“Let Me Tell You a Story”

A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems

Cliff Williams

~~~~~~~~~~

Deaths, 113–128

One of the hardest things about being a college professor is being present at the funerals of former students.

Remembering Stephanie

A tear trickled down my cheek as I waited for Stephanie’s funeral to begin. I recalled the first time I met her. I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, sitting near the milk machine, when she flitted by, exclaiming, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”

“Didn’t do what?” I asked, a bit nonplused.

“Didn’t take Pooh,” she replied.

“Oh, I see,” I said. “And who are you?”

“Stephanie Iatesta.”

“Oh, hello.” And then, because I had heard that she had a possibly fatal disease, I asked, “Are you the person who has to have an operation this summer that you might die from?”

“Yes.”

“How does that feel? I mean, how does it feel to know you might die in a few months?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “I say with Paul, ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith!’”

Now she was dead. She lay in a shiny casket in front of the room at the funeral parlor, her picture on top of the casket, lovingly placed there by her parents. She had undergone the operation two years later than originally expected, had pulled through marvelously, but had succumbed to pneumonia and other complications that had developed. She died on August 20, 1988.

I remembered the times Stephanie had stopped by my office to talk. We talked about a variety of things, mostly of the everyday sort, but once in a while of life and death. I was intrigued by the fact that impending death for her was a real possibility. Her brother had died seven years earlier from the same disease.

After she had visited me several times, the question popped into my mind. Should I be treating Stephanie differently, knowing she might die the coming summer? Should I be extra nice? Should I send her a note every now and then? Should I talk about eternal matters, or just talk about nothing in particular?

It occurred to me that Stephanie would not want me to treat her any differently. It also occurred to me that in a way everyone was in her predicament. Sooner or later everyone I came into contact with would die. Should I be treating them differently, knowing they would die someday?

I resolved not to treat her differently.

The funeral ended and we moved to the cemetery. Stephanie was placed over the gaping hole next to a mound of dirt which had been covered by a soothing green carpet. The sun shone brightly on her casket as the minister read from I Corinthians 15.

After the prayer, people slowly departed. One person moved the part of the carpet that had hidden the gravestone of Stephanie’s brother. The inscription read, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith!”, the same verse Stephanie had quoted to me two and a half years earlier in the cafeteria.

If Stephanie could come back for just a minute, I might say to her, “Thanks for your cheery smiles, the Pooh Party Book (I haven’t played Musical Pooh Pillows yet), and the notes you wrote on my office door. Do you remember the time you rented the Pooh movie and we watched it with several others? I saw you stealing a glance at me to see if I liked it. (I did.) And thanks for the lesson. (I never told you about the question.) Goodbye. No, make that ‘See you later.’”

Published in the Trinity Digest, Fall, 1988

Killed in a Fiery Crash

It was 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7, 1997. The car Peter Lu was driving veered into oncoming traffic and hit a tractor-trailer head on. He was killed instantly and burned beyond recognition in the fire that ensued. The police did not know who he was. However, they found the name of a faculty member at Trinity College in Peter’s Bible in the back seat of the car. It was Prof. Jackie Bell, Peter’s former piano teacher. They called her. Jackie told the police who it was, for she knew that Peter was headed to Chicago from the University of Missouri, where Peter was a graduate student in biology, to pick up his mother at O’Hare airport.

Peter’s parents lived in China. Neither of them had been able to come to Peter’s graduation from Trinity College the year before. But his mother was coming a year later to visit Peter and to attend a graduation ceremony with Peter. Jackie Bell also knew about this. But she was unable to go to the airport to contact Peter’s mother. So she called another faculty member who knew Peter, Prof. Carmen Mendoza. Carmen went to the airport, found Peter’s mother and told her what had happened to Peter.

Peter’s mother had waited at the airport for six hours after she arrived, alone, not knowing what to do except to sit and wait. When she saw Carmen approach her, she knew instinctively that something dreadful had occurred. She wailed when she found out what it was. Peter was her only child.

I found out that Peter had been killed two days later, on Friday, the last day of the semester. Just after I had eaten lunch, Phil, a student, called me at home about something, and during our conversation asked whether I had heard about Peter. I hadn’t. I was so stunned when he told me that Peter had been killed that I could not work. I lay on the couch. I went outside. I lay on the couch some more. I did an errand. The news ended the sabbatical I was on that semester.

I first met Peter at the beginning of his sophomore year. He wanted to get into the honors section of Introduction to Philosophy. I told him that the requirement was a GPA of 3.3. He said that his was 4.0. I let him into the class.

When Peter was a junior, he asked me if I would like to drive a carload of students to an Indian restaurant in Chicago. I said yes. So he got two or three other students and I drove us all to the restaurant. The next semester we went to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. And during his senior year we went to two other foreign restaurants.

