Ashley Huber
Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Ashley Huber has won our writing contest on the theme Humanity with her story "Irreverence Justified."
Ashley Huber grew up in a small Kansas town and spent several years in different parts of the country pursuing higher education and surviving practicums. All of her family eventually moved away from the Midwest just in time for her to move back. She settled in the Kansas City Metro Area in 2003 and has spent her professional life serving in healthcare and also as a congregational pastor. She loves reading and writing, riding her mountain bike on miles and miles of KC trails, hiking with her husband, and cuddling her two blue heelers. The people closest to her agree that she has a great personality and is a joy to be around. This is the first time she has submitted her work.
Irreverence Justified
As I peered in, all I could think about was that it just did not look like *Devin. Of course, it was him. His sandy blonde hair was combed neatly to the side, but it seemed like it was parted the wrong way…or something. Maybe I had forgotten how he normally parted his hair or…. Could it be that I never noticed?
He always looked like a bird to me, tall and thin, with a long face and a prominent nose. At only fifteen years old, he had many years ahead of him to grow even taller, to win basketball games, and to spread the joy that came so easily to him.
I could not see any of that here. The lights were dim in the church, reminding me of medieval chapels lit only by candlelight that never quite made it to the corners of the room.
Although we belonged to the Lutheran church rather than the Catholic one in which we stood, I had expected a familiar comfort when I entered the sanctuary. Instead of peace, I felt confusion. I felt an absence of the confidence, the comfort, the order, the bliss that had always lingered at the foundation of my being.
Earlier that same year, the foundation had started to crack. Little did I know, the tragedies of a few months before created the tiniest opening in my soul. Somehow, forces I could not control slipped a wedge into that opening and over the next few months a hammer would strike that wedge over and over again, creating blow after blow, ripping apart everything I knew to be true. Devin’s
death was a powerful slam and this fourteen-year-old had no clue how to repair the damage.
Although his hands, with long slender fingers, were folded across his torso, there was nothing restful about the way he looked. The color of the make up on his face was all wrong, more of a greenish hue than the bright translucent peach of his skin. It was the first time I had seen an open casket, and I decided resolutely that I would never again stand in line to see someone I loved look the way he did.
I had been informed of the rubrics before we had arrived. We were not to receive communion here, we were not to turn our backs on the cross, and we were not to mention how he died. The latter request was one that had become a tangled mess.
The night before the funeral, I had called *Amy Carter. She and I were not close, but everyone knew everyone in that small town, and calling someone up out of the blue was not uncommon. Through the deep fog of hushed whispers about Devin’s suicide— “what could have driven him to do it?”, “I saw signs, didn’t you?”— Amy’s voice resonated.
“He didn’t kill himself,” she insisted. He had been on his knees in the middle of the street in front of his house when he was found. On the phone, Amy’s voice got louder with what seemed like panic, a desperate need to be heard, but also a reluctance to tell the whole truth. She had been having an affair with him, she said, and someone was not happy about it.
Most likely, I looked into his coffin for only a few seconds, certainly less than a minute, but it felt like hours. As I noticed the things about him that did not fit, I also noticed that there was no gunshot wound. Wouldn’t I be able to see it in an open casket? Maybe that’s why his hair looked so different.
Even so, we all followed the rules. We didn’t talk about it. To do so would bring disgrace to his family, to his memory; to do so would make people question where his soul ended up.
Our silence consumed us. My brother, one of Devin’s closest friends, always the social butterfly, spent the rest of his summer alone in his room with the door closed. Softball games and summer camps continued. We eventually went back to our small-town high school focused on new beginnings, as if nothing ever happened.
The wedge remained in my foundation, and it was powerful as it lay dormant, slightly out of
my line of sight. The same was true for our community as a whole. We had a soreness, a bruise, that
would not heal, but we decided not to poke it.
Then it tore open again in a way that could not be ignored, or at least I thought. We heard it from our neighbors before it made the news. Amy Carter and her boyfriend had been out drinking one fall night. They went out to a familiar field to lie in the back of his truck and look at the stars, sharing a drink.
Later that night, her boyfriend came home late. Breaking his usual routine, he went into his parents’ room, kissed his mother, and told her he loved her. A few minutes later his mother heard the gunshot. He had put the end of a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. She rushed him to the hospital.
When she went home later to grab some essentials, she opened the passenger door of his truck and was stopped cold. Amy Carter’s beaten and bloodied body, lifeless, was stuffed into the footwell of the passenger seat. Her boyfriend was still upset about her affair.
The silence was captivating. It was oppressive. It was imprisoning.
Twenty-five years later, I am a puddle on the floor of my therapist’s office, speaking the truth aloud for the very first time. With words, I begin to push out that powerful wedge ripping a hole in me and my community. It is the irreverent healing of a story told.
*All names have been changed