excerpts
Odd Thomas
I lead an unusual life.
By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I’m sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.
I mean only that my life is not typical.
~
You can con God and get away with it, Granny [Sugars] said, if you do so with charm and wit. He’ll also cut you some slack if you’re astonishly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.
~
I’m not the law. I’m not vigilante justice. I’m not vengeance personified. I don’t really know what I am, or why.
In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action. A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.
~
So many things are beyond my control: the endless dead with all their requests, the bodachs, the prophetic dreams. I’d probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn’t simplify my life in every area where I do have some control. These are my defensive strategies: no car, no life insurance, no more clothes than I absolutely need-mostly T-shirts, chinos and jeans-no vacations to exotic places, no grand ambitions.
~
According to [Stormy], she’s not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her.
She says she’s talking about mental stimulation.
I tell her that, in case she hasn’t noticed, I do have a brain.
She says there’s definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big head is still open to debate.
~
On more than one occasion, I have asked [Stormy] to marry me. Though we both agree that we are soul mates and that we will be together forever, she has always shied my proposals with something like, I love you madly, desperately, Oddie, so madly that I would cut off my right hand for you, if that made any sense as a proof of love. But as for this marriage thing-let’s put a pin in it.
[...]
“So... you mean you’re accepting my proposal.”
“Silly, I accepted it ages ago.” Off my look of bewilderment, she said, “Oh, not with a conventional ‘Yes, darling, I’m yours,’ but I accepted it in so many words.”
~
A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.
Yet I can’t entirely dismiss that cynic’s sour assessment. I harbor a capacity for inhumanity, glimpsed in my cruel retort to the person I love most in all the world.
~
[My father] wanted me to see the desire that he inspired in this lush young woman. He had a weak man’s pride in his status as a stud, and this pride was so fierce that it filled his mind, leaving him quite incapable of recognizing his son’s humiliation.
“Yesterday was the anniversary of Gladys Presley’s death,” I said. “Her son wept uncontrollably for days after losing her, and he grieved openly for a year. He loved his dad, too. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Elvis’s own death. I think I’ll try to look him up and tell him how lucky he was from the very day he was born.”
~
One of my most vivid memories is of a rainy night in January when I was five years old and suffering from influenza. When not coughing, I cried for attention and relief, and my mother was unable to find a corner of the house in which she could entirely escape the sound of my misery.
She came to my room and stretched out beside me on the bed, as any mother might lie down to comfort a stricken child, but she came with the gun. Her threats to kill herself always earned my silence, my obedience, my grant of absolution from her parental obligations.
That night, I swallowed my misery as best I could and stifled my tears, but I couldn’t wish away my inflamed and sore throat. To her, my coughing was a demand for mothering, and its persistence brought her to an emotional precipice.
When the threat of suicide didn’t silence my cough, she put the muzzle of the gun to my right eye. She encouraged me to try to see the shiny point of the bullet deep in that narrow dark passage.
~
Throughout my life, I have seen terrible things. Some have been worse than the [woman’s breasts in] the Rubbermaid container. Experience has not immunized me to horror, however, and human cruelty still has the power to devastate me, to loosen the locking pins in my knees.
~
As much as I wanted to avoid looking at them, the dead on the floor commanded my attention. I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.
~
I will not tell everything I saw. I will not. Cannot. The dead deserve their dignity. The wounded, their privacy. Their loves ones, a little peace.
More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we’ve witnessed of man’s inhumanity to man, we simply can’t go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.
~
For a while I had gone mad. Madness runs in my family. We have a long history of retreating from reality.
Forever Odd
Over the years, I have a few times endured a dream in which, during a search, I open a white paneled door and am skewered through the throat by something sharp, cold, and as thick as an iron fence stave.
Always, I wake before I die, gagging as if still impaled. After that, I am usually up for the day, no matter how early the hour.
My dreams aren’t reliably prophetic. [...] I’m pretty sure the scenario with the white paneled door will come to pass. I can’t say whether I will be merely wounded, disabled for life, or killed.
~
In my strange and dangerous life, I have only once resorted to a gun. I shot a man with it. He had been killing people with a gun of his own.
Shooting him dead saved lives. I have no intellectual or moral argument with the use of firearms any more than I do with the use of spoons or socket wrenches.
My problem with guns is emotional. They fascinate my mother. In my childhood, she made much grim use of a pistol, as I have recounted in my previous manuscript.
I cannot easily separate the rightful use of a gun from the sick purpose to which she put hers. In my hand, a firearm feels as if it has a life of its own, a cold and squamous kind of life, and also a wicked intent too slippery to control.
