The most famous member of the Atlanta Braves and Hall of Famer, Henry Aaron, passed away during the 2021 Major League Baseball season. The Braves won the World Series. They won forty-four games before the All-Star Break and forty-four games after. They won during the forty-fourth week of the year. Henry Aaron wore number 44.11
I’m fucked. For as long as I’ve been capable of thoughts, being alone with them was unsettling. But being alone with them and also . . . walking in a dark hallway . . . flanked by two black-winged angels . . . behind Fate . . . took that unsettled feeling to an entirely new level. Fuuuuucked. As we walked, I thought of all the times I offhandedly justified my actions with a laugh, “Well, you know, I’m already going to hell.” Now I wondered if that was true. I never believed in hell, so this couldn’t be possible, could it? This couldn’t be my . . . fate? I was told for years, decades, that our thoughts dictated our realities. And if we changed our thoughts, we’d change our realities. I struggled with the execution of that, but I really hoped it was true at this moment. I didn’t believe in hell. So, it couldn’t exist, right? Right?
I was desperately fighting not to make up the kind of stories in my head that drove me to the edge of insanity during my life. I kept telling myself that none of the thoughts I was having were real, just as I had practiced after reading meditation books.
The truth was, however, that I didn’t live the purest, kindest life. I left plenty of pain and broken hearts in my wake. I truly believed that I was a good person. I believed my intentions were almost always good. I had just failed to back them up consistently with my actions. I lied, and I cheated. I stole, and I coveted. Frankly, except for “Thou shalt not kill,” none of the commandments were safe with me. What hurt most was that the commandments I most often broke were my own. No excuses, but not living authentically and in the direction of your soul results in the kind of actions you regret. Regardless of intention.
The heart I disrespected the most was my own. I cheated myself more than anybody else. Of personal truth and passion. I stole time from myself. I coveted a life that was disingenuous. I lived a life that was not representative of who I really was. Maybe I did kill. I just killed possibilities instead of people. In that divide between who I really was and the life I really lived, I hurt people. Some repeatedly. I was so afraid. If I ever did find my way into flow and clean living, I sabotaged it. I didn’t think I deserved it. I felt full of shame for being happy.
I offered no excuses for myself or my actions, but there’s that old cliché: “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” I hesitated to appear to be justifying anything, but that cliché might very well apply to me. Those I hurt seemed to move on. I never did. I carried the pain and personal disappointment with me. Always. I let it define me. If I made a mistake or hurt somebody, if I lied, stole, cheated, or didn’t follow through on some goal, I’d beat myself up, refuse to forgive myself, and then pack it all into a bag that was always within arm’s reach. No matter how stuffed and over-packed that bag got, I could always find a way to stuff in more disappointment and self-loathing.
Who was that guy who was sentenced to push the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down? Sisyphus? I was like that guy. I should have had that guy tattooed on my calf. Only instead of pushing a boulder, I sentenced myself to life in prison without the possibility of parole. No double jeopardy rules for me. I re-tried myself and re-sentenced myself for the same crimes against humanity. Despite my personal breakthroughs and new understanding of contentment and risk, I still felt every ounce of my mistakes as we walked down the hallway. Call me Erikus.
Fate and the black-winged angels led Blondie and me into another room set up exactly like the one where I found the boy. White. Sparsely furnished with a twin bed, desk, chair, and mirror. A waiting room? Purgatory? I sat on the bed, and Blondie jumped up next to me. Fate took the seat at the desk. The black-winged angels stood guard at the door.
I tried to stall and keep it light. “Seems like God needs a better interior decorator.” That got me nowhere. “So where’s everyone else if you’re here with me?”
Fate was still wearing his mask, which gave no indication of his mood or expression. He responded with, “You don’t have to worry about them. They’re fine.”
I always hated the word “fine.” It was such a bland expression, devoid of any kind of emotion. Vanilla. Not good. Not bad. Just “meh.”
It was happening, however, and Fate’s tone made me feel like I was in deep shit. He seemed kind of pissed off and stressed, and I worked hard not to add context that wasn’t there. I reminded myself that I was the one who thought he was pissed and stressed. He had never said that.
Don’t have a conversation that doesn’t exist.
Don’t have a conversation that doesn’t exist.
Don’t have a conversation that doesn’t exist.
I was writing it over and over on a mental chalkboard.
“Listen, you weren’t supposed to be in that room,” Fate sighed, cutting to the chase. “You weren’t supposed to see that boy.”
