The Utterance of Light

We don’t set an alarm clock in our house.  In fact, not counting the last days of her first pregnancy when my dear wife tossed and turned across 290 degrees like a compass lost in a tornado that time could be marked by her regular whirlwind tours to the bathroom, it’s been 1,045 days since we last set an alarm clock.  That’s the number of days since our world was graciously shattered by the arrival of our firstborn.

I’ve always considered myself a morning person.  6 a.m. has never been a problem for me.  I don’t want to be awakened by the sun.  I want to awaken with the sun.  To make sure of it, I would gladly set an alarm clock.  When our daughter was born however, the alarm clock took on a life of its own.  At first it was giving bottles and changing diapers, two things she seemed mysteriously well equipped to call for with great consistency and bravado.  This meant that a 5 a.m. feeding was barely worth going back to bed over.  In two hours the alarm clock would coo and yelp me awake again anyway, and one hour after that I’d be racing to catch up with the sun, and to get to work. 

This morning, however, I rolled over at 7:50 a.m. alarmed only by the sound of silence.  “Sweetheart,” I said, “guess what time it is?”  The shades were drawn and I couldn’t see if the sun was out or not.  At such an hour, I knew it was, but neither of us was jumping up to beat it or greet it.  Not today.  Ever since Bernard’s accident almost three months ago, our lives have been summoned to attention by a whole new alarm clock: anxiety, restless hope, the ever pending call from back home saying the hospital called, we should go there.  I say this not as an attention-seeker or self-pitying fool.  Rolling over to hear my wife say, “I don’t want to get up.  I mean, I don’t want to get up,” I knew the clock had truly caught up to us.  For well over 60 days she has been the one to get the daily updates, to hear that yesterday’s 2 steps forward are today’s 5 steps back.  She has been the one to get on the phone with her dad daily, not necessarily to talk, because at times he just can’t, but to say, “Hi Dad, it’s me.  I’m so proud of you.”  She is not an ignorant optimist.  Just the opposite.  She’s a crazed realist.  She sees it all for what it is–a hard, nearly impossible feat of healing whose only medicine might still end up being death.  And given the choices between life and death, you don’t have to choose life–many don’t, and that is okay–but if you’re going to choose it, let it know that it’s been chosen.  So she makes the daily call and speaks proudly of her dad.  And so Bernard has come a long way back towards life.

A few weeks ago he quite literally won his freedom from I.V. drips and gurneys.  With no more rushes to the operating room, with no one and no thing keeping him asleep, he could, for the first time really, sleep.  Now I have heard about people who can sleep when they must.  A soldier stands watch and is relieved, but soon they will have to stand watch again.  They best sleep while they can.  Albert Schweitzer once said, “We can do only what we can do. But if we do that each day we can sleep at night and do it again the next day.”  I suspect a soldier sleeps fine then not because the ground is soft or the night silent but because they have done what they can do, and they’ll be just as fine with waking up because they know there is work to be done and they can do it.  All this to say, the best sleepers are those who embrace sleep as their only important work to do.  Don’t do this and we find ourselves waking up too soon, or waking up on someone else’s terms, which is the same thing.  Being something of a crazed realist himself, perhaps suspecting full well what lay ahead of him–life or death–and deciding it was going to be life, Bernard made good and sure then to first get some sleep.  And then he woke up.  No one can say for sure what rattled his cage.  It certainly wasn’t an alarm clock.  I’d like to imagine it was the same thing that woke us today: the utterance that though we could not see it, the light had to be shining.  “Sweetheart, it’s 7:50 a.m.”  Another day had struck.

