8
The End of the Road

My husband made the call to leave the RV at a repair shop in Flagstaff and rent cars in order to make it to the show that night in Phoenix. We would pack what we needed for the evening, spend the night in Phoenix after the concert, and the RV would meet us the next morning—ready to drive us to Las Vegas for the next night’s show in Sin City.

I packed lightly. Everything fit into Annie’s diaper bag. I was convinced, after all, that the RV would be fixed sooner than we thought. I might even be able to get back to Annie’s room in the RV before we went to bed that night. It was just going to be an easy fix and our home on wheels would be a few short hours behind us. Based on our track record I should have assumed the worst, but my survival instincts kicked in. I believed the best because it was all I had left.

The RV was, in fact, not ready to meet us in Phoenix that night or the next morning, and we had to make a decision. Go back to where we broke down in Flagstaff, Arizona, and wait for our RV to get repaired, or keep the rental cars and head on to the next show in Las Vegas, Nevada. With a few guitars, duffle bags, and the clothes on our backs, we kept the rental cars and drove to Las Vegas, mostly empty-handed.

We didn’t have any of our merchandise, because it didn’t fit in the rental cars. All three thousand T-shirts, CDs, and other merchandise trinkets you sell in order to pay the bills while you’re out touring were in the trailer, which was attached to the RV. Computers, credit card machines, clothes, diapers, suitcases, underwear, baby toys, blankets, and all the special embroidered gifts that first babies get were in the RV . . . all of it. We weren’t prepared to last more than a short night and morning away from our home on wheels. But we didn’t want to miss the sold-out show in Las Vegas either. So we arrived at the venue with the outfits on from the night before and borrowed musical gear from our tour mates. I had two diapers left and was hopeful Annie would not have the classic mustard blowout she was notorious for.

Sometime that night, during dinner, Ryan got a call. He looked confused. He left the room. He came back. Ash white. Eyes wide with adrenaline and a twisted smirk on his face. He was smiling so he wouldn’t crack and break.

The RV had blown up.

There was a single explosion underneath the bed that Annie and I spent our time on. A fireball shot fifty feet into the sky. There were pictures. Our driver, Brandon, was sending video clips. He was somewhere in the desert outside of Las Vegas. Initially, he blacked out because the smoke was so heavy. The highway was shut down; police, firefighters, and paramedics were all on the scene. Everything was in flames. Less than five minutes and it all burned to the ground. It was all gone.

We gathered around Ryan’s phone to watch our world go up in flames with our driver’s words coming over the phone, hanging in midair. Gone. Explosion. Nothing left. What to do with the remains? My head was spinning. The world seemed to disappear; the voices grew blurry.

We were told it took state troopers six hours and specialized equipment to remove the RV’s metal frame from the highway because it melted right into the asphalt.

I was told it took specialized equipment to keep me breathing.

I had a complete breakdown.

Ryan and I lost everything that night. Besides the furniture and dishes back home, everything we owned was in that RV. Everything we owned had blown up. Five minutes and it all stopped existing. And after the year from hell, this was too much for me to bear.

I found a small, empty children’s nursery in the back of the church where the concert was being held. And I fell apart. I remember every single detail. The cracker crumbs on the floor, the taste of my tears, the feeling of nausea that overcame me, the disorientation, the ticking of the clock, the laughing voices of teenagers passing in the hall as if nothing had happened. As if life were easy and fair. I distinctly remember feeling a surge of rage.

Can’t they be quiet? Just shut up and stop being stupid teenagers, my mind and heart raged. Then I folded into a ball as uncontrollable sobs heaved out of my body.

The hardest part of suffering is that the rest of the world keeps going like nothing has happened.

Years ago I sat next to my husband’s grandmother in the hospital as she lay dying. My mother-in-law ran her fingers through Nanny’s hair and said, “It’s okay, Mama. Go home and be with Jesus. Go be with Daddy. Go home, Mama. It’s okay to go now.” We sang an old hymn to her, “In the Garden.” Tears fell, the silence wringing our souls out. Her breathing became more labored, each breath shorter than the one before. Each pause between breaths drawing us all closer to heaven. Each pause excruciating as Nanny fought hard to stop fighting.

And the nurses were talking way too loudly in the hallway. A little kid was running down the corridor screaming. Someone was honking their horn outside. And there were construction workers with cranes and equipment, banging and banging and banging their tools on the street below.

And I just wanted to yell at all of them, “Stop! Be quiet! Our world is breaking in here. We are walking Nanny to heaven. She is going to the freaking garden alone; please just stop.”

As I wept on the floor of that nursery in Las Vegas, wrestling with the final blow of the year that seemed to rob me of everything, my weary soul wanted the whole world to just stop. Everything in my soul wanted to beg the world around me for what it could not possibly give.

Just give me a minute to grieve—to wrap my mind around this—please just stop with me.

But the world can’t stop for every heartbreak.

If it did, it would never start again. So it keeps going. Little babies are born and people leave this life and pass on to the next with each tick of the clock. Diseases are diagnosed, art is created, marriages fall apart, community happens, people give up, orphans are rescued, businesses fail, cures are discovered, and earthquakes shake the foundation of the very thing we have come to rely on as constant.

And those who still have solid ground underneath them? They must keep going.

The world doesn’t stop for life or death or breakdowns or earthquakes, and it certainly doesn’t stop for fires.

The loneliness I experienced when my life went up in flames is hard to explain. When the world keeps going in spite of your suffering, you begin to realize that true grief is observed alone. What a harsh insult to injury. I know now there are some journeys you have to walk alone, no matter how many people love you, no matter how many friends you have, no matter what kind of community you surround yourself with.

The hardest part of my world crumbling was realizing that nobody else’s was. At least not in the same way mine was.

Not even my husband’s—and he lost the same belongings as me. A grief, truly observed, happens deep within the confines of your own soul. And if no two souls are the same, it stands to reason that no two individuals share an identical season of grief either. Grief is unique like freckles, isolating like puberty sprouting deep in your bones, private like discovering the curves of your own body.

And it was there—in that most private, desolate, lonely place where no one else could truly stop or could truly make their way to the depths of my despair with me—that I remembered with certain, haunting clarity her voice and his eyes.