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Chapter 2

The Suffering

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      Jake’s throat and chest tightened. He looked up at the trees. It seemed as if the redwoods were about to totally close in on him, toppling and crushing him. Breaking into a run, the question Why…? pounded away inside his head. The Blackness all but enveloped him as he thought of his mother and father, of the terror they and all the others must have felt during those last moments when the plane was spinning out of control, plunging straight down toward the ocean.

   He ran faster. The echo turned into a silent scream that found its way down into his larynx, then burst out through his mouth, into his voice, into one simple, long drawn out, “Noooooo… !”

      As it always did, his screaming out loud the word, “No…!”  broke the tension, acting like a flashlight cutting through the Blackness. He slowed his pace. Flinging himself at a nearby tree, he threw his arms around the tall redwood and hung onto it, the way he sometimes used to hang onto his mother when he was very young and afraid of something

      Jake buried his face in the long, narrow strips of bark layered on top of each other like thin shingles. The soft bark absorbed his tears as mucus flowed from his mouth and nose. The tree’s clean smell soothed him. He felt like a small animal burrowing into the trunk of the tree, trying to escape whatever psychic predator was after him.

      He missed them so much. He missed them so badly. Why did it have to be them? Why were they taken from him? How could God let this happen? The God he had loved and trusted for so many years? The God who had kept him safe, who had brought peace and a sense of hope to his young heart every time his mother and father fought? Did God even have anything to do with it, he now wondered? Or did God just stand back and let things happen, let planes have mechanical failures, let them crash and kill people like his Mom and Dad and those eighty-three others?  He thought to himself, was there even a God at all?

      Jake, starting to sob again, clung even more tightly to the redwood. Then he remembered to take a deep breath. The breathing really helped. That was the one thing, the one gift, which Mary, the grief therapist he had worked with, had given him. She hadn’t been able to answer his questions about why the plane had gone down, or why his Mom and Dad had to die. She couldn’t tell him where they were now. She couldn’t tell him what happened to people when they died, and she couldn’t take away his fear of dying, especially of dying in a plane crash.

      No, she couldn’t answer any of these questions. But she did teach him about breathing. Whenever the pain started, whenever the anxiety came up, whenever he felt the terrible emptiness and loneliness in his heart and soul, conscious breathing helped. She said if he could just breath deeply, breathe all the way down into his tummy, as she called it, it would ease the pain, and he would feel clearer, more relaxed. Mary was originally from England and the way she said tummy always made him grin.

      Anyway, the breathing worked. It always seemed to work, bringing light into the Blackness, taking the edge off his pain, and making room for the Suffering. The Suffering was something different, unlike the Blackness The Blackness was his. It was his private, personal demon, the hurt of his own great loss, the worst loss any child could ever undergo. The Blackness was all his fears, especially his fear of dying, rolled into a dark, terrifying ball The Suffering belonged to other people. It was their pain, their fear. It was the pain of the world.

      Jake invited the Suffering into his life a few months after the plane crash. It was in response to being afraid of the Blackness overwhelming him, when he was sure he too, was going to die. He happened to pick up a newspaper his Uncle Keith—who was now, officially, his foster father—had left lying around. There was a photograph of some scared-looking children, boys and girls in their early teens and younger, standing by a house, next to some dead bodies.

      The picture was from Kosovo, in the Balkans, where a war was raging. The bodies on the ground were the children’s parents. Serb paramilitaries had forced the three families living in the house to come outside. Accusing the adults of being supporters of the resistance movement, they killed the parents in front of their children, shooting them before their very eyes. The children stood there terrified, paralyzed, looking into the camera with grimy, tear-stained faces. Jake felt their pain and wished he could reach out and hug them. He wanted to say to them, “My parents died too, in a plane crash. At least I didn’t have to see them die, like you did. I am so, so sorry. I wish I could do something to bring them back for you.”

      Jake cut the photograph out of the paper and put it in a scrapbook along with the accompanying story. Afterwards, he began reading the paper every day, as well as the other news magazines Uncle Keith and Aunt Belle bought. When they finished with the papers and the magazines, Jake cut out photographs and stories depicting violence and war, pasting them in his scrapbook. He titled the book, “The Suffering.”

      There were pictures of the revolutionary war in Sierra Leone showing children and adults, whole families, with their hands and sometimes their feet and ears hacked off. Rebels would come by and do this terrible thing to people without a second thought. They would line them up by a table, or something with a flat surface, and force them to stand with their hands outspread. They were terrified, crying, whimpering, knowing the rebels would shoot them if they didn’t obey. Then one or two of the rebels would go down the line, and using machetes, chop off the people’s hands one by one, as if they were chopping off the heads of bunches of celery. It was almost too awful to imagine.  

