17

If I make my bed in hell, you are there.
—Psalm 139:8b

In the weeks following Adam’s death, Tracy and I reread Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I had studied the Letters as a graduate student in theology, but this time we read them together as an end-of-life narrative, as the story of a young man in his midthirties who is trying to come to terms with the loss of his own future. We read them in the same spirit with which Adam explored his own illness: not so much for help in coping, but for their insights into God’s role in our suffering. This was especially important to me, who had replaced my prayer book with an unabridged dictionary.

We understood that resisting illness is not the same as resisting Hitler, and living with cancer is not the same as life in a concentration camp, but we were both moved by an underlying similarity between Bonhoeffer’s faithfulness and our son’s. There is a current running through his letters that sounded familiar to us: it is the stripping of altars, the inexorable reduction of life to its touchstone. That was Adam’s plot too.

In Bonhoeffer we could hear the titanic struggle between survival and nothingness that went on in Adam. Already in the spring of 1943 he wrote a friend, “I sometimes feel as if my life were more or less over.… But, you know, when I feel like this, there comes over me a longing (unlike any other that I experience) to have a child and not to vanish without a trace—”

By January 1945, he had adopted a fully retrospective view of his own life. He made the telltale gesture of instructing his parents to give away all his clothes, including the salt-and-pepper suit and the brown shoes. According to the witness of the prison doctor, before he went to the gallows Bonhoeffer removed his prison clothes and knelt in prayer. On April 9, 1945, the stripping of his altar was completed.

In the summer of Adam’s death, the letter we returned to most frequently was dated Christmas Eve 1943. In it, Bonhoeffer writes wistfully of the gap that separates friends from one another by distance or death. He says that most people assume—mistakenly—that it is God’s job to fill in the gap with compensations, perhaps in the form of inspiring thoughts, diversions, or false expectations. Not so, he insists. In fact, the opposite is true. God keeps the gap open between us and those we love, “even at the cost of pain.” I later found a similar view of grief in one of Freud’s letters in which he reflects on the death of his adult daughter Sophie: “No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be.… It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”

“Parents of murdered children seeking closure,” the newspaper headline proclaims without a hint of irony. Sure they are. Along with “moving on” or “turning the page,” “closure” tops the hit parade of clichés oppressing the bereaved. “Closure” paves over the craters and cankers in the gap; it locks doors that, for the time being, should be left ajar. In our case, not only would closure suppress honest feelings of grief, but it would deny the love that made grief possible in the first place.

The truth is, we are all creatures of the gap, living out our days between the giddy promises of youth and the inevitability of death. What we find there is not resolution, but multiple contradictions. And religious believers are no more immune to them than anyone else.

Believers confess that God is good; yet, like everyone else, we live with losses no one in his right mind would call “good.” It will never be “good” in any spiritual sense that Adam never brushed his daughter’s hair, never read Goodnight Moon to her, and was not permitted, even once, to sit by her bed and study her while she sleeps. It will never be good for them to be apart. Far from defending God’s goodness, Lewis admitted, “Sometimes it is hard not to say ‘God forgive God.’ ”

What Bonhoeffer adds to the paradox, however, changes the believer’s experience of life in the gap: we live with these contradictions in companionship with God, who makes up for his many failures by sharing in our suffering. Bonhoeffer wrote, “I don’t want to go through this affair without faith.” When Tracy and I read that, we thought of Adam, who felt the same way about his ordeal.

A Jewish mystic said, “The more I know what God is not, the more I know about God.” “God” is not a synonym for security or happiness, a cipher for success. That god is an idol. Instead, we should be content to live as if God were absent or, as Bonhoeffer said, not a “given” (which is often the experience of those who suffer)—but always by faith in the One who is mysteriously present.

Believers often give God an excused absence by referring to his “transcendence,” as if it were a condition, like rheumatism, which would explain why he seems so feeble and remote from our lives: God is so far above us that we can’t relate to him nor he to us. But there is another kind of transcendence, based not on distance but convergence, which cancels out the traditional metaphor and ushers God into the world of homeless shelters, prison cells, cancer wards, and the human heart itself. God is so transcendently close we cannot see him, and so woven into the fiber of things that he remains hidden, like the key that is “lost” in plain view. In the Beatitudes, Jesus offers a clue to God’s whereabouts in the world: look for God in the poor, the persecuted, the dying, and those who mourn.

I remember our shopping trip to the mall and our Father’s Day outing at the ball game, when I watched my son moving slowly and in evident pain. At first, it helped me to imagine him in the company of a friend. It was the gaunt Man of Sorrows himself who was with him, like a gnarled cane or a walker supporting him in the passage from life to death. But as things grew more intense I began to see Jesus in him, as if he and Adam were doing the Stations together and the two of them had agreed to share a single, broken body.

