In the Zone

After high school, I spent four very cool years in the Navy riding around in a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine (USS Ray SSN 653). When you are stationed on a boat (submarines are called boats), you need to spend close to a year getting what they called “qualified.” Getting qualified means learning every system on the ship. These systems included everything electrical, related to air, water, oil, power. By learning I mean, you need to know where all the valves are, how to close or open those valves, how to turn off every piece of electrical equipment in several different ways (the switch on the piece, and a couple of power supply sources). You didn’t need to know how to operate everything, you just needed to know how to shut it down if it was doing something dangerous, like smoking. I still remember that the power supply for the binocular locker was FL-7. If the locker caught on fire, I could turn off the power without needing to get to the locker itself. The goal was to be able to keep the ship from sinking if it caught on fire, flooded, or exploded, from anywhere you might be on the ship. They put a pretty high premium on making sure the go-ups equaled the go-downs.

To make sure everyone was up to speed, the captain called for special drills a couple of times each week. He might have a fire in sonar or flooding in engineering. He might have a 3,000-pound air leak in the torpedo room. The thing is though, that we never knew if it was a drill or real. So, everyone sprang into emergency mode whenever anything happened. I remember one time we told there was flooding in the diesel generator room and right in the middle of the emergency a fire broke out in radio. It turned out that the flooding problem was a drill, and the fire was real. You do very different things in those two different events, so things were very exciting. No one died.

One of the things I remember about those days is that whenever anything happened that might destroy the ship and kill us all, I popped into a kind of zone. Whatever I had been doing disappeared and the only thing I thought about was what I should do, given where I was on the ship. It was really important that I react in the right way to whatever the emergency was. I went into a zone. Everything was precise, focused, fuzzy around the edges and in slow motion. I’ve read that men in battle react like this. And I suppose this was a kind of battle. Then, when the emergency was over, we would talk about it, do a little shaking, and get back to whatever we had thrown into the air to take care of the emergency.

I mention all this because I remembered that this was my reaction that day in October 2015 when the doctor said, “The tests indicate that you have 4^th stage esophageal cancer. It has spread into your lymph nodes, and through your whole body. You have six months to live without chemo and maybe 18 with it.” I went into the same zone I had gone in in the Navy. My concern was for Eileen, for Rachel and even the doctor (can you imagine how horrible it must be to tell patients that news?). Everything slowed down, became particularly focused, and became fuzzy. I didn’t know about anything other than what was right in front of me. People would come and ask me how I was doing, and I would have no idea. I was in the zone and whatever else was going on didn’t register or matter.

The difference between the Navy and later life was that the emergency in the Navy only lasted for a few minutes. It got over; it was done. We either solved the problems or we died. That was it. But now, Eileen is really really sick. And she isn’t going to get better and there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t help. I can pray for her. I can make her comfortable, I can talk to her, hug her (carefully), love her, but she’s dying. I/we tried to let others help us. We have and had the greatest group of friends on the planet. Folks took her to chemo and brought her home. They brought us enough food to keep me eating for months after she went to Jesus. A local cleaner pressed all my shirts from then on and for a year after she died. The church hired a local lady to do the paperwork for the billing and insurance stuff, she was really great. And people contributed to and paid for the burial costs. There was probably a lot more that I don’t and didn’t even know about. I was in the zone.

As I mentioned, in the Navy, when the emergency was over, we would go back to what we were doing before. If it was a real fire, flood, or something else, going back meant repairing or replacing what was broken or lost. Either way, you still went back to what you were doing before. But when your wife dies, there is no going back. Things are different. Who you were is not who you are. Even where you lived isn’t where you live. Life is not the same. There’s no going back to how it was before. You can’t replace or repair parts.

I think this one of the things that makes grief so horrible. You go into the zone and the thing that puts you in the zone never ends. You can’t get out of the zone by having the emergency end.

So here I am. In the zone.

The good news is that I’m not alone in the zone. I know one who lost his son to evil men. Of course, he had the ability to raise his son back to life. But he’s also raised my Eileen back to life. She isn’t dead, she just lives in a better, nicer place. One the things she looked forward to, as she was awaiting death, was visiting with Jesus, the baby we lost before she/he was born, and Bessy Wilson. And now, I look forward to visiting with Jesus, Eileen, and all those others. Because God lives, Jesus lives, and Eileen lives. All she did was go visit Jesus without me and instead of her coming home someday, I’ll be going to her.

I think someday I might get out of the zone, but for now, I’ll continue to serve God with every fiber of my being. There isn’t really anywhere or anyone else to turn to. He’s all there is. That sounds sort of fatalistic, doesn’t it? But if God is the creator of the universe, turning to him has got to be way more exciting than serving on a submarine sneaking around off the Soviet coast in the Arctic Ocean. And there were times when that was spectacularly thrilling.