The Terror Trap (Department Z Book 7) Read online

  Mark and Stephen arrive at the ER, where like two bodyguards they assume positions at my side and serve as liaison between Katy and Linda Lenz who are by this time doing the same for Mom and Michele at home.

  During the next forty-eight hours, I am wheeled in and out of scans and tests in the hospital while the medical team rules out first one thing, then another. The only thing not cooperating is the room. It is still circling. A CT scan, an ultra sound, an MRI, and something called the Dix-Hallpike maneuver rule out alternating possibilities of stroke or heart attack. Still no letup with the room.

  Dr Lam (yes, another newbie in our physician collection) makes a diagnosis of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. The good news is it is not life threatening. The bad news is I can seriously hurt myself by moving around on my own in my present condition.

  It is the most common cause of dizziness when balance in the inner ear malfunctions. I am told small crystals in the ear determine the direction of gravity. When these come loose and float around the inner ear, it causes the sensation of vertigo, or spinning. It can be caused by a virus or even be stress related. Well, I don’t have a virus. The bad news is, even the walk from bed to bathroom is a dizzying experience for me.

  So now I am in a hospital bed with the room continuing to spin round and round with no let up. Outside the open doorway, the hall rushes past like a speeding train. Why is this happening? I need to be home with Dixie and I can’t even walk by myself to the bathroom.

  Monday 03 August. Michele and Katy arrange for a professional nursing team for Mom. She is pleased, as they settle in, with the way in which they treat Mom and go about their business of giving care.

  Tuesday 04 August. Morning. A few minutes after 8 o’clock. I look up to see Stephen standing by my hospital bed, cell phone in hand. He is crying.

  “What. What is it?” I ask.

  “Mom is gone,” he replies through tears.

  His words stun me. Take my breath away. Mom is gone! The medical team has planned one more hospital day, mainly for my safety in recovery. But I’ve been here too long. Mom is gone! How can this be? This is wrong. She needs me. No, it’s the other way around. I need to be there with her. I should have been there. But it makes no difference now. I am too late.

  Mom is really gone!

  Stephen leans in, wraps his strong arms around me and we hold one another, weeping. Then I push away the sheet and start to get up. This sets off a familiar loud alarm wired to my bed to protect me from injuring myself if I try to walk without assistance. The alarm has gone off several times before during my stay, resulting in voices in the hall, “Someone get in there, he’s up again.” But the nurse entering this morning quickly realizes today is different.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  The room is still spinning. The hallway is still rushing past my door. It no longer matters. Nothing else matters.

  I tell her, “My wife just died. I have to go now! Please help me get checked out of here.”

  The official time of death: 7:52 am.

  Dixie’s long, arduous and painful journey is over.

  Mom is gone.

  And I am not there.

  “Even with all the separation and things that might come our way, I would rather spend my life with you in the work of God than anything else I can think of.” ~ DLT letter, 30 June 1955

  This morning, 04 August at 7:52, Dixie slipped quietly and peacefully from earth to heaven. Her long and difficult sacred journey is done.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord. ~ Psalm 23:6

  ~ posted on Facebook and CaringBridge.com ~

  A Postscript for Dixie

  A desert sunrise . . . how glorious! How glorious you must be, O Lord, to create such beauty. The ever changing colors make me realize your creativity is not static, but ever changing, ever revealing and reflecting your beauty.

  You not only create the beauty, you give me eyes to see and a heart to appreciate your handiwork. How majestic you are, O Lord! I receive with gratitude your beauty. Create in my eyes the ability to see all the majesty and beauty of your self. Reflect your beauty in my life. Let my family and those around me see the colors of your beauty reflected in me. Take away the darkness of my life so your light can shine through these colors, sparkling like a prism to a dull world that is drab and colorless without you. Let me be warmth to those who can’t see your color because they are cold and empty.

  Thank you, Lord, for filling my eyes with your beauty . . . for filling my life with your warmth . . . for filling my soul with yourself. ~ DLT diary, December 1995

  A postscript is any addition or supplement a writer attaches to a book to supply further information. A kind of final word, if you will. This is not the last time I will speak of Dixie, Dix, Mom, Gramma, or GG. She is all of these and more to us. I will speak of her often, telling her stories to the generations that follow. I will recall her smile at the very end, content in having finished well her sacred journey, anticipating what lay ahead. But this is my last word for now.

  How does one fall in love so deeply and stay there for so long? Those who have experienced it may try to describe it, but I cannot. At least not adequately. I only know it happened once and I was there.

  Dixie’s and my love was at first an attraction, a drawing together, physically, emotionally, spiritually. But for attraction to be more than “dry kindling on a hot fire,” consuming itself and then dying, requires a decision to commit to one another with servant love. It is this kind of true decision to be forever committed to another that remains strong through the tests, temptations and trials of life.