I can still hear the shrill voice from the hospital room next to his: The age of miracles is not past. But now we know it is a different miracle than the one we dreamed about in the summer of 2005. Not the supernatural escape from illness, but the faithful companion in the Valley. Not the restored flesh we hoped for, but God in the flesh of those who suffer.

That’s why we loved Adam’s flesh—the graceful body with its underlying sinewy strength, but also the small tumors on his side and his pale white head—because what his body was losing in mass it was gaining in transparency. The sacred presence had always been there, of course, as it is in each of us, like stars on a cloud-filled night, but we had never seen it so clearly as when he began to die.

As long as we continue to eat and drink in community, we will never plug up the gap that separates us from our son, for every meal reminds us of how little self-sufficiency we can claim for ourselves and how dependent we are on others for nourishment. That’s the way it was in the summer of 2005, and that’s the way it is today. I remember how like a patriarch he presided at our dining table, covered with the signature dishes of friends and strangers, in a room so filled with love you could taste its saltiness. At the table where he said, “Tee it up, big guy,” and we recited “Come Lord Jesus” like children. I remember our family’s last supper at Adam and Jenny’s house with boxes of Colonel Sanders on the table. I remember his first communion when he was twelve and his last Eucharist on an adjustable tray in Room 9323 and the many tables that came between. I remember thousands of meals prepared by Tracy in “Peggy’s Restaurant,” including waffles every Sunday night, and the many graces spoken in unison at our family table. I remember the long table by the Potomac in Washington, D.C., when we raised our glasses to him and celebrated half the night. I remember our breakfast in the diner with a U-Haul parked outside. I remember the day of his baptism and the banquet of fried chicken, tortellini soup, and beer that followed. I remember the buffet after his funeral, paid for by the love of a friend.

All our meals belong to the open space in the gap, because we are never really finished with eating. We are never so full of love for one another that we don’t need to share a meal, and we are never so full of God that we don’t need him to feed us with bread and wine. When it comes to this sort of nourishment, Adam once asked, can there ever be “too much”?

I think about Adam a lot when I am alone, but I most often meet him at a table with others. That’s where Jesus met his friends too, at a table, where he was determined to be something other than history to them. When I approach the altar for Communion, the many meals of our lives coalesce into one. By faith, I sense another room, another table, another source of light, and join the feast in progress. The table is always dressed in white or gold as if for Easter. It reflects the glory of the Host who presides in our midst but never makes an appearance.

Adam is there too, as he was in our bedroom the morning after his death or during my hallucinatory night in the hospital. Then his presence was nearly palpable but marred by the aftershocks of death. Now his reality is no less powerful but in a more relaxed and companionable way. He is not tied down by oxygen lines, infusion bags, and the paraphernalia of suffering. Of all that he is blessedly free. He is no longer the man of dust we baptized and buried, but a child of perpetual light.

In the time it takes to kneel in an ordinary church, the company of those who had a hand in composing Adam, as well as those whose lives he touched, are gathered together for food and drink. We are in communion—but elusively so. From our perspective, we come and go, but for Adam it is different. He is no longer encumbered by sequence, schedule, and the need to be in the right place at the right time. Father David was right. He is present to God and we are present to him all the time.

I eat the scrap of bread, drink the wine, and then linger for a few seconds with Tracy, and sometimes Elizabeth, before tearing myself away from the table.

The service often ends with the prayer “that we may be one with all the saints.” Then we all leave the sanctuary and return to the clock and the day at hand.

The theologian Karl Barth once remarked, “God is so unassuming in the world,” which may be the only way those who grieve experience the presence of God. Nobody’s grief is characterized by sudden movements or dramatic reversals. Grief does not “break” like a fever.

I was reading some of the same psalms Adam and Jenny read before he died, more as a method of staying in touch with him than seeking a spiritual blessing. I noticed that in most of them the figure of God is bathed in light; but Psalm 139 strays from the familiar imagery by asking the reader to imagine that light and darkness are the same to God. If true, it means that God is capable of working in the dark. Which means that healing begins where creation began: in chaos and darkness. God doesn’t wait until the depression lifts or spiritual adjustments have been made before he begins to stir in the human heart. That afternoon in the cemetery when Tracy said, “Let him come to you,” she was referring to Adam—“him”—but I later realized she was also talking about God. There is nothing you can do: let Him come to you.

