My Brother's Keeper

Tragedy.  Defined by Wesbter’s as “An event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress“.  Now put the word family in front of it and you get “An event causing persons living together in a household, familiar with each other in deep ways, to experience great suffering, destruction, and distress“.  Tragedies have occurred in families since the first family to set foot on this earth.  Adam and Eve’s first born, Cain, took the life of his younger brother, Abel. 

Since that time, family after family has walked this treacherous road we call tragedy and wrote a new page in their family story that will never be torn out.  Tragedy is like that.  It is so deeply embedded in who we are by what we have gone through, that it is never forgotten.  The event that defines all other events in my life is the day my grandfather fell in a well on our family farm and drown.  Another young man drown trying to save him and a third has suffered mental complications ever since.  Three families were defined that day.  And since that day, all other events in my life are arranged around that one single family tragedy.  My first period started “the week of the auction, after grandpa died.” 

Nearly thirty years later, another family tragedy hit.  This time it was my own father.  He had struggled with a horrendous cancer that took his tongue, jaw bone, throat, cheek bone, and eventually began to eat away at his brain stem.  It was excruciating to live with.  The last time I saw him, his one eye had sunken lower on his face, where his cheek bone used to rest.  Bones are in place for a reason.  They keep order and protect things around and behind them.  It was just a couple weeks later that his caregiver found him in the upper loft of his barn.  He had shot himself.  The pain was more than he could bear.  The suicide was more than I could bear.  I hadn’t known my father for very long.  My mother and he divorced when I was just two and he spent several years of his life running from state to state before living in prison for several more.  One tragedy after another was beginning to pile up in his life… and ours.

This week we had a tragedy in our own community, on our own block, in fact.  I was driving home from work and the street was closed off.  My mind began to race, “An accident? A heart attack?...”  I called home and my husband answered.  The tragedy was across the street.  A neighbor.  So I got out of my car and went up to an officer and asked if clergy was needed.  It was.  Another family tragedy.  Another family will begin to define themselves by a day, a moment, an act. 

Most tragedies cannot be prevented.  Some can.  What makes them bearable and allows us to live onward, though the pain left behind is deep and wide, is the love those around us show and the prayers that are lifted on our behalf.  I am thankful for those who were praying as my three year old sister walked up to the casket and placed a stick of gum in my grandpa’s suit coat pocket.  He had stood at the door to the barn each morning with a similar stick in his hand, watching her waddle across our backyard to offer her morning hug and retrieve the gum.  I am thankful for those who prayed as I stood before a few lone neighbors and friends in my father’s back yard, wearing my clergy robe and stole, speaking words of hope and grace as tears ran down my cheeks at his funeral. 

Continue to pray for my neighbor, and yours too.  There are family tragedies all around us.  Some hit the airwaves more than others, but each tear apart lives and remain in the hearts of those who dangle along the family blood line.  In the first book of the Holy Bible, after Cain took his brother’s life and God had asked where his brother was, Cain responded “What am I? My brother’s keeper?”  The answer is yes.  Yes, each of us is.  Keep praying for those surviving family tragedy… today, tomorrow, next month, and yes, next year.  If we cannot love our neighbor in this way, tell me, how can we truly love them at all?