What Difference Do It Make? (8 page)

I remember when I rolled into Fort Worth on that freight train. It wadn't too long after that president named Kennedy got shot dead in Dallas. I used to camp out in the hobo jungle at night and panhandle for food during the daytime.

Some homeless fellas taught me a trick called “the hamburger drop.” That's when you get you a little money, say about a dollar, and you go down to the McDonald's or the Burger King and buy yourself a cheap burger. Then you go to some fancy part a' town where everbody got on coats and ties and workin in them big glass buildins. Now, this don't work unless you can find a buildin with a trash can out front. Once you spot it, you take a coupla bites out that burger, then—when you sure nobody's comin—you stash that burger down in that trash can real careful.

Now you wait till you see somebody comin, and when you do, you act like you diggin in the garbage for food, and then you pop up with that burger and start eatin it.

Nine times outta ten, them rich folks is gon' stop you cold and yell, “Hey, don't eat that!” Then they gon' give you some money and tell you to go buy yourself somethin to eat.

When I first got to Fort Worth, I remember a lotta times wishin that instead of givin me money, somebody'd just ask me my name. But after a while, when I figured out city folks thought I wadn't no better than a speck a' dust, my heart began to grow a tough hide over it, like a orange that's been left out in the sun. My heart got harder and harder. Pretty soon, all I wanted was for folks to gimme that dollar and leave me alone.

That's when homeless folks that ain't drinkin or druggin already make themselves a new friend. Them half-pints and beers and little packets a' white powder becomes their friend, their pastor, their storm shelter—a deep, dark, hummin hole they can crawl into to escape from themselves even if it's just for a little while. They tryin to drown their problem—or burn it.

Now whatever drove them to the streets from the get-go is a problem, and whatever they is usin to escape is a problem.

So now they got two problems.

11

Ron

That Deborah would get cancer made no more sense than a drive-by shooting. She was the most health-conscious person I had ever known. She didn't eat junk food or smoke. She stayed fit and took vitamins. There was no history of cancer in her family. Zero risk factors.

What Denver had said three weeks earlier haunted me: Those precious to God become important to Satan. Watch your back, Mr. Ron! Somethin bad fixin to happen to Miss Debbie.

Just before midnight she stirred. I stood and leaned over her bed, my face pressed close to hers. Her eyes opened, drowsy with narcotics. “Is it in my liver?”

“Yes.” I paused and looked down at her, trying vainly to drive sadness from my face. “But there's still hope.”

She closed her eyes again, and the moment I had dreaded for hours passed quickly without a single tear. My own dry eyes didn't surprise me—I had never really learned how to cry. But now life had presented a reason to learn, and I yearned for a river of tears, a biblical flood. Maybe my broken heart would teach my eyes what to do.

A
t age seventy-five, my daddy was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Even though the doctors said it was slow-growing and that he would probably die of something else, he called us all together to say good-byes and give him last rites, even though he wasn't Catholic. I guess he reasoned he was entitled since he'd voted for Kennedy. My brother led him in the sinner's prayer. Daddy repeated it after John and said he understood that he was praying Christ would forgive him of his sins.

I was skeptical. And it made Daddy mad when I reminded him that his doctors weren't at all worried that he was at death's door. No doubt he was feeling his mortality and begging for the attention that I had spent a lifetime withholding.

Four years later, in April 1999, Deborah was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of colon and liver cancer. Some doctors thought she might only live three months; others thought a year. Though her prognosis was catastrophic, we were not going down without a fight, and she began a very aggressive chemotherapy regimen, sometimes alternating different treatments within the same week. The drugs took her down swiftly, but she fought like the last warrior left standing at Troy. Deborah had a lot to live for, like seeing her dream of revival coming to our city through Denver. She also longed to see Regan and Carson get married and to be a grandmother to the grandchildren she had prayed for since our children became our own.

On Christmas Day of that year, Deborah did something heroic. She cooked a gourmet dinner at Rocky Top, the 350acre ranch we had bought in 1990, and she decorated it in the style of the authentic Old West. Don't ask how she did it. No one can explain that. But with her elegance and style, all Deborah's special dinners were fit for royalty, and they usually included an invitation to Denver and to the ungrateful “Earl of Haltom,” a noble title I had bestowed on my dad as a joke. (We had moved to the Fort Worth suburb of Haltom City when I was seven.)

As we took our places at the table, we blessed the food and praised God for the strength he had given Deborah to prepare it. And, of course, we asked for healings. I'm sure he meant no malice, but before the first bite, Dad commented, “Cancer ain't no big deal. I've had prostate cancer for four years, and it don't bother me a bit. Y'all are making a big deal about nothin!”

Deborah left the table in tears. Daddy was angry that she left the table. He looked at my mother and said, “Let's go home Tommye. We're not welcome here!”

They left. Denver walked them to their car. The meal went into the refrigerator. Carson, Regan, and I crawled into bed with Deborah.

Denver acted as though he was very uncomfortable but avoided taking sides. It was his second Christmas with us, and he was confused. He took a walk down by the river to gather his thoughts, then returned to the house and knocked on our door.

“Bless him,” he told me when I answered it.

“Who?”

“Your daddy. He meant no wrong, and I praise God for your father and his life. He's a good man, and he's a part of my blessin. If it hadn't been for your father, there wouldn't be no Mr. Ron. And if it hadn't been for you and Miss Debbie, I'd still be in the bushes instead of havin Christmas with you.

