A September Tragedy To Remember

This still deeply moves me.

This month marks thirty years since my cousin Paul Nisly received an urgent phone call from his wife Laura while finishing up some work at his office at Messiah College in south central Pennsylvania.

"Come home right away,” she said, with a terrible desperation in her voice,. “Pastor Sam is here, and he says Janelle has had a bad accident." Janelle was their oldest and only daughter, who had graduated near the top of her class with a degree in nursing just four months earlier, and had landed her first job as an RN in nearby Harrisburg.

All the way to the hospital they prayed as they had never prayed before, “Please, please, have her be OK,” unable to even consider the possibility that she wouldn’t survive. But they were soon to learn that Janelle had suffered fatal injuries in a collision with a tractor trailer that careened out of control and crossed a median strip and into her lane on a busy highway not far from their home.

In the book Nisly wrote about his loss some five years later, “Sweeping up the Heart: A Father’s Lament for his Daughter,” he describes the walk to the grave site after her memorial service: “Boots of lead weighted our feet as we moved to the grim hole which was only partially masked by the phony green outdoor carpet. In burying my child, I was burying myself.”

In a later chapter he anguishes, “Not only were my questions about God troubling--and unanswered--but I confronted formidable questions about the nature and purpose of prayer. Does God hear prayer? ...To the most urgent prayer in my life I had received a blank.”

In such a time, it is a double tragedy to lose not only a loved one but to fear the loss of one’s confidence in a loving and protecting God. My cousin sometimes found himself wrestling with the kind of desolation expressed in Psalm 88, “I am counted as those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength. I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave... Why, O Lord, do you reject me...? You have taken my companions and my loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.”

When another cousin and I went to see Paul and Laura we, like Job’s friends, found ourselves unable to offer much besides the gift of our presence and care, which they received graciously. I felt humbled by my own difficulty in knowing anything to say that I felt could be of the remotest help.

In times like these, our only help is that of the Shepherd who walks with us, suffers with us, weeps with us, along with the presence of others who are often as speechless and clueless as we are.

On the last page of Nisly’s book he concludes with some words from the poet John Leax’s “The Geography of Love.”

We have crawled like cicadas

from the years of darkness,

split our backs by will,

and left the old nature fastened to the tree.

Yet we will fall into the ground.

The grave, too, is Christ’s.

It is his place.

Eternity is now,

What we are is here.

In the geography of love

the only place is Christ.
We dwell in him, the presence of the Father.