Notes From the Road

"The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is." - Winston Churchill"

I've learned that some people can't grasp the truth of the world until they are willing to know themselves. And knowing yourself is a lifelong process, with your biggest lessons often emerging from your biggest mistakes. Truth about the nature of man and the world isn't always pleasant, some things we don't want to know - where our tax money goes, how many calories there are in an apple fritter. What all that beer in college did to our liver. Whether that person really loves us or not. Some things we cannot bear to know. And that knowledge of some things, no matter how hurtful to ones' spirit, is absolutely essential to our well being, for only with truth do we have the resilience, the capacity to continue on, alive in the moment, unbound by shame or regret.

In disaster, the nature of truth, and how we face it, asserts itself.

Those who take charge do, those who choose to hide from things do, be it disaster, heartbreak, the economy, crime or a terrorist attack. After 9-11, I had one acquaintance who refused to watch the news, heading out on a planned vacation and pretending it never happened. Another watched sitcom TV non stop, staying home from work with a bowl of popcorn. Both of these individuals were in denial, afraid to accept the truth.

I lost a colleague several years ago to cancer. He was fairly young and healthy up to diagnosis, a strapping man, with an exuberance for living that just radiated from him. The doctors felt a mass during a routine exam. It was already at late Stage 3. I used up my vacation days from work and tried to spend as much time as I could with him at the end, as he had no family around.

My memory of that time was simply of a hospital rooms' fluorescent light spilling in, a monitor beeping, the IV pump clicking. I could almost hear the whoosh of the pain medication pushing into his body - a duet with the dulcet tones of his labored breathing. Although my eyes were brimming with fatigue, they couldn't stay shut, for I was afraid that if my fingers failed to gently touch his skin, he'd leave us.

I couldn't remember if I had ever lived a day as long as that one, not when I buried a parent, not when I buried someone I'd hoped to spend a lifetime with. I wasn't his lover, just his friend. He'd been very much in love with someone, and she'd left him when he got sick. People asked why I, and a couple others who worked with him, stayed. For myself, I didn't stay because of duty or guilt. I stayed because I hoped, that had it been me, someone would have been by MY side if I had no one else there.

So by that hospital bed I stayed, with my only light that from medical equipment and that small beacon of faith in my heart. My priorities clear; this is where I wanted and needed to be. I fumbled from a half sleep, bleary and dreamless as an alarm clock beeped. Reaching over to shut it off as if it was time for one of those 4 am hotel wake up calls, I realized it was simply the sound of the IV pump. T. was awake and looking at me solemnly. ". . .am I going to die?" he asked quietly, his face turned towards me, waiting for some kind of answer, some kind of hope.

I forgot about my lack of sleep, the work piling up for me back in my office, as his question sucked me, awake with nerves raw, back into my body. What could I say? I wish I could have told him that no, he wasn't going to die, but I knew that wasn't the truth, and I knew he knew it as well. I knew that the question, though simple, was a drop of clear rain falling into a dark, deep lake.

Looking into his blue eyes I remembered the time someone told me something they thought I wanted to hear, even if it wasn't the truth and how it hurt when the truth was revealed, a painful moment like skin pulling away, exposing nerve endings to the cold. As T's question echoed in the room and the weight of the moment crushed against my heart, I spoke carefully and softly. "Yes - but you know where I'll be?" my question spilling another drop in the pool ."Where?" he said. "Right by your side", I replied.

I sit here tonight, exhausted from hours of travel, and a long day, a very long day ahead of me tomorrow. On the table by the computer is a small blue stone with a moose on it. Hundreds of miles away is a black stone just like it, held by my best friend, who would await that call that the mission for the day is over and I'm in my hotel room safe.

This is not quite the life I expected when I hung up my wings back in 96 for another four years of grad school and a return to service. But it's the life that fits what strengths I have. I've come home with brain matter on my shoes. I've come home with images a person should never see, playing in my head like a bad film, until sleep comes fitfully. Yet I come home with purpose. With resolution. I collect those moments of lives, of loved ones, in the minutes before they leave us. I collect what is left, carefully, gently and with reverence, cataloging the bare bones of all that is truly important, so that it doesn't happen again. Then I go back to an empty hotel room.

On that day years ago, while we watched our friend and coworker buried as taps played, I thought that truth is fierce and unrelenting. We cannot ignore it or change it, but we can change the way we live with it. The truth of 9-11 is that the world is a dangerous place and being politically correct to the point of ignoring the facts of who attacks us, while frisking a four year old from Des Moines, won't make it any better. But denying to the point that we do nothing, won't make it better either.

I finished at the Academy late summer of 2001 and September 11 was one of my first real "I'm actually trained" days on the job. Looking at the images on TV of Ground Zero, we sat, stunned, waiting travel orders while I tried to not let it out that my big brother worked at the Pentagon, there smoking on TV. There was no talk, just a breathing that bordered on keening, looking at one another, our team leader, with an alert, profound justice as though we had already seen through the flames to where we would be, the shape of the disaster of which we could not speak. That day was trial by fire.

On the day my friend passed, I experienced the same sense of still I felt on that terrible day. For there is something about a room in which someone has passed, that bears with it the same quality of a piece of ground in which many fled this earth, as though the air itself is speaking to us. It speaks to us in silent and profound significance, whispering its own truths. Around us there is only musing sound, as shadows hang aloft, as if from invisible wire, hovering above what remains for us to see. A place severed from the living, spectral shadow among that place of circumscribed desolation, filled with the voice of wasted lives and murmuring regret. There, only those left who will gather what remains, cataloging it for infinity.

It's not easy but we go into it with our eyes wide open, for that is truly the only safe ground to stand upon.The truth is that both attacks against what we believe in and dying are inescapable experiences of being human, as is our fear of them. But by facing those truths, we can step beyond them, we can be honest with ourselves and others about what we stand for, as individuals and as a nation, and what truly matters to us in our hearts. Only then are the lives we have made for ourselves truly our own.