Hope
by Kwan Yin
Note: Some names and details have been changed for privacy.
On the news the weekend before, they had reported it, two dead and one in critical condition after a murder-suicide. A young man had apparently taken issue with the dead woman, only named as his caretaker in the report and shot and killed her. He then shot another family member, and finally shot and killed himself. He was a young man, a kid really, only fourteen.
Even though I had never met "Davon", I sat with the others gathered in the crowded church to mourn the death of a child. I thought I was there to support a friend who knew the family, but I soon learned that as a social worker I was there to mourn a great deal more.
In the community, there were all kinds of stories of "what really happened". Some stated that the boy had killed the woman because he thought she was stealing the money sent by his father. Others told the story, popular among the young people, that another unidentified person had come into the house and shot everyone, and that this man was still on the loose.
Just before the service started one of the family members actually leaned over to me as a man was repeating this story yet again, and said, "You know we only tell ourselves that because it's easier than facing the truth. You know and I know that nobody else was there that night. My cousins were on the block when it happened, and ain't nobody run out the house after they was dead."
"Who gave Davon the gun?" was a question uttered again and again throughout the week following his death. His parents asked this question to blame someone, the neighbors asked because they worried that their children too would find guns, and the kids asked to have something to fill the awkward silences that seemed to fall all around them.
There were hundreds of people at this funeral, and most of them were young kids. Many were dressed in their street gear, boys in big baggy pants, girls in tight jeans and off-the-shoulder blouses that revealed just how young they still were. Through most of the service they remained dry-eyed, detached from the situation. I watched them to figure out what they were thinking. By the end I still wasn't sure. Maybe they were angry. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they didn't know what to do. Maybe they were numb. Maybe they just didn't care.
Davon's mother was there. She had been in prison for some time now, but they released her for a few hours to attend the funeral. She arrived in a drugged daze, and though I had never met her before this night, she waved hello to me and the other strangers, smiling wildly, more glazed over than any other mother I've seen at a child's funeral.
When I arrived at the repast, inadvertently I was seated at a table with several family members. There was a man next to me who was overly friendly, repeatedly asking about whether I had come with my boyfriend, and if not, whether I wanted a boyfriend. He appeared to be high or inebriated. He talked about inappropriate topics and laughed at strange things. The other family members either tried to ignore him or shift his attention to something else (like the child who had died). Even as I tried to ignore him and his advances, he actually gave me his phone number before I left.
The next day I sat at my desk staring at this scrap of paper trying to figure out what kind of man would ask out a woman during a child's funeral. I suddenly noticed the man's name, and realized he had the same name as the child who died. I talked to my friend who had also been at the funeral and asked if that was the child's uncle, godfather, or namesake. This person looked at me and laughed. He said, "You didn't know? That was Davon's father."
To look at these angry children seated all around me at the funeral, and to look at the parents in their drugged dazes, and then to look momentarily and selfishly at myself, the young girl who used to be armed with dreams and confidence in saving the world, the grief was overwhelming. The pastor who led the service was very energetic, and as with most of the African-American Baptist services I have attended, I was moved by the faith that filled these people. As one of very few white people in the church, I tried not to stand out. I clapped my hands along with everyone else when the music and dancing got going, but more than usual, I felt a bit hypocritical in celebrating this death. One pastor reported that we could rest easy tonight because he knew that before this incident Davon had accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. He acknowledged that obviously Davon had not come into relationship with Christ as he would, had he lived long enough, but that we could be assured t hat the child was in heaven.
Other people went on to say that he was mostly a good kid. Several grandmotherly women described how Davon had done housework for them, or how he would come to chat with them at least once a week just to keep them company. Friends and family members alike described him as quiet, mostly respectful, and that the way his life ended was so unlike the ways of the young man they knew. On the side, several people did whisper that he had inherited his mother's temper, but that murder was still outside what they knew Davon to be capable of.
Besides his parents, at least a hundred people from the young man's family attended the funeral. They were all dressed in ties and dresses, finery appropriate to the occasion. They spoke in low tones, and one deacon rose to ask how many times his family will go through such earth-shattering tragedy.
The pastor spoke in raw terms too about how he could feel Davon's frustration with a life like his. In this neighborhood, life had become a game in which buying and selling drugs were what kept you "living the life." Davon's was also a life in which parents never said no to their children, if the parents were even home to say anything at all. The pastor spoke about how we as a community have failed our children and that we must renew our commitment to our families and our children and our lives in Christ. He asked people to stand with him as a testament to the fact that we would join his commitment.
Even though many people around me stood, I could not bring myself to stand. It's not that I was offended by the sentiment. I'm not a Christian, but Jesus Christ was a good leader, and I would stand to support him. In that moment though, my heart was too shattered by the grief and anger and confusion all around me. I thought of the children I work with and thought, they too have helped me clean up the office, sat and talked with me politely each week. Many of my boys are very quiet, and they all have similar backgrounds: parents in jail, abandonment, drug culture infiltration. Rejection, negativity, and violence all around them. Death is too fine an option for many of these kids, and even Jesus couldn't save this child. If he couldn't do it, who am I to stand up and say that I will?
I was beginning to feel that I would leave this service without any hope at all. Before I left though, one woman gave me reason to go to work the next day. She stood up to sing, and just before she began, she told the gathered congregation that she knew the family was deep in grief right now, a grief that seemed endless and without reason. She let them know that the love of Christ will bring them through. She told how she herself had lost all of her own children under tragic circumstances in just one night and that at the time she did not think she could go on, but that God's love brought her through. In the next breath, her voice filled the huge church with a song of redemption. She sang about going up yonder to the Promised Land, and the hope and knowledge she had of that place. The young people around me finally started to lose their steely facades, and many broke down in tears, hanging onto each other to keep from falling to the ground. Her song and her survival of grief seemed to touch these kids where they could still hurt. She gave me strength in a time that survival and strength seemed ludicrous to hope for.