~
The character of their recognition was uncomfortably familiar to me. They knew me as a hero, as the guy who stopped the lunatic who had shot all those people the previous August.
Forty-one were shot. Some were crippled for life, disfigured. Nineteen died.
I might have prevented all of it. Then I might have been a hero.
~
Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore.
~
As I pushed shut the [elevator] doors, closing him in, Danny said, “I’ve decided I don’t wish I were you, after all.”
“I didn’t know identity theft had ever crossed your mind.”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered through the narrowing gap. “I’m so damn sorry.”
“Friends forever,” I told him, which was a thing we said for a while when we were ten or eleven. “Friends forever.”
~
Any gun is less intimate than a knife. Killing [Datura] intimately, up close and personal, her blood pouring back along the handle of the knife: That required a different Odd Thomas from a parallel dimension, one who was crueler than I and less worried about cleanliness.
~
Datura and her acolytes had left me less willing than usual to turn the other cheek. They had lowered my threshold for anger and raised my tolerance for violence.
~
No matter how clever I was about finding a way out of the hotel, before I got to freedom, I was likely to encounter [Datura]. It was a little like destiny.
If you’ve had a beer too many and are in an argumentative mood, you might say Don’t be an idiot, Odd. All you have to do is not think about her.
Imagine yourself running barefoot on a summer day, as carefree as a child, and your foot comes down on an old board, and a six-inch spike spears your metatarsal arch, penetrating all the way through your instep. No need to cancel your plans and seek out a doctor. You’ll be fine if you don’t think about that big sharp rusty spike sticking through your foot.
You’re playing eighteen holes of gold, and your ball goes into the woods. Retrieving it, you’re bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. Don’t bother calling 911 on your cell phone. You can finish the round with aplomb if you simply concentrate on the game and forget all about the annoying snake.
No matter how many beers you have consumed, I trust that you get my point. Datura was a spike through my foot, a snake with fangs sunk into my hand. Trying not to think about that woman, under these circumstances, was like being in a room with an angry naked sumo wrestler and trying not to think about him.
~
“What sucks the worst is ... this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can’t. We try, but we can’t.”
I started to cry. The tears surprised me. I thought I was done with tears for the duration.
~
Manuel put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Maybe we can fix it, Odd. You know? Maybe.”
I shook my head. “No. We’re broken. A broken thing can’t fix itself.”
“Maybe it can,” Karla said, putting a hand on my other shoulder.
I sat there, just like a faucet. All snot and tears. Embarassed but not enough to get my act together.
“Son,” said Chief Porter, “it’s not your job alone, you know.”
“I know.”
“So the broken world’s not all on your shoulders.”
“Lucky for the world.”
The chief crouched beside me. “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“Or me,” Karla agreed.
“I’m a mess,” I apologized.
Karla said, “Me too.”
“I could use a beer,” Manuel said.
“You’re working,” Bill Burton reminded him, then he said, “Get me one, too.”
~
“The hard thing is, I was dead, too, but somebody didn’t want me to be, so I’m back.”
“Yes. You said before.”
My chest swelled. My throat thickened. I could hardly breathe. “Chief, I was this close to Stormy, this close to service.”
He cupped my wet face in his hands and made me look at him. “Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.”
“I guess so.”
“You know that’s true.”
“This was a very hard day, sir. I had to do... terrible things. Things no one should have to live with.”
~
In spite of everything, I’ve chosen life. Now on with it.
Brother Odd
Outside, Elvis stood with his head tipped back and his tongue out, in a fruitless attempt to catch flakes. Of course he was but a spirit, unable to feel the cold or taste the snow. Something about the effort he made, however, charmed me... and saddened me, as well.
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in blood, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
~
“Maybe my lack of compassion for these abusers of children-and other failures of mine-means I won’t see Stormy on the Other Side, that the fire I face will be consuming rather than purifying. But at least if I wind up in that palpable dark where having no cable TV is the least of the inconveniences, I will have the pleasure of seeking you out if you have beaten a child. I will know just what to do with you, and I will have eternity to do it.”
~
Over the years, in pinches and crunches, I have survived-often just barely-by the effective use of such weapons as fists, feet, knees, elbows, a baseball bat, a shovel, a knife, a rubber snake, a real snake, three expensive antigue porcelain vases, about a hundred gallons of molton tar, a bucket, a lug wrench, an angry cross-eyed ferret, a broom, a frying pan, a toaster, butter, a fire hose, and a large bratwurst.
