Forgiveness

My youngest had just been born, May 1, 1980, when I happened upon the religion page of the Seattle Times—devoted almost entirely to Bruce Larson, the new minister coming to University Presbyterian Church. “If ever I’m in real trouble,” I remember thinking, “I will call him.” Blake was not yet two when I picked up the phone. And so began a spiritual odyssey that has taken me places I would never have envisioned.

My first meeting with Bruce was, I think, that very same day. What I remember most were his eyes. Sky blue, and they bore into mine with a buoyant smile as he reached out to warmly shake my hand. I couldn’t look away. I was a deer caught in the headlights; for the first time in my life I was visible. It shocked me to the core. I think many women are raised so invisibly we don’t know what it means to be seen—until it happens. We stumble through the years in deep fog, identified and recognized through our casseroles and Christmas pageants, our sundry lists of service. But Bruce saw past all that—to me. Me. Whoever that was. And I held fast to his gaze, afraid to let go, for I recognized instantly that God had thrown me a lifeline.

Bruce listened to the most recent event of my life—the tip of an iceberg that had left me reeling. Prompted by my doctors, I’d finally seen my way clear to filing for divorce. The church I was attending, however, was disinterested in my story and told me, "Quite frankly, we have no more use for you." A stronger woman might have taken this in stride, gone around the iceberg and gotten on with the rest of her life, but the hull of my own life had been torn through by the subterranean unseen and I was sinking. My three children, ages 1, 3, and 6, would go down with me.

“Sometimes,” Bruce said sadly, “the church likes to bury her wounded.” He invited me to attend the church's annual retreat the following weekend, and arranged for me to bunk in with a public health nurse he thought I’d enjoy getting to know. To my surprise and initial resistance, Penny named me a battered woman, traumatized by emotional violence. In subsequent weeks, Ray Moore, an associate pastor Bruce introduced me to, named my religious abuse and opened new windows of theology that gave me an entirely different view of God. Rusty Palmer, a psychiatrist who taught single parenting classes at the church, named some of my abuse as psychological. Shortly afterward John Westfall arrived as a singles pastor and then Rich Hurst as his assistant—and through them I began to appreciate humor in the pain. And thus was born Bruce’s ministry in my life, anchor and hub to a vast network of informed people who each in their own way helped me chart the treacherous sea I was in, helping me navigate my way through the ice flows and around the iceberg that never went away.

A friend once said, “All divorce is the same. The details differ, but the stories are similar.” To some degree this is true. However, for some us the divorce never ends and so the story goes on. And on. As did mine. Bruce and the others often found themselves buffeted by the upheaval in my life—long after other shipwrecked women, arriving at U-Pres more dead than alive, healed and went on. I did make great strides, discovering courage and fortitude and enough talent to raise my children as a writer—learning to see what Bruce saw in me. But for me at least the real struggle never abated. My children’s father was like a rabid dog. He lived to make me suffer.

In an act of desperation I moved my children a hundred miles north. I continued to drive south every other Sunday, though, for I was dependent upon Bruce’s insight and wisdom. Just walking into the sanctuary at U-Pres was to be in a safe place. Christmas 1989 everything changed.

My children’s father brought to bear all the force he could muster. The stress was so severe my doctors were again concerned for my survival. My friend Barbara said, “There is something almost demonic about this guy, I wonder if we’re dealing with spiritual forces beyond our comprehension. What if Bruce gave you a spiritual divorce? You were married in the church but divorced in a court of law. What if U-Pres gave you a bill of divorcement, signed by Bruce?”

As soon as she said it, I knew it to be true. I went to Bruce and laid it all out. “I wish I’d thought of this myself,” he told me. “Let me talk to the other pastors, I’ll get back to you.”

Some of the other pastors were against the idea, but Bruce stuck to his guns. In my situation, he said, it was absolutely necessary. “But I need to talk with your ex-husband first. He deserves to be aware. Besides, I want to confront him. I want to ask him how, in God’s name, he’s been able to do what he does.”

My heart sank. “No, Bruce,” I said, “I will lose. You will abandon the truth of everything you know. Everyone does. The only exception is Ray.” Ray Moore, in fact, had initially been swayed. But he listened to me again, and brought my children’s father in for further discussion. “Did you— Did you— Did you—” he fired, rapidly raising one question after the other, trying to determine the veracity of what I was saying and leaving no time for manipulation, only the truth. Cornered, the man I was divorcing could only blurt out, “Yes, yes, yes.”

A thousand questions Ray could have asked, but the man I was divorcing heaved to his feet in a defiant stance of moral indignation, adjusted his fancy suit and summarily dismissed Ray and the entire congregation at U-Pres as heretics. “What God has put together, let no man put asunder,” he announced on his way out the door and with the same moral superiority in his voice and face I’d witnessed for ten sorry years. I held my breath, waiting to see what Ray would do. Would he, like everyone else, denounce me? Tell me I had to suck it up and drop the divorce proceedings? “I don’t know how you have survived,” he said, turning to look at me with such sadness I broke down.

Ray remained the only male to believe me after being exposed to my ex-husband’s machinations. This was a spiritual battle I had no confidence I could win. Bruce was susceptible as the next. But he was insistent. “I have to speak with him. The man calls himself a Christian, he needs to be held accountable. I intend to shame him. Denying his children support, medical help… He deserves to be confronted before facing God on judgment day.”

