Happy Birthday, Jess.
Someone gave me a butterfly tie at Men’s Breakfast at New Covenant a few weeks ago. People are still hearing Jessie’s story, still giving me butterfly things, a tear in their eye, saying things like “I never met her, but I feel like I know her.” Thirteen years she’s been gone, and she’s still moving hearts and minds.
I wonder what we’d be doing today, for her 32nd birthday, if she were still here. Not digging up chocolate gold doubloons in the backyard with her kindergarten buddies like on her 6th birthday. Not laughing while she swung blindly at a piñata on her quinceanera. Something more suited for who she would have been now — an empowered woman, maybe a mom, a wife, a musical leader of youth, in the prime of her life. Maybe just a simple dinner together at a local, healthy, organic, sustainable, family-owned hole-in-the-wall.
We’ll never know. Because she’s not still here, like she should have been. One young man’s fantasy changed that forever.
I remember when she was one, when mom and I were in chiropractic school in Marietta, Georgia, in 1995. We’d stand out in the front yard at night, me holding her, both of us looking up into the clear night sky. I’d say, “the moon, Jessie!” Her eyes would get wide with wonder. Then she’d look at me, and back up at the bright moon, and point to it.
It’s harder for my eyes to get wide with wonder these days, now that she’s not here to look into them anymore.
But although the natural beauty of this world she used to love so much is a little duller for me now, she and our Maker have helped me see a deeper and more profound kind of beauty — a super-natural one. It’s a kind of beauty so deep and profound as to make sense of the senseless. Like forgiving a killer. Like loving a liar. It’s a kind of beauty that helps distinguish someone’s bad choices, unacceptable behaviors, and messed up values from their person — including my own. It helps you release resentments and anger while not releasing accountability. It helps you value others when others value only themselves. It helps you understand they are a child of God, who loves them without conditions — like I loved Jessie without conditions, even when she screwed up. It helps you see the divine in them when there’s no earthly reason to do so. It offers an eternal patience and grace for the disappointments of people and life. It infuses in you an unexplainable peace. It helps you love yourself.
The world is desperate for this kind of beauty now. In a way, I’m glad she’s not here to see it — the world today. But then again, I imagine she sees it all more clearly than I do, from where she is, through eyes of grace, in the presence of that unexplainable peace.
And so I’ll say it plainly again, because it still matters and it’s worth repeating — forever:
I forgive you, Dan. I’ll never forget. You’ll always be accountable — so will all of us. You must be where you can’t hurt anyone else. But I release any and all resentments, anger, and condemnations against you, and I keep my heart open to you. What you did will never be OK. But you are forgiven and loved. With anger and resentments released, my heart is pure and my head is free. Yours can be too — but you’ll have to do the work.
Of course, we haven’t ended interpersonal violence yet. If anything, the data is getting worse. But every good gardener knows that in the first year they sleep, in the second year they creep, and in the third year they leap — that there’s a lot of unseen underground growth before the tree grows, and that a mighty oak started as a little acorn a hundred years ago. We’ll see if this oak, Jessie’s legacy project, grows mighty in the years to come. Maybe it won’t. But we’ll keep tending the garden, lest it go to weeds.
And I know that as we keep tending the garden of LOVE>hate, she will keep occasionally sending beautiful little butterflies to visit — reminding us that all is well, usually just when we most need a little hope, when the world looks like hell. Like the butterfly tie from the retired old man with a tear in his eye at men’s breakfast, who feels like he knows her now.
Still loving you, Sweetie. Still missing you. Still blown away by the amazing revelation that her body is dead and gone, but she is not. The darkness is real — but so is the light.
— Dad
