of this world like you lived, like you were born—everything quiet, waiting in, tomorrow had become today.
I wasn’t afraid of giving you birth–you had two older siblings. I was afraid of giving you a life. Daddy was earning $175 a week as the Assistant Pastor of the Lee Baptist Church taking care of church buses that brought 100 boys and girls to Sunday School every week. Luke had just survived a 13-hour surgery for an optic nerve glioma that had left him blind in his left eye. We lived in meager circumstances. We wanted to raise our 3 children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord God, Almighty. We had no idea that these were just the first giants to besiege the fortress. By the next summer, we had already jumped out of those stain-glassed windows during the Great July Melee. 12 hour stretches of day ahead of us. Just go 12 hour stretches. Poverty in rural Maine was such a giant, but we fought against it valiently.
“I bought that crib for Cuahtli, Gil’s 4-month old nephew who accompanies his mother to Tio Gil’s new Chapultepec dress shop every day to work,” I explained to Kandy the week before while we were touring Guadalajara. “Do you know why I bought it?
She shook her head.
“When I was here at Christmas, they were just moving into this store, but the apartment was an abandoned wreck. She would bring that baby and lay him down on the floor, wrapped in blankets. After we left the Baptist Church, we moved over to Sangerville where Paul was supposed to cut wood for his brother, Charlie. Vivian, an elderly lady from the Grace Bible Church where Luke was enrolled in Kindergarten Christian school, offered to let us stay in her double wide trailer for the winter while she went to stay in Texas with her daughter. We stayed in an old cabin on the river that fall while we waited for her to head South. There was no bathroom, no heat, no running water. The kids all slept together in the bottom bunk bed. During the day, Joel stayed in an old playpen that I had dug out of the House family barn and cleaned up. It had been covered with barn dust and chicken poop. The 3 kids played there for hours, not really caring. I cared. I didn’t want my perfect children living in such second-hand filth. I always felt guilty that I didn’t have the money to give them a better life. But I did have the money to buy Cuahtli a crib.”
Joel, you started out in the helpless dust and you finished there. Your father and I held you first, and Sgt. Oscar Ayala held you last. He wasn’t able to get you out of that Iraqi dust. Your HumVee was a piece of second hand junk dragged out of some Army used goods garage. I couldn’t buy you a bright, shining new one, baby. You and your Army brothers lived in those worn out vehicles. You didn’t mind. You never complained. But when that deeply buried improvised explosive device detonated, that jeep wasn’t enough to save your life. You died, like you lived. You never complained. It had taken you months to stand up to some officer who was denying you your sergeant’s promotion because you just wanted out of the Army. When you wouldn’t re-up, they wouldn’t give you that promotion despite everyone saying that you were a great soldier. You died, never knowing that you made Sergeant. Maybe complaining would have let you see that promised land.
“We always joked around in the mornings before we went out,” Sgt. Ayala said. “That morning Joel said he knew he was going to die.”
“Everyone who wants me dead, raise your hand,” Joel used to play with Luke and Joy. We had been foster parents for a while, and one of our foster children used to tell the kids that they hated her and then say, “Raise your hand, if you want me dead.” I can see Joel remembering the little routine about him going to die, but Luke and Joy weren’t there to add their parts, their giggles. The 3 had been together with us for two weeks in March, and I was reminded of their perfectly timed private jokes that ricocheted like ping pong balls from one mouth to another as they rehearsed the family history in scripted quips of dialog. After the 3 grew up and left home, I could hardly wait for them to come home just so I could hear their version of the family history. We’re all struggling now with the future script without Joel to read his part.
“Dee, can I tell you something?” Gil asked me a couple weeks ago while I was visiting at his store. It was early, before opening. He was finishing a dress that would be picked up at 10 that morning. The tone in his voice and the way he expressed himself scared me. I thought maybe he was going to tell me he was dying or something. But something else had been bothering him:
“My brother-in-law’s family is from Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala,” he began. “His mother says that every week, the girls from Guatemala cross the border into Mexico to give birth to unwanted babies. They try to sell them for $50 and, if they can’t, they throw them in the trash or the river after they are born. I’d really like to do something to help those babies. I could adopt one really easily by just putting my name on the government document.
“Gil, you’d make a wonderful father,” I assured him without really knowing what to say. This is the 2nd time he’s talked about adopting an unwanted baby. I couldn’t imagine the pain of throwing away a child or who could do so, but I have lived in Mexico to learn that the poverty giant is absolutely overwhelming. The Guatemalan women come to Mexico because comparatively speaking, their neighbors to the North are better off economically! “Do you think you are ready to take on the responsibility of fatherhood?” I asked, and we talked on in our broken communication style (slow Spanish with lots of repeated words and ideas). Gil, like my husband Paul, comes from a huge family with so many nieces and nephews that patience just kind of drips from him.
Joel, I’m ready to leave the guilt over that playpen and the poverty, loss of ministry, and fear of uncertain future in the dust. Dad and I didn’t have much to give you three kids, and what we did have, we had to balance between surviving and reshaping a ministry. You were born in the dust and you died in the dust, but no one ever threw you in the dust—unwanted and forgotten. You were loved.
I bought a crib for Cuahtli, Joel, but I don’t know what to do for the garbage babies. Daddy has a new ministry now serving the families of fallen soldiers. He needs me to come home as soon as possible and never return to Mexico. I’ve been blessed to have a husband who has given me the opportunity to learn Spanish and Mexican culture these many years. As an American Mom, Christian, writer, educator, I could never have experienced or witnessed personally the depths of some human suffering that I have tucked away inside my heart, but I’ve been coming and going with no doors opening for so long that I’m afraid the giants have already defeated me and I didn’t even know it!
I returned to Monterrey with the story of Joel’s death ringing in my ears. Moving on. Futility at times. Overwhelming at other times. Maybe just a little nap, a little sleep to make this first year of remembering go by. But the giants of despair, poverty, hunger remain undefeated in Mexico. “Who will go and feed my LAMBS?” God asks. “Here am I, Lord, send me.”
Deannahouse's Blog 
Leave a Reply