I was immediately defensive. “I wanted to help him. There’s something about him that just doesn’t feel right.” I started talking without taking a breath, offering an avalanche of justifications. “I had the best of intentions.” I was telling the truth. “I didn’t mean any harm. I got up with Blondie because I felt like you and I had a moment when I figured out the thing, and I really had to pee. And then . . .” I could not stop talking. “. . . I started walking down this hallway, which was super dark and normally would have freaked me out, but I just kept walking, and I felt so brave and bold, and I . . .” Blurting out one fast sentence after another. Rapid fire. I would have gone on forever if Fate hadn’t rescued me from myself.
“Stop. Take a breath,” Fate finally said.
I did exactly that. And then proceeded to hold it.
Fate laughed at me. “Seriously, Erik. Relax. You weren’t supposed to be there, but you also didn’t do anything wrong. You’re not in any kind of trouble.”
I let out a sigh of relief.
“Would it have killed you to lead with that?” This wasn’t the time to play up the drama. I think if I had been standing, my knees would have buckled.
He continued. “If anything, we should apologize to you. We put you in a bad situation, and that’s never our intention.”
Whoa. That was my line. If ever there was a time when I wanted to sit in the moment, it was this one. Did Fate just cop to making a mistake? He mentioned “we.” Was he suggesting that God made a mistake? I took another of those deep breaths and, with all the courage I could muster, asked, “What do you mean? What mistake? Who is ‘we’?”
“You weren’t supposed to see that boy. He wasn’t even supposed to be at dinner.” I wondered if that’s why I hadn’t seen him initially. Maybe he wasn’t even there! I felt a momentary sense of entitlement. I wasn’t in trouble, and, as a bonus, it turned out that I might not have lacked human awareness after all. Even still, I didn’t totally understand. “So he snuck in or something?”
Fate took a deep breath of his own and started to explain. The boy had an accident. He and his friends routinely bombed their bikes down a steep hill and off a jump at the bottom. “They got tons of air,” explained Fate. “Pretty impressive.”
However, it was dangerous. The bottom of this hill intersected at a blind corner. If a car was coming, the jumper wouldn’t be able to see it. A friend always stood watch to warn the jumper of cars, call “all clear!” and, if necessary, stop any cars if an attempt were already in progress. The friends had a pact never to jump without each other. They swore on their lives.
The boy, it turned out, couldn’t help himself and decided to try the jump without his friends around. On his fourth run down the hill, he hit the jump more perfectly than he ever had, and as he was flying, a car came around the corner. The windshield shattered on impact, and he went flying over the roof of the SUV, landing on his shoulder and head. His bike was destroyed. His helmet cracked in multiple places. Multiple bones were broken. Fate described the sounds of the crash in a grizzly detail that I didn’t need. The sounds of tires screeching, glass shattering, and the collision created the worst kind of harmony that echoed through the boy’s quiet, suburban street. Neighbors immediately came running from all directions. The boy’s friends had to be held back by their parents as the ambulance drove him away.
I still didn’t understand. What am I doing here?
“I need you to go back into that room. I’ll finish explaining everything on the way.”
Why did he bring me into this room in the first place just to have me go back?
I got up from the bed and called for Blondie. She wasn’t too happy about being disturbed. She let out one of those displeased dog moans. She had found a perfect spot on the pillows. I always said that Blondie loved a good pillow. Sorry, sweet girl, but this is one of those times when I really need you with me. She forgave me quickly. Dogs are always far better at that than humans.
The black-winged angels moved away from the door and back into the hallway we went. It was no longer dark. I had never seen the Northern Lights except in pictures, but that’s what the hallway looked like. Or the Space Mountain ride at Disneyland. Suffice to say, the hallway was far less daunting. Still, the beauty of the lights did little to assuage my anxiety about and sadness for the boy. To die so young. Why didn’t he just go ask one of his friends to come out and stand point? What was he trying to prove? And to whom? What sort of pain was he hiding?
The hallway felt much longer when we walked it previously in the darkness. In the light, I could see we were less than one hundred feet from the original room. Fate stopped me just outside the door. “I know how you felt about the girl in the movie. You wanted her to enjoy the creative life you think you never experienced. You were always like that. More focus on what you didn’t have than celebrating and honoring what was right in front of you.”
I didn’t understand what peeling back a few layers of my psychological onion had to do with this boy.
Fate said, “I need you to talk to him again.”
Wait. What? “I’ve tried to talk to him. You know that. You watched me try to talk to him. He just looks through me. What, exactly, am I talking to him about?”
Fate took another deep, maybe slightly frustrated breath and shocked me with the punchline: “He can go back.” And, after a beat, “He needs to go back.”
“Go back where? You mean, go back, go back?” I was freaking out. HE CAN GO BACK? I didn’t understand. “How can he go back? If he’s here, he’s dead. His friends and family are mourning. He . . .”
