Mountains Melt Like Wax
Mountains Melt Like Wax
Jacqueline Baker
On Suicide, Ray-Ban Sunglasses & Leaving Middle-Earth
“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
"Mom. Could you get me a pair of Ray-Bans for Christmas?"
Sebastian sounded happier on the phone−more like his usual self. He had been in rehab for seven weeks. I thought he was going to make it this time.
"Not the aviator kind. I want the black Wayfarers. All the guys here have them."
"I could do that," I told him during our weekly hour-long phone visit. Sebastian, at twenty-two, had entered Teen Challenge, a twelve-month Christian inpatient drug rehabilitation program in Phoenix, hoping to avoid prison. Sebastian's court-appointed attorney mentioned judges were more sympathetic to first-time offenders voluntarily entering drug treatment programs.
My husband Steve and I had dealt with Sebastian's mental health and drug abuse issues for over five years. I had finally asked Sebastian to leave our home after discovering he'd been stealing money off my debit card to buy marijuana. His uncle David offered him a new beginning in New Mexico. Unfortunately, instead of being appreciative, Sebastian pawned his uncle's tools.
So, I bought Sebastian those exact sunglasses and gave them to him for Christmas, hoping they could help him heal somehow and continue to keep him safe.
I thought he would be safe in rehab. If I didn't know where he was, I'd worry he might be dead. Sleeping was brutal on the nights I didn’t know where he was. I spent many long hours praying to God in the dark. I couldn't do anything else.
*
Ray-Bans' Wayfarers have been the epitome of cool for generations. Sebastian always wanted to be thought of as being cool, even in rehab. Bausch and Lomb initially designed these black trapezoidal plastic frames in the 1950s. In the 60s, they graced the celebrity faces of Bob Dylan, John F. Kennedy, and Andy Warhol. In the 80s, they were seen by movie goers in over sixty movies, including Tom Cruise in Risky Business, John Belushi in The Blues Brothers, and John Hugh's film The Breakfast Club. Most recently, Daniel Craig wore them during his reign as James Bond.
I've heard it said the eyes are the window to the soul. In that case, Wayfarer's opaque lenses are perfect at concealing what is going on in the mind of the individual who wears them. It's as if they are a piece of armor protecting a warrior from harm. Removing them makes one vulnerable to attack or pity.
I never saw Sebastian in his Wayfarers. Still, I suspected he put them on in front of a mirror and practiced wearing them before going out in public. He did something like this during his teenage years after watching the movie Zoolander. He spent hours perfecting his "blue steel" pose made famous by Ben Stiller. I have hundreds of self-portraits Sebastian took, saved on my desktop computer of him sucking in his cheekbones and pursing his lips in pursuit of that iconic look.
*
Sebastian had been in Phoenix for five months the first time he attempted to kill himself. One morning after eating breakfast, he walked away into the hot Arizona sun from Teen Challenge and disappeared for twenty-four hours. He tried to hang himself with a rope he had kept hidden away. Fortunately for me, the rope broke. He spent three weeks in a psychiatric hospital and started taking antipsychotic medications. After that, we moved him to another Teen Challenge in Bend, Oregon. This treatment program was closer to home, and they could help him with his medications. He found a therapist and I visited him every couple of weeks.
*
"I'm bored, Mom. I can't do this any longer." Sebastian had whined to me during one of our last phone calls.
"It's only for three more months," I told him. "You can do this. I know you can. Then you can come home."
"I'm tired of working in the thrift store all day."
"Not every job is exciting. Why don't you organize the books? It will keep your brain busy until I can come visit again."
*
A week after Sebastian died, I found his sunglasses hidden amongst his personal belongings in the bottom of a broken packing box. The homeless shelter where he only stayed one night sent it to me. One container held everything he owned. He had been kicked out of Teen Challenge the day before. Sebastian had completed nine months, but the director said he wouldn't follow the rules anymore.
Staying at the shelter was supposed to be temporary, thirty days; that's what the Teen Challenge director told us. After that, he thought Sebastian would appreciate how good the rehab program really was for him.
"I can't come home, can I, Mom?" Sebastian lamented to me on the payphone outside the shelter.
"I wish you could," I replied. But I knew I couldn't trust Sebastian. I wanted to, but I couldn't yet.
"It's OK. Mom. I understand." He said quietly. "I love you."
"I love you too." I whispered back. "I'll see you next week."
But there was no next week.
*
When Sebastian was fourteen, I heard God say, "Jackie, are you willing to lay Sebastian on my altar?" I twirled around to make sure there was no one around me speaking. I had been walking by myself one early morning on a deserted Oregon beach while squawking seagulls flew over my head. What did that even mean, "lay Sebastian on the altar?" I remembered God spoke to Abraham like this. God had tested Abraham and told him to take his only son, Isaac, and sacrifice him on Mt. Moriah. Abraham obeyed God even though it meant his son might die. As he raised his knife to slay his son, an angel of God stopped him and said, "Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son."
Was God testing me like He tested Abraham? Hadn't I already given two daughters away by adoption? Now God wanted me to give away my only son. Then I remembered that God had given up his only son. Could I do this? I only had Sebastian for fourteen years. I had plans for him. I wasn't ready yet. As the wind whipped my hair across my face, I stopped walking and stood still on the beach. I stared into the sun overhead, my eyes swelling with tears, and then I asked, "What if you don't give him back?"
The waves crashed against my bare feet, and the seagulls continued to scream around my head. Then just as God spoke to Moses through a burning bush, I heard God roar through the ocean wind and say, "You have to trust me."
For nine years, I pondered the meaning of those words.
A week after Sebastian died, I remembered this conversation with God, and I finally understood what God was saying. It wasn't about Sebastian after all. It was about me trusting God no matter what happened. I felt God's presence come over me and fill my heart, and I clung to him, cried to him, prayed to him, and trusted him to get me through this horrible pain that overwhelmed me.
I had no choice. I had nowhere else to go but to him.
*
After finding Sebastian's glasses, I wore them on sunny days, cloudy days, and rainy days. They hid my swollen eyes from lack of sleep, nightmares of Sebastian falling off that cliff, the one he jumped off. He had died alone without me by his side.
I wore his glasses in every Facebook and Instagram photo I shared. Sebastian's glasses developed special powers and seemed to protect me and keep me safe. They provided the façade of seemingly everyday life, a life that appeared to be moving forward. Yet, no one seeing those photos knew the sunglasses were his.
Every day I'd check for them before I left the house. I knew them by feeling as I dug into the dark cavern of my purse. Panic would well up in the mornings if I couldn't find them. But as soon as I touched them, my brain would calm down, and I could go on with my day. It was as if, in those sunglasses, I had a part of Sebastian with me all the time. They provided comfort and a sense of stability.
Sebastian's sunglasses have traveled with me around the world. They've seen the WWI trenches in France, walked through London's streets, and visited the places J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had met together and discussed the books they were writing. They've traversed the Swiss Alps by train, listening to the cowbells in the mountains' grassy fields. They've navigated the streets of Jerusalem, listening to the Muslim call to worship. They've seen the cities where Jesus performed most of his miracles. In New Zealand, they visited Sebastian's sister and searched for Middle Earth. At each location, I'd say, "Sebastian would have loved this place."
*
Two years after Sebastian passed away, I looked out the kitchen window of my rental apartment on the south end of Lake Wakatipu and witnessed the first glimpses of dawn peeking from behind the mountains. The Remarkables, a majestic and ruggedly resplendent mountain range, appeared to wrap its ancient rocklike arms around the nearby towns of Frankton and Queenstown. The indigenous Maori people who first inhabited Aotearoa (today's New Zealand) in the 1200s, called The Remarkables "Kawarau," named for an ancient esteemed Maori chief. "Kawa" means bitter or pointed, and "rau" means many or more than 100. The Maori name aptly described the numerous jagged razor sharped peaks I observed over the past week; these pointed pinnacles appeared to pierce the pervading blue skies across the New Zealand landscape. The Remarkables, running north to south along the South Island, seems as if it were a sleeping giant's backbone. It contains some of the world's most photogenic alpine scenery, mingled with snowcapped fjords, flower-filled pine forests and meadows, drinkable freshwater rivers and lakes, numerous waterfalls, and beautiful quaint towns enveloped within its vast wilderness.
God knew I needed beauty today.
*
Our family loved all J.R.R. Tolkien's books, especially The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While our children were growing up, we read them out loud to each other; we listened to the audiobook versions on our annual road trips from Washington State to New Mexico each summer, visiting Steve's family. Every Christmas season, it was our tradition to watch Peter Jackson’s mammoth film adaptation of these books. A typical LOTR viewing marathon took twelve hours, including bathroom and food breaks.
During these annual film binges, we began to fall in love with the landscape of New Zealand. Jackson recorded many scenes in and around The Remarkables, where my daughter Isabel and her husband Brennan now lived. On a previous trip two years earlier, we had made our "quest" to Hobbiton, the fictional home of Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin. We were in awe of the movie-set-now-turned-tourist-attraction; we hiked all over the South Island, searching for these mythical locations.
Sebastian had all three movie posters hung in his bedroom, and every Christmas, we'd buy him the latest LOTR Lego set. For his 10th birthday, he had a LOTR themed birthday party. He and nine of his fellow birthday guests formed a "fellowship" and went on a quest, a scavenger hunt searching for the "One Ring" around our back yard. Sebastian dressed as Aragorn, a sword-slashing chivalrous man and eventual king of "Middle-Earth." Isabel, not to be left out (she was eight), came attired with pointy elven ears and a green cape. She had transformed into Arwen, a powerful elven princess who helped rescue Frodo, the main protagonist, from the evil Dark Riders.
It didn't surprise us when Isabel announced during a family trip to New Mexico that she thought God wanted her to go to New Zealand. At the age of twenty, Isabel was in a dark place trying to figure who she was; she had dropped out of art school the year before and struggled with severe anxiety. She left the United States to search for her own "Middle-Earth." I thought she’d call me in a week to come and get her.
Instead, Isabel spent three and half years in New Zealand. Not only did she find her "Middle-Earth," but more importantly, she found herself. My daughter blossomed and matured as she immersed herself on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, a place where she experienced the love of Jesus in a new and personal way, apart from her parents' views of Christianity. Isabel made her profession of faith public at her baptism in those cold waters, along with her future husband, an exceptional young man from Canada who shared her love for Jesus. She married Brennan two years later.
It only made sense that we would end up in New Zealand on Sebastian's anniversary.
*
Mourning is messy.
It had been over a year since Steve and I had been with Isabel. I missed my baby. She married Brennan six months after Sebastian left us and then they moved back to New Zealand. I think she married Brennan to help cope with the loss of her brother. I was devasted; I wanted her to wait a year. I wasn't ready. I cried the day she married Brennan, wanting and wishing for Sebastian to be there.
I lost both my children in the same year. Are we ever ready for our children to leave us?
Through this time, Steve was there for me, but he too was mourning and dealt with Sebastian's loss differently. I remember hearing him, usually in the middle of the night—violent sobs ripping through his body; I felt helpless to help him amid my own sorrow.
My world continued to rip into tiny pieces after Isabel and Brennan left and Steve immersed himself into starting a new business.
They had found their focus. I didn't know what to do. So, I began to write, and I began to heal.
*
It was Isabel's idea. "Let's take Sebastian's ashes up into The Remarkables," she mentioned this on Facebook Messenger a few months before we came to visit.
Sebastian's ashes were sitting on a bookshelf in his former bedroom next to the makeshift memorial of mementos I had gathered over the past 20 months. I'd find something of his randomly around the house, a sock, a picture, his wallet, and my heart would start to race again; the tears would well up, and I'd quickly take that newfound keepsake and place it next to his white plastic urn, then close the door, leaving it for another day.
"He never got to come to New Zealand." She added. "I think he would have loved it here."
"I think you are right," I replied.
Sebastian's birth was supposed to be the pièce de resistance of my, "and they lived happily ever after" story.
God had given me a son. I could finally keep my baby. I didn't have to give him away. I sobbed happy tears as I held him to my breast that day in April, 28 years prior, realizing no one would be able to take him away from me. I had blossomed and had become a different person. I had grown up, matured, and had evolved from being a messed up, scared young girl. A girl uneducated, unmarried, alone; a girl set up for failure when her high-school drop-out seventeen-year-old mother gave birth to her; a girl who had gotten pregnant twice, both times while being unmarried. A girl who realized she didn't know how to care for her daughters; a girl scared that she might beat her children and emotionally abuse them as she had been by her mother. So, out of the love she had for these two beings she hadn't even met, she decided to relinquish them into healthier homes, hoping they'd have a better life with their adoptive families.
Isabel Catherine was born two years later.
After relinquishing two daughters up for adoption, God had blessed me with a girl. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I'd have a little girl of my own. She was the cherry on top of the perfect life I imagined I'd have.
*
I’ve since learned there is no real happily ever after on this side of heaven.
The Apostle John wrote, "A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born, she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world." (John 16:21 NIV) Birth pains are the promise of what is yet to come. They announce the end is near. Once we hold our newborn baby, the pain becomes a memory, replaced by joy, happiness, and a profound love we didn't know we'd have for another human being.
But in Genesis, God told Eve, after she had disobeyed him by eating forbidden fruit, "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you give birth to children…" (Genesis 3:16 NIV). Pastor Matt once explained a mother would continue to have "pain" after childbirth as she raises her children. Mothers worry about their children: worry if they are safe, worry that they eat enough, worry that they don't eat enough, worry at the slightest cough their child might make in the middle of the night. Worry they might die. The pain of mothering never stops, even as our children reach adulthood. It is still painful. It continues to hurt.
*
We drove high up into The Remarkables and found a spot off the road to park. There was no one else nearby. Here we climbed a well-trodden path that led to a rocky ridge. We reached the edge of the precipice just as the sun began to set over Lake Wakatipu; its red, yellow, and orange hues slowly brightened the dark rocks surrounding us, warming us as if it knew why we were there. Steve uncorked the wine he brought and poured Isabel and Brennan a glass. I drank my usual iced tea. Brennan unpackaged the cheese and crackers, and we sat next to each other on a blanket munching and drinking, watching the sun descend behind The Remarkables as if we had no care in the world. Isabel set down her glass on the blanket, pulled out her phone, scrolled through her playlist, and found the melodious violin strings of Howard Shore's musical score from The Lord of the Rings and played "Concerning Hobbits." I was momentarily blinded when my eyes began to fill with tears. I blinked, and as my vision cleared, I drank in the beauty of The Remarkables at sunset. This is why we had come.
"I want to read something from the Bible," Isabel announced. She jumped up from the blanket and scrolled through her phone again. "This Psalm always reminds me of Sebastian." She began to read Psalm 139:
You have searched me, Lord,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, Lord, know it completely.
Steve grabbed my hand and squeezed it until it hurt. I could see the tears falling down his face from behind his sunglasses. My tears were streaming down my cheeks behind the sunglasses I wore that once belonged to Sebastian.
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
For you created my inmost being.
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
Brennan’s eyes focused on a blade of grass he was twirling with his fingers. He had never met Sebastian. Sebastian had fallen; slipped; jumped off another mountain and died the day before Brennan was to meet him. Isabel was excited for Brennan to meet her brother. It was all planned, but Sebastian had made other plans.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
My brain wandered back to two years earlier; Steve, Isabel, and I had agonized about what to put on Sebastian's headstone, something we never thought we'd be doing. We picked out a spot underneath a tree at the cemetery. He loved climbing trees.
Isabel paused for a moment and then read the verse she had asked to be inscribed on Sebastian's gravestone:
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Isabel stopped reading and I stood up and opened the square-shaped lid from the white heavy rectangular plastic urn that held the remains of Sebastian's earthly body. Steve, Isabel, and I each took turns throwing his ashes into the New Zealand wind. Brennan stood back and observed in silence. He understood our pain; he was there two years ago on this day when the police came to our door and told us Sebastian had died.
We all watched as the last pieces of Sebastian's former life blew across the Remarkables; the sparkles from the remnant dust specks glistened through the sun's final pink glow. We stood for a while, the three of us holding each other, Brennan next to us, staring as the sunset disappeared behind the horizon. We were all crying and yet laughing in relief. We had made it through this moment. We would be OK.
Then I recalled one of the final scenes in Return of the King. Frodo never fully recovered from an injury from a Morgul-knife by a Ringwraith during the skirmish at Weathertop. On each anniversary of the stabbing, his shoulder wound would hurt again. I think Frodo needed to leave Middle-Earth to get healed from his injuries and find rest. So, he took a ship to the Grey Havens, Tolkien's version of heaven, accompanied by Gandalf who was leaving Middle-Earth as well. Merry, Pippin, and Sam began crying when they realized they were to be left behind. Gandalf’s last words in Tolkien’s last book of his trilogy were something to remember: "Well. Here at last, dear friends on the shore of Sea, comes the end of our Fellowship in Middle-Earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil."
And just like Frodo, it was time for us to leave Middle-Earth and go home.
Jacqueline Baker
Writer & Nurse Practitioner
Jacqueline is a writer and pediatric nurse practitioner who has lived and hiked in Washington State for the last thirty years. She has a doctorate in nursing practice and cares for underserved children and their families at a local federally funded health care clinic. She also has a masters in biblical studies from Multnomah University, in Portland, Oregon. She recently finished the second draft of her memoir called Birth Pains.
Photography by Onni Anttoora
