My friend Jodi introduced me to a song several months ago by a friend of hers, J. R. Richards. The title is the “Far End of the Black”. It has come to be a meaningful gift that she gave me.
It is the story of a man who wishes that he could take care of the one that he loves, but life keeps getting in the way. At the same time he longs for her “to wash the harm from his back.” But the world is doing them both harm.
“In those days when nothing seems right,” he begins and then chronicles a liturgy of everything that is wrong. Yet in spite of it he hopes beyond hope for her. And for him. It is a sad soulful prayer of longing and determination and commitment that in spite of the world being against you, you can survive.
Throughout my life I’ve known people who just expect things to go wrong. I remember visiting a family in a hospital once after the father had fallen off of the roof and broken his back. His daughter was holding his hands, hovering over his face when I entered the emergency room. She was whispering to him, “Dad, we know all of our luck is bad. We’ve survived it before. We will now. We know how to live with bad. That’s all we’ve ever had.”
I remember once my folks took us all to the Florida Keys for a get-a-way. Everyone was excited. Dad rented a boat to take us out on and the motor died. We were stuck in paradise just floating. Dad got frustrated that his perfect get-away with his family was going horribly wrong. “This is just my luck,” he said.
Poor and homeless people have sat across from me for the past three decades and told me everything that has gone wrong in their lives. Unplanned pregnancies, lost lovers, families that fell apart, glorious addictions, mental illness, AIDS, former military who just couldn’t cope without the structure, companies that shut down or laid off…I’ve seen and touched them all.
In my own life, after decades of nothing going wrong, everything seemed to go array at once. Wave after wave of unwanted and unanticipated events hit me time and time again. For the first time, I was losing things and not gathering them up. Now I live alone and wonder what it is that I’m going to do next.
Yesterday morning was the epitome of it all. I had a swollen tightly wrapped leg from a surgery the day before. My car wouldn’t start and I had some places that I needed to be. I learned that things that I’d spent years building may soon be dismantled. I was lonely and sad. Chelsea called needed extra money for school as I sat paying the bills.
My son Jeremy called in the midst of all of this and over the course of two conversations we talked through mutual frustration. I called my daughter Kristen needing her help but called her back later saying that I’d just deal with everything tomorrow. I was sad and tired.
Then my friend Joan called out of the blue and talked to me about how much courage it takes to invest time in yourself, even at the expense of what you’ve got.
At the Bored meeting, I laughed because of tourists from Alabama and Mississippi who thought that everything that we said was funny. If you ever attend a Bored meeting, we are anything but finny.
Mom stopped by to check on her son.
Rebekah who worked with me for many years showed up with wine coolers and ideas about all of the good things that “we” going to do when we work together again.
I texted people that I love to tell them that I love them.
Then late in the evening, with my wrapped and swollen leg on my beloved back deck, I listened to this song.
On the far end of the black,
There is light.
There is light.
And it is you.
