My Testimony part 2: Tony
[Here’s a link to the playlist on YouTube]
Here’s the second of four parts of “My Testimony.” This story has as much juice as it’s possible for a story to have for me. I don’t know whether it means everything, or nothing, or something. I know it means one thing if you’re the 40 year old man in the story and something else if you’re the fifteen year old boy, and something altogether different when you remember it as a 48 year old man with his own fifteen year old son.
Goodbye, Tony. Tony Kissinger. You had a hard hard life. You’ve had rest since 1991 or so. I think you’ve been resting in death longer than you were tortured in life. I remember you and your hat and your sunburn from falling asleep on the men’s fishing trip, the trip when you had friends. The trip my father invited you on. I and the other boys my age, we were afraid of you.
I see you differently, now, Tony. I don’t know the details of your life, but I know they were hard and bad. Too hard and bad for a little boy to have had much chance. I remember your rage and screaming at Daddy, and Daddy telling you about God’s love, and believing it, and you believing it, and me watching the two of you sitting in the car in the driveway. I never prayed, but I prayed for Daddy to be safe, because you were really scary to me. You were big and rough and burly and as unstable as radioactive plutonium. But I know now how you raged because it was so hard just to live. I wish there had been some help for you. I wish there had been some help for Daddy. He wanted to give you the help that he wanted someone to give him, I think. You’ve been in my mind since you walked into our church that day. I was out of town when you died in my living room, but I saw the pellet holes in the door, and the new couch, because your blood soaked the one I sat on nights to watch westerns with Daddy.
Daddy who wanted a gentle life so badly. He wanted a life where he could work quietly on meticulous hobbies, like writing calligraphy on glass. Instead of that, he was mistreated as a child and then became a doorgunner in Vietnam. He dedicated himself to finding peace through his relationship with God.
I come from a different time and place. I had strange experiences with love, and boundaries, and intensity. It’s a weird testimony, but it’s mine. It’s all just how life worked as far as I knew.
It might be part of Tony’s testimony, too. He’ll always be part of my story. I don’t want to die in a rage against myself the way Tony did. Maybe without Tony’s story interesecting with mine I would have missed out on something that stuck in my mind and has helped me try and live a good life for myself.
Or maybe…maybe it’s just hard to hold reality in your hands and let yourself see it without it meaning anything except what it was. Life and death and love and mistakes and grief and things you can’t take back and pain you don’t want and a life you get to live just this one single solitary time.
On this Easter I think of you, Tony, and new life. World without end, Amen.