And Yet

a personal note on death

this essay is a companion piece to this poem and vice versa

There will always be a childhood that we deserved but did not get. It has been hard for me to accept this. I have not lived as fully, richly and helpfully as was possible, because I am always trying to correct or atone for - or just forget altogether - a childhood I did not ask for and cannot fix.

Gary Gilmore was executed the same summer my grandfather died. I was not at that time unfamiliar with death. Animals died all the time in my life - trout, milk snakes, cats, chickens, ducks, sheep, cows, deer. But until the summer of 1976 the possibility that humans might die had not seriously occurred to me.

I’m sad to say that Gilmore’s death affected me more than my grandfather’s. But that’s not quite right. My grandfather’s death affected my father deeply. And in his understandable grief, my own struggle with Gilmore - which was a religious struggle - was undertaken largely without him. He simply wasn’t available. My father didn’t see what was happening in his son because something bigger and more pressing was happening in him. Attention is always finite. There is always a loss somewhere.

Yet it was my father - my beautiful burdened father - who had taught me why Gilmore’s death mattered. Gilmore was a condemned man - he had done terrible things. His life was a litany of destruction and hurt. Everyone agreed he deserved to die. What else was there to say?

It was my father who taught me the value of “and yet.”

And yet.

Gilmore was executed by firing squad. I knew what guns were. I had taken lives with guns - pheasants, squirrels, raccoons. I knew what guns did to bodies. I had seen the wounds; I had touched the wounds. And I did not understand - I could not understand - how you could intentionally do that to another human being. The state of Utah paid men to shoot Gilmore. I remember asking my father would he have taken that money and he got very angry at me. My mother got angry too because it was wrong to burden my already-burdened father. So I did not get an answer to that question and, in a sad and difficult way, my life shaped itself around that question. Would you take the money? Would you drive the nails?

Sometimes I use the word “rupture” to describe that time. Something broke hard in me, and the ones who were supposed to help me heal could not and so I went unhealed. In the end, it wasn’t just Gilmore who died, or my grandfather. It was my faith in my father to have answers and help me solve difficult questions about suffering and death. In 1976 a hard and determined loneliness began, one I have never fully escaped.

I tend to write in ways that make it seem like I’ve got my shit together. But the truth is, I’m a hard and difficult man. I’m arrogant and evasive. I drove some of the nails and I took the money. And yes, I learned why we don’t do that, but I learned it the hard way and I was not - I am not - the only one who paid the lesson’s cost.

Often when I tell this story I say that as a boy I wanted to console Gary Gilmore. And it’s true, I did. I couldn’t bear he was alone in a cell counting the hours to his appointment with bullets. His body would be torn and the life - the life Jesus and my father insisted was not worthless but of immeasureable value to God and they are right - would bleed out of him. Gilmore did deserve consolation, but I think what I am really trying to say here is that I needed consoling. I can dress it up any way I want but I was scared and I needed someone to tell me it would be okay. They did not because they could not. I am - and this is - what happened next.