Smoke and the Unnamed Thing

Ugh. Re-reading this through the editing process is…not really uplifting. I almost thought of not publishing it at all because it seems depressing. But it's real, and life truly is not always rainbows and unicorns so I published anyway with advance apologies if I incite melancholy.

 
The sky has been wrong for days. Not the kind of wrong that passes by afternoon, but the kind that settles in and changes the quality of light, turns the sun into a pale coin behind gauze, fills the air with the smell of something enormous being consumed. Last week the Morrill Fire, Cotton Wood fire and the Road 203 fire have collectively burned over 750,000 acres and still had zero containment and winds were running 40 to 50 miles per hour across the panhandle. It is the largest wildfire in Nebraska history, burning through the state I came back to almost 25 years ago because it felt like home. I wanted my children to grow up near their grandparents, because Nebraska was the kind of place that held still long enough for a life to take root. It is not holding still right now. People have been evacuated. Families are watching from a distance while the thing they built burns. I am physically safe, which is the first thing you say and also the thing that feels somehow insufficient when the smoke is sitting in your lungs and someone else is losing everything.

 
I have been awake since 2:30 am. I woke up with the feeling again, the one I cannot name, and I have been sitting with it in the dark trying to locate it the way you probe a sore tooth with your tongue, trying to find exactly where the pain lives. Writing is the only tool I have for this kind of work. I am not a writer, I say that regularly, and then I sit down and write because the alternative is to let the unnamed thing just move through me unchecked, and that has not been working.

Morrill Fire Rages

Here is what I know is in the room with me tonight. Elise, my youngest, graduates in May and will be married a few days later and will move to Montana to begin her life as a teacher and as a wife, eighteen hours from here. I have watched her grow into one of the most extraordinary human beings I have ever known, not because she is mine but because it is simply true. She is the team captain and the prayer warrior and the least selfish person in most rooms she enters, and she is joyful during her wedding planning in a way that makes you believe joy is a choice she made and keeps making. All of this is right. All of this is good. And something in me is grieving anyway, quietly and without permission, the way a room grieves when the light changes and you cannot quite say when it shifted.

 
My parents are both 89. Dad will turn 90 next month on our shared birthday, which has always felt like a gift that we share that day, and this year it arrives weighted differently. Mom fell in December and broke her femur and the recovery has been one setback after another. Dad spent his whole life being the rock and now he is spending 10 to 12 hours a day at the nursing home and going home alone at night, worn down in a way I have never seen him worn down before. They have never needed help until this year, which means they have been my rock for 66 years, and now the ground is shifting underneath that, and I do not know what to call what I feel about it except that it is large and it does not resolve.

 
I am retiring from teaching and coaching in a matter of weeks. Fifteen years. Thirteen years coaching high school cross country, a decade before that coaching adults, a career built on the belief that you do not build champions so much as reveal them, that every kid, every human has something God placed inside them and the coach's job is to help them see it stride by stride, failure by failure, each hard workout another thread in their fabric. I wrote about my last state cross country meet in October, and I thought I had processed it, thought the writing had done its work. But it turns out processing and finishing are different things, and the ending is still arriving, and I am still not entirely sure what I am supposed to do with my hands now.

Firefighting Crew at Work

And then last night, on top of all of it, the news about the accident. Four young people from Elise's college. One fatality. One in serious condition. The one who died was a young athlete, a college boy, married young and full of whatever was ahead of him, and he was coached and mentored by one of my good friends, which means the grief has an address now, it is not abstract, it lives next door to people I love. A young wife wakes up this morning to a life that looks nothing like the one she went to sleep inside. Instead of beginning, something ended. I keep sitting with the specific wrongness of that, the way a young marriage cut short feels like a different category of loss than the losses I have been tallying, the ones that come with age and season and the natural turning of things.
And then there is Pam. Pam, who is one of my mentors and friends, founder of the art community that holds me and challenges me and calls me forward, who lost her husband Byron unexpectedly and has been navigating that loss with a grace I find both moving and humbling. Byron fed the birds almost everyday day. A few days after he passed, a starling (I think it was a starling) found its way into Pam's studio through two flaps of a small pet door, stayed for a few minutes, and then flew out toward the light. She knew immediately. She wrote to her tribe: I believed it was Byron then, and I know he is with me now. I have been sitting with those words for days, thinking about what it costs a person to lose their best friend, the person they built their life beside, without warning, without a chance to prepare. Pam has been showing up anyway, tending her community, encouraging the people around her, sending love outward even while she is still deep inside her own grief. I am in awe of that. I am also undone by it in a way I cannot entirely explain, because watching someone carry something that heavy, with that much dignity, holds up a mirror to every small complaint you have been nursing about your own unnamed ache.

