Getting Loose

Crazy

"This is crazy! This is crazy! This is crazy! This is crazy!"

That’s what she spoke as I talked to her in the chapel just before the general public was to enter. And indeed, she was right. Her husband of just a few years, dead at 36. So senseless. So stupid. So very crazy.

But that is what an addictive disease can do to you. It can make you act crazy. It can make the lives of the people around you that you love the very most, crazy. And it can come to a stark and senseless end. Way before it should have.

There are just no adequate words to say that will make anything better anytime soon. And some people say the most stupid things in an earnest effort at trying to be helpful, when silence and presence would do so very much more.

But my heart went out to her. Two grade school children whose daddy is gone. And though she may never be able to grasp this, though she will always wonder what she could have done differently, she really did do the absolute very best that she knew how to. She went the second mile. And the third mile. And the fourth mile. And the . . .

Sometimes, things in life are just tragic.

Kathryn

You learn a lot when you go to see someone, and just sit and listen. I love doing that very thing.

I had always known her as Kathryn. She has a rather serious look to her face. I know that she has traveled lots of miles so to speak in her journey of life.  She’ll admit it has been a pretty good one for her many decades.

But when she was much younger, she was Kate or Katie. I found that intriguing. All of a sudden a younger girl appeared who was full of life and activities that involved siblings and cousins—never mind whether they were first or second—they were kin and that is all that mattered.

She’s outlived two of the children she helped to rear. She has outlived two of her husbands, and some days are better than others.

She gets frustrated with her inability to precisely call a name or a date or a place, but the older I get, the more I sympathize.

But what really stunned me was that she was a Beckendorf. And that set of dogs is always related to each other through one way or another. Of course the one I knew the best was Harvey Beckendorf, a fellow clergyman. And then I found out there’s another Beckendorf who is pastoring a church in Beaumont under another name. I felt a kinship with her that I had not previously felt.

She was so appreciative of the visit. It made her day. She said, "You know, you can hardly find anyone anymore who cares about what it was like in days gone by."

But that is not me. I love to hear the stories of days gone by. I find myself, the older I get, ruminating around in my mind decades ago, reliving, dissecting, analyzing, wondering, puzzling about events that I feel certain most everyone else has forgotten about.  But somehow they linger brightly in my mind. Why that is so, I don’t really know.