Pistol Butt
We don’t always need the profound to give us strength and we are finding so many daily moments where that strength is presented to us in our interactions with others. Everyone is suffering some sort of loss or mourning of their own. We must find the joy and beauty to be found in those stories, in the people we meet, in the breezes of the air, in the skipping of a happy child, to sustain us.
We march on in our preparations for Hans’s funeral. At first Zatha was dismayed that the date for it was pushed so far, in her mind, out to the future, but it has been blessing. It was good to have the time with Hans in the hospital to come to terms with the accident and his death. We’ve had time to prepare a fitting funeral, to prepare his eulogy, to meet with Hans’s company mates and friends.
Long ago Hans’s grandpa, my dad, aptly nicknamed him “Pistol Butt.” We’ll never know what exact grandson-grandpa event “triggered” this name but, as sometime frustrated parents of a strong-willed son, we were known to use that name many times. My dad, the 1960 USNA grad, grew up in North Platte, Nebraska, helping his own dad on their family hog farm, and spent summers on his grandpa’s farm in Minden. He is a cowboy and warrior himself, and instilled in Hans a love of marksmanship, an appreciation for our second amendment rights, and the joy of roasting hot dogs in a small pit dug into the ground of the Texas grasslands near Amarillo where they now live, while out hunting prairie dogs. Pistol Butt loved everything about his grandpa and their adventures and expeditions.
Grandpa even sent Hans and Zatha to the NRA’s Whittington Center Adventure Camp one summer, where both of them honed their marksmanship skills. Hans especially loved it and became a camp counselor there. Hans was a talented marksman and outdoorsman.
Luckily for us, my mom and dad were with us at the hospital just a day after the accident, and they were there for our meetings to discuss Pistol Butt’s MRI results, for meetings of going forward, for the news of his death, and for just holding their daughter in great pain. Before my mom and dad flew back home to Texas on Saturday, and we relocated to Annapolis, we had discussed how Hans had once said he wanted a tattoo someday but he didn’t know what design he would get. We joked about we should all get pistols tattooed on our butts. On Sunday I got a text from my mom from Amarillo. It was a picture of my dad’s 76-year-old upper derriere with a pistol tattooed on it above the initials HPL. A fitting tribute for our little Pistol Butt.
I am personally learning how mourners grieve differently. We are told regularly that it happens differently for different people. There are those outward signs of inward pain, and Eric and I decided to join my dad in his outward sign and visited a local tattoo parlor (we know they don’t call them that much anymore but it just sounds so cool) yesterday afternoon to get our own Pistol Butts.
Being tattoo “virgins” (they really do call it that) the staff flowed with kindness as Eric, in his regular data gathering mode, learned about the process, and as we discussed the art and craft of our tattoos. It was in the hours we spent with our artist that we learned the lesson again that everyone is mourning some loss, that we should meet everyone with kindness because you just never know what someone is going through, or has gone through.
What we learned humbled us. Our 44-year-old tattooist was a master-degreed mechanical engineer, an Army vet, with two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan under his belt. His wife is still active duty. We’re not sure of his timeline but he opened up about his final tour in Afghanistan only after we asked him about it.
His group patrolled the same route and left camp each day using the same route. This concerned him, knowing the Taliban was watching. One night, though the sentries noticed a group of Taliban men huddled and working on a nearby culvert pipe, even moving dirt to a waiting truck, they did not report it. The next morning as they left on patrol in their transport and the vehicle in which he was riding passed over the culvert, 600 pounds of explosives went off. He told us of one comrade being thrown from the vehicle and of how the vehicle than rolled back into the crater, crushing him to death. The soldier next to him died. He spent six months in a hospital, and is still fighting repercussions from the incident. He sports a new hip that gives him trouble. He is facing long-term dental care as his molars, which were shattered in the explosion, need to be slowly replaced. He suffers from PTSD.
Despite all this, he continually flowed with kindness and love towards us, celebrating in Hans’s life with the little he learned in our few hours together. We laughed and joked about so many things. We each found ourselves tearing up as we told each other our stories of mourning. Thank goodness his tears came as he gently took a break and held his tattooing tool up from my derriere.
Just in our short time here we have been told other stories of personal mourning, which people lovingly share with us when they learn of Hans’s death – from the secretary in the barber shop of Bancroft Hall who lost her young son; to our hotel manager who lost his brother to cancer in his 20s; to the mom at the rental place (where I am looking to secure a local apartment so I can stay longer and visit more regularly to support Zatha through graduation) whose 22 year-old son died in the middle of the night from an unknown congenital heart disorder just seven months ago leaving an older sister; to the USNA company officer whose former fellow midshipmen boyfriend died of cancer before their graduation. They tell us their stories not to top ours but to let us know we are not alone.
We are not alone; we are never alone. Most especially, God never leaves us alone – He shows himself in those bouncing children, in an exciting lacrosse game, in the weddings parties we watch process through our hotel.
I still sob. Eric still cries. Zatha weeps. I feel as though I am being regularly pounded with a heavy rubber mallet of grief, while Zatha probably feels more like sharp knives stab at her non-stop every time she sees the faces of thousands of fellow midshipmen reminding her of her brother, every time she walks by the gazebo where they shared a ‘Dogs on the Luce’ brat lunch just two days before the accident, every time she visits the library where they regularly shared a hot espresso drink as they studied together. Everything, everywhere on the Yard and in town reminds her of her brother, and of the pain in knowing she won’t get to make any more earthly memories with him. I know that she finds joy in those memories as well, and I pray for the day that those memories will shine greater than the pain of her loss. Shine like Hans.
