We made a go of it briefly but things soon fell apart. She went back to California and we lost touch. But, twenty years later, some kid from Harvard invented Facebook and about twenty years after that she found me on it. This gave us a chance to catch up.
We weren’t young any more. Both of us were divorced and she’d had, so she told me, a son. Given her looks and her tastes in men, I could imagine what a fine, tall, handsome young fellow he must be. He was in college apparently, but their relationship was tenuous.
Soon, I was married once more, but Stacy and I continued to chat now and again online — about politics or current events, about her expectations coming to naught, and her struggles with family, all of whom I knew of course.
Photo by Peter Bucks.
One day my cell rang at work and to my surprise she was on the other end. But all I heard for a while was sobbing. I couldn’t understand any words for a good five minutes. Eventually she quieted enough to choke it out.
“It’s my son,” she said, frantic.
“Okay, sure, got it, what about him? Is he okay?”
“He committed suicide this morning.”
“Oh my God!!!”
He’d been spending the week at his grandfather’s house in California. He’d been having a tough time apparently, and there was a gun handy, and that was that.
I talked to her again that night and again next day. It didn’t get any easier.
Photo by Adrian Regaci.
But in that third conversation, as she was lamenting, I thought of the question that led to the theme of this month’s magazine: Radical Gratitude.
A man named Craig Jones, whose article, The Wrecking-Ball Question, can be found in this issue, had asked it of me once when I was in a bad way. A very bad way.
“What’s great about this?” he wanted to know. It was offensive at first. It smacked of a lack of sympathy and of empathy. It seemed like charlatan’s question, a jibe more than a help.
Image created using ChatGPT software.
But then I found myself asking it of myself, pondering it, and thinking, “well, is there anything great about this?” As Jones wrote of his own first time being asked, “once heard, I couldn’t unhear it.”
And so, amid my old sweetheart’s very real, tangible, and wholly understandable grief, I found I could not get past that question. I shoved it back down my esophagus, choked the air out of it. I bit it back behind my teeth and thought of hanging up before it could escape my lips.
But ultimately there came a pause, an opening just long and wide enough for me to whisper, “listen. There’s a question… it’s not an easy question but it’s… I want to ask… well, what’s, what’s good about this? Is there anything at all that can come out of this that could be positive?
There was a shocked silence on the other end. All I could do was wait.
“Stacy?” I said eventually. My guts were churning, certain that I’d gone too far, asked too soon. Jesus, the kid had just died the day before. This was the third rail, you stay away from that. What the hell was I doing?
“No, no, I get it,” she said, “Umm… hang on, just hang on.”
Slowly, haltingly, she thought of her family, that despite their issues they would all be together at the funeral. Then, that perhaps this would be an opportunity for healing. And of course, that her son was at peace. She thought that the gun would now be locked away. That her grandfather might actually learn something from this.
It wasn’t much, how could it be? But it was a start and, having once been asked, of course she could no longer unhear it.
Photo by Merly Black.
It’s the kind of question that can only be asked when things are tough. Bad. When things just really, really suck. Why ask it otherwise? But Jones calls it a wrecking ball because of the damage it could cause if clumsily asked or if badly received. It is not, in other words, a question for the faint of heart.
The asking takes great courage.
But, as I saw clearly in talking to Stacy, the answer takes even more.
