Resurrection
The Facts.
1. My brother died on the morning of November 10, 2002.
2. My brother was buried in the afternoon of November 24, 2002.
3. My family spent the intervening two weeks praying for his resurrection.
4. It didn’t happen.
~
We moved to Summit County in July of 1999, when I was four years old. My parents came because they were Charismatic Christians who believed in prophecy, and because they believed that God had told them in dreams and the words of others to leave the thriving spiritual climes of Kansas City and move to the mountains of Colorado. My father bought a red pick-up and invested a small fortune in tools to open his own home repair service, which he ran out of his truck and our garage. We rented an unstained, single-level ranch home in Silverthorne’s residential corridor: a chain-link fence, a sleepy church catty-corner to our property, half an acre of adjacent weeds to forage for insects in, and across the street, an even smaller rental that my father managed to supplement his income. On Sundays, my parents drove up to Omega Outpost Baptist Church in Breckenridge, where the pastor’s son and I binged on communion crackers after Sunday services.
My brother was born ten months after we arrived. We named him Zion, which in Hebrew means, among other things, habitation of God.
~
It is vital to understand this: in my family, the world was a thing that meant. Our lives were things that meant. To name a child was to negotiate that meaning, to charge human narratives with divine significance. Zion was my parents’ promised land, their reward for abandoning their lives, for following the Divine Will into a spiritual tundra. He had filamental blonde hair. When he smiled, he captured rooms; he smiled so wide it looked like it hurt. He climbed to the highest points on playgrounds and grinned at our panic before leaping, to hell with whether the ground was pavement or wood mulch. He disappeared in crowds so often that my mother finally resorted to a wrist-to-wrist toddler leash she found in a mail-order catalog. He was electric energy, and I hated him for it. On shopping trips, I would knock cereal boxes from the shelves or tip items out of the cart—anything feasibly within reach of where he sat kicking his legs—and I would tell my mother that he had done it. I remember grinning as she rebuked him. After he died, my mother insisted that I had been the best big brother he could have hoped for, and perhaps I was. Mostly, though, I saw him as an inconvenience, risk-prone—a hazard to himself and others.
~
As a child, my head rippled with the mythic heroes of the Old Testament. The seedier, the bloodier, the more mystical and borderline occult the tale was, the better, so that when asked my favorite Bible passage, I would answer, “Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones,” without hesitation. In brief, the story goes like this: like most of his colleagues, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel is utterly miserable as Israel’s resident social critic. He builds to-scale models of the coming apocalypse in the city square, openly illustrates his countrymen’s captivity by lying on his side for 180 days at a time, and generally fails to endear himself to the public on any level. But what Ezekiel does have are visions, fantastic visions of wheels in the sky, creatures covered in eyes. And in one of them, God brings him to a valley floor littered with the skeletons of a great army and has Ezekiel speak life into them. I often lay in bed and imagined how that would happen. Would the bodies recompose themselves layer by layer? Would sinew sprout from bone, and bloody muscle from sinew, and skin over it all? Or would the flesh condense out of a mist, a shimmering into being? Were the bones scattered? What would it look like for the breath of God to rush into a corpse?
Sometimes, I tried my hand at more feasible object-lessons. As the 2000 election approached, at five or six years old, I gathered my father’s coin collection, lugged it to the kitchen, and emptied it onto the linoleum before my startled mother. I declared that if there were more heads than tails, Bush would win. Of course, there really were more heads than tails, and Bush did win, confirming my rightful place as a seer. My parents occasionally took me with them when they went to prophetic conferences in Denver, and I would watch in awe as self-styled apostles riffed on a dizzying array of subjects, from signs of the imminent tribulation (planetary alignments, eerie numerology) to the principles of prosperity (speak it forth, name-it-claim-it in its most literal meaning). In a moment of inspiration, I seized a piece of printer paper and, stepping into the forum of our living room, I rent it in twain (which is how I might have said it), calling it a symbol of God’s impending judgment on America.
~
It is Sunday. My father is leading worship at our church; my mother and I have stayed home. I am reading at the kitchen counter while my mother plays tag with Zion in the living room. Pachelbel plays in the background, overlaid with his squeals of laughter. My mother leaves the game to stir breakfast, and within seconds, we hear a sound as large as the world. By the time we manage to lift the filing cabinet off of him, his lungs have been crushed; his mouth is pumping blood like a second heart. My mother cradles him, and her sweater seems to absorb it all.
Emergency personnel manage to briefly revive Zion in our living room. He has lost more blood than seemed possible, which means that the irreparable damage to his chest never becomes an issue. My father receives the call in the middle of his worship set, and he immediately bolts for his truck. The nurses can’t let him see his son or give him updates, because they don’t have any and because, in all honesty, if their experience has taught them anything, the two-year-old with the crushed rib cage and a missing third of his body’s blood has only one possible outcome, the one you can’t tell to the wild-eyed father in his church clothes. An hour after he was admitted, Zion dies.