Beginnings, getting started, should not be underrated.  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”  A thousand miles on foot would be one hell of a journey.  For most of us it’s enough just to try for the first step.  That’s how God did it.  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and earth, there was nothing much–an empty space .  And it was dark.”  It might as well have been a bland, whitewashed hospital room.  But there wasn’t nothing.  There was a beginning, a possibility.  And God was there.  At first God isn’t doing anything of obvious consequence.  Just hovering.  Just breathing.  Just scoping things out.  And then, as if now good and ready, into nothingness, yet out of nothingness, an utterance: “Let there be light!”  There’s no waving of the arms, no focusing of the eyes or tilting of the head.  There’s not even a single step taken.  It’s only necessary that one say, “Alright, let’s get moving.  Give me some light!”  “And so there was light,” records the Good Book.  Oh, there was still darkness.  It wouldn’t be all light all the time.  But now one could always find their way out of the darkness.  What is more, we can now see what the darkness is not.  It is not permanent.  It is not terrifying.  It might be–it can be–a rather quiet and safe space to return to for a snooze.  That we might awake again and do what we can do.  Even if it’s only to utter: light.

Afterword…

12 hours after 7:50 a.m. and not wanting to get up, I found myself sitting on the bedroom floor at the base of a laundry mountain.  Perched on top of the mountain was my two year old son, who was determined to keep me from scaling the mountainside by dismantling my handiwork one pair of folded underwear at a time.  He had me going no where.  Outside it was indeed dark.  In the background was the sound of my daughter taking a shower, giggling at what I was pretty sure I should find out but didn’t want to know, and Bruce Springsteen pumping out, “Waiting on a Sunny Day.”  In a moment the water from the shower head shut off and a minute later the song ended, which is when I heard what is perhaps the proudest sound of my life yet: my daughter singing very loudly, “I’m waiting, waiting on a sunny day.  Gonna chase the clouds away.  Waiting on a sunny day.”  I got up and walked into the bathroom ready to tell her that at 3 years old there was absolutely nothing she could do from this day forward to disappoint me.  She was kneeling on the shower floor in a pile of bubble bath suds, her hands caked with foam and drawing shapes on the walls.  I was pretty sure I’d have to answer for that brand new bottle of Disney Bubble Bath later.  Lifting the shower head off the wall I smiled and told her there was nothing she could do to disappoint me, at least not in that moment.  “We should probably hose the shower down, sweetheart.”  “Let me do it daddy.  I promise I’ll do a good job.”  Unwisely, I handed her the hose and walked out to check on my laundry.  My bedroom now looked like a cotton field.  Sticking my head back into the bathroom I saw that the ceiling was soaked, and not just over the shower.  Somehow even the dry towels on the other side of the shower doors, on the other side of the room from the shower, were a bit drippy.  Fortunately it wasn’t hard to find a dry one still.  Someone (no saying who) had draped one over the lamp in my bedroom.  Wrapping her in it, we went into her room to find some pjs.  Her brother followed.  Sneaking back to the bathroom to mop up the ceiling, I came back to her room to find them sitting on her bed shaking loose her piggybank.  Inside they had discovered a bunch of folded up sticky notes with messages on them.  I did not know they were in there.  They were to my daughter from a very good family friend of ours who now lives too far away from us but who used to come over every Monday night for two years to hangout with her.  (It would be inappropriate to say that she came over to babysit because you don’t babysit what belongs to you, and that’s pretty much how she said it was going to be.  There would be no transactions, no obligations.  Just belonging.)  She must have slipped a note in her piggy bank for 100 weeks straight.  We probably owe her for the coins and bills in there as well.

Pulling out a bright green piece my daughter gently peeled back the creases to proclaim to her brother: “Hey buddy, it’s for you.  It says, you are a good little boy and I love you a lot.”  And then she correctly named its author.  Maybe she and her Monday night keeper had a little secret going between them about the piggy bank.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  My guess is, she just knows where love and kindness comes from.

Climbing into bed tonight I can’t say what time we’ll be waking up tomorrow.  But if you’re Bernard, and even if you’re not, I think I see the sunlight poking through here, just a little west from where you are.  Until it gets to where you are, I’ll keep uttering it for you.