Almost an Elegy, Part 2 6 comments

By Bradford Winters

That isn’t my brother, whose nearly fatal bout of septic shock from a bacterial infection I described in my last post. That’s my good friend, Nick, who, like many others, had added his prayers to the cause over the course of the three weeks that my brother remained in ICU with first his life, and then his extremities, on the line.

Until he, that is, Nick—fraternal by faith if not by flesh—was killed in a freak accident on his tractor in upstate Connecticut.

Just when it looked like my brother was officially out of the woods thanks in part to all those prayers, Nick’s included; just when I saw fit to take a Friday night stroll from the hospital to the nearby Metropolitan Museum for a look at something more beautiful than flowers in the ICU waiting room; and just when I was standing in the newly refurbished Greek and Roman galleries, surrounded by the timely sight of human bodies in all their sculpted glory, a third call in ten minutes from my sister-in-law (I had ignored the first two) informed me that Nick had been thrown from his tractor that afternoon and caught under the mowing deck.

Leaving behind his wife and two children adopted from a Russian orphanage.

Apparently it’s not enough in this world for sibling orphans to be traumatized by the loss of their biological parents only; and on top of losing their loving adoptive father, one of them has to find him under the tractor in the meadow above the house when Nick was abnormally late for dinner.

Nor is it enough, apparently, that Nick himself had just buried his schizophrenic half-brother three months before, so dedicated to be there by his side until the bitter, cancer-ridden end that in a year of financial hardship he had no choice but to let work suffer even further and more debt accrue.

Nick prayed and believed that the Lord would take care of his family finances soon enough. Little did he know how soon they would be taken care of in the form of life insurance.

I guess this was supposed to be an elegy, not a jeremiad.

But five weeks later, there’s a part of me that still refuses to do one justice, given the sheer injustice of it all. How could Nick, the smartest person I knew whose collegiate cocktail of philosophy and punk rock hardly seemed indicative of the Christian faith he would later wholeheartedly embrace, be dead?

How could Nick, who, from the hi-tech cabin in the woods where he kept an office and brought a certain prophetic mandate to his frontline efforts to protect our digital identity rights in the technocratic age to come, be gone?

44 years old, dead and gone.

At the funeral, though, I did my part and was more than honored to:

“I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how supremely physical the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, a Gospel that Nick believed in so beautifully with all his heart, and all his soul, and all his strength, and all his mind. And for those of us who knew Nick’s mind, that is not a small thing.

“So when Laura gave me the choice to read one of my poems or a passage from Scripture, I decided on a poem that celebrates this physical core of the Gospel, as we tend to lose sight of it in all our spirituality. But by way of a prefatory comment, I’m going to first read just a few related verses from the Book of Job that share the same concern, as well as point to the fact that for all of his genius in things technological, Nick was a writer at heart. And a great one at that.

“From Job 19: ‘O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved in a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.’”

Of course, there are other, less conciliatory passages from Job that would have been every bit as fitting, if also quite unfitting and downright upsetting.

In keeping with Nick’s brief but passionate walk of faith, a walk that helps me to my feet as I stagger again and again, the cover of the program for his funeral was printed with these words of Jesus as recorded by the Gospel of John:

“I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, even though he die, shall live.”

But if there’s anything to challenge this belief in — not to mention the slightest comprehension of — the resurrection, it’s the sight of my good friend, walk and smile and all, reduced to a small box of ashes at the graveside interment long before it ever should have taken place.