A family from church that I barely recognize picks me up from the scene. I spend an hour playing video games with their son, whom I thoroughly detest. He has a mutt that he tells me is named D.O.G., the full acronym, and I can’t believe it. “We named him D-O-G because that’s G-O-D backwards,” he tells me.
Within hours of the accident, our house brims with visitors and their goodwill offerings. It seems that the county has en masse stumbled onto the same enchilada recipe, like there’s some website or chain-email counseling homemade Mexican classics for the freshly bereaved, enchiladas followed by a wave of chicken-and-broccoli casseroles. Some bring consolatory memorabilia, pairs of hand-carved angels popular in the Christian market, and one mother and daughter bring a plush bear as large as I am. It doesn’t mean anything to me, but I want it to—as though I know that someday I will need it.
Families we have seen on the other side of the table at so-and-so’s wedding show up with children I didn’t know they had. They troop in the same side door the EMTs took Zion through, a white screen that stays propped open for what seems like the next two weeks. I come to feel that we have inadvertently committed ourselves to an open-home exhibit, with the filing cabinet shoved against the wall and a rug covering the stain. Ginger, curious steps frame the scene on their way to the kitchen and its crockery-laden pink formica. There is a sort of synesthesia here. The smell of burned and clotting cheese blurs into sounds and sights—my grandmother scrubbing uselessly at the carpet with a bucket of ammonia, the flickering of unfamiliar faces into and out of my vision.
~
For the first week, MSN brought a steady flow of emails from known and half-known prophets who declared ex cathedra that God Himself wanted us to pray for my brother’s resurrection. They, too, knew the world as a thing that meant. And doesn’t God always bring back his promised land? So they wrote long-form exhortations, massive blocks of text that I caught sight of over my mother’s shoulder: cocktails of biblical excerpts and quasi-biblical phrasing, punctuation scattered like shrapnel. And we believed it all. My parents had a hushed phone conversation, and when my father came back from the hospital, he bore a small bundle wrapped in a white linen blanket. He laid it on the pin-striped green coverlet of the guest bed. The evening of the accident, I went into the room and watched as he prayed over the pall. My father kneeled at the end of the mattress, striped polo stretched tight over his college-wrestler’s back, face buried in his hands. He had his elbows on the edge of the bed, so that when he shifted, the mattress shifted with him, and Zion seemed to stir.
A minor leader in Summit County’s spiritual community came to visit and drew me aside. She ushered me into my room, shut the door, and stood before it with arms crossed. She had lank blonde hair and the raw, wind-swept features of a local. “It’s a terrible thing that happened to you,” she said. “But God had a reason for it, and you’ll have to get over it someday. You can’t hold on to it forever.”
After two days in our home, we had Zion embalmed and installed in his old crib. As the enthusiasm of early hopes settled into a rotation of prayer vigils, our home acquired a liminal aspect: we were all living on the threshold. A reporter from the Summit Daily News appeared several days after the accident, to tell the story of our delusion. She was an agnostic, but after several interviews with my mother, she decided to follow our case past her deadline. There was something virulent about the thought that it could happen. Although we never knew which ones, disembodied names, acquaintances at second or third hand, emailed us with news of systemic prayer movements around the nation. “Hundreds of churches are praying for your son’s resurrection,” one email told us. My grandfather’s geriatric Lutheran church sent word from Michigan that they had made room for us in their liturgy. I tried to picture that, the soft-voiced parson with the downy mustache offering prayers for resurrection, and I simply couldn’t.
My favorite grandmother arrived five days after the accident. She was a peace-loving former social worker with hair dyed jet black and a perpetual aroma of Chanel No. 5., and she made it her responsibility to keep me out of the dying house. She inched my mother’s Yukon around town, to the library and the outlet stores, sometimes to the movie theaters. But two days into her visit, the house began to drain her as well. The filing cabinet remained visible, although she attempted to scrub and then re-cover the carpet stain. There was no place we could go to play Scrabble or Uno or Pick-up Sticks that did not call the Event to mind. Eventually, she retreated into silence. We idled for hours across from each other, her feet settled on the raised footrest of our green felt armchair as she watched me read or play dominoes. Truthfully, I don’t recall anything that I read during those two weeks. I suppose books were simply texture, pages to turn.
Some memories of that time are floodlit, an unending rehearsal. Others feel foreign even when described to me: entire days of living, an aunt’s weeklong visit.
~
One day, when my parents shut themselves in with Zion, I went into the guest room they had taken him from and laid down on the unchanged coverlet. Apart from the subliminal murmur of prayers across the hall, it was quiet. I stared at the ceiling light until blotches spread across my vision. If I blinked in just the right way, flashes of color danced across the ceiling and walls, an effect I had once mistaken for angels.