Peter went sandwiching with me once or twice. On the way back on one of these occasions I wondered aloud what the real world was—the homeless world of hunger and despair on the streets of Chicago that we had just been in or the affluent and beautiful Deerfield world in which Trinity College is embedded. Peter reported on his website that I often “pounded in” that question to the students in the car. On that trip he found a tape of Mozart piano sonatas in the car and put it into the tape player.

Several months after Peter’s death, the Student Development Office called me to say that a box of Peter’s belongings were in the office and that I could come over and take what I wanted. I took a Mozart CD and a heavy shirt. I could not see the contents of the box too well through my tear-filled eyes.

Right at 1:00 p.m. on May 7 every year since Peter’s death I have stopped whatever I am doing to remember Peter. One year that time fell at the beginning of a final exam. That year I did two things at once, though the students in the class saw me doing only one.

Murdered

Pete had moved to Guatemala at some point after he graduated from college. He was working for a relief organization there. Unfortunately, he got involved in an altercation between two Guatemalans. He sided with one of them and was killed by the other, most likely with a machete.

The murder took place just after Pete answered the back door of his apartment in Guatemala. His visitor may have lured him out and then brought out a machete from behind his back. Or the visitor may have yelled at him first. Or attacked him from behind somehow.

At the visiting hours in the funeral parlor, Pete’s mother sobbed. Sometimes she wailed. The eight or ten of us who surrounded her could only listen quietly.

Pete was in one of my classes. I did not know him well—an occasional hello on campus and a goodbye at commencement. I knew him well enough, though, to see that he was a gentle person who gave happy smiles to all he encountered.

How could such a person be murdered?

A Tragic Yet Beautiful Life

Kristin Newby broke her neck when she fell out of a tree at seventeen. She instantly became a quadriplegic. However, she could still move her right arm some so as to maneuver the lever of her motorized wheelchair. She could also write by having someone strap a pen around the palm of her right hand. Her left hand was limp. You could not shake that hand.

Kristin came to Trinity College when she was twenty-eight. I saw her one day on campus and went over to say hello. We struck up a friendship, and the following year she took a course from me.

One day it occurred to me that it would be engaging to roll around campus with her. She agreed. So she had her mother bring her hand wheelchair to school, I got in, and we “strolled” here and there. She manipulated the lever of her motorized chair and I rotated the wheels of the mechanical one. We stopped now and then to talk, but mostly we moved around on the campus sidewalks, being careful not to get too close to the edges so as to avoid tipping over. Afterwards we made plans for more strolls.

On one of these expeditions we were headed up the sidewalk beside the library. It was a little difficult for me to go up the incline—not impossible, but hard enough so that a visitor who happened to be nearby thought I was struggling. He pushed me up the incline, I thanked him, and Kristin and I continued rolling.

After a bit we headed toward McLennan Academic Building. When we got to the parking lot adjacent to the building, I got out of the chair, folded it, and put it into her mother’s van. I walked to the entrance of the building while Kristin rolled beside me. Just then the visitor walked past. His face registered astonishment. I smiled at him, said hello, and kept walking.

Kristin and I continued our strolls after she graduated, branching out to a nearby forest preserve and downtown Chicago. On none of these occasions did she complain about her restricted life. When I asked her about the fall out of the tree and her ambulance ride to the hospital, she told me the details without a trace of bitterness or resentment. Her normal talking voice was even and calm, and its gentle peacefulness worked its way into me. I parted from her with a sense of having been with someone who was at peace with her life.

I told the story of Kristin’s life in Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach, and I was looking forward to telling her that and sending her a copy of the book when it was published. That was scheduled for May, 2020. In September of 2019, I learned that she had died in the hospital two years earlier, when she was fifty-one. That explained why she had not answered my phone messages and letters.

I was stung.

The pages telling her story are in a section of chapter 8 titled, “Constricted Circumstances, Impaired Wills, and Suffering.” Her story there serves as a memorial to her tragic, yet beautiful, life.

A bit of background for the following quotation: Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th-century philosopher, believed that “life has no genuine intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.”

From the book:

“Kristin’s will must have been impaired significantly after she fell out of a tree when she was seventeen. She instantly and permanently became a quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair. But she did not let that impaired will constrain her forever. She went to college some years later. Though one of her hands was almost totally incapacitated, she could operate the controls on her motorized wheelchair with her other hand, and she could write with that hand, though slowly, if a pen were strapped to it.

“I found her to be kind and gentle. In the numerous contacts we have had since her college years, some by phone and some in person, I have never heard a bitter word or complaint from her. Her life is one of constant suffering because of her incapacitation, yet she is gracious, mild-spoken, and benevolent, unlike the wild teenager she once was.

