Talk About It

I'm listening.

(Image is a piece of brilliant blue sky with fluffy white clouds, framed by the leaves and branches of the sycamore and friends.)

I sat reclined under the sycamore that shaded my trailer in Logan Lake, Ohio, reading a book but feeling almost too sleepy to continue. Is this my life now? Just… napping? After having worked so hard for so long, this new life was feeling outrageously decadent – and useless. Lazy.

This can’t possibly be what the universe had in mind for me. I had put up a couple of posts, taken a shower, gone into town, but I was having trouble believing that was it for the day. Aren’t I supposed to be doing something? Helping people? You know - the light, the love, the healing?

Just sit, Spirit said. Look up at this brilliant blue sky and these fast-moving clouds. Feel the sun on your skin when it dapples you through the leaves. Let us just hold you.

But… I should be working on something – writing, painting, laundry!

Just sit. Right there. Listen.

I watched a golf cart trundle by on the gravel road that loops around the campground. Lots of golf carts at these campsites, not sure if they rent them, or what. It was driven by a heavy older man, heavy black dog at this side, and he tossed his garbage into the dumpster at the entrance, then turned and looped back around the path, which would put him just in front of me in a moment. Before he could reach me, though, I could hear a motorcycle going at a very fast speed on Route 33, just out of my view. As it got closer, the golf cart was obscured momentarily by my car, and it reappeared just as the motorcycle ripped by, giving the illusion that the golf cart was the speed demon making that noise. The driver spotted me and waved, and I called out, laughing, “Is that you making all that noise?”

The man said, “Me? Naw.” Then he swung into the driveway, stopping a few yards from me. The dog hopped down and started exploring, making her way to my door – hot on the trail of the cat she smelled. The man lifted his baseball cap, resettled it, and said, “I’ll tell you what that was. That was a bad accident waiting to happen!” He seemed annoyed – no, angry – at the motorcyclist. I wondered why he took it so personally – and I was about to find out.

“I’m a former law enforcement officer here,” he said, “and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to be the one knocking on someone’s door to tell them their loved one didn’t make it.”

He shook his head with remembered sorrow, then changed the subject. He gestured to my car. “So, what part of Illinois are you from?”

This led to a conversation about how I ended up in Illinois after raising kids and getting divorced, and returning home to a small town. He told me a story about how he and his wife were at a store in southern Illinois – beautiful area, Southern Illinois University is there, beautiful campus – and how the young man at the register had asked them where they were from. The kid was in disbelief when they told him they were from Logan Lake. “That’s where I’m from!” he said. The kid could not believe that there in Carbondale, Illinois were people from his part of the world, so much so that he started asking detailed questions, looking for proof.

“The more people we named, the more people we knew in common,” the man laughed. “I think he finally believed us!”

“Were you there looking at the University for your kids?” I asked.

“At the time, yeah. My boys ended up joining the military, though.”

He had two sons he raised with his wife of forty years. “I was 26 when I got married, my wife was 32 at the time. Forty years!” He slipped his cap off his head and scratched his balding head with the same hand. He was in the police force for 30 years while they raised their kids, and now he and his wife RV around, retirees on the road. “You know, you go to bed and you’re 26, you wake up and you’re 40. The time just… I don’t know where it went.”

His dog had meandered over to me and was nuzzling my face, leaning against my leg. She was black all over, but she had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen on a dog. She picked up a twig and offered it to me. I tried to take it and she turned away with it, teasing me.

“I know! Time just flies by, doesn’t it?” I agreed. “And the kids – they’re grown in the blink of an eye. How old are your sons?”

“Well, my oldest is 38,” the slightest hesitation then, a moment of indecision flickered in his blue eyes. I recognized that look. There was a story, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell it. I am that person, though, that strangers feel safe with. I waited. He looked down.

“My younger son died in 2019, when he was 28,” he sighed. “He was in the army – both my boys were – and he was stationed in Hungary. He finished up there, came home, and ten days after he got back, he died in his sleep.” He glanced up at me.

My heart clenched. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I cannot imagine how awful it is to lose a child.”

The conversation continued – he poured out the story as if he had been carrying it like a very full glass of scalding liquid, and he finally found a place to tip out the excess.

“It’s been tough. Real tough. My wife and son have been having a rough time – especially my son. This is his dog, we bring her with us sometimes. He’s…he’s having trouble. We’re trying to help him as best we can, but he just feels guilty, like it should have been him.” He looked up at the farm behind me, the hills in the distance. His eyes were as blue as the dog’s, far away, thinking about his kids.

“The military’s been real good to us though, real good. They took care of everything, went and got him and made sure the autopsy got done, all that. They had to, you know, make sure it wasn’t something he got in Hungary on duty. Not that they’d tell us, you know, if it was something like that they would have to keep it to themselves.” Another ball cap removal – this time the opposite hand rubbed the sweat from his brow and head. It was hot out, and sticky.

