SITTING PLACE

We searched the beach for over 28 hours. People pitched in like people do in disasters. Every mom and dad, every semi-drunk teenager, lifeguards, waitresses, policemen and bikers, people who in the common everyday would never work for the same purpose, people whose hearts called them to help the couple with the stark pain on their faces...all kinds of people helped but it didn't matter. We never saw her again. The police said she most likely drowned but her body never washed ashore. They told us to go home. If they found something they would call.

I hadn't really let myself feel the impact of her dissappearance. I had been too preoccupied searching the beach and comforting my wife. Several of her family members had come down and offered to drive her back to Houston. I needed some time to myself so I said okay. As I was driving back, numb in the aftermath of my shock and disbelief, I started to lose control of my feelings. I held onto the wheel desperately like it would give me some kind of control over the world.

I fought down the violent, screaming horror in the pit of my stomach all the way back to Houston. I drove through Memorial Park. Hendrix was on the radio, Purple Haze, off Are You Experienced? The monster started emerging and I knew I had to pull over or risk an accident. I punched my fist against the volume knob to bump Hendrix's screaming guitar and peeled off the road into a parking area. I slammed into a curb, killed the car, got out and ran. I just wanted to be away. I wanted to find some place where that deaf, bloody God could hear me when I cussed him out. I wanted to be some place where I could scream and not worry about answering the questions in people's eyes or reading it in the papers the next morning.

That's when I found my "sitting place". I sat on the shelf, beating my fists against the earth until I was exhausted. Then as I lay there, hollow, completely surrendered, softly crying, I began to hear the noises around me. First the bird voices, clear and crisp like I was hearing them for the first time...then the wind, the soft breathing of the earth, the insect sounds.

I had a sense of the incredible diversity of life. A sense of order emerged that I needed desperately. I found a wholeness and a continuity to the life in that little glen that gave me peace. And as I sat there looking and listening with the wet eyes of a child, I felt her, my little girl, in the air around me. I could almost hear her laughter in the hiss and whistle of the breeze that swam lazily through the treetops. I called her name and somehow...she answered. I knew somehow...that she was alright.

Looking back, I know that was the day I quit being an onward Christian soldier. My old fire and brimstone god died with my daughter, a minor blaze on the bonfire of my anger and despair. It was also the day I discovered, for the first time since my childhood, that there was magic in the world.

My little Rivi never came home. My wife and I were haunted by it. Only our love for the two sons we were to have soon after and our resolve to be full and whole for them gave us the strength to overcome our loss. Still, sometimes I find myself searching through a group of children...