A Promise in His Eyes

The pursuit of writing requires having the words to explain unexplainable emotions and circumstances. There are times when the circumstance is so heavy that words fail me. Remembrance around 9/11 is one of those occasions. Finding words to remember a friend is another.

Still, so many words come to mind from this picture. This is Bill, the husband of my good friend Janet, holding his days-old daughter, Caroline. His smirk is speaking volumes and there are so many possible interpretations. He must be saying “Can you believe my luck? I’m Dad to this beautiful girl.” Or maybe he is saying “such a lovely princess needs a larger crown.” He might also be hiding some natural, new parent trepidation. “What the heck am I supposed to do here? Am I doing this right?” Or maybe he’s practicing his fatherly protectiveness. “Try taking her from my arms! Just try.”

This is a haunting picture because Bill would lose his life only a few weeks later, the weekend prior to September 11, 2001, to a swift and devastating illness.

However, it’s what I see in his eyes, dark and intense and lingering, that consumes me still. His eyes seem to be searing a promise into the air, a promise to the little human in his arms. “I’m just so stinking happy and I promise you the world.”

Bill knew a thing or two about promises.  Once, when he and Janet were dating and she was moving, again, something that she’d worried would frustrate Bill, he made a promise with one statement: “I would carry your mattress on my back down Virginia Beach Boulevard if it made you happy.”

With that one simple line, Bill made a promise to Janet that he’d always have her back, that he would protect her happiness in those crazy moments of transition that life always brings. That as long as he was able, he would pick up her burdens as his own. With that one sentence, he set the bar and set it high for all of us who knew him. What were we willing to do to prove our commitment to each other, to our spouses, to our family, to our friends? What promises would be kept no matter the difficulty?

Bill’s funeral was held in the days following 9/11, twenty years ago. In addition to the personal grief I felt over the loss and for witnessing such a crushing blow land on my friend, I was also overwhelmed by the idea that this scene of tears and eulogies and black attire would be repeated thousands of times over the next few weeks. I felt the loss of Bill at the same time that our country mourned for so many souls and their families.

Having lost my father when he was only thirty-three, the same age as Bill, my uncle Mickey recognized my heartache at the tragedy and came to stand beside me at the funeral. A minister at heart and a human at his core, he knew he couldn’t answer the many questions I had about why and how was it possible and why and again, why? But he came and stood beside me anyway. He came to help carry my burden for a while like so many others did while surrounding Janet on that day and like so many thousands did for those who lost loved ones on September 11, twenty years ago.

Bill offered a promise to his daughter. Fulfilling on that promise required action, commitment, and steadfastness from family and friends to honor his memory, to support his legacy. We needed to have his back now. In the years that followed Bill’s death, no one fulfilled that promise better than Janet and her new husband, Brian, as they raised that beautiful, little girl into a vibrant young lady, all the while making sure she came to know the man behind those smiling, brown eyes who so proudly held her in his arms for such a short time but loved her infinitely.

Robert F. Kennedy found comfort in his time grief in a poem (by Agamemnon of Aeschylus) and memorized these moving lines: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’

That unexplainable grace and that wisdom have fallen drop by drop into Janet’s world each day as she revealed grace in the place where grief resided, grace where the joy from motherhood nestled in, grace in her choice to love once more. She honors that grace as a friend, a wife, a mother, as a child of God, with all the hard-earned wisdom gained in the fulfillment of that promise to Bill.

There was a time I thought successful writing required all the right words and insightful answers. Now I understand the power of unanswerable questions and the simple beauty in fulfilling promises—whether or not I ever have the right words.