~
Boo turned away from the plowed pavement and sprinted friskily across the meadow. Laughing and jubilant, Elvis ran after him. The rocker and the rollicking dog receded from view, neither troubled by the stormscape nor troubling it.
Most day, I wish my special powers of vision and intuition had never been bestowed on me, that the grief they have brought to me could be lifted from my heart, that everything I have seen of the supernatural could be expunged from memory, and that I could be what, but for this gift, I otherwise am-no one special, just one soul in a sea of souls, swimming through the days toward a hope of that final sanctuary beyond all fear and pain.
Once in a while, however, there are moments for which the burden seems worth carrying: moments of transcendent joy, of inexpressible beauty, of wonder that overwhelms the mind with awe, or in this case a moment of such piercing charm that the world seems more right than it really is and offers a glimpse of what Eden might have been before we pulled it down.
Although Boo would remain at my side for days to come, Elvis would not be with me much longer. But I know that the image of them racing through the storm in rapturous delight will be with me vividly through all my days in this world, and forever after.
~
“Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army. We never made love. Because of a bad thing that happened to her when she was a little girl, she wanted to wait. Wait until we could afford to be married.
“Sometimes I thought I couldn’t wait, but then I always could. Because she gave me so much else, and everything she gave me was more than a thousand other girls could ever give. All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that. I don’t know what she saw in me, you know? But I could give her that much.
“She took four bullets in the chest and abdomen. My sweet girl, who never hurt a soul. I killed the man who killed her, Jacob. If I had gotten there two minutes sooner, I might have killed him before he killed her.”
~
“I thought you’d have moved on by now,” I told him. “You know you’re ready.”
He nodded, still grinning like a fool.
“Then go. I’ll be all right. They’re all waiting for you. Go.”
Still walking backward, he began to wave good-bye, and step by backward step, the King of Rock and Roll faded, until he was gone from this world forever.
Odd Hours
Loss is the hardest thing. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore. Grief can destroy you-or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to you knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.
I lead an unusual life.
By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I’m sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.
I mean only that my life is not typical.
~
You can con God and get away with it, Granny [Sugars] said, if you do so with charm and wit. He’ll also cut you some slack if you’re astonishly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.
~
I’m not the law. I’m not vigilante justice. I’m not vengeance personified. I don’t really know what I am, or why.
In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action. A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.
~
So many things are beyond my control: the endless dead with all their requests, the bodachs, the prophetic dreams. I’d probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn’t simplify my life in every area where I do have some control. These are my defensive strategies: no car, no life insurance, no more clothes than I absolutely need-mostly T-shirts, chinos and jeans-no vacations to exotic places, no grand ambitions.
~
According to [Stormy], she’s not ambitious, just easily bored and in need of stimulation. I have frequently offered to stimulate her.
She says she’s talking about mental stimulation.
I tell her that, in case she hasn’t noticed, I do have a brain.
She says there’s definitely no brain in my one-eyed snake and that what might be in my big head is still open to debate.
~
On more than one occasion, I have asked [Stormy] to marry me. Though we both agree that we are soul mates and that we will be together forever, she has always shied my proposals with something like, I love you madly, desperately, Oddie, so madly that I would cut off my right hand for you, if that made any sense as a proof of love. But as for this marriage thing-let’s put a pin in it.
[...]
“So... you mean you’re accepting my proposal.”
“Silly, I accepted it ages ago.” Off my look of bewilderment, she said, “Oh, not with a conventional ‘Yes, darling, I’m yours,’ but I accepted it in so many words.”
~
A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
I am an optimist about our species. I assume God is, too, for otherwise He would have scrubbed us off the planet a long time ago and would have started over.
Yet I can’t entirely dismiss that cynic’s sour assessment. I harbor a capacity for inhumanity, glimpsed in my cruel retort to the person I love most in all the world.
~
[My father] wanted me to see the desire that he inspired in this lush young woman. He had a weak man’s pride in his status as a stud, and this pride was so fierce that it filled his mind, leaving him quite incapable of recognizing his son’s humiliation.
“Yesterday was the anniversary of Gladys Presley’s death,” I said. “Her son wept uncontrollably for days after losing her, and he grieved openly for a year. He loved his dad, too. Tomorrow is the anniversary of Elvis’s own death. I think I’ll try to look him up and tell him how lucky he was from the very day he was born.”
~
One of my most vivid memories is of a rainy night in January when I was five years old and suffering from influenza. When not coughing, I cried for attention and relief, and my mother was unable to find a corner of the house in which she could entirely escape the sound of my misery.
She came to my room and stretched out beside me on the bed, as any mother might lie down to comfort a stricken child, but she came with the gun. Her threats to kill herself always earned my silence, my obedience, my grant of absolution from her parental obligations.
That night, I swallowed my misery as best I could and stifled my tears, but I couldn’t wish away my inflamed and sore throat. To her, my coughing was a demand for mothering, and its persistence brought her to an emotional precipice.
When the threat of suicide didn’t silence my cough, she put the muzzle of the gun to my right eye. She encouraged me to try to see the shiny point of the bullet deep in that narrow dark passage.
~
Throughout my life, I have seen terrible things. Some have been worse than the [woman’s breasts in] the Rubbermaid container. Experience has not immunized me to horror, however, and human cruelty still has the power to devastate me, to loosen the locking pins in my knees.
~
As much as I wanted to avoid looking at them, the dead on the floor commanded my attention. I hate violence. I hate injustice more. I just want to be a fry cook, but the world demands more from me than eggs and pancakes.
~
I will not tell everything I saw. I will not. Cannot. The dead deserve their dignity. The wounded, their privacy. Their loves ones, a little peace.
More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we’ve witnessed of man’s inhumanity to man, we simply can’t go on. Perseverance is impossible if we don’t permit ourselves to hope.
~
For a while I had gone mad. Madness runs in my family. We have a long history of retreating from reality.
Forever Odd
Over the years, I have a few times endured a dream in which, during a search, I open a white paneled door and am skewered through the throat by something sharp, cold, and as thick as an iron fence stave.
Always, I wake before I die, gagging as if still impaled. After that, I am usually up for the day, no matter how early the hour.
My dreams aren’t reliably prophetic. [...] I’m pretty sure the scenario with the white paneled door will come to pass. I can’t say whether I will be merely wounded, disabled for life, or killed.
~
In my strange and dangerous life, I have only once resorted to a gun. I shot a man with it. He had been killing people with a gun of his own.
Shooting him dead saved lives. I have no intellectual or moral argument with the use of firearms any more than I do with the use of spoons or socket wrenches.
My problem with guns is emotional. They fascinate my mother. In my childhood, she made much grim use of a pistol, as I have recounted in my previous manuscript.
I cannot easily separate the rightful use of a gun from the sick purpose to which she put hers. In my hand, a firearm feels as if it has a life of its own, a cold and squamous kind of life, and also a wicked intent too slippery to control.
~
The character of their recognition was uncomfortably familiar to me. They knew me as a hero, as the guy who stopped the lunatic who had shot all those people the previous August.
Forty-one were shot. Some were crippled for life, disfigured. Nineteen died.
I might have prevented all of it. Then I might have been a hero.
~
Their melancholy drains me. Their need exhausts me. I am wrung by pity. Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving it scarred and sore.
~
As I pushed shut the [elevator] doors, closing him in, Danny said, “I’ve decided I don’t wish I were you, after all.”
“I didn’t know identity theft had ever crossed your mind.”
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered through the narrowing gap. “I’m so damn sorry.”
“Friends forever,” I told him, which was a thing we said for a while when we were ten or eleven. “Friends forever.”
~
Any gun is less intimate than a knife. Killing [Datura] intimately, up close and personal, her blood pouring back along the handle of the knife: That required a different Odd Thomas from a parallel dimension, one who was crueler than I and less worried about cleanliness.
~
Datura and her acolytes had left me less willing than usual to turn the other cheek. They had lowered my threshold for anger and raised my tolerance for violence.
~
No matter how clever I was about finding a way out of the hotel, before I got to freedom, I was likely to encounter [Datura]. It was a little like destiny.
If you’ve had a beer too many and are in an argumentative mood, you might say Don’t be an idiot, Odd. All you have to do is not think about her.
Imagine yourself running barefoot on a summer day, as carefree as a child, and your foot comes down on an old board, and a six-inch spike spears your metatarsal arch, penetrating all the way through your instep. No need to cancel your plans and seek out a doctor. You’ll be fine if you don’t think about that big sharp rusty spike sticking through your foot.
You’re playing eighteen holes of gold, and your ball goes into the woods. Retrieving it, you’re bitten on the hand by a rattlesnake. Don’t bother calling 911 on your cell phone. You can finish the round with aplomb if you simply concentrate on the game and forget all about the annoying snake.
No matter how many beers you have consumed, I trust that you get my point. Datura was a spike through my foot, a snake with fangs sunk into my hand. Trying not to think about that woman, under these circumstances, was like being in a room with an angry naked sumo wrestler and trying not to think about him.