  Humility, patience, sexual faithfulness, forgiveness, time, trust, integrity, communication, selflessness. Tears over having hurt or disappointed, spilling from one’s eyes in the presence of the other. Suffering and sorrow. Generous portions of laughter with and for one another. Delight and contentment. These are the commitment ingredients that must be mixed thoroughly with attraction if love is to last. Rabbi Barnett R. Brickner says, “success in marriage does not come merely through finding the right mate, but through being the right mate.”

  Friendship. There are few things on which I see eye to eye with poet, composer and atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, but I do agree with this statement attributed to him, “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

  I will miss my best friend every day. I will miss hearing her voice, seeing her face, feeling her touch. I will miss bringing her coffee each morning. I will miss reading our out-loud books together: the Bible, books of poetry and prose, theology and philosophy, practical Christianity.

  I will miss praying together each morning. Starting busy days this way was oftentimes our only chance to be with one another, intimate in the presence of Redeeming Grace. I most often led in our morning prayers. She liked this. Is there something deep in a woman’s heart that longs to be touched this way? To hear her husband pray for her and for those she loves? I believe so.

  On occasion I asked her because I, too, so loved listening to her pray, expressing the intimate beliefs of her heart and her inmost depths of longing or concern for those she loved. I’ve heard her mention many of you by name to our very Best Friend. She could be tender and passionate at the same time. She loved with a fierce love, sometimes standing in the way of blows meant for others. She was a tough lady, and as Pastor Gary, with whom she worked for several years as minister to women, reminded our family at the interment, “she did not suffer fools!”

  I will miss all this and more. She honored hers and my relationship by helping us have a happy life with one another, with our children and their children and their children’s children, with the family of God and with the many strangers whom we have been privileged to meet along the way.

  It seems as though she’s st
ill here. Force of habit finds me getting up quietly in the early morning so as not to awaken her. Neighbors respectfully give me space, leave cards expressing sympathy at my door. Candace, the young woman who deep cleans for us once a month cries while she works because “everything I touch reminds me of her ~ the woman who cared enough to talk to me and listen to my story.”

  My children and their spouses have been rock stars of strength and stability in these days of caregiving. Friends have brought meals. The group of business leaders who meet in our home every Wednesday morning have been a band of brothers to me. So many have sent cards and letters of encouragement, written messages on Facebook and CaringBridge, left phone or text messages. I cannot begin to adequately express what this has meant.

  Medical teams have served us well at Overlake Hospital Medical Center of Bellevue, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and Proton Therapy Center, and Evergreen Hospice Center of Kirkland. Well over 200 doctors, nurses, technicians, therapists, and administrators in all.

  It is imperative that we view all of life as a sacred journey. From the time we learn to share our toys to the time we learn to share our hearts. The good and the bad. The journey we choose or that is chosen for us is sacred, set apart to be shared unselfishly, secure against violation, offered in the end as a legacy to those who remain after death has at last parted us.

  I give you my thanks, as do our daughter, Michele, son, Stephen, and all the members of our family, including you who in one way or another have adopted us on our sacred journey. If you’ve found the words written here helpful in some way, perhaps you will share them with friends. A gift of Sacred Journey to your pastor’s wife would bring a huge smile to Dixie’s face. I hope you or someone you love will find God’s strength and love in your own Valley of Shadows, whatever they may be. My prayer is that you will discover, through your faith and his promises, the ways in which yours will be the sacred journey your Creator/Redeemer envisioned it to be when he saw you for the very first time. It is never too late to begin.

  No, this is not my final word about Dixie. I will keep on telling the stories of how she came to us in her youth, touched us, became part of us, loved us, and like a stone cast upon the water, left us at the end with ripples of her love and devotion as our legacy.

  I find myself expecting her to walk into the room just now and ask me what it is I am doing. I tell her I am writing the final postscript to a love story.

  Her eyes light up, her countenance aglow with knowing.

  “It’s ours, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I reply.

  With her hands on my shoulders, she leans in until her check brushes mine, her gaze resting on the final page. And as she has done so often before, she smiles and says, “So, tell me, what do you think we’ve learned from all of this?”

  It’s a good question. One I am sure she would want to ask you, now that you and she have become acquainted.

  “What do you think you have learned from all of this?”

  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.

  But the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:1

  25 Postscript to a love story

  The Beginning

  They came from different worlds . . .

  THE SONG SPARROW AND THE HUMMINGBIRD

  26 Song sparrow

  The song sparrow made her home on

  the ground in scrubby low cover

  at the edge of a once very beautiful Garden.

  Beneath her dark eyes and short bill

  she wore a rich, feathery coat of russet-and-gray

  with bold streaks down her white chest.

  Her long tail, cocked and proud,

  pumped up and down on short flights across the Garden.

  She was known for her colorful range of songs.

