Hope Springs Eternal

Hope Springs Eternal

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blessed:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

My parents flew in from Tennessee on Friday. After I tucked my girls in bed, I pushed open the door to step out on the porch when I heard my mom say into her cell phone, “I hope I heard wrong.”

There was a pause, as our friend repeated the news.

My mom gasped and began crying. My dad gently took the phone from her and talked to our friend.

I thought it was our friend’s wife who had passed away, but it wasn’t: it was their son, who’d died in a tragic car accident that claimed three other lives.

Seven years older than I am, their son once saved my life. Or at least it felt like that at the time.

I was six years old and trying to cross a creek in Gatlinburg to reach my brother and this boy. I was about halfway to the rock where they were sitting when I lost my footing and got caught in a current that swept me downstream.

I don’t remember much except for that adrenaline-inducing tumble as the silver rapids closed over my head, and I couldn’t find the surface.

This boy found me. He somehow covered the distance until he reached me and pulled me out.

That next summer, when I was seven, he repeated this chivalrous gesture.

I’d forgotten I was no longer wearing a life vest and jumped off a dock into the pond on the camp where we used to live.

Again, the water closed over my head. I watched the greenish bubbles rising to the surface until this boy reached down into the water and fished me out.

I’m not sure if it’s just my overactive imagination–along with my need to make sense of the world–that causes me to believe this boy twice saved my life.

Maybe I would’ve found my footing on that summer day in Gatlingburg and dragged myself over to the side of the creek.

Maybe I would’ve bounced on the bottom of that pond, crossing patches of warm and cold water as I worked my way over to the yellow ladder strung with algae next to the dock.

I don’t know. I may never know. But after I received news of this man’s death, I leaned back on the porch and stared up at the Wisconsin stars as my parents talked to his father.

For the second time in a week, I was struck by life’s delicate nature and found myself trying to figure out the balance between doing things that need done on a day-to-day basis, and yet living each day with the realization that it could be my last. Or the last of those I love.

The next morning, after the phone call, we walked through an antique store, and I stared at artifacts displayed behind glass: Native American arrowheads, elaborate cradle-boards, beaded moccasins, wooden butter molds, hats with bird cage veils, ancient books–silverfish pressed between the pages like flowers.

Looking at these items, I thought of the ones who’d chipped that arrowhead from stone, who’d carried a baby on the back, who’d churned butter, who’d worn that hat out to a dance or the cinema, and I marveled that this tangible representation of their years of life and love was all that was left.

After the antique store, we took my parents to a small art studio, an Amish community, and a pizzeria and ice-cream parlor in the middle of nowhere. On our way home, my four-year-old daughter pointed out the window and said, “Look at those statues!”

I looked, too, and saw a graveyard, and then I could see what my daughter did: those were, indeed, just statues. Like those artifacts behind glass, they were tangible markers depicting what had taken place in the temporal, but in no way depicting what is, even now, taking place in the eternal.

That beautiful gravestone, marking my friend’s earthly resting place in Kentucky, is just a statue.

The gravestone that will eventually mark that man’s grave, where he will be buried on Thursday in Tennessee, is just a statue.

The gravestones–or crosses or trees–that will one day mark my loved one’s resting places, or mine, will all just be statues, depicting what has taken place on the earth, but in no way depicting what will be taking place in the world beyond it.

And, in this thought, hope springs eternal.

How about you? How do you cling to “hope that springs eternal” when faced with a death?