Facing the Sky. Roy F. Fox

guidance in the final stages of preparing this manuscript. My wife, Bev, again served as the sanest sounding-board and editor I could ever hope to have. Finally, I stand humbled before the people who agreed to become a part of this book, for trusting me, for believing that their experiences could help others.

      ~

      That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called, “spirit world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.

      —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

      Wisdom is like the sky, belonging to no man, and true learning is the astronomy of the spirit.

      —Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel

      Introduction: An Unfinished Furrow

      The gravel in the parking lot of the old church across the road shone zinc white in the sun. This church held ice cream socials to raise money, sold cardboard fans with gaudy pictures of Jesus on them, and, for a dollar, bottles of imitation vanilla. I knew people used it in cooking but could not understand why it was a big deal. I once saw my eighty-five-year-old great aunt dab a fingertip of it behind each ear as a kind of perfume, but it still didn’t add up. As a ten-year-old in Paradise, Missouri, in the sweltering August of 1959, I moved inside a glass jar and a huge, resounding stillness. Nothing moved.

      The only competition with my great aunt’s squat, relic-like presence was my grandparents’ brown plastic View Master and its white disks that rotated photos of Niagara Falls. A more exotic treat was a five-cent Hershey bar or an orange Nehi soda from Hafferty’s Farm Implement store. There was nothing to read, either, if you discounted the tiny gray print of The Smithville Democrat Herald, which reported the locals’ activities, such as, “Mrs. Claudie Archer’s nephew and his family, from Platte City, visited on Sunday.” The only other reading material was the archaic gibberish in the Bible.

      Across from the church and down the road, the vacant house overgrown with brown weeds, tangled trumpet vine, and sticky burrs stood perfectly silent as usual, but I would not poke around in it on this day, even though the marbles, shells, and pebbles of glass randomly lodged into its outer plastered walls remained just as mysterious as ever. What kind of people in the middle of rural Missouri would make a house like that? On this day, though, the ghosts that I was sure hovered there would have to dissolve inside themselves and wait for another day. It didn’t occur to me to go there, because, on this day, everything was different.

      I knew that the yard, house, chicken coop, wire fences, and cellar were not really different. It was just that they no longer mattered. Like they weren’t even there. Or they had somehow shifted from being three-dimensional into being faded, cardboard props. My grandfather, Pop, had just disappeared from the earth, and inside of me, everything was churned up, voided. I was confused and cut loose from an anchor I didn’t realize was there. My grandfather, Daniel Harrison Fox, was soft-spoken, tall, lean, and gentle as a lamb’s ear. Never critical, often quietly bemused. Why him?

      Instead, I wandered in my grandparents’ yard, away from the shuffling, small groups of elderly farm neighbors who milled about the porch and steps quietly paying their respects, carrying covered dishes of green bean casserole, potato salad, and pies, especially the sticky-sweet pecan pies. There seemed to be dozens of each. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, and I found myself in the back of their small home, where they had moved after leaving their farm. The garden was half-plowed. In the middle of an unfinished row, a rusted hand-plow rested. Next, I spotted a small homemade bench made of weathered boards in a simple T-shape, stuck into the ground. Not steady, but good enough to sit and catch your breath.

      After the hushed, humble neighbors shuffled off, it was time for Sunday afternoon-dinner, which we often had with my grandparents, though this time, my grandfather would not be shaking extra salt on his ham or, afterward, drying the dishes handed him by my grandmother—the only times I ever saw them talk together. My great aunt, Betty Rupe, the widow of a country doctor, lived with them. She was small, squat, chatty as a parakeet, and did not believe that the earth rotated on its axis because, if it did, “we’d all fall off.” Aunt Betty left her false teeth on the table beside her glass during dinner. I couldn’t bear looking at them, lest they came clacking down the tablecloth and clamped onto my fingers. Dinner usually consisted of green beans, smoked and salty ham from Dave Lizer’s locker, fried chicken, baked oysters, rolls, mashed potatoes, and fruit salad with tiny marshmallows.

      My parents, grandmother, aunt, and everyone were placing plates and bowls on the table as I watched in silence. How could they? Didn’t they know he had just died? The well inside me came surging upward. I broke into tears and ran outside. I sat on the slope near the garage and quieted down, then laid back on the grass and stared at the clouds blowing across the sky, giving way to blue expanses, unfolding into oblivion. I wasn’t there long before returning to the dining room. I don’t remember what any of the adults said to me. Likely nothing. It just wasn’t something you talked about.

      We all have our first experience with death. I had no warning about what would happen or what the funeral would be like, how the burial would work. In those days, these things were not talked about. As I sensed at the time, the adults in that dining room were also grieving, carrying around their own weighty sadness and confusion on their insides. It just wasn’t something you talked about.

      Three decades later, I am with my friend, Tom, in a sunny backyard in Idaho. I had recently buried our cat, Buford. I looked up as my daughter, Emma, five years old, was leading Tom to the outer edge of the yard, under the huge fir trees. She started chirping out of the blue: “Wanna know what happens when you die?” she asked.

      “What?” Tom said, not missing a beat. “Well, first they wrap you in a towel, then they put you in a box, then they put you in the ground,” she answered.

      A few days earlier, we’d buried Buford, our gentle, elegant, orange and white cat, and I’d hoped she’d forgotten about it. At least she was talking about her first experience with death, however tersely practical her summary. I’d just read aloud to Emma E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (her first real book, as I wrote on the flyleaf) about the spider, Charlotte, that spins webs for her friend, Wilbur, the pig, to read. Wilbur, the runt of the litter, had been rescued from death by Fern Arable, the owner’s daughter. Wilbur again faced his fears of death when the geese told him that his new owner, Mr. Zuckerman, was planning to fatten him up for the Christmas dinner.

      Charlotte promised to save her new friend. When she spun the phrases, “some pig,” “terrific,” and others into her web, Wilbur began acting like some pig, doing tricks and stunts to amaze the people around him. This beautifully-crafted, simple story has much to say about people and nature and the cycle of life and death. But it’s also about the powers of expression, of words and what they can do, especially during those times when our lives become redefined for us. At that time in Paradise, Missouri, it never occurred to anyone to talk things out, much less to write it up. Somehow, the word and the image did not exist for such purposes. But when we’re jerked into a new reality, facing the unfathomable, composing through words and pictures can help us sort things out, understand, and go on.

      ***

      In this book, I use writing interchangeably with composing, and both terms apply to any medium or symbol system. As well, composing through trauma has two meanings here. First, to create or write or compose something in words and images related to the trauma. If you compose in word and image, you’ll often arrive at the second meaning—to compose yourself—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. This all means coping, yes, but it goes beyond that.

      At a recent international conference called “Making Sense of Pain,” there was much talk about “coping strategies,” from medical doctors, medical anthropologists, counselors, and others. Just as often, the question kept surfacing from different people: