THE SCAB

Joe Franzen

Have you ever had a cut that wouldn’t heal? A scab that just hung around? You might forget about it for awhile but eventually you bump it, or pick it, causing it to bleed and reopen.

I’ve had a wound like that for five years. As I approached the weekend of the fifth anniversary, I had forgotten what weekend it was and was treating it like any other. Then a person reminded me, and the scab came right off. I was kind of stunned at how the blood flowed slowly at first, but then, as more people poked and prodded, it became a steady flow, until this wound became all I could think of. That happens every year around anniversary time.

On August 12, 1997, I was at the Audubon ecology camp in Maine. It was a Tuesday. Earlier that day my parents and brother had put me on a plane at the Philadelphia airport. At the camp I met up with a buddy I had gotten to know the year before. I began to envision how the week would turn out. Sometimes, looking back, I first think it was at lunch but then, remembering on, I recall more clearly that no, they caught up with me in the morning.

So yes, it was morning when one of the counselors, a family friend, pulled me outside the mess hall and told me bluntly that there had been a family emergency. I needed to leave. They had all my stuff ready to go, took me on a boat to the mainland, and sped me to the closest airport.

There my uncle was waiting in the lobby. I had thought of everything that could have happened: A car crash. My brother had run away. Our dog had died. Divorce. Not once did what really had happened cross my mind. But then my uncle told me that my father had killed himself. What I couldn’t think of, what I couldn’t have imagined, became a dark and twisted reality.

That is when my cut first was opened. It was a bleeder, all right, and I probably should have gotten stitches or at least some gauze, but there was none around. I must have lost a lot of blood, because during the time right after and for at least a few weeks, I felt empty and drained, devoid of anything that would support me mentally as my physical shell remained standing but only as a vessel for a waning light.

A pilot had offered his service to my family when he had heard I was up in Maine during that time. I flew the three hours back in a two-seater Cessna, holding back tears which came from a bottomless well and pretending to read Stephen King’s It to show I was all right.

Eventually I got home, or what had once seemed like home. Cars overflowed our three-car-maximum driveway. Relatives, friends, and people I had not seen before filled my house and engulfed me as I tried to get my bearings. I cried. No, I wept, I yelled, I argued. Eventually when I had nothing left I just laid on my bedroom floor and moaned.

This cut had hurt me more than I could ever have imagined. My legs were chopped out from under me. My heart was beaten and bruised. It hurt to breathe and to move. The pain was so excruciating that remaining totally still was the only way to hold at bay the unbearable sadness.

But to move past such an ailment, we must pay attention to it. Gradually I found the little understanding and strength I needed to begin living again. After the first weeks the blood congealed, and people each offered their own ointments and specialties in healing the now scabby mess.

Since my dad died, I have had to make many decisions. When your whole world changes dramatically, when everything you held as sacred and secure collapses, you can choose destruction or rebirth. Destruction will always seem easier; it requires no effort and seems to solve the problems. But rebirth, hard though it may be, allows you to choose your new life. You gain a chance to construct a new reality with stronger supports and stability. For the past five years I have tried to shape my new life the best I could. I have learned lessons in love, pain, and living which some people may never know, and I thank God for them.

Each year the scab grows smaller. It hurts a little less each time I bump it. It still bleeds, but instead of making a mess, it offers me compassion. It occasionally hurts, but instead of causing unbearable pain, it evokes the memories of how it happened. Eventually my cut will become a scar, and that will have its own feelings. For now the scab remains, and tomorrow, August 12, it will surely bleed again. But as the fact that I’m sharing this the day before suggests, at least this year I’m ready for it.

—Joe Franzen recently graduated from Souderton (Pa.) Area High School and is now a first-year student at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. He shared an oral version of this article at Salford Mennonite Church, his home congregation, on August 11, 2002, the day before the fifth anniversary of the death of his father, Bill Franzen.