A pitted oak armoire stood in the corner, spider plantlets dangling from the top. I studied it. I memorized the knotted wood, the rusted rings and hinges. I extended my hand in a Yoda claw and closed my eyes, subtracting everything, one by one, the door and the voices in the next room, the bed and coverlet, the window and walls, all but the armoire. I imagined that I could feel its weight. I took a deep breath. I willed it upward.
As in those glorious, suspended seconds when Zion seemed to breathe on the guest bed, I cannot deny that something happened. I felt a strain and then a lightness, and when I opened my eyes, there was a tiny, micro-radian of a difference in the room. The armoire hadn’t shifted, but I have never shaken the sense that something, perhaps my faith, had given way.
~
This is how it ended.
My parents had already held one service at the chapel across from our house to pray for Zion’s resurrection and another at Omega Outpost to generally memorialize and surrender him to God, but they decided to make one last-ditch effort. So we swaddled him in thick blankets and laid him in a coffin and loaded it into the back seat of our Yukon for the drive down the I-70 corridor.
We carried the cedar box into a tiny store-front church on the northeastern outskirts of Denver. Pastor Chiun Li had Zion brought to the front of the congregation, while I stayed as far toward the back as I could. The space was painted black and sound-rigged like a nightclub. Shortly after she began praying over the corpse, Pastor Li stopped and looked out at us and said, “It’s time to stop praying.”
It felt as if the bottom had fallen out of my gut. I started crying for the first time since the accident, and I remember someone bodily restraining me as I screamed at the pastor. Her pronouncement made, she sat down. I couldn’t make myself heard over the throbbing bass. In the front rows, my parents had collapsed into themselves, too weary to be outraged.
We later learned that television cameras were waiting on the sides of the room, to capture the miracle when it happened.
~
Eleven years after the accident, I matriculate at a small religious university and am asked by my spiritual mentor to write a testimony. He is a music professor, a gifted trumpeter, and one of the most compassionate human beings I have ever met. I tell him the only truth I have ever told anyone about my brother’s death: I had a brother, he was two when he died, he pulled a filing cabinet on himself, I saw it happen. I do not tell him about the resurrection that didn’t happen, or about Zion’s macabre undeath. My mentor offers his passionate condolences after class.
Twelve years after the accident, I begin crafting defenses for the likely scenario in which I someday tell someone about what happened. (My parents believed in a particular set of propositions that made the whole thing rational, I will say. Imagine that you put your faith in a transcendent Being who had raised the dead on multiple occasions. Imagine that you had just lost a child you believed was a gift from God. Imagine that you believed in prophecy, and that in your anguish at having lost God’s gift, you received emails from people who claimed that the transcendent, resurrecting Being had told them He would raise your beloved child from the dead. Now I dare you to condemn my parents.) But after a short time, I realize that the only likely opponent I will ever face is myself. I am defending my parents, yes, but at a deeper level, I am also defending an eight-year-old who had the chutzpah to hope for an exception to history.
And thirteen years after the accident, an unkempt young man in an oversized winter coat asks if he can sit with me in the university cafeteria. I feign interest, and our conversation soon turns to theology. “God is good,” he says, and it all comes out at once, his posture stiffening and his fork suspended aimlessly as I inveigh against the God Who Was Not There.
~
The trouble with trauma is that there’s no poetry to it. It defies narrative. Inside trauma, there is only the sacred chaos—imprinted sights, senses propped open, a whirl of meanings and intuitions. Many contend that to write well about tragedy, we must elide ourselves. Isn’t it so much more poignant when we get out of the way? Laconic. Understated. The sort of spare account that leaves you gasping at the end. This, we are told, is how to write about trauma: in sheer, carbon facts. In skeletons.
And yet, if trauma disrupts the ability to tell yourself stories about what has happened, what does it mean to demand the quick bones of the Event? In effect, it means that the more traumatic the subject, the less right you have to speak it in your own words. For here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a thing about which (you) the victim can say nothing meaningful, which must hush (you) its victim into a proper silence, into letting the Event “speak for itself.”
But the Event never stops speaking. It silenced my brother, and thirteen years later, it threatens to drown out my God. I waited two weeks in the silence, staring at the bones of what I believed. And I have sworn every year that I will wait no longer.
My incantations are half-remembered. My will is weak. But a magic still lies somewhere in my palms, waiting to make things move. I wonder what it’s like to bring a skeleton back to life, how one goes about it. Do you start with the sinews or the blood? Can you conjure the skin over the bones and bring the organs up beneath it? Does the heart begin beating before or after the arteries are intact?
Does it hurt?