(Christopher left us on 9 February 2018; this is how I was at Easter.)
Cliffs of Fall
On a rainy Saturday morning in early February, I decided to
take just a quick glance at my college email. Moments later my husband appeared at the door of my study,
concerned, and I realized my repeated refrain – “no, no, no” – had raised from
a bare whisper to an outraged cry.
“It can’t be true,” I managed to tell him. “They say Christopher’s killed himself.”
Christopher: my
advisee, my friend, just a few weeks from graduation with highest honors, one
of those few students genuinely loved by all on campus. It wasn’t until I encountered his
absence from the hallways on Monday morning and his empty seat in my Hopkins
class that afternoon that I really believed I wasn’t trapped in a nightmare.
The beret, the bowties: eccentricities to be sure, but not,
it became clear, for the purpose of garnering attention – it was just a style
he enjoyed. (And still my fingers
want to type “is” and “enjoys.”) A
committed student: if I arrived at
my office by 7:00 or even earlier, Christopher was sure to be somewhere about,
reading, writing, preparing for his day, often greeting me with a new book or a
new insight. Brilliant: already on his way to seminal work in
ancient philosophy in both his senior theses (a double major, of course, in
classical studies and philosophy).
Curious and eager: I had to order him to stop reading so that he would
have time to actually write and edit his thesis on Heraclitus before term’s end
in the fall. Caring: “how are
you?” meant he really wanted to know, and his popularity rose no more from his
quirky, fun-loving ways than from his ability to listen, to encourage, to speak
truth.
He came to our small Christian college a believer, but not
fully satisfied. My course on
Gerard Manley Hopkins played into his seeking, and he converted to Catholicism
during that first semester of his sophomore year. He loved the Church as he loved his Lord, and he taught us
much about his new-found home – which he was studying and living with typical
whole-hearted enthusiasm – and reveled in filling the gaps in our
Protestant-driven ignorance as we tried to understand the theology that drove
Hopkins’ life and work. He had
been retaking the class as an audit in this senior year, for fun as well as to
deepen his understanding of the poetry, and I had been relying on his
articulate explanations of Catholic theology and life.
We knew he struggled with depression. He knew our hearts, and our time, were
always open to him. Yet none of us
had any idea how deep the darkness lay, and on Monday the campus itself felt
heavy with sorrow, anger, and confusion, as we met each other in hallways and
classrooms with aching hearts and weeping. My own frustration turned from Christopher (why did you do this!) to those who
seemed to demand that there be a specific, clear, easy-to-articulate answer to
that very question, wanting to blame his circumstances or his pride. “I’ve been there,” I kept telling them;
“there is no answer that will satisfy you.” And I quoted Hopkins again and again:
O the mind, mind
has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer,
no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung
there.
And inside I was crying out, O Christopher, why couldn’t you hold to the hope that your beloved poet
showed you even in his own darkest moments!
In chapel, the gospel was preached alongside the
memories. There, thankfully, no
one tried to explain, only to offer hope, for Christopher, for us all. At some now-forgotten word spoken by
one of his other faculty mentors, I doubled over in near-physical pain –
because in that moment, I suddenly realized the awful pain we were feeling as only
the tiniest pang of all the pain of all the world, and images flooded my mind:
the horrific torture and killing of believers in the Middle East; the degrading
enslavement of women and children to the lust of evil men; abortion and the
genocide of those with Down’s Syndrome; murders on the streets, and in
hospitals where the elderly and the infirm are discarded like so much trash;
the suffering and death of multitudes from disease and injuries; destroyed
marriages, rebellious children, abusive or absent parents; the suffering of
those like Christopher – so many, too many – trying to find peace and somehow
missing it . . .
I literally could not breathe.
The moment passed, but I have held to it since, wanting
always to know that the brokenness I see is the barest image of the brokenness
that is. One can’t think of it too
often, much less feel it – we mortal beings aren’t made to bear the whole
world’s burdens – but it was good to catch that tiny glimpse of what our Lord
sees and bears every moment of every day, the brokenness we have brought on
ourselves in our demand to be like Him.
In some manner that I cannot explain, that moment of horrific darkness strengthened
my hope in His light to illumine our way.
If He died for all that, if He carries all that every day . . . then He must love
us indeed.
And yet, despite that hope, the rain continues to dog us even
as April begins with its Easter resurrection. And that empty chair in my Hopkins class . . . that chair is
so empty.
photo credit: Celeste Damiani at Flickr, Creative Commons licensing