  She knew twenty different tunes

  with hundreds of improvised variations

  and shared them all with her neighbors.

  Favorite among humans in the Garden were what sounded

  like the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

  Sadly, those closest to her did not listen.

  Mother and father bird seemed always to be fighting,

  too busy tearing their nest apart to hear her songs.

  Like the humans who had once loved their Garden

  and each other but rarely came here anymore.

  She felt their anger,

  unloved,

  lonely and ashamed,

  certain it was her fault.

  But still she sang her songs.

  One day a charm of hummingbirds flew past, playfully cavorting, dancing in the sun. One hummer heard her singing and abruptly stopped in midair. He circled back. She sat alone on a low branch. Lovely to look at and her songs were . . . well, they were amazing! He landed on a branch in the next tree over. Not too close so as to frighten her away, but close enough to hear her sing. After awhile the song sparrow stopped singing and was quiet. He knew she had seen him. He couldn’t hold back. He had to show her how he felt.

  He was small, but colorful with iridescent feathers. The humans called him Anna’s Hummingbird. An iridescent reddish pink throat and crown. Wings so fast they made a humming noise. He could fly right, left, up, down, backwards, and even upside down.

  And so he did. He did it for the song sparrow. Right, left, up, down, backward, and even upside down! He hovered by flapping his wings in a figure-8 pattern. He’d learned this before leaving the nest as a youngster. With his long and tapered bill . . . he’d learned this by watching his father . . . he obtained nectar from the center of flowers.

  But there were two things he couldn’t do. He didn’t have a voice for singing and he couldn’t walk or hop about. His feet were used for perching only. He was little, but a fighter. One of the fiercest of birds, a warrior! He had successfully repelled much larger birds away from feeders and flowers he liked. Somehow, he wanted her to know that.

  At last he got up his nerve. This was it. He swooped in, flared, then lighted on the branch next to her. He waited for what seemed like forever. Waited for her to push him away. To tell him to get lost. To say they were too different, not suited for each other. That they came from different worlds . . . he from a country farm . . . she was a city bird.

  He had grown up in an open cup nest the size of a golf ball, made up of dandelions, bits of leaves and feathers woven into a dense cup bound together with spider silk and decorated with moss and lichen for camouflage. She, too, had grown up in an open cup, but hers had been low on the ground and made of weeds, grass, leaves, strips of bark, lined with fine grass and rootlets and hidden in tall grass.

  She was a solitary bird. He, on the other hand, was part of a charm (a group of hummers). She was monogamous. He was . . . well, hummingbirds are not so much. Males mate with the female and don’t contribute to the care of the eggs or chicks. They defend the territory, but that’s about it, and they will pretty much mate with any female in their territory.

  But the song sparrow was clear early on about this. If they were to have a lasting relationship it had to be for better or for worse, richer, poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day until parted by death. Furthermore, he was going to have to do more than sit on his favorite branch “guarding the territory.” He would need to help around the nest and join her in raising any chicks they might conceive.

  He was smitten. Sick with love. He did cartwheels, chirping and squeaking, sounding a lot like something was stuck in his throat. He danced over her in the sky. Oh, how he danced . . . right, left, up, down, backwards, upside down! And as he danced the sparrow lifted her head and sang her love songs.

  For many seasons after they flew together. Differences blended over time. They worked at living and loving together and it was good. They were blessed by the Creator of the Garden. The trees and flowers seemed greener and brighter, and birds in the neig
hborhood found inspiration and encouragement by sharing life together. They liked it when the hummingbird danced in the sky, and they loved the song sparrow’s songs.

  Each day he would brush against pollen in flower blossoms as he fed with his long bill. Each day with pollen on his head and bill, he transferred it between different flowers to help the plants grow while the songbird built their nests at the ten-foot level instead of on the ground. They called it compromise. And their little family grew, then flew away.

  One evening a charm of hummingbirds flew by, on the way to warmer climate. He greeted them with a few rights, lefts, ups and downs, then watched as they disappeared. But something had been different this time. He came to her there in the nest. She was silent. She had not sung her usual song for the hummingbirds as they passed by. In fact, she did not sing at all.

  Not for them.

  Not for him.

  Not for anyone.

  And for a moment . . . a long breathless moment . . . the entire garden was silent.

  He looked away for an instant, and when he turned back she was gone. The nest was still warm. The scent of her presence still there. But she was gone.

  His tiny feet clung to the branch. More tightly than ever before.

  His tiny wings fluttered, but he did not lift off.

  No left, right, up, down.

  No more dancing in the sky.

  He gazed at the empty nest for a long while as a cloak of darkness wrapped around him. At last, as dawn began to break, he opened his wounded heart to cry out his sorrow. Instead, he began to sing. Sing like he had never sung before. It was his voice, but they were her songs! Songs he had heard through many seasons. They were his now. Lodged forever in his heart.