“I want you to hear me real good on this, Mr. Ron. Just bless him.”

I listened to what Denver had to say and acted as though I planned to take his advice. But the truth was, I thought his advice was ill informed at best and possibly tainted by the fact that he was used to living around all manner of addicts and alcoholics. Besides, Denver had no idea of the hell and embarrassment Earl Hall had put my family through over the years. And even if Denver had a small point—that there was more to the man than the “Earl in the bottle”—I wasn't ready to let him out.

12

Ron

I was fifty-five, graying at the temples, with half my heart lying in the ground at Rocky Top. How to survive? How to move forward? I felt trapped in a whiteout snowstorm with no guide and fresh out of supplies. The intensity of my fear surprised me.

For weeks, I wandered through the house like a ghost in a graveyard. I haunted Deborah's closet, opening the drawers and cabinets, touching her scarves, her stockings, burying my face in her clothes, trying to breathe in her scent. Sometimes I closed the closet door behind me and sat there in the dark, holding the last photograph ever taken of us together.

O
n November 3, 2000, my wife of thirty-one years and seven days passed into eternity. Cancer took her, but I blamed God more than cancer for ripping her away from me and shredding my heart in the process.

For a couple of weeks, a whirl of activity blunted my new reality—the private graveside service where we buried Deborah in her favorite spot at Rocky Top, the church memorial service, a getaway with my son and daughter meant to help us process our grief. But then the busyness was done, and I stood at the edge of the yawning black chasm that was a life without my wife.

I paced the halls, crying, tears running down my face in sheets. I couldn't stop. And nothing that anyone could say seemed to help.

Worst of all were the expressions of Christian sympathy.

“You know, Ron, we've been praying for Deborah to be healed,” some well-meaning person would say. “And now she's healed forever.”

Bull
, I thought.
She's dead.

In my blackest moments, I might even have said that out loud. It angered me that people might think some pat little Christian phrase would quench the inferno of my grief. At other times, I realized people meant well and, mainly, spoke wounding words because they didn't know what else to say.

There were just a couple of people who did know what to say: “I can't even imagine how you must be feeling, but I just want you to know that I love you.” Those were the people who climbed down with me into the pit of my grief and stayed with me. But the grief pit is a pretty nasty, slimy place, and most people don't want to get down in it.

To keep them from having to, I withdrew from everyone, even my friends. I just wanted to disappear. And at times, it seemed I
was
disappearing—literally. Inside of three weeks, I lost twenty-five pounds. The bones of my face cut sharp angles. My clothes flapped on my frame, an empty husk where a man used to be.

I didn't want anyone to see me, even if I had a decent day. I felt that if I looked happy, someone would mistake that for meaning I was doing well. I did not want to do well. I wanted my time in sackcloth and ashes and did not want to be robbed of it. I would go to the grocery store at two in the morning just so I wouldn't have to see anyone.

Psychologists like to talk about the stages of grief: anger, bargaining, denial, depression, acceptance. For a long time after Deborah died, I stayed stuck in anger like a tractor stuck in the mud on a Texas blackland farm after a pouring rain. To call it
anger
seems too mild. You can be angry over a broken dish or a lost football game. This was profound rage, and it had one primary target:

As I fired arrows of blame—at the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, cancer researchers—clearly the bull's-eye was God. It was He who had ripped a gaping and irreparable hole in my heart. Without a gun or mask, He robbed me of my wife and stole my children's mother and my grandchildren's grandmother. I had trusted Him, and He had failed me.

I was afraid to be real about that. I knew most of my Christian friends would not understand my anger. They all wanted me to take a different path than I took, to praise God for His divine plan, to resign myself to His will.

Instead, I sat in my room alone, screaming at Him, “If that's what You do to the people who love You most, I don't want to love You!”

Sometimes I wished one of my Christian friends would just be real with me. That one of them would say something like, “Can you believe what God did? It doesn't seem fair!”

It might have comforted me if they'd said that. Since Deborah's death, I try never to mute another person's grief with some kind of verbal anesthetic. Instead, I try to just cry with them and sometimes even to simply say, “Yeah, that stinks.”

But even as I wished someone would be that real with me in my grief, a truth nagged at the back of my mind. It percolated way down in the blue pool of my soul, where there lay a small inlet somehow unfouled by rage: God did the same thing to His own son—ordained for him an excruciatingly painful death.

And Jesus said, “No servant is better than his Master.”

If anyone I had ever known was a servant of God, it was my wife. She did not want to die, but she did want to serve God. And she had, serving Him—through serving the homeless—right up until the moment when her body would no longer allow it.

Shortly after Deborah died, her best friend, Mary Ellen, shared with me that verse from the gospel of John that I mentioned ear-lier: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Within weeks of Deborah's death, more than half a million dollars had poured into the Union Gospel Mission—money designated to build a chapel and state-of-the-art facility that would help homeless men, women, and children in Deborah's name. By 2009, Deborah's story had raised more than thirty million dollars for homeless shelters around America.

Do I wish God could've managed to help the homeless without taking my wife?

Absolutely.

Do I believe Deborah, if she could now see the fruit, would want to come back?

Absolutely not.

The pain of losing her still brings tears, especially when I play with my three granddaughters—granddaughters Deborah never got to meet. But Denver met them for her. Griffin, my daughter Regan's girl, is now three and a half. When she was born in 2005, she was the first white baby Denver ever held.