 
I have been trying to find the name for what I am feeling and I keep arriving at the wrong words. Sadness is in it but sadness is not all of it. Guilt is in it, heavily, and most of the guilt has Pam's name on it. Not because she has asked anything of me, she has not, she has only ever been generous and present even in her grief, but because I watch what she is carrying and then I look at what I am carrying and the comparison does something uncomfortable to me. I feel like a man complaining about a splinter in a room full of people who have lost limbs. Comparison is rarely good. I know that, teach that. My pain is real, I know that too, but it curls back on itself when it gets near hers. I feel inadequate as a friend to her. I wonder if I have shown up enough, said the right things, been present in the ways that matter. My nature is to need time alone to process, always has been, and that nature that I have always defended as just how I am built now feels selfish and small when I measure it against what Pam and others may have needed and what I may have withheld without meaning to. The guilt of that is not clean. It does not point toward a single action I could take to resolve it. It just sits there, alongside everything else, adding its weight to the pile. And beside it: guilt for grieving transitions that are mostly beautiful, guilt for the exhaustion I carry when my parents are the ones doing the hard thing, guilt for feeling anything at all on a night when the sky is orange and people are watching their homes burn and a young wife is waking up without her husband.

One area burned by the fire

My sister suggested depression. I resisted it the way I resist most diagnoses, because I am the eternal optimist, the glass-half-full person, the one who genuinely believes the next good thing is right around the corner. Depression is not a word I have applied to myself, ever, and the resistance to it is strong. To my knowledge, I have not been depressed a day in my life. Sad? Sure, but depressed? I have been immobilized on Sundays. I have craved sugar in a way I do not recognize. I have no energy. I have attributed it to getting older and I think I have been wrong about that, which is unsettling in the way it is unsettling to discover that the story you have been telling yourself about yourself is missing something important.

 
The smoke outside is not a metaphor. I want to be clear about that. It is actual smoke from an actual fire consuming actual land, livestock and actual lives, and the people who have been evacuated do not need their suffering turned into my symbolism. But I will say this: there is something about sitting in a room at 2:30 in the morning with smoke in the air outside and a sky that has been wrong for days, writing about a feeling you cannot name, that clarifies something. The clarity is not comfortable. The clarity is: I have been running on fumes for a while. I have been so busy being the person who wants to show up but often doesn’t. The coach, the father, the son, the husband, the artist, the eternal optimist, that I have not given the harder feelings their due. And they are collecting interest.

 
I think what I am feeling might simply be grief. Not the clean kind with a single source and a name you can point to, but the complicated kind that arrives when too many things are ending at once and some of them are good endings and some of them are terrible endings and the heart does not always sort them cleanly into the right categories. Elise leaving and a young athlete dying and my parents needing help for the first time and a fire taking the sky away, these are not the same size or the same shape, but they are all losses of a kind, and they are all arriving in the same season, and I am one person with one heart trying to hold all of it.

A Starling for Pam

The Last Race piece I wrote in October, I ended it with two open hands. One open to receive and one open to give. I meant it then and I mean it now, but I will admit that currently, at 2:30 am, with smoke outside and a feeling I cannot name sitting heavy in my chest, the open hands are more of an aspiration than a description. I am working toward them. I am not there yet.

 
What I know, underneath all of it, is this. The young athlete who died this week was loved. He was mentored and coached and poured into by people who meant it, and that love does not disappear when he does. It transforms, the way my friend Pam said, the way physics says, the way faith has always said in language that arrived before physics did. My parents are tired but they are still here, and every day my father sits beside my mother in that nursing home is a day I get to witness what a life of faithfulness actually looks like up close. Elise is not dying or really even leaving. She is becoming. The distance between here and Montana is a measure of geography, not love. And the fire will be contained. Eventually. The wind will change. The sky will come back.

 
I do not know what I am feeling. But I am feeling it, which means I am still here, still paying attention, still showing up to the blank page early in the morning when everything is too much and the sky is wrong and the heart needs to find its words before the day arrives and takes them. That is something. That has always been something.

 
Keep making. Keep showing up. Even when the smoke sits low and the feeling has no name and the ground is shifting under everything you built on it. The open hands. The next good thing. The grace that has never once arrived on the schedule I expected but has also never, not once, failed to arrive. Life is good. God is good!

 
Still here. Still making. Still, somehow, full of hope.

Nebraska fires