“If Kristin had taken Arthur Schopenhauer’s thoughts on suffering to heart, she would not have remade her life into one of virtue and service. She would have had a ‘complete disappointment with the whole of life.’

“Before her accident, in ‘the rosy sunrise of [her] youth,’ life would have seemed to be ‘fair in prospect,’ with ‘many promises.’ From the vantage point of her wheelchair, she would have felt that few of these promises had been kept (299). She would have thought about the prominent part suffering played in her life as an instance of ‘the infinite pain, which everywhere abounds in the world’ (291).

“In addition to disappointment, she would have felt that her life was ‘a cheat’ (299)—she was cheated of the normal pleasures humans experience, of walking and being with friends at will, of being both inside and outside daily, of family life and of having a wide array of acquaintances, of hopeful anticipation, all because she was condemned largely to a life of bedridden boredom.

“If she had thought like Schopenhauer, she would have found it unacceptable that ‘Jehovah created this world of misery and affliction’ (301). She almost certainly would have felt resentment that such a divine person made her, and felt, too, that ‘it was better never to have been’ (301). If the purpose of her life was not simply to undergo undiluted suffering, what could she say it was?

“Suffering was certainly an obstacle for Kristin’s pursuit of a worthwhile life, but it was not a permanent one. After she finished college, she obtained a master’s degree in social work and for a number of years worked as a social worker at an institution for troubled girls. From time to time, someone took her on ‘strolls’ here and there. She kept in touch with acquaintances. She developed a faith in the Divine One.

“When I hike in the Colorado mountains above the tree line, I have sometimes gasped with astonishment at the stark and wondrous beauty that is so amazingly close. The awe I have felt when thinking about what Kristin has done with her life sometimes exceeds that awe.”

The quotations in this long quotation are taken from Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1974), and the page numbers are to that book.

Quoted from Clifford Williams, Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 150–1.

Mourning

I am sitting beside Dr. Arthur Holmes in the library of a nursing and rehabilitation center. He was one of my college philosophy professors, and I am visiting him some four decades after sitting in his classes.

He is in a reclining wheelchair. I am in an upholstered armchair. His eyes are closed, not because he is sleeping, but because of the stroke he had five months earlier. Before the stroke, at age eighty-six, he was still as sharp as the numerous occasions in class when he gave brilliant lectures. He was working on a new edition of a book he had written two decades earlier. Now he is felled. He cannot get himself to sit up straight. He keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. His arms move slowly up to his head, sometimes to his closed eyes.

“Hello, Prof. Holmes,” I say when I first sit beside him out in the hallway. “This is Cliff. Cliff Williams.” He says something I do not catch and his lips form a half-smile. “I heard you were here and thought I would visit.” No response. I say something else and he asks me where I am teaching now. I tell him. It is noisy in the hallway, so I ask an assistant whether we can move to the nearby library.

In the library I intersperse my talk with silences, during which I gaze at his eyelids, looking for some sign of what he is thinking or feeling. “Did you hear that Linda and I went to Oxford, England?” “No,” he exclaims in his thick British accent. I tell him about places and people I saw, about spending my days in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He murmurs when he recognizes something I mention.

I read him a George Herbert poem, then ask whether he would like me to read more. “I don’t think so, thank you.”

He moves his arm jerkily to one of his eyes, and I think I see his eyelid becoming red, as if he is tearing up. I get a lump in my throat, but stop my eyes from getting wet.

Six days before his stroke he had written me to say how delighted he was to have read a book of mine, which he had endorsed on the back cover. “And thank you! You make an eighty-six-year-old teacher realize once again how worthwhile teaching has been!”

One never outgrows the need for affirmation from one’s teachers.

When I leave, I take his hand, which is lying on one of his legs. He squeezes it. I look back as I walk out the library door.

_________________________________

Now I am sitting in a vacant parking lot a couple of hundred feet from the intersection of Routes 12 and 134 in northern Illinois, trying to picture what happened there some weeks earlier on June 30, 1993, at 8:15 a.m. That morning, a storm had knocked out the traffic lights at the intersection. Perhaps Don saw that. In any case, just as he headed west through the intersection, a truck driver who was heading north and who had not seen that the light was out plowed into Don’s car at fifty-five miles an hour, smashing it across the intersection.

“Did the hospital tell you that Don had been killed when they called you?” I asked Stacy, Don’s widow, seventeen years later at a college reunion. “Yes, because they don’t want you to drive fast. I got someone to drive for me.”

I had not known Don too well when he was a student. But I knew that he was competent in the college’s computer lab. We said “hello” to each other when we passed in the academic building’s main hallway.

Near the intersection, I imagine him driving across it. I imagine the truck striking his car. I try to feel what his widow felt. Then I go.

Back to the Contents page

© 2024 by Cliff Williams