Five Elk at Franklin Basin
By: Joshua Lew
McDermott
“I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility,
for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place
as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in
the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a
world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I
do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.” –
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Children are
logical. If you tell them that they can affect their physical environment
through prayer, they will follow that notion to its farthest
implications.
They will pray for
toys for Christmas. My friend Matt Bryson once asked me to pray with him when
he lost his dad’s pen during Sacrament Meeting. We were six, maybe seven. I
used to pray constantly that my mother wouldn’t die.
The morning when I
found her, unconscious, fighting for air in low, drawn out gasps, my first reaction
was to call 9-1-1. My second was to pray. I was eleven. I remember I was
wearing just my red boxer shorts. I ran into the living room, near the bay
window, and prayed aloud, bent over, hands clasped.
I know that sounds
dramatic, the kind of scene which is framed in swooping cinematography and a
tragic score. An eleven year old crying out to God to save his mother: has
there ever been a scene with more obscene conviction?
In the film, God
would save the kid’s mother. Or, conversely, the scene would cut to a funeral
home, decorated with floral drapes, and open with a slow zoom from the child’s
face, his hair neatly parted, dressed in a new suit. In short, the audience
would be spared the tedious, slow grind of the empty day to day living that
follows a death. And the boy’s conviction would, in one way or another, be inferred
as being admirable, even if naïve.
The true story is
much simpler. My mother did not die that morning. She died on a different
morning, six months later, in July. And I grew old in the remaining days of
that summer, which stretched on for years. It was so foreign, those dramatic
moments of my life. Foreign because they were so unlike a movie, so unlike the
storied trials of prophets and martyrs from the scriptures. So enfolding in the
dullness of their pain. So broad in scope. In other words, they, life, were so
unlike stories.
The horrifying
thing about death, the thing which feeds its grief, is its utter mundanity.
Confronted with this absurd foundation of life and death, at eleven years old,
all stories fell away. What remained of life was an austere, empty room. All my
memories before that point became glossed in the haziness of a dream. Stories
were so absent from my new world view that I could never have even conceived of
the question: “Why did you not save my mother, God? If you have the power to
bring the dead back to life, and I had the faith, why not save her?”
The morning she
died, all the stories and the potential reflexive questions that they could
have entailed, were lost. The camera was broken.
I had believed, as
only a child can believe, that God would save her. It was clear to me that
whole year that she was sick, and so I prayed every hour; I stayed up through
the night begging God and sporadically sneaking into her room to check her
breathing. If I had the faith, her death was impossible.
Now, looking back,
it’s clear that I was suffering from severe obsessive compulsive disorder,
anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. Yet at the time I was merely practicing my
faith with conviction: a logical outgrowth of the child who believes in the
story of Lazarus, in Joseph Smith healing the sick at the founding of Nauvoo,
in the power of Enos’s marathon prayer. I lived my life as a story, because that
is how it had been framed.
But then she died.
And God died. And faith died.
After God’s
funeral, the mundanity of life is unbearable. Speakers in the chapel on Sundays
drone on and on into a void. No one is listening, and no one cares. People read
stories from books and scriptures so remote from reality that their words blow
over you like a passing breeze.
You can’t eat.
Your aunt makes you a sandwich, but you don’t care. Nothing means anything
anymore, and so why eat? The sun just burns itself out, and you are overcome by
the absurdity of caterpillars.
I even tried to
continue praying, but in time I got tired of talking to myself.
The morning she
died, after I burst through the back door, ran across the yard, and collapsed
with shock, my father carried me to the front room and laid me down on the
green couch. A crying policeman stood looking at me through his sunglasses.
There was a paramedic in a yellow coat. And they meant nothing.
From the couch, my
eyes fell upon a Victorian doll standing on the bookshelf across from me. It
was my mother’s doll. And the doll did not emerge from the background, or seem
to glow, or communicate a message to me, despite the fact that I knew it was my
mother’s, that she had placed it on that shelf. The doll told me none of those
things, held no larger meaning other than being a Victorian doll. Yet, it held
my attention. I continued staring at it. It was profound in its emptiness. Pale
skin, synthetic blond curls. A lace bonnet. Painted rosy cheeks. It was obscene
in its total lack of meaning. Nothing. But it was my mother’s. And, I guess,
that’s why I even looked at it in the first place.
Epilogue:
This essay, and
its outlook, may seem bleak. But the loss of meaning was just my first eleven
years. Finding meaning has been the rest of my life.
And would you believe me if I said I’m better for it? Or that my OCD no longer bothers me?
23 years old now, I am hiking with two friends in Franklin Basin, Utah, amongst autumn-kissed trees and powdered mountain peaks. We drink water from a fresh stream near an abandoned steam engine, left from the days when this place was a frontier for lumber jacks and timber hunters.
And would you believe me if I said I’m better for it? Or that my OCD no longer bothers me?
23 years old now, I am hiking with two friends in Franklin Basin, Utah, amongst autumn-kissed trees and powdered mountain peaks. We drink water from a fresh stream near an abandoned steam engine, left from the days when this place was a frontier for lumber jacks and timber hunters.
We
come around a bend, and a harem of elk appears, passing confidently across our
trail. Two young bulls, a dull bronze color in the overcast light, and three
cows, their long necks and muscular legs just now thick enough with fur to be
rustled by the passing breeze.
What
do the elk mean?
Where
is my mother now?
Shhh.
Be quiet. And watch them as they disappear into the forest, breathing and
alive.
In other words,
decide for yourself: what do the elk have to do with my mother?
Read more by Joshua McDermott by visiting his poetry blog: mcdermottpoetry.com
Read more by Joshua McDermott by visiting his poetry blog: mcdermottpoetry.com