“Do not do this. I beg you. Do not do this to me.”

“Have you no faith in me?”

I stared into his eyes—and I knew this would be the last time I’d ever see him.

It was Christmas Eve when he called. “Hello, Brenda,” he said, “I’ve just had a nice talk with your husband.”

My knees went weak. Husband? I'd been divorced almost as long as I'd been married. I sat with a clumsy thud into a kitchen chair. My two boys were eating an early supper across the table from me. I don’t recall where my daughter was, perhaps last minute shopping, due home any minute. “We had a good visit, Brenda. He loves you and wants very much to put this family back together. I believe him. And as your pastor, I have to encourage you to do this.”

“I told you this would happen,” I managed to stammer. “I told you.”

“Yes, you did, but I do believe him.”

“Did you speak with Ray?”

“I don’t need to, I’m a romantic, Brenda. I believe in happy endings, and this can have a happy ending. He’s even willing to overlook the letter you sent.”

I involuntarily jerked up straight. “What letter?”

“That letter you wrote me last week.”

“I didn’t write you a letter.”

Nonetheless, he was convinced I’d written a litigious, slanderous letter, a crazy letter, demanding and whiny, chock full of misperceived insults, a letter he apparently shared with my ex-husband. My head was reeling.

“Was it hand-written?” I asked, thinking of my file where I kept copies of all my correspondence with Bruce. Perhaps if I’d hand-written something I might have failed to make a copy. But no, it was computer generated—and I knew I did not have copy of such a letter in my file, or on my hard drive.

“I signed it?” I asked.

Yes.

“Is it my signature?”

He couldn’t recall what my signature was supposed to look like.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d send me a copy,” I told him, but to protect me, he said, he’d destroyed it. It was too damning, too vociferous. Besides, he didn’t want such a vile letter in his office. He had to get rid of it.

My mother has her theories as to who sent that letter. I can’t go there. How can I? Such knowledge would defeat me. I can’t live knowing someone can be that malicious, that treacherous. Twenty years later I still can't go there..

“It’s Christmas Eve,” said Bruce on the phone. “I just wanted to call before I went home. Think about what I said. You need to put this back together. You owe it to yourself, to your children. He loves you, he wants to make everything right.”

I think I just hung up. I had to stand to reach the phone, and what I remember is a sensation of numbness, like someone could cut my heart out and I wouldn’t feel a thing. But my head was spinning. The world tipping, me sliding. I looked at my boys, nine and eleven. Their faces were ashen.

“Bruce says your father loves me,” I told them. “Tell me the truth. I need to know the truth. Does he?”

They looked at each other, they looked at me.

“Phillip,” I told the oldest. “I need to know the truth. Tell me the truth.”

Again they looked at each other. Blake, nine, nodded. Phil, eleven, turned back to me, his ashen face going completely white. “Mum, Dad wants you dead.”

This was truth I recognized—though the bluntness of it startled me. Out of the mouth of babes… But my sons’ father could kill me with his bare hands and it would be nothing compared to Bruce’s betrayal. The church has a way of burying her wounded.

I don’t recall what I’d fixed for supper—soup, chili, ravioli. It was in a pot. I do remember that. And I remember watching my tears drip into it as I stirred. Now what? I asked God. I’d been cut off from my church, from Bruce, from the entire staff. And this, I knew, was exactly what my ex-husband had intended to do. Take away my only spiritual haven. I was on my own.

Am I not enough? God seemed to ask. Next thing I knew I was slamming my head against the nearby cupboard. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop until the physical pain eclipsed the pain within.

A few years later, HarperCollins published my book Taming the Dragons. I’d relied heavily on some of Bruce’s many books to support my thesis that we are never alone in conflict and asked my editor to send it to him, then at the Crystal Cathedral in California, for an endorsement. I wanted Bruce to know I’d not gone back to my marriage but had figured a way to extract my own self from spiritual oppression. Secretly, I’d hoped he would write and tell me he was sorry.

He did give me an endorsement—“Wilbee, a gifted writer and a keen observer of life, has written a book that could not be more timely for women—as well as men.” That he respected me was clear. That he valued what I had to say—not only for women but for men as well—was also clear. I wasn’t surprised by his validation. After all, he was the first to see this in me, and to call it forth from my battered soul like Jesus called on Lazarus to rise from death. But Bruce didn’t contact me. I realized then that he simply didn’t know the depth of his betrayal.

For nearly twenty years, though, the pain remained. And then last week, out of the blue, John Westfall found me. "Hi,” he wrote via Facebook, “Eileen and I were wondering how you were, and I did a quick search….” I hadn’t heard from John since Taming the Dragons was released. I read on his Facebook wall that he was preparing for Bruce Larson’s memorial service. I shot back a message, distressed to hear of Bruce’s death. I think my heart actually hurt.

The next morning John informed me that Bruce had actually died just before Christmas, but the service was to be at two that afternoon, at U-Pres—a three-hour trip for me. Rich Hurst would be there, he wrote, and Keith Miller. “Bruce, Rich, and Keith together,” he said, “wrote most of the books out there, you wrote the rest!” Untrue, but I was pleased to learn that Rich had been writing; he had so much to say. Like, God does not call us to trust. He calls us to love. Trust must be earned. John, too, was a writer. We’d shared the same editor at Harper. No time to think about this, though. It was already 10:45. Rain was coming down in a torrential downpour and rumors were out that parts of I-5 were closed due to flooding. But I had to try…I had to say goodbye…I had to find a way to let go of my pain. I had make peace with a man I loved and to whom I owed so much despite our difference of opinion.

I arrived just as the opening trombone number was under way and I slipped into the second to last pew. The sanctuary was packed—easily 3,000 people. I slid in next to a stranger, home again. How could I forget? How could I forget the solace and sanctuary of this place? The swell of the organ all but lifting us off our feet? The serenity of the stained glass windows despite the drumming rain on the other side? How could I forget the healing presence of Bruce? For he was here, his tremendous love bringing him back to say goodbye to us all—as us to him. In his presence, then, and for the first time in twenty years, I felt safe—for this is the legacy of Bruce. Safety at the cross, not condemnation.

The old vanguard was all there, all his old writing comrades, his family, John Westfall, Rich Hurst, Ray Moore, men who’d stood in the gap when I needed them most. Lloyd Olgivie, former chaplain of the U.S. Senate and longtime friend of Bruce’s, had us alternately guffawing and fighting tears. And when Lloyd suggested that Bruce was with us, in this sanctuary, I was glad to know someone else, of much greater stature, understood this to be true.

I sat at his memorial service in the second to last pew and “watched” him move with the spirit of God from person to person, in no particular order, reaching out to those who sensed him, smiling at those who could not. I can't explain how I could "see" or "hear" Bruce, or "know" he was sorry. But, as he said of me, I am a keen observer of life. And knowing he was sorry, I could forgive and the pain mysteriously vanished.

I waited around at the reception afterward long enough to find and speak with John and Eileen Westfall, Ray Moore, Rich and Kim Hurst. I was worried about I-5 closing, going northbound, and the service, thanks to Lloyd Olgivie, had gone on for a couple of hours. I gave each a hug, thanked Eileen for thinking of me, urging John to find me. “It’s so weird,” John said, “we got to thinking of you and Eileen said, ‘See if you can find her.’” It was a miracle I was here, a miracle I could think of Bruce and not hurt.

This Christmas Eve, 2008, my youngest son, now twenty-eight, commented on something he’d read from Anne Lamott: “Forgiveness is letting go of the desire for a different past.” So for the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to integrate this with my endless cycling. Driving home in rainfall so severe my wipers were hard pressed even on high, this concept of forgiveness and a fifth question came to mind: Who would I be if it were not for Bruce?

The obvious clicked into focus even as the rain filmed  my windshield. I am—was and will be—the person Bruce recognized and named. I’m a friend, a scholar, a complex thinker, a gifted writer and keen observer of life with things to say that cannot be more timely for women—as well as men. Stuck? Events are immaterial in defining us. We are who we’ve been created to be. And if we’re lucky, we have someone like Bruce to help us see it.

He did well by me. I miss him and love him, and I count myself divinely blessed. 

A Thief in the Night, Halloween 2008

Happy Halloween

Halloween. I can’t sleep. I toss and turn, the house making more than its usual noises as it settles down, night deepening. Loud creaks, a crack. I picture chunks of it breaking loose and falling clean off. Ker-chunk. The wind begins to pick up. Fans along the top of the house clank. 12:30 a.m. Now 1:00, and I drift in and out, the house still making noises. 1:45. The wind outside pushes against the walls. The bathroom fans clatter. I’m in for it now, I think, and bury my head under my pillow to stifle the racket. Two a.m. Now I’m thinking of the night’s news, a man with a rap sheet two inches thick, breaking into a Seattle home and raping a woman at knife point while her children slept just down the hall.

What’s that?

I lie stark still, breathing hard, listening. I ease the pillow off my head, ears on high alert.

A sliver of light from the hallway lamp comes slanting under my bedroom door and 2:05 glimmers green from the clock by my bed. No, I finally think, it’s just the house, and I close my eyes. Not for long. This time I bolt straight up into a sitting position, staring at the door, heart pounding my ears so hard I can’t hear a thing. And my lungs don’t know what to do. They shiver and shudder in confusion and it hurts. I have to consciously tell them to take turns with in and out. In. Out. That’s better. Another noise… Someone’s in the house!

I don’t even reach for the phone; it’s sitting by my computer in the other room. So stupid. I’m going to be stabbed to death because I forgot the phone. Another noise and I throw off the cover, feet to the floor. Next thing I know I can’t pivot the doorknob key into lock! And my hands are shaking so badly I fear I’ll rattle the door in its frame. Hey you out there! Come get me! I might as well shout. Which way does the lock turn? Right? Left? Just as it clicks into place I hear footfall on the other side.

I freeze. Just for a moment. Then I’m across the room, grappling the lazy roll-up blind. Too loud. Half-heartedly, the blind at last gives me about eighteen inches. Good enough. I reach under, flip the window lock. Too loud! Every noise I make is going full blast. The window slides open with a trombone sigh. What, what? The screen? How do I get the screen out? I claw at the corner. Too loud too loud!! A loud snap, tooooo loud. The screen falls into the night. Now I’m trying to swing my legs out and over the sill, fighting the blind with more noise than a coop of hens all aflutter. I perch, one butt cheek in, one out, bare legs dangling in the wind. I hesitate. Maybe it’s just my imagination. And if I drop, I can’t get back in. And I’ll look pretty damn silly running around the neighborhood in bare feet and wearing only a short summer nightgown.

The rush and roar of my heart deafens me, pounding harder and faster than it ever has on a treadmill. Who needs a half hour of misery three times a week when all they need is someone to break into their house to give their heart a workout? I smell the sea. The tide’s in, the wind just right…a rare combination. Or maybe it’s just the salt in the sweat of my fear? All this darts through my head in a fraction of a second, whole thoughts, questions raised, curiosity up and sniffing like a chipmunk at its door while I remain dangling in terror half in, half out my window, straining, straining, straining to hear. Oprah of course would tell me to get the heck out of Dodge but I hang there.

I can see the slant of light under my door. If a shadow crosses, I’ll know. But then more noise and I drop, heavy as a brick, and land right on the screen, torking it out of shape. I’ve done this to a screen once before, at the old house. Dad had to fix it for me. There’s no one to fix this one, Dad’s dead, and a rush of loneliness rushes out of nowhere and takes me almost to my knees in sick fear. Dad! Dad! Tell me what to do!

I glance quickly down the narrow aisle of my side yard. I can dart in behind the rhodendrons, ease through the arbor vitae, then vault the floppy fish netting I’ve stapled behind them and land in the field behind the house. But what if I somehow get stuck in the netting, like Peter Rabbit? To say nothing of having to first tiptoe barefoot through the entire neighborhood’s unwanted cat poop! And once in the field? What then? Race over hay-stubble in my bare feet under full light of the moon? And to where? A single glance out a back window will give me away. Whoever’s in my house might--might?--have a gun and blow me to smithereens.

I glance the other direction, up to the front of the house. I dash for the gate. Shivering, trembling so badly I can hardly grasp the latch, I gratefully find it undone. The gate swings away noiselessly, but then collides with the gravel on the other side. Too loud! I give the gate a shove. The gravel grates, everything amplified. I squeeze around. Three steps. My feet find the brick I laid last summer. Just to my right is the garage. Tucked along the wall and beside the garbage can is a stump my dad made for my watering can. If I had my phone I could sit here in the shadow of garage and garbage, and call 9-1-1. But no phone. I have to get to a neighbor’s. Any instant the intruder will break into my bedroom and know I’ve flown the coop.

Do I go Lori’s? My neighbor on the other side of my house? But her porch lights will be on. One look out my kitchen window and the intruder has me in his sites. Who will get to me first? The guy with the knife, or Lori, wondering why someone’s ringing her bell in the middle of the night?

I sure as shooting ain’t going down to the mean Lori’s house. Down the street the opposite direction. Once-upon-a-time my boss, she replaced me in July with a twenty-year-old. I won’t get over the discrimination for a long time. Russell’s? I wonder. Across the cultesac? The scent of the sea is suddenly eclipsed by the garbage and I stagger forward, to the end of the garage and drive. What?

A car sits bold as you please in my driveway. I shrink back quickly and cozy up to the garbage can. Is someone at the wheel? Waiting for the guy inside to make his haul and come flying out for a quick getaway? I ease forward, thinking that the good Lori’s porch light might be bright enough for me to see. Yes, and no one’s in the car. Wait. . . Blake’s car? As in Blake, my twenty-eight-year-old son? Is that his car?

I dart quickly across the drive, past the face of my house and front porch. The accountant lamp on Grandpa’s desk, a warm glow behind the Venetian blinds, suddenly goes out. I plunge around the porch and gain the far side of the house.

The side windows are all over my head. No one inside is going to spot me while I work my way down to the back yard. But to where? Why? I’m losing all sense of rational thinking and I freeze at the back deck, mind paralyzed. Really, I can’t go up and peer through the glass doors to see if it’s Blake! How asinine is that? What if it isn’t? I have to find out if it’s Blake’s car. I have to. How?

I head back up to the front.

I’m passing the living room window when the wooden blinds above my head rattle. I jump a mile. Truly. I look up. Maybe it is Blake! A burglar, a murderer, wouldn’t be rattling the blinds. Would they? Or maybe they know by now I’m out here. My heart goes into overdrive. I cough on the pain in my chest and stumble forward, pause at the porch, car in full sight.

It looks like Blake’s car. Ah! I suddenly remember he’d been vandalized, that his radio has been stolen. I glance at my front window, where the accountant light is out. All is quiet. Very dark. No one is peering through the slats. I race to the car, peek in through the driver’s side. Oh my gosh, a gaping hole in the dashboard!

The relief is so profound and so swift my innards go warm and liquid and I nearly wet myself. True. At the same time I realize my feet are ice, and soaking wet from the grass that needs to be cut one more time before winter sets in. I stumble up the drive, knees so wobbly they’re knocking, stagger up the two cement steps and lean an index finger into the doorbell.

He doesn’t answer.

I use my thumb this time. Twice. Bing bong. Bing bong.

Get up, I say to myself, shivering and shaking and wondering how long I can stand. Then I hear him. He flips on the porch light. I hear him turn the dead bolt. The door swings open three inches. A very puzzled-looking Blake squints through the crack. Suddenly recognition lightens his eyes and, hand to his head and stepping back a bit, he says, “What the…”

“What are doing in my house?” I demand.

“What are you doing out there!”

“Someone broke in and I jumped out the window!”

“You jumped out the window?”

He let me in.

Of course I’m locked out of my bedroom. He has to go out and around and scramble up through the window. I try not to think of the damaged screen.

“How could you do this to me?” I demand when he sheepishly lets me into my own bedroom.

“I e-mailed you! I told you I might be staying over!”

“You didn’t e-mail me!”

“I did!”

I head for the computer, fire up Firefox. He’s laughing in the doorway and says: “When the doorbell rang and I’m wondering who might be calling? I never, ever, in my wildest dreams figured on finding my mother standing out there!”

And there’s his e-mail. i may sleep at your place tonight on the way back from vancouver, so if you hear a noise in the middle of the night don't be alarmed.

Who said better late than never?

I hear him wandering back to the living room and sofa. “This’ll be a funny story in the morning!” he calls over his shoulder. “We can have a lot of fun with this one!”

I kill Firefox. It blinks out. I trail Blake. “It would be a whole lot funnier if I’d had my phone and called the cops on you.”

“It would,” he agrees.

I turn back to my room. Gosh, that would have been funny!

“Someone needs to get you a tazer!” he hollers.

So guess what’s on my Christmas list. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Good-bye, Heather

She’d been born to die, my little sister, a gift wrapped in grief. Grief I first experienced through my mother, a stranger who came from the hospital without our baby. She wore my mother’s bathrobe and mindlessly she turned in her fingers the large shiny black buttons I loved. Who was this woman? Listless, she sat on the kitchen sofa, eyes puffy from crying, heedless to the growing collection of family and friends. They swarmed around her, fuss-clucking and full of God-words. She didn’t respond. Her Aunt Grace, our great-auntie, fixed supper. Joan, our boarder, set the table. Where was Heather?

My father explained. Mum had been dressing her to come home and was talking to my uncle, a resident at Vancouver General, when Heather went blue. Uncle Stan through quick thinking had saved her life. For now. But she was not expected to live.

One by one people took their leave. Aunt Grace said dinner was ready but Mum shook her head no and her plate was cleared away without comment. Dad lifted me into my high yellow chair and scooted me in. He did the same for Linda and Tresa. Seven, six, and just-about-five, me in the middle, I stared at our reflections in the large plate glass window on the other side of the table, wondering if the glass might fall in from the weight of sadness pressing against the house. Unable to eat, I pushed the food around on my plate. Dad finally cornered off some mashed potatoes, told me to eat this little bit, and I could be excused. “Leave her be,” said Mum and I burst into tears.

But it was the grief, like sunlight through stained glass, which made Heather’s fragile life so lovely. And how we loved her, my other sisters and I. The first eighteen months of her life Linda, Tresa and I only knew her only through hushed whispers and diagrams Mum drew of Heather’s heart with its all-but-missing wall between the two ventricles. The right ventricle, she explained to us is where the tired, used up blood, having run its course through our arms and legs, came in to receive more oxygen from our lungs. The left ventricle, she said, is where the refreshed blood got ready to sprint back out. But with a gaping hole between the two halves, Heather’s blood got all sloshed together. Her heart had to work twice as hard and still she’d never have enough oxygen to make her strong.

The doctors, Mum said, predicted she’d died within days. If not, then weeks. If by some miracle she defied all odds maybe, maybe, a few months. There was a good chance she'd never learn to speak, sit up. Or walk. Chances were good she’d slip into a vegetative state, her brain starving for oxygen. But when they brought her home eighteen months later, after her second open-heart surgery and not expected to survive the trip, one look at this frail little sister, so weak and so blue, and looking for all the world like me, my terrible grief eclipsed into magical wonder. God had hung a smile from the stars.

For a long time we were not allowed into our parents’ room where Dad set up Heather’s crib under an oxygen tent. Exceptions were made if we donned surgical masks and scrubbed our hands about raw with a huge yellow bar of Fels Naptha. We didn’t mind; we could kill her with germs we didn’t know we had. We could, however, peek through the door all we wanted. Sometimes I just sat on the cold tile floor and watched. Mum usually had her propped up in a corner of her crib, and Heather amused herself by watching butterflies Mum had made from candy wrappers. They hung from a coat hanger, I think. She also had Aunt Grace’s “Puppydids,” a mink shawl of heads and tails that she’d fallen in love with, and Auntie hadn’t thought twice about letting her keep them. At first, when I softly opened the door lest I startle her and inadvertently kill her, she’d stare at me without movement, but after a few days she smiled, recognizing me, a weak soft smile that came mostly from her eyes. “Hi, Heather,” I’d say. What I meant of course was “I love you.”

Even outside the room we had to be careful, and people criticized my parents for this. It wasn’t fair to burden us big girls with Heather’s uncertain existence. It wasn’t healthy, they admonished, that we had to be quiet once we reached the back corner of the house when coming home from school. It was wrong that our normal pursuits be secondary to death hovering at our door. Who were these people? They went to church. Didn’t Jesus say to think more of others than ourselves?

Heather blossomed in the warm rays of family sunlight. She learned to sit up, to talk, and, delightfully, to sing—a clear sweet voice that floated through the house like bird song at dawn. Mum began taking her outdoors on sunny days and let us push her gently in the baby swing.



When she gave Heather a bath in her bathinette out by the clothesline, sheets drying in the sunshine, we were allowed to pass the soap and help dribble water over her pale blue skin—as delicate and translucent as a poppy open to the sky. It hurt me, though, to see her scars, two zipper-like marks that ran horizontal around her rib cage, one under each arm. I’d distract myself by showing her how to wiggle her fingers in the water and make a splash; and I’d wonder at the courage she possessed.



By two-and-a-half she’d learned to pull herself up and could walk alongside the chesterfield; or, holding onto our fingers, in front of us. How she came by her black patent leather shoes I don’t recall, but the three of us didn’t begrudge her the shoes we had no dream of ever owning for ourselves. And as much as we loathed our Buster Browns—shoes so ugly and uncomfortable we had to stick our feet in an X-ray machine so the salesman could tell if a new pair was too big or too small—we took pleasure in Heather’s good luck. And I admired her for making liars of the doctors. At seven years old and seeing those shoes, I understood that prayer was not a waste of time.

When she turned three, a winter child, Mum pulled out my old blue snowsuit. And while it was Mum or Dad who dressed her, my sisters and I were allowed to mitten her hands. I treasured the sensation of tucking her little fingers into the warmth of mittens I once wore. “Three little kittens, have lost their mittens, and can’t tell where they are,” we’d sing. “Oh, Mama dear, we greatly fear, our mittens we have lost.

“What!” I’d cry, “Lost your mittens! You naughty kittens! You shall have no pie!” and Heather would smile. I lived to see her smile.

She had a bedtime routine. I might be busy doing cutouts, or playing a game with my other sisters, or coloring or reading to myself, but I found comfort in the schedule unfolding around me. Her jammies on, she first had to have her blue may-he-dun, then her pink. Never the reverse. Once Aunt Grace, when visiting, got it backwards; and she feared she might kill Heather for all the distress it caused. We of course sprang to the rescue and explained the error, and if Heather had two doses of Penicillin that night it was better than letting her heart gallop on.

After her mayhedun, she had to be carried about the house, shutting all the cupboards and drawers, everything tucked into its place and put properly to bed. Mum’s canary had to have his cage draped and the counter had to be wiped. Finally, sitting down on the yellow rocking chair before a fire, Mum had to sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and two verses of “Silent Night.” Once she tried to shorten the routine but Heather cried, “No, no, shepherd’s cake!” It took awhile to figure out, but eventually Mum caught on and settled back in and sang the second verse of the Christmas carol. “…shepherds quake, at the sight.”

The routine was soothing as oil, a serenity that became as much my goodnight schedule as Heather’s. Her stints at the hospital left the house empty and I didn’t sleep well and I rattled around with a hole in my own heart. When she returned, the house filled back up and I shut my eyes at night to a world very much at peace.

In the March after Heather turned three in December, Mum decided to give our new baby a bath in Heather’s old bathinette, brought out from the back bedroom and set up in front of the plate glass window in the kitchen. Heather was feeding herself in the baby table by the fireplace. Mum had just gotten Tim undressed, and he was lying on the bathinette hammock strung over the water, waving his little arms and legs and chewing on his fists, trying to find his thumb, when something slammed with a whack into the window. A rattle and crack and glass flew like rain. A grouse hurtled past me, bounced off the table, glass skittering, and landed, wings slapping the slate, on the raised hearth across the room next to Heather. She nearly came out of her chair, screaming in terror.

Mum darted for Heather so fast she slammed her hip against a chair and nearly tripped over the bird, as big as an owl, now flopping all over the floor and spurting blood. She whisked Heather, screaming, down to the other end of the house, calling at me to do something with the baby while I stared at wee Tim covered in glass shards. Behind me the bird was dying. Would Heather would die? Would the baby blink on glass and go blind? Would he cry and swallow some of it? Don’t let Heather die, God, don’t let the baby move!

Quickly, carefully, I picked at the glass. From around his eyes first, then his mouth, under his chin, his neck. He stared up at me, as still as stone. I worked my way down his little body no bigger than a sugar sack. Don’t let Heather die, don’t let Timmy move. I glanced up at the clock. Five minutes? So many pieces, tiny and large, and still I picked away at the spill. At last Heather’s crying ebbed and the baby I saw, checking him over, had but one wee scratch, on his ear lobe. Just a thin red line of blood. I slowly grew aware that the bird had ceased to stir and I swung around. The poor thing was dead; a heap of feathers, glazed eyes, and blood I couldn’t look at.

A few days later, the feathers and blood mopped up, Mum had Tim sleeping in Heather’s old pram in front of the hearth and warm fire, for it was raining, the drops steadily splattering the large new windowpane. Heather pulled herself up alongside the pram to take a peek inside, then reached for Tim’s hand and tucked a nickel into his palm.

“Look, Mummy. Heather just gave Timmy a nickel!”

She was sewing at the far end of the table. “Where did she get that?”

“I don’t know, but she gave it to Timmy!”

“What a little monkey,” said Mum, mumbling around the pins in her mouth.

Life was so lovely.

One night some time later I awoke from a deep sleep sensing something was wrong. I threw back the covers and crept into the hall. At the far end a sliver of light slipped through the crack at the bottom of my parents’ door. An eerie glow washed over Mum’s well-polished tile floor.

“Daddy? Daddy?”

I sprinted, bare feet cold against the tile, and inched open my parents’ door. He was sitting on the edge of the bed holding Heather, carefully keeping the oxygen mask a few inches from her mouth. She’d always been afraid of it. Put too close, she’d thrash in a panic. Years later, I understood. Rubber suffocates. No knew back then—though Dad didn’t need to. He always held the mask where she needed it, even though precious oxygen escaped. The lesser of two evils.

“Daddy?”

He looked up.

“May I come in?”

He motioned me to sit beside them. The bed sank a little under my weight. Heather startled. I reached over and took her blue fingers in my own and was happy it calmed her. At the end of the bed, Mum paced. In front of me stood the oxygen tank.

In the terrible tension and rushed tiny gasps of my sister, I became fascinated by the gauge needle slipping closer to the red empty mark. I gave Dad a running commentary. Finally, in uncharacteristic abruptness, he said, “Brenda, it would be better to pray than to chatter.”

I instantly let go of Heather’s hand, shoved both of mine down between my legs and bowed my head in agony. I’d been caught pretending she wasn’t dying. But she was. I did know this. And I knew that if she didn’t regain her breath within minutes, before the precious oxygen was gone, the sun would rise without my sister in its light.

Frantically I prayed. I begged. I watched the needle sink into the red zone, like the spinner in Shoots and Ladders settling on the line between six and one. And I reminded God of the grouse coming through the window and how he’d let her live. Do it again. Please. The hiss of the oxygen tank suddenly sputtered out. I slid my eyes sideways, afraid. But she was asleep, her lovely translucent skin the soft pink of sunlight at dawn.

“Daddy?”

He looked at me with bone-weary eyes.

“She didn’t die.”

“No, she didn’t,” and he reached with a smile to ruffle my bangs.

She died two months later while I slept.

Did it hurt to die?

“She just went to sleep, and woke up in heaven,” the preacher said that dull day mid-June, 1961, while I stared with stinging eyes at the little white box in front of the church. How did he know she just went to sleep and woke up in heaven? He wasn’t there; no one was there... Her third open-heart surgery and she’d been left alone….

In the tunnels of my mind I could see the slats of her crib slivered through with the low light of night at the hospital. Tucked in, needles sticking her, alone under the canopy of plastic and surrounded by her beads, her Ned the Lonely Donkey which was really mine, her string of red monkeys looped across the crib bars—and her Puppydids, of course, kissing her face while the oxygen pointlessly hissed. Had she cried out? Found no one there? While I slept? God’s smile hung from the stars came crashing down, and I stared at the white box in mounting panic, for I did not know where to find the scattered shards.

-----------------------

The story ends here. I'm 56 now. Heather died 47 years ago, and so I've spent 47 years looking for the scattered shards. A new book I'm reading, Sibling Loss, explains why. At nine years old I did not have the psychological development to create closure for death. And so the years have passed, her death never finalized in my mind. Writing about her is a way of bringing closure, of saying good-bye, of telling her I love her, miss her, and still weep for her.

And while I've spent my life searching for that lost connection I couldn't close, I am ever so grateful to my mum and dad for allowing my other sisters and I the eye-witness access to the fragility of life and it's exquisite beauty when reflected so clearly through the terrible prism of suffering. My little sister was a child of great courage, and even greater love, an offering she gave freely to all who knew her. Nearly half a century later she is an enduring blossom, and I still breathe the lingering fragrance of her life so well lived. I can catch the scent.

Good-bye, Heather.

A Date With David Denny

As some of you know, I often joke that I left my husband twenty-five years or more ago because I'd fallen in love with David Denny, founder of Seattle. Actually, I don't think it's all that funny. My love affair with the most profound man I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know has never wavered, and so you can imagine my delight when I learned a friend at my former job is one of David's great grandsons. And he has an old trunk full of manuscripts, photographs, letters, artifacts! Oh, my lucky day!





David's Trunk
And so I spent Saturday immersed in history, happy as a clam.

Very quickly, 19-year-old David and a pal he met on the road west landed at what is now Freeport Point, West Seattle, on September 24, 1851. The next day they explored up the Duwamish River, came back down, and around the West Seattle peninsula. Here they met Chief Seattle and a hundred braves along a stretch of sand that is now called Alki Point. David decided to build a city here. He dashed off a note to his sick brother in Portland, "Come at once, there's room for 1,000 settlers," and sent Charley Terry back down to Portland with it. He, with the help of Seattle's men, built the first cabin in what is now Seattle. The rest, as they say, is history.

You can of course read the whole story in my six books on David and Loui(z)a. Here I'm just going to introduce you to some of the material my friend graciously allowed me to see--much of which he allowed me to take home--including one of David's Bibles, some newspapers 120 years old, envelopes and letters, old diaries, handwritten manuscripts...