A few weeks after the funeral we took our grandson Luke to the beach, just the three of us. We stayed up late watching movies, eating Klondike Bars, and listening to the ocean. We turned out all the lights and lost ourselves in E.T., The Lion King, and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It came as something of a shock to Tracy and me that we could laugh out loud and grieve our lost son at the same time. Other bereaved parents may come to the same realization in the enjoyment of music, sex, or work. We found it first with Luke and Willie Wonka. We began to realize, even then, that other loves would form a supporting web of new tissue and cartilage around his irreplaceable loss. At some level, Luke understood that we were treating him as our new little boy. He accepted the role and played it to sweet perfection.

•   •   •

I later traveled to Indianapolis to give three lectures at a conference for newly ordained ministers. It was late in the evening of my second presentation, and I was more than ready to get back to my hotel room. A young black man named Marcus who had been waiting his turn in a small group of students finally approached me.

“Dr. Lischer, I’ve been waiting to ask you one question.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“How’s Adam?”

Who? Do I know an Adam?

It’s much easier to take a body blow if you have time to tense the muscles in your stomach. Then you say, “Now.”

“I was a student at Wesley Seminary while Adam was attending American Law School next door. We lived in the same building.”

Oh, that Adam.

“I was going through a rough time back then,” the young man said. “I wasn’t sure the ministry was for me. The money wasn’t there and my bills were piling up. When I met Adam I had already decided to quit. We played basketball every evening that fall, just the two of us, behind the apartments—one-on-one in the dark.” He laughed at the thought of it. “It was Adam who told me not to give up and not to quit. He always said I would make a great pastor. He told me that every night. I never forgot it. So—what’s he doing?”

I had a flashback to a mellow 2-L who was never so overburdened by studies that he couldn’t hang out with a friend, especially on an asphalt basketball court. I could see him in his baggy shorts and sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, no t-shirt underneath despite the chill in the autumn air. The baseball cap is backwards, of course, and later tossed aside as the scrimmage grows more intense. Finally, his voice: high, clear, and positive, assuring his friend that he belongs in the ministry. “If that’s your calling, man, you should do it.”

I already knew he was an optimist with a gift for encouraging others, but it was exhilarating to be reminded. My son considered me a hopeless pessimist, doomed by a lethal mix of Germanic genes and Lutheran theology. As a teenager he once created a file on my computer and bookmarked it for me: “Dad’s Problems.” He himself had the mind of a Catholic and the heart of a Methodist. One year for Christmas he gave me a book by a famous motivational speaker and forged the author’s signature along with the inscription, “To Rick, always do your best!” I have since found two other books on my shelves, both gifts from him and both with the same inscription. The odd thing is, when I read these forgeries again, I actually do try to do my best.

When the nightwatchman at Tracy’s office looks me in the eye and says cheerfully, “That young man never knew a stranger,” I want to reply, “Yes, yes, you’re on the right track. You’ve got a part of him all right,” knowing that the larger thing cannot be broken down into its component parts without losing the whole. It is too big for us to talk about just now. Who wants to stand around at the end of a workday and make small talk about the hidden immensity of grace?

It often happens in a restaurant or a checkout line, when the woman (it is always a she) takes my credit card and asks me if I was his father. She is curious, that’s all. “Say, were you Adam’s father?” Her question inevitably opens onto a conversation about who they were in high school, what a charmer he was, and how sad it all is. It is a potentially exhausting conversation that neither of us really wants to pursue to its conclusion, because it has no conclusion that can be achieved in anything short of a lifetime.

So I simply reply, “Yep, I was. Still am.”

So, “How’s Adam?” the young man asks. The question simply will not go away. There are others still standing around us, but the event is quickly breaking up into separate conversations on the way to the bar. I put my hand on Marcus’ elbow and steer him away from the traffic into a quiet corner of the room.

“Well, Adam has died,” I say, making it sound as though it had happened yesterday. “I mean, he is dead.” Too abrupt, especially for the young. “He developed cancer and passed away the summer before last. I am so sorry for you, Marcus. I mean, me telling you like this. This must be a terrible shock for you. I’m sorry I’m not doing a better job. You were friends.”

“Oh,” he replies, flatly. The smile is still there in anticipation of a happy story, but now it’s exposed and foolish-looking. “I have to think about this. Adam passed. Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

“I never do either, but I’ve got to learn.” We talk a little more about Adam’s passing, share a stiff, shoulder-to-shoulder embrace, and he heads toward the elevators and his room.

I have never told a stranger about my son. I have received words of comfort from people I don’t know well, but I have never attempted to console anyone outside my family. Later, I realize I have said absolutely nothing to comfort him. To a young minister, no less, I have said not a word about Adam’s goodness, his faith, his capacity for friendship, or my hope. Only that he is gone.

It occurs to me that I have acquired a new responsibility. I have become the interpreter of his death. God, I must do a better job.