The Blessing and Gift of Jonathan

This Christmas season has come and gone. We rang in the new year with family and friends. We did most of our usual traditions. We went to Florida to see Aunt Nelly. Mom was there too. We saw my brother Ian and his wife Gabby, my Dad and Donna, and Nelly’s beau Dwight. We stopped in Charleston on our way to see Calvin’s oldest brother Wallace and his family. We went to the botanical gardens and out to a nice dinner.

This year was so very different. 

If I am to be honest Christmas is not one of my favorite times of the year. In fact, I usually sense a bit of dread arriving just after Thanksgiving and a sense of relief the day after Christmas. I know in my heart it is the celebration of light coming into darkness — the Savior of the world revealing the truth of his Father to the world. The Truth, the Way, the Life incarnate here among us, then in the flesh and now in the spirit. And yet ... and yet, what I feel every year is a melancholic spirit. I feel the urgency and frantic energy in the air as people focus on all the material aspects of making the important day come to fruition. Somehow in the hustle bustle of activity, I feel precisely the opposite of what we are all reminding ourselves of and celebrating — I feel the absence of spirit and peace. I have come to know this place well, and I accept each year that these sentiments will arrive. I greet them with a familiarity now, and know that they will pass and I will look back lovingly on the events we do each year that have become our family traditions. I know when we attend the Christmas Eve service that the sense of peace and spirit fills my being. I am with my love celebrating Love. My darlings are sleeping and will awake to their gifts all wrapped and ready for the tree, or table as it were, to avoid Bijou’s pee (the never housebroken dog)!

This year was so very terribly and awfully different. 

The day before our departure from Richmond Calvin came home from work and told me the news — Jonathan has been hit by a car, he is dead. Time stood still for just an instant and then my heart shattered. I dropped my head in my hands and they became wet with tears. The grief was immediate and the impact so felt. A few months prior I lost my grandfather. He was an old man with a full life. He died at 97 years old, he had a successful career, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. He climbed mountains, ran marathons and travelled the world. He enjoyed good food and fine clothes. One might say “a life well lived.” I don’t mean to imply that there was no grief or feeling of loss when I heard the news of my grandfather. Certainly there were moments. Those moments, however, were subtle and gentle. Jonathan's death felt so violent. It seems there is something satisfying about a potential that has been fulfilled. When that is the case the spirit more readily lets go. There was nothing left undone that needed to be said, shared or done. The body and mind of my grandfather took time, years and years to decay, dying little by little to ultimate death. It’s as if there are many little good byes that happen during that time and those years to parts of the man that was, that is no more. It is natural, in order and in good time, time to go.

Not so with Johnathan. He was a young man, 38 years old. I remember feeling drawn to Jonathan before I ever met him. I knew Calvin had this younger brother that I did not know. So I pressed upon him to try to meet him. He lived about 45 or so minutes away, but happened to be on the way to where I drove to Greensboro occasionally for my voice lessons. So we planned a visit on the way home one week. He did not answer his phone, and although the door was open, as he always left his apartments, he was not there. So we left a note — I wanted him to know we tried, that we both wanted to see him and I wanted to meet him. I eventually met Jonathan a few months later at his older brother Wallace’s school graduation. 

I can’t quite say why but I had a “love at first sight” reaction to Jonathan. Not in the romantic sense, but in a heart sense, where your whole being just feels connected to this other individual. He was so beautiful and there was something so vulnerable and perceptive about him. I got to know him better over the years and was often so impressed by his deep metaphysical insights and understandings. But Jonathan was also deeply troubled, and as the years moved forward so did his issues. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and suffered neuroses that caused odd behaviors. He did not take care of his hygiene, his thoughts and communications where not always coherent or logically connected, and he certainly held anger and resentments, sometimes towards those who loved him most. He did have desires — he wanted a wife, he wanted a career and in his way he tried to manifest those things — but because of his mental handicap, to no avail. He felt he was a prisoner to his own condition, yet refused true help, convinced he could help himself despite years of evidence to the contrary. 

When we went to clean out Jonathan's apartment after the funeral there were many empty soda bottles on the floor and plastic grocery bags everywhere. There was a stack of ramen noodle packages two feet high on the stove. Seems that ramen and soda where the staples of his diet. He had not even one proper change of clothes (he wore the same outfit over and over). His blankets were on his little day couch where we pictured him sleeping, nights alone, in dirty clothes amongst the trash on the floor. Such a sad picture. Jonathan did not manifest his potential, he often was not kind to those who tried to care for him, lashing out from his place of deep pain.

That moment I heard the news of his death and felt my heart shatter, I had a vision. It was energetically that of a shattered mirror, shards of light, and rays of black. It is in some ways how I saw Jonathan’s spirit — shattered like a broken mirror, trying to organize the pieces and somehow put them back in order, but the burden was too heavy, the puzzle too complex. 

I have thought a lot about Jonathan’s passing, and one aspect that is so striking and powerful to me is his impact on so many in his family and immediate surroundings. Despite Jonathan's lack of manifestation, or even “good behavior”, we are pained and grieved by his loss. We miss him and have a real sense of the loss of a beautiful being that was among us and is no more. What an amazing and powerful testament this is to the absolute value and worth of this individual Jonathan who touched and affected our lives in some profound way. So profound in fact we can not quite wrap our logical minds around. I think in pondering these things this is a huge gift and blessing that Jonathan has given us and reminds us of. The inherent and undeniable value and impact of another being. It did not matter what Johnathan did or did not accomplish, even his actions or inactions become secondary to the very phenomena of Jonathan. He did not have in fact to do or be or become anything. He was and is, and that is enough. We love him because he is — uniquely Jonathan made in God’s image. Worthy of honor, respect and love, despite his worldly challenges, something so perfect, and so so dearly missed. ("Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father" (Matt. 5: 48)