Surrendered

The man gazed into the night and glowered.

His brain was a knotted mess. He was a chaos of live wires arcing in all the wrong directions.

Distractions… All the mundane things that tugged him back to the world instead of declaring his grief— they were impossible to entertain.

It was wrong to think on anything that cheapened his loss.

Laughter, hobbies, work, even fear, these things were electrical tape, slapped on the sparking current of his sizzling brain… all they could do was melt, reduced to sticky ash and acrid smoke in the heat of his great pain.

So he severed himself from the world, a recluse chasing constant retreat. Retreat from the stimulation the screens and the noise… retreat from all distractions.

He needed a goddamned break. Not relief though—never!

He needed the world to quiet, just for a minute, so he could focus on the only thing that was still real: his memories.

Because his son had been his everything, and now that the boy had died, grief and loss were the only things left to him— the only things left that he could nurture and hold and cherish…. The only things that were true.

He had no wants, and only that one need: to swim with the current and spiral down to the bottom of the whirlpool where he belonged.

So he thrust those distractions out of his mind and hugged his pain and held it close. He polished it. He must brush it off and hold it close and raised it on the pedestal of his mind— free and clear of the worldly debris that cluttered him so cruelly.

For his pain was simply too great and awful to permit competition.

He had lost his beautiful boy. His child— the pain was all he had left. Nothing else mattered, nothing else ever could.

So he quit his job. Ignored the neighbors and their condolences and turned away from the friends who asked if there was anything they could do… He did not bother to delete his social media accounts, he simply stopped using them. And when he got in his car and drove away he left his phone, his laptop, and his wallet on the counter and his front door wide open.

Then he drove North, up the trachea of the mountains, where the wind blew bitter just like him.

And he drove higher and higher until he ran out of gas, then he stepped out of his car and left that behind too. He marched aimlessly into the blinding, snowing wilds, leaving everything and losing himself in the coldest hills.

Like a hermit— the thought occurred to him— he was like a hermit, one of the spiritual wild men from biblical times, who went away from the world to get closer to God.

… Except they were idiots, wasting their worship…

Because there was no God.

How else could the man explain the loss of his beautiful boy?

Once, so long ago, John had been a man of faith. When his life had been good, he had loved the Lord. And even after the cancer had it’s way with that perfect, undeserving child— John had still been a man of faith. He had hated the Lord, for letting it happen and that had been a matter of faith too.

Then, in the depth of his grief, John had seen clearly: If God had been real, then God would never have allowed it. That could only mean one thing. There was no God.

There was only one thing worthy of exaltation: the memory of his beloved child, the bleeding, haunted memory of that sweet smile, and that hilarious laugh….

He would worship the memory, no matter how bad it hurt. His son was dead, and all that was left was the ghost in his head, the neurons firing flash-bang images and sounds of their short time together.

He marched deeper into the indifferent forest.

He trampled wild mosses, stumbled trough the pines. He tripped on their gnarled roots, he groveled and crawled under their shaded boughs— onwards and up, hugging the rising slope of the earth.

He pushed on, until near the peak, just before the tree line, exhaustion finally quieted his body. He fell down in a slump under a wind-beaten tree. And let the mountain air make war and frost with his tear-damp face.

The sun began to sink, and he relished the chill that bathed his skin. It settled into his bones and felt right. The pain— so sharp and penetrating— the pain was a salve to his aching soul.

And as he shivered he stripped away his clothes, and threw them aside.

He lunged those few final steps, past the beaten tree like and onto the bald cap of the peak.

The last vestiges of his life now cast away, he lay himself back on the cold, stony roof of the mountain, and stared up into the darkening, unobstructed sky.

And he fell, languidly into the embrace of quiet. His mind suffered no distraction, but focused purely on his loss, and a great silence welled up inside him.

He did not feel the bite of the wind across his goose-pimpled flesh. And he did not feel the needles of ice piercing his nerves. And he did not see the pale stars dotting the heavens, nor did he hear the distant boom of rolling thunder.

All he saw was the ghost of his boy, painted across his minds eye: the smile bright as day … an urgent contradiction to the slack-faced, waxen child lying in a casket.

And he grimaced and shook, and sobbed, and smiled because this was the only way he could have his son back again.

It didn’t matter if it tortured him. It didn’t matter if it killed him.

Better if it did.

The thunder grew closer and the wind picked up…. And his body continued to cool.

Eventually, his system began to enter the shutdown of hypothermic shock, and it was there at the pinnacle of willful disconnect, that the man heard a whisper:

*

“You are not alone. I go before you always.”

*

And his heart thrilled. In his fixation, he thought this the voice of the spirit of his son— come back to him.

He called out with all his dwindling strength, “son?”

But the whispering voice said,

*

“I am He that was.”

*

And John’s world was all confusion. There, at the height of the mountain, the whole earth his dying bed and the sky his blanket, John felt the bewilderment of a spiritual awakening.

Even as his body shut down his soul cried out the wordless question.

The heart-stained “why” was poured out in John’s dying breath, and the Lord answered in the weakest whisper:

*

“Why didn’t I save him? I could not.”

*

And as John’s heart stopped and is brain burned the last of its oxygen, the whisper faltered. Ethereal and distant, like a dust beam cast by dimming light, the ghost spoke softly:

*

“Long ago I was the Father… I had the strength and will to create and protect. Then I made a mistake. I lost all my hope when my Son hung on that cross. He died in pain and my will was broken, just like yours. I can no longer lift a finger.”

*

And John’s brain fired it’s very last neural pulse. The hinge was swung open and his soul was loosed, and the shackle of his body was cast aside as haphazardly as any of the other belongings he had flung away from his person on his last day.

And he looked and beheld the raw truth of Holy Ghost, a pitiful and pitiable thing— floundering in memory and grief. Weak and dim, hardly discernible from the moaning wind.

And he looked at himself and saw all the same, and he heard God’s Ghost, whispering sadly:

*

“When one dies with our kind of grief at heart, the door to heaven remains shut forever— not because we are not welcome, but because we will not have it.

Our souls are tethered to the world like driftwood tangled in a fishing net lost at sea. I did not save my Son, and now I am lost. Lost in regret and longing. I could not save your son, or anyone else. All I could do was haunt and watch and remember and cry.”

*

And there was deep sadness all over the face of God’s soul…

*

“I kept trying to tell you to go back, to your life before your grief made you like me, but the best I could do was whisper, and you couldn’t hear me until it was too late.”

*

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Authors note:

This is pure fiction.

It’s not intended to be insensitive to people who have lost loved ones, nor is it intended to be an insult or criticism of any person of any faith.

It’s just a bit of a thought experiment, as to how I’d imagine the grief of losing a child would feel.

No thought scares me more than this.

This writing is also intended to explore a hypothetical answer to the question of why a supposedly omnipotent God would allow evil to occur.

My sense of belief fluctuates and I generally lean towards agnosticism. But I like the idea that if God is real, God is not an all powerful magician. There are limits to what God can do in the physical universe and the limits are the laws of physics.

So this is a little story imagining the process by which an all powerful God could have been reduced to a powerless, ineffectual state of longing. So I imagined God like a grieving father, a ghost haunting His own creation.

As always, I’m wide open to feedback and constructive criticism :)