Disneyland

I had barely walked through the door of my office at the jail when a guard showed up. “There’s an inmate who’s been trying to get a hold of a chaplain since Saturday. His kid is in on life support at the hospital. He wants to talk to someone. We suggested “Health Care,” but he wasn’t interested, so…” I gulped. Said I would “take care of it,” whatever that could possibly mean. I leafed quickly through some of the requests that had trickled in over the weekend and noticed two from this poor guy. I’ll call him Terry. Could someone please come see me… pray for me… pray for my son? My heart heaved a little.

I went to see Terry. He shuffled in slowly, resignedly. He was around my age, I knew, but he looked older (they all do, in this place). His voice was barely above a whisper, a mumble, a groan. I had to lean close just to understand him. He struggled to make eye contact, shifted in his chair a lot. The story came out in scraps and fragments, but it was no less agonizing for that. A son, twenty-five, full of promise and potential. The hope of a better path than his dad. Some bad choices early on, sure, but some better ones recently. Things looking up, things looking better. He’s been reconnecting with his indigenous spirituality, he’s been going out and helping people, trying to make a difference…

And then, a wrong turn. An old acquaintance. An overdose. A crumpled body on an unforgiving street.

No one noticed him, no one helped for like thirty minutes…  

I thought of my own kids, how it would shatter me to my very core to hear something like this. To endure something like this.

They’ve done some scans, there’s nothing there. I’m his dad, I guess I have to make the final call. His mom is dead. There’s nobody else.

Terry looked past me, a tear in his eye. You know, he graduated from high school. He even got to go on a band trip once. To Disneyland, can you believe it?

I smiled, wordlessly. Disneyland.

So, there we sat, two fathers with sons roughly the same age. One son going about a normal workday, the other son being kept alive by machines. One father making his way through the paperwork of the morning, the other father wondering what he should tell the doctors from a phone in a prison. It all just seemed so cruel and unfair and maddening. The distance from Disneyland to an unforgiving patch of concrete on the wrong side of town seemed impossible to compute.

I told Terry how desperately sorry I was for him, that this was a decision no father should have to make. He nodded. We prayed. He thanked me for coming. He went back to the phone.

A while back, in one of his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave, who has lost two kids, responded to a man whose daughter had been violently murdered. “How do we cope?” he was asked…

You have been presented with a burden beyond what an ordinary person can be reasonably expected to endure. I feel deeply for you but can offer you little else than to reach out, one human being to another, and say I am so profoundly sorry. I dearly hope you find a way to transcend the horror of your circumstances, even a little bit, to somehow make a good life within the terms of this atrocity.

How does one “make a good life within the terms of this atrocity,” whether it’s a murdered daughter or a son losing his way from Disneyland and ending up slumped over on a street, alone? The terms are impossible to accept. The terms are incompatible with making anything like a “good life,” surely. Transcendence seems out of the question.

Later that afternoon, I sat in a circle with around twenty guys from his unit. Normally, Terry would have been at chapel, but his chair was empty. I asked if anyone knew anything. “Yeah, his son died,” one guy said. “So, they let him out.” I guess he only had a few more days to serve anyway. “Compassionate grounds,” or some such thing. We sat in silence for a while. I’d like to say it was a “reverent silence,” but it wasn’t. Not really. There was the usual restless sniffling and shuffling. It felt awkward. Maybe none of us really knew what to do with this kind of heavy sadness.

And so, again, we prayed. We prayed for Terry, who would now have to go out and try to fight a few more demons than the usual suspects, who would have to bury a son, who would have to attempt a good (or at least better) life within the terms of this fresh atrocity. We prayed for peace, for strength, for hope, for all the good things that seem so elusive for Terry and so many others. And then we turned our plastic chairs toward the screen, queued up our show, and watched Jesus do his Jesus-y things.

This morning as I wrote this reflection a song from the Gray Havens came on my headphones. It’s called This My Soul and contains the following lines:

This my soul you were born
You were born into
What this man has done
It all extends to you
Let the words shake on down along your spine
And ring out true that you might find new life.

I thought of Terry, who has now entered the category of “a father who has lost a son.” I thought of another Father who lost a Son. And I gave thanks for the hope that what this man has done does indeed shake down our collective spine and extend to all of us.

——

Image above is taken from the 2023-24 Christian Seasons Calendar. It’s called “The Sentinel,” by M. Jennifer Griffin, who says of this piece: “[We] wait in hope as a sentinel stands guard on the city wall, watching and waiting expectantly for the coming of God like the dawn of the morning.