“They ended up telling us it was natural causes, and I don’t know if that’s the truth or not, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He’s still gone. I can still feel it like it was yesterday. After all the times I’ve been the one knocking on the door, I never thought I’d be on the other side, receiving that news.”

I sighed, my hand on my heart. Six years.

“Oh, that’s so recent – I’m so sorry,” I said again.

“My wife’s not doing so well, either,” he went on. “She and my son are always saying how they wished they’d have done more things with him, talked to him more. Maybe if he had a medical condition he might have brought it up in conversation – so she is just full of regret about it. But she goes to a group meeting for parents who lost a child every month, and that helps. They share pictures and tell stories about their kids,” he looked away, shaking his head. “I don’t go to those things more than 2-3 times a year. I just can’t… I mean, I get it, everyone has to deal with this stuff their own way, but I don’t want to go to a meeting and just keep talking about it every month. That’s not for me.”

“I know, sometimes I wonder if continuing to re-live it is helpful in the long run,” I said, thinking about the people I know who continue to live in that place of regret, that place of never letting go. It’s such a hard place to exist in, because the rest of the world keeps moving on, and the farther away the world gets, the more you cling to what you had. It becomes harder and harder to let go.

“For me, when I start thinking about it…” he waved his hands in front of him, “I just want to be left alone. I don’t wanna talk about it. Just… leave me be. That’s how I deal with it. But I try to be supportive of my wife, because she likes talking about him.”

He was silent for a moment. That was my cue.

“What was he like? Did he like being in the military?” Tell me about him, sir. I’m listening.

His son hadn’t originally intended to join the military. He was into business, worked at JP Morgan/Chase and wanted to go to college for business. They would pay for his courses, but it had to be specific classes, and his son didn’t want his studies to be so restricted. “So he came to me and said he wanted to join the army: the GI Bill would pay for whatever he wanted to study. I told him to go talk to his grandpa, my dad, who was in the navy, to just see if it sounded like a good fit – not that the navy is the same as the army, but you know,” he continued. “Now, his dad, my grandpa, was in WWII. He was 17 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he went to his folks and said ‘I want to enlist’. So they gave their approval and when he was 18, he was on a boat to the war.” I could hear the generational pride in his voice. “Can you imagine a 17 – 18 year old doing that now? There’s no way. It’s just not like that anymore, that sense of duty just isn’t the same. That’s why they call that generation the Greatest Generation. They understood about service, about duty to country, about sacrifice.”

I nodded. I’m pro-peace, myself, but I completely understand wanting to serve your country – that feeling of love and loyalty that prompts that response. My dad and my father-in-law were both military men. I get it.

“So the military was a good fit for him, then?” I asked.

“Eventually, yeah,” he said. “He had a rough time in basic, you know, but that’s what they do. Make’em march for 24 straight hours, then tell them to go to bed, not even shower, then 45 minutes later they’re in there banging things and making noise, ‘Get up! Get up!’ and they had to go march again!” He chuckled a little. “He had some stories! He was in Georgia for basic, and the mosquitos there are the size of birds. They had to stay completely still in a foxhole – couldn’t swat at the mosquitos or anything, because, you know, if you’re really in a foxhole you can’t move. He had so many bites all over his face,” he laughed again, remembering his son’s tales of woe.

“I assume you went down for the commencement?”

His face filled with pride, and he sat up a little straighter. “We did. And I’ll tell you what, I didn’t even recognize him. My wife had to point him out to me! I couldn’t tell which one was him, they all looked the same! But there he was,” he hesitated, his voice tightening for a split second. “I told him, son, you went in a boy, and you came out a man.”

His son, Kyle, had been an athlete in high school – championship level baseball and basketball. He wasn’t a big kid, but he was a record scorer, a really remarkable athlete. “At the funeral people came up to me saying ‘oh, he was such a talented basketball player, so good at baseball’, all that. But in my eyes, that doesn’t matter. I’m most proud of his military career. He went in a boy, and he came out a man,” he said again. “If you go down into town they have him on a flag there. Just across from the hardware store, there. Nice memorial.”

“I can tell you are so proud of him,” I said. “He sounds like he was a great kid.”

“He was. He was.”

The man called for the dog, who obediently jumped up next to him. “Well, I should get back, my wife is getting antsy to leave, she’s gonna wonder where I’ve been.”

I smiled, “Well, just tell her you were talking to me about Kyle.”

His eyes widened. “She’d never believe that! She’d say, ‘You were talking about Kyle?’” He shook his head one last time, started up the golf cart. “I don’t talk about him.”

I nodded. “I get that. Well, thank you for telling me about him. Safe travels.”

“You, too. Take care,” and he backed out and drove away.

I sat for a moment, my eyes filling with tears. I heard a voice in my mind saying, ‘Thank you, I needed to hear that.’

I looked up at the blue sky, the racing clouds, the sycamore bowing and fluttering in the wind. That’s why I needed to just sit, right there, right then. And listen.

“You’re welcome, Kyle.” I said.