In the week following the service, I watched several of my children more closely. One young man became slightly more distant this week. I don't know if it was my perception, or my desperate prodding that made him seem so far away. I can't bear the thought that I can't save everyone, and I certainly can't bear to know that I'm losing someone sitting right in front of me.
I tried so many ways to find inspiration or to avoid the desperate hopeless that was beginning to fill me. I immersed myself in helping one of my "success cases". I left my visit with her this week thinking that just maybe I could stay in this work long enough for her to finish the program, and then I would go. I also engaged in lofty dreaming with friends that we would all leave our day jobs and start a film production company. I had some idea that filmmaking would be something easy, something without consequences. Something that wouldn't keep me up late at night wondering what else I could do, and something that wouldn't wake me early in the morning, trying to get to the office before anyone else so I could get a few more things done before the ruckus of the day began.
Almost a week later, I was reading the Sun magazine, and there was an excerpt from a book by Claude Anshin Thomas called At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey From War to Peace. He writes about the experience of being an American soldier in Vietnam, and his journey to Buddhism as part of his recovery from addiction and his confrontation of his own suffering. He writes, "I wanted to apologize through Thich Nhat Hanh [a Vietnamese Buddhist monk] to the Vietnamese people, to make amends in some way for all the killing, but I didn't know how. Finally I worked up the courage to ask Sister Chang Khong, "How do I atone for the destruction that I was responsible for in Vietnam?" She said to me: "If you blow up a house, then you build a house. If you blow up a bridge, then you build a bridge." "But if I killed a person," I said, "how do I make that right?" She repeated what Thich Nhat Hanh had said about non-veterans being more responsible than veterans, but I knew that I had asked her a question that she couldn't really answer. I had to find my own way."
And then later in the article: "While I was [at the Plum Village Monastery], I kept asking myself what I could do about the lives that I had taken. I couldn't reconstruct them. What I am discovering through Buddhist practice is that by waking up and living consciously, I can begin to repair what I have done. I've come to believe that the universe does not work by simple arithmetic: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bridge for a bridge. But by decreasing the reservoir of pain and suffering, we can save lives and even create new life."
This was the first truly hopeful thing I had found since the funeral.
Finally at the end of this long week, I talked with my priestess, a woman I admire deeply, and told her of another personal worry. Someone in the neighborhood had been harassing me, and though it was really a minor thing, and the man was obviously mentally ill, I was afraid to be home alone. My nerves were raw, likely exacerbated by the compounding of grief and hopelessness I felt. As we talked, I could see her concern growing, and I could feel her gaze searching my face for a way to help. I was so touched and intrigued that someone else could feel this overwhelming urge to help. She hugged me and put her arm around me. I melted into this human touch. It was the first time in so long that I did not have to be "the brave one". I can't put into words what it felt like to have that release of fear and know that someone else was worried about the same thing, but for my sake alone. She too has experienced deep grief in her life, and yet her reservoir of hope and compassion has not dried up. This too, is hope.
Between writing, I've walked from room to room in my house. It's early afternoon now, and the sun is creating a glow in some of the rooms that were shadowed in darkness this morning.
What kind of hope can I find now in my sun-filled meditation room? The incense that lingers since my early morning meditation or the music that still plays in my ear, or the leaves outside the window turning orange and red, they all remind me that the seasons will still turn even if I stomp my foot and demand to be taken back.
Still, I return to the question at hand. I mean, really, how can I keep "my kids" from becoming that kid? What even separates my life from becoming as desperate as his, and all the other young lives like his? I, too, saw the disintegration of life inside and outside my home, and I somehow turned out alright. As I was growing up, my family could have been counted among the disenfranchised at times, accessing public handouts when there was no other way. This made me angry and ashamed and sad in a way I could never admit to my friends growing up. I knew abuse and poverty before I "studied" about it in school with my academic peers. But in the end, I worked my way through college earning the degrees to address these issues, and now I live in a warm house, eat organic yogurt for lunch, and get paid a living wage salary to walk these city streets where the names are different, but the needs are the same. I live everyday knowing that I could have been a completely different person with a few simple choices. But why?
Tonight, my priestess, who showed me such concern, planned and held a healing service for me. She and two coven members gathered and laid their hands on me guiding me to release this negativity and hopelessness. This healing was a transcendent experience, beyond the words I have tried to use for days to explain away what has happened and why.
Logically, I should still be beyond hope. Nothing has really changed. Two people are still dead, one an abused, neglected child who turned to murder in his last moments. Bad things will continue to happen on this earth. Somehow though, this human contact was an experience that replenished my hope in the world, just like the hope known by the woman who sang of her beloved babies going yonder, and just like the Vietnam Veteran who had figured out that a stagnant arithmetic problem was not the solution to suffering.
I'm a social worker. According to our very practice theory we like definitions. I can't ask a client to work on a problem without stating a method or how improvement is measured. So I don't like it that I can't put in specific terms why my spiritual life has given me hope again. I want to put this intangible thing in a box and package up this something that is too large to even be defined, let alone wrestled down with packing tape. The hints are in the sunny corners of a room in silence, the moment of meditation before the day begins, a woman's song, a turn of phrase, a laying on of hands, but sometimes hope remains, without explanation or logic or reason.
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