      Whenever Jake looked at these photos, like the one showing an entire, sad-faced family holding up their mutilated arms, he always knew, if it was him, he’d rather be shot first. What he would do, he had convinced himself, would be to fight back, to try and take one of their guns. Of course, it would probably get him killed, but at least he would have died trying to take some of them with him. But he would not just stand there and let them chop off his hands or his feet while he watched. He was determined never to be such a victim.

      There were many other pictures and stories in The Suffering album. It seemed that in so many countries around the world, people—adults and children—were  either being tortured, abused and killed, or were dying of poverty, disease, and starvation. Whenever he looked through his growing collection or just paused to remember it, as he was doing now, hugging the redwood tree in the dark coolness of the forest, it completely took him out of his own pain.

      He even felt somewhat connected to what people called “God” again, though he had stopped praying. He didn’t believe in prayer anymore. After all, who or what was he praying to? He didn’t know. Still, he intuitively felt as if there was something bigger than the world itself—some intelligence or power behind reality—which was the source of everything, which connected everybody and everything together.

      He tried talking about it once to a writer for Life magazine who was interviewing him six months after his parents’ death The topic of the story was the different ways people coped with the loss of loved ones due to an air disaster. Jake told the writer meditation sometimes helped calm him. His Dad had once showed him how to meditate, to sit, breathe, and be still, and try to feel the wholeness of everything. He told the writer both of his parents were very spiritual and taught him a lot. But since the death of the two people he loved most in the entire world, he admitted his faith in God was pretty well shattered.

      Even so, what hadn’t completely gone away was the feeling of a connection to something larger. He wasn’t clear exactly what it was, but because of this connection he somehow felt a responsibility towards all the people who were suffering in the world. Though, being young himself, he related mostly to the children.

      Obviously, it wasn’t because he personally caused their suffering. But since he knew what it was like to suffer and lose someone you loved, he felt he had to do something about it. He did, however, feel at as loss as to what to do. After all, what could a kid who had barely turned fifteen, who no longer had a mother and father to guide him in life, do anyway?

      As Jake looked up at the densely packed redwoods all around him his tears finally stopped. He breathed again, a deep sigh. It felt good to have his arms around the tree. It felt good to inhale the clean, fresh perfume of the forest. Even the decaying matter, the rotting twigs, redwood needles, and other leaves underfoot smelled good. It was the smell of the earth, the pungent, fertile odor of life.

      He remembered another thing Mary, the therapist, told him. She said that grief came in waves. Sometimes the waves would be heavy and intense, and at other times they would be gentler and calmer. She said that over time, the intensity and frequency of the waves would decrease, and the periods of calm would be longer and longer. She said it would probably take a few years before the worst of the grief passed.

      “It may never be completely gone,” she added, “You are always going to love and miss your Mom and Dad, Jake. Even ten years from now there will be sorrow in your heart for them. How could there not be? You loved them, they were a part of you. They were your family, your kin, you shared a great love. There will always be the awareness of what you have missed with them being gone, and a sadness for what they missed by not being here to watch you grow up.”

      Mary put her arm around his shoulders during the session, and stroked his hair with her other hand. “And I wish I could answer some of your questions about where they are now and what really happens when we die, but I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. We can only trust that they are in Heaven…” Her voice trailed off. “Of course, I know you don’t believe in Heaven.”

      Jake didn’t say anything. It wasn’t so much he didn’t believe in Heaven, but so far, no one, not even Reverend Jeffries, the Pastor at the local Episcopal church, was able to satisfactorily explain just what or where Heaven was. But that was a whole conversation in itself, and he gave up trying to engage Mary, Reverend Jeffries, or anyone else in it.

      “Goddamn it! It’s so unfair! Why did it have to happen to me?” Jake pounded his fist against the trunk of the tree, sending pieces of bark flying everywhere. He felt the Blackness starting to descend again.

      Crying out, “Oh God, help me!” he started to run.

      He flew along the narrow trail, trying to outrun the pain, fleeing the Blackness, which, like the trees themselves, was pressing in on him, beginning to suffocate him. He ran so fast that branches of the undergrowth whipped at his arms and his body. He didn’t care. He ran faster. His eyes were so blinded by tears he didn’t see the fallen limb across the trail ahead of him

      When he tripped, he instinctively threw his arms out to break the fall. Through his tears, he saw a rock jutting up from the ground. Turning his head, trying to avoid it, there was a loud crack, an explosion of light, stars, and a searing pain which seemed to split his head in two.

      Then there was just darkness.