Cold Hard
In the fog of grief, the practice of focusing on heaven helps ease my pain, but sometimes, I forget that tool is available to me, and it falls to the ground. On Monday, I was reminded to stretch, lean in, and pick it up. Look up to heaven. That’s where my peace—if momentary—can be found.
A few days ago, I was riding my bike, listening to Johnny Cash. My parents loved Johnny Cash. I’m not a big country fan, but there are some exceptions, and Cash is one. A few months ago, I’d heard his cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and was transported back in time to that June 2 day forty years ago, walking linked arms with my dad, up the aisle to join the man in an all-white tux.
Soon after hearing Johnny’s sweet cover, I bought the album—but forgot to listen until this week on a ride.
With Cash’s bass-baritone voice still in my ears, I arrived at “Sacred Cross,” the intersection where Joey died on that cruel, frozen ground. I paused the music. I needed quiet at this busy junction:
I replay a silent movie—the one I force myself to imagine.
I take in all the pain, the tragedy, the loss.
I see the unforgiving pavement—black asphalt marbled with concrete.
There is no crosswalk in sight.
I let it rest on me, move through me, let it have its way.
This practice is strange, good medicine: An inoculation.
Visiting Sacred Cross is not traumatizing or re-injurious. It’s oddly comforting. This is the cold, hard site of my biggest heartbreak, yet where I feel closest to Joey now, a complicated intersection of contrasting emotions. Straddling my bike, it occurred to me that this is precisely why mourners visit the graveside long after their loved one passes. In this case, this isn’t Joey’s “resting place,” he’s not buried there. But it is solemn, holy ground where he last stood, walked, lived, and then, in a moment, gone, taken up to heaven.
In the impossible quiet, I pull out a treasure—Joey’s handwritten page captured in a screengrab from my phone, a wholly affirming and loving note, he’d signed, “Yours forever.” I let that penetrate, too. Even here. Especially here.
It seemed time to break the silence.
I press play on my Cash album and hear the next song, the last one on the album. I hear the words “We’ll meet again.” Ok, so God has the mic now.
I listen with rapt attention.
Through Johnny Cash’s rich timbre, God’s voice tells me to focus on heaven—not to get stuck here, and that I will hold my beautiful boy again. “Know this,” he says, “I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again—as much as you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
It was an emphatic and gentle invitation to imagine the first moment in that next mysterious realm: the first time ever I would see his glorified face.
PS. Joey loved Johnny, too.