Here are some of my favorite things:

David's Bible.
What tops the list is of course David's Bible. He is one of the few men I know who lived his life as the Christian he professed to be--to the point of losing more than $3,000,000 during the recession of 1893. His brother Arthur begged that David shut down his many ventures, but David refused, saying that he could not put 100 men out of work. He could not let 100 families starve. And so he mortgaged everything, trying to stay afloat long enough to ride out the recession. He lost. By the time his brother's bank, no longer owned, however, by Arthur, was through with him, David was left with less than 25 cents to his name. He never recovered financially. He died poorer than when he arrived at nineteen years old. But he died with a reputation more valuable than gold.

The front flyleaf has his signature, dated Jan 18 - 1900. On the opposite flyleaf, Laurie has written: "Grandpa died at 3.36 Wed morning of Nov 25, 1903. Those present were Grandma Denny and Mother, Jon, Zeo, Inez, and Winnie. William & myself. [Added in ink is Zick Use, Indian.] Grandma held his hand as he passed away. The battle is over and Grandpa has the victory."

Letter from A.A. Denny to Rev. Bagley
This letter was actually written to a cousin of some kind of mine--Reverend Daniel Bagley, father of Clarence Bagely, a Seattle historian.

The letter is penned by Arthur from Washington D.C. where, as one of Washington's first Representatives, he was trying to secure the appropriation for Washington's university. The appropriation was important because having the university would put Seattle on the map and secure her position as the leading city in the Northwest. Arthur is, however, discouraged. He doubts he can secure the appropriation and allotted $40,000 "this time around."

But Arthur did pull it off, despite his discouragement. We owe the reality of the University of Washington to him.

David's Matches:
These are some of David's matches. I was amazed to see how they were made and packaged, almost the size of toothpicks, stuck together. And I thought today's matches were a bit dicey--always breaking!









David and Louisa's Glue Pot
This is David and Loui[z]a's glue pot. It looks like a double boiler, where water was boiled to soften the glue in the interior "pot." A pot similar to this, only larger, is what burned Seattle to the ground in 1889. The glue bubbled over and burst into flame. I think 66 blocks of downtown Seattle were reduced to rubble. Arthur actually got richer with this disaster. He and a buddy owned a brick company and a law was passed that downtown buildings and roads had to be built of bricks. If you go to a reading in the basement of Elliott Bay Books, you'll see the bricks.

Frying Pan w/Painting of a Cabin
The handle is broken off this frying pan. Still, you wouldn't want fry an egg in it. Someone's painted a log cabin on the bottom. It looks suspiciously like the first cabin built in what is now downtown Seattle, the foundation of which was laid by Loui[z]a and her sister-in-law.

It could well be the "honeymoon" cabin, or the cabin built up in the Swale where the Seattle Center is.

The artist is not identified but David and Loui[z]a's eldest daughter was a prolific painter.

Anna's Letters
The letters found in an envelope bearing the image of David Denny's Electric Railway Company and bound with a ribbon, contained letters to his daughter Anna from a lover I did not know she had. She and her Dad had gone back east, to New York, in 1888. Here she died of a sudden illness and David had the sad task of bringing her back in a coffin on the transcontinental railroad. In all of my research I never came across the fact that she was deeply in love, and to read these letters can bring tears to your eye, knowing that this young man would never see her again.

Louisa's Sweetbriar
David's step-sister and sweetheart, Loui[z]a Boren, brought sweetbriar seeds from Cherry Grove, Illinois, in 1851 as a tryst between herself and her best friend, Pamelia. Every July, when the flowers blossomed and grew, these clustered wild roses would remind Loui[z]a and Pamelia that they were never really apart.

The sweetbriar grew and spread and the early Seattle pioneers called Loui[z]a the Sweetbriar Bride. I conclude with a picture of her sweetbriar growing up and around my front porch. I am fortunate. The women in Cherry Grove, Illinois, pulled it up by the roots from her farm and gave it to me when I went back to speak to their historical society a few years ago. After three years of coaxing, it finally bloomed!

The inset is a picture of David, Loui[z]a, and their eldest two children--Inez and Madge. In all they had four girls and four boys. Madge died as a young girl in a flu epidemic, as did Anna while back east. Jon's twin died a few hours after birth. The family history is the story of Seattle, and I am grateful to know some of their descendants.

So many things in David Denny's trunk. . .

Merci beaucoup, Theron!

Blake Snyder and Screenwriters

I just spent a weekend with a handful of screenwriters and Blake Snynder, one of Hollywood's most successful spec screenwriters. Not that I want to write a screen play. I needed help structuring Temper the Wind, a story that's been in my head for more than ten years and which won first place in this year's PNWA's literary contest. But which is, did I say? stuck in my head? Stuck like Pooh in Rabbit's Hole?

Blake started out burying the title--not "killer" enough.

Then he and the others pushed and pulled and tossed out the trans-fat of all my old ideas and dieted me instead on new ideas. Weird ideas.

We ended up with a completely different story. But, hey, I'm no longer stuck.

This is Blake Snyder.

BTW: If you're a story teller? Get the book. And his blog is to your right, should you want to learn more about his 15 beats.