~
“What sucks the worst is ... this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can’t. We try, but we can’t.”
I started to cry. The tears surprised me. I thought I was done with tears for the duration.
~
Manuel put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Maybe we can fix it, Odd. You know? Maybe.”
I shook my head. “No. We’re broken. A broken thing can’t fix itself.”
“Maybe it can,” Karla said, putting a hand on my other shoulder.
I sat there, just like a faucet. All snot and tears. Embarassed but not enough to get my act together.
“Son,” said Chief Porter, “it’s not your job alone, you know.”
“I know.”
“So the broken world’s not all on your shoulders.”
“Lucky for the world.”
The chief crouched beside me. “I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“Or me,” Karla agreed.
“I’m a mess,” I apologized.
Karla said, “Me too.”
“I could use a beer,” Manuel said.
“You’re working,” Bill Burton reminded him, then he said, “Get me one, too.”
~
“The hard thing is, I was dead, too, but somebody didn’t want me to be, so I’m back.”
“Yes. You said before.”
My chest swelled. My throat thickened. I could hardly breathe. “Chief, I was this close to Stormy, this close to service.”
He cupped my wet face in his hands and made me look at him. “Nothing before its time, son. Everything in its own time, to its own schedule.”
“I guess so.”
“You know that’s true.”
“This was a very hard day, sir. I had to do... terrible things. Things no one should have to live with.”
~
In spite of everything, I’ve chosen life. Now on with it.
Brother Odd
Outside, Elvis stood with his head tipped back and his tongue out, in a fruitless attempt to catch flakes. Of course he was but a spirit, unable to feel the cold or taste the snow. Something about the effort he made, however, charmed me... and saddened me, as well.
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in blood, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
~
“Maybe my lack of compassion for these abusers of children-and other failures of mine-means I won’t see Stormy on the Other Side, that the fire I face will be consuming rather than purifying. But at least if I wind up in that palpable dark where having no cable TV is the least of the inconveniences, I will have the pleasure of seeking you out if you have beaten a child. I will know just what to do with you, and I will have eternity to do it.”
~
Over the years, in pinches and crunches, I have survived-often just barely-by the effective use of such weapons as fists, feet, knees, elbows, a baseball bat, a shovel, a knife, a rubber snake, a real snake, three expensive antigue porcelain vases, about a hundred gallons of molton tar, a bucket, a lug wrench, an angry cross-eyed ferret, a broom, a frying pan, a toaster, butter, a fire hose, and a large bratwurst.
~
Boo turned away from the plowed pavement and sprinted friskily across the meadow. Laughing and jubilant, Elvis ran after him. The rocker and the rollicking dog receded from view, neither troubled by the stormscape nor troubling it.
Most day, I wish my special powers of vision and intuition had never been bestowed on me, that the grief they have brought to me could be lifted from my heart, that everything I have seen of the supernatural could be expunged from memory, and that I could be what, but for this gift, I otherwise am-no one special, just one soul in a sea of souls, swimming through the days toward a hope of that final sanctuary beyond all fear and pain.
Once in a while, however, there are moments for which the burden seems worth carrying: moments of transcendent joy, of inexpressible beauty, of wonder that overwhelms the mind with awe, or in this case a moment of such piercing charm that the world seems more right than it really is and offers a glimpse of what Eden might have been before we pulled it down.
Although Boo would remain at my side for days to come, Elvis would not be with me much longer. But I know that the image of them racing through the storm in rapturous delight will be with me vividly through all my days in this world, and forever after.
~
“Life had been hard on this girl, Jacob, but she had enough courage for an army. We never made love. Because of a bad thing that happened to her when she was a little girl, she wanted to wait. Wait until we could afford to be married.
“Sometimes I thought I couldn’t wait, but then I always could. Because she gave me so much else, and everything she gave me was more than a thousand other girls could ever give. All she wanted was love with respect, respect was so important to her, and I could give her that. I don’t know what she saw in me, you know? But I could give her that much.
“She took four bullets in the chest and abdomen. My sweet girl, who never hurt a soul. I killed the man who killed her, Jacob. If I had gotten there two minutes sooner, I might have killed him before he killed her.”
~
“I thought you’d have moved on by now,” I told him. “You know you’re ready.”
He nodded, still grinning like a fool.
“Then go. I’ll be all right. They’re all waiting for you. Go.”
Still walking backward, he began to wave good-bye, and step by backward step, the King of Rock and Roll faded, until he was gone from this world forever.
Odd Hours
Loss is the hardest thing. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore. Grief can destroy you-or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to you knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.