Tom
March 15, 2004 This weekend I actually accomplished one and one half things from my list of things I needed to do. I got the living room halfway cleaned. By this I mean that I actually vacuumed the floor. This required removing many things that had found a happy home on our floor. Some things were nice enough to stack themselves like apartment dwellers, but there were a lot of single family homes on the landscape. I felt like a slum lord pushing all of my tenants into a life of homelessness. Unfortunately, they all seemed to have found happy homes on higher ground. I will have to deal with them later. In the meantime, if I haven't already mentioned it, my Dyson really sucks.That was my Saturday. I didn't mention falling asleep on the loveseat after I had vacuumed behind it, did I? Well, a nap should have been on that list of things needed to be done. I would have assured myself greater success by listing at least one nap.
My Sunday was much different than my Saturday aside from the nap I took on the loveseat after church. I stayed up much too late on Saturday night and did not want to get out of bed Sunday morning. My thinking gets muddled when I have only gotten a couple hours of sleep and I groan pathetically whenever anyone says anything above a whisper. Will would have none of it, though, and told me to push myself. I did as requested. We all got to church in time for Sunday school classes. Will has a separate class that he has been attending that is about leadership. I have been attending the main class in the auditorium. We are starting a new class this term. I was very sleepy, but the lesson revolved around whether the modern-day Jew is still waiting for the Messiah. The gentleman teaching the class used some information he found on the web at Judaism 101. It was fairly interesting because I had always assumed that Jews were still waiting for their Messiah. It suddenly seemed odd to me that I have known many Jewish people and have never attempted to ask them about their beliefs on that particular topic. I used to work as a nanny when Will and I were first married. I worked for two different Jewish families and never once did I broach the subject. I am usually more inquisitive than that. I suppose I didn't want to jeopardize my position by having them think I might have strong Christian beliefs. One family included me in some of their holiday observances and I really appreciated that. This was also the same family that would openly speak with distaste about Christians. I am glad that I am not a person that things like that stick to. I often find it interesting how much I can remember about my life without it having any actual weight to it. I love people and I love their idiosyncrasies. God did make us wonderfully interesting.
The thing that happened this weekend and left a most heavy imprint on me, though, happened as we were singing the invitational hymn. The hymn that is supposed to encourage those who need to be baptized to come forward. Will and I were sitting by ourselves up front on the far left. We always sit there. Lily had decided to sit with the youth group and Clara sat nearby with her friend's family. We all stood and sang I Surrender All. The nice thing about the church of Christ is that we sing a cappella. Sitting up front, like we do, we have the advantage of hearing all those behind us and it is quite beautiful and uplifting. As I was in the middle of singing, something behind me caught my attention. The man that was in the pew behind us had suddenly passed out. I turned around to find him lying limply in the pew at rather an odd angle. His face was unnaturally red and his hands were quite blue. His breathing was shallow. I didn't know this man. We have an attendance of about four hundred, but it is rare for me to not know at least a person's face. Someone yelled out for Dr. Brady and within seconds there was Dr. Brady with Gina. Gina is a nurse and works at Dr. Brady's office now, but she used to work as a paramedic. I suddenly realized that this man had a little girl standing over him in tears and that she was getting in Dr. Brady's way. I took her hand and had her come sit with me where she could still see her father, but not be in the way. I talked to her and told her that everything was going to be all right. I hated the feeling that I might be lying to her, but I didn't think I was important enough in her life for her to lose complete faith in human beings, if things went awry. This is harder to do with one's own children. Or, at least, it should be.
I found out, through talking with this girl, that her name was Alex and that she was eight. I also found that she had a brother named Beau standing with rather large eyes on the other end of their pew. I brought him around with his sister. Apparently, they had only just started visiting our congregation. They told me that sometimes this happens to their father and that their mother wasn't there because they were divorced. She lived nearby, though, and Alex had her cell phone number memorized. When the paramedics got there, the congregation was in the middle of singing the closing hymn and it struck me as both odd and beautiful. I took both of the children by the hand and led them to the office to call their mother. They didn't want to go, but they limply followed me when I took them each by the hand. I didn't think they needed to be there for all of the paramedic action. I called their mother and told her what was happening and she seemed oddly detached saying something about this wasn't the first time this had happened. I told her that I would wait for her at the church and she could decide what to do when she got there. I had assumed that she would want to find someone to watch the children while she went to the hospital. Am I so naive? I let the children talk to their mother for a minute and then we went back in to check on their father. He was standing up white-knuckling the back of a pew. The lead paramedic told me that they were encouraging him to let them take him to the hospital. They even had the gurney popped open and ready to go, but the man was refusing. The paramedic talked pleasantly with the children for a minute and then looked back to me and said that they couldn't force him to go because the man was lucid. The paramedics packed up and left the man to Dr. Brady. When the mother arrived, most of the congregation had departed. She took the children by the hand and told them to hug their father goodbye. She was going to take them with her to a friend's baby shower. There was some discussion about getting the children's things out of their father's car and, then, they were gone.
By this time, we were out in the foyer and I was sitting on the floor in front of the man that I finally had a name for, Tom. Tom was sitting on a bench looking quite beaten. We talked for a while and it seemed that Tom has been quite depressed and under a lot of stress during this divorce. He had actually spent three days at a nearby hospital that is considered as having one of our country's best cardiothoracic units. They didn't know what was wrong with him. He couldn't sleep anymore and he wasn't eating anymore. All this he was telling me and I could sense that the only reason he was sharing this with me was because he was still very shaken. You could see that he was at a point in his life where he felt completely beaten down. I found a couple who were willing to drive him home while one of them followed in their own car.
As he left, I gave him a phone directory and pointed to the page with our picture and phone number and told him to call us if he needed anything. I could no longer resist the urge to hug him and so I did. Then he was gone.
On the way home, I sat in the car feeling horrible. Divorce is a terrible thing. It is too foreign to me. I can't imagine not caring about William. I can't imagine seeing him in so much despair and just walking away from him.
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Comments:
Your story about Tom has really touched me. I'll be praying for him and his children. Divorce, no matter how welcome, is so very difficult. My husband went through a deep depression during his divorce from his first wife, despite the fact that it was mutual. I really fear that unless Tom finds some peace, something drastic might happen! Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: Medb at March 18, 2004 12:23 AM
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