What Difference Do It Make?

by Ron Hall

  An AVM is something like an aneurysm, the doctor explained, a weakness in the wall of a blood vessel. Carina had been born with hers, and if it ruptured, she could die instantly. Her only option: brain surgery, either conventional or with a radiological gamma knife.

  “I felt so overwhelmed,” Carina says. “I wanted to hear God’s audible voice tell me where to go, who to see, what procedure to choose.”

  But questions tore at her heart:

  “Why? Why me? Why this, why now? My children need their mommy! Why would God tear me away from them?”

  Before the diagnosis, Carina had been a harried mom who barely had time for her daily devotional reading. Now she dove into the Scriptures, clinging to those that quickened her heart and writing them down in a notebook.

  She sought counsel from her pastor and proceeded “cautiously, in baby steps,” asking God and each doctor for wisdom. All the while, Carina poured out her anguish and concern in her notebook.

  “Why?” she still wanted know. “What possible purpose could this serve?”

  The risk of death loomed like a phantom. But there was another risk: even if doctors could repair the AVM, they said, the surgery could leave the left side of Carina’s body paralyzed for life.

  After weeks of painstaking research, Carina selected Don Woodson, a renowned Phoenix neurosurgeon, to perform her operation. And she continued to battle her fear with prayer. “I asked that the Lord’s hands be on the surgeon’s hands as he operated on me.”

  When the time for the procedure neared, Carina flew to Arizona and checked into the ICU of the hospital where the surgery would be performed. The day before the procedure, a nurse came to check on her. Still gripped with anxiety and looking for comfort, Carina asked her, “What kind of surgeon is Dr. Woodson? What’s his reputation here?”

  The nurse offered a reassuring smile. “When Dr. Woodson is in surgery, it’s as if God is using his hands.”

  Carina’s heart soared! It was as if the nurse had spoken aloud the answer to her prayer.

  The next day, Carina emerged from surgery with full mobility and her AVM successfully repaired. Back at home, members of her church beat a steady path to the Delacanals’ home, bearing meals and offering babysitting. One close friend also brought a stack of books.

  “As a mother of four boys, I have very little time for myself, so just reading my devotion for the day was a huge accomplishment for me,” Carina says. “I was about to give the books back when my friend pulled one from the stack and held it out.”

  “This book was very special to me,” she said.

  Carina glanced at the title: Same Kind of Different as Me. She was unimpressed. Still, to be gracious, she thanked her friend and took the book. That day, with little to do but sit still and let her brain heal, she lay in bed and turned to page 1. And before too many pages had gone by, she says, “It was as if God gave me new eyes to see and new ears to hear!”

  Reading the story of Denver’s slavelike upbringing and his eighteen years spent homeless on the streets of Fort Worth, of Deborah’s cancer diagnosis and her battle against all odds, and of our crazily unlikely friendship gave Carina a new perspective on the terrible trial she’d just been through.

  “I began to laugh to myself, wondering if I went through all that I did just to get me to sit down and read this amazing true testimony,” she told us. “It went to my hands, through my eyes, and straight to my heart!”

  With her new eyes, Carina could see with crystalline clarity God’s shepherding kindness in her own life. The trial by fire of illness had drawn her and her husband closer, like two lovers huddled together before a campfire on a bitterly cold night. In fact, their season of fear had drawn her whole family closer to each other and closer to God.

  In addition, knowing she could have lost forever the ability to use the left side of her body gave her new appreciation for what she was able to do. “I would never again take for granted the gift of serving,” she says. Now the simple ability to change her baby’s diaper by herself seemed a miracle.

  That she had children at all was a miracle too. During consultations leading up to her surgery, doctors had told her that if they’d found the AVM before she had children, they would have advised her to avoid getting pregnant at all costs. Each of her pregnancies could easily have caused the AVM to burst.

  But that hadn’t happened. Suddenly Carina could see that God had protected her every day of her life, only revealing the AVM after she had four beautiful, healthy sons.

  “Our pastor had an explanation for why I didn’t realize until later how God had held my hand every step of the way,” Carina says. “He says sometimes you can only understand why things happen when you see them in the rearview mirror.”

  13

  Ron

  Like country folks, we sat around Deborah’s grave on hay bales . . . For the next hour and a half, we honored my wife.

  We sang old-time spirituals and country hymns, accompanied by two cowboy friends playing acoustic guitars. Warm sunlight filtered through the oaks, casting circles of gold on Deborah’s pine casket, so that the simple box she’d asked for appeared covered in shimmering medallions.

  Two weeks after we buried Deborah, Denver and I drove back to Rocky Top. We’d buried her in a simple casket, covering the grave with a pile of rocks and marking the spot with a cross of cedar. The ranch is crawling with critters, from bobcats to wild hogs. Worried that wild animals might try to dig her up, I hadn’t slept since. Denver and I were on our way back to build a fence of stones and wrought iron around the grave.

  For more than an hour, we rolled west from Dallas in complete silence. Then, just as we crossed the railroad tracks in the little town of Brazos, Denver burst into laughter, as though bumping over the rails had shaken loose some buried joy. I shot him a sideways glare, irritated that he would find something to laugh about when God had seen fit to steal my wife.

  “What is so dang funny?” I asked.

  “Mr. Ron, there ain’t nobody gon’ believe our story,” he spit out between chuckles. “We got to write us a book.”

  “Who is this ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe? You can’t read or write . . . just who is going to write it?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you my part, and you write it down. You know your part, so you write that down. Then we’ll put it together and make us a book.”

  Three weeks later, we raised the gates at what had gone from a lonesome stone-covered grave to a little family cemetery we named Brazos de Dios, which means “the arms of God.” There was so far only one family member in residence, but I knew I would join Deborah there someday, near her favorite spot where a leaning oak sheltered a natural stone bench in a covering of shade. Meanwhile, though, I had a problem. Half my heart was buried in the ground at Rocky Top. What exactly did God expect me to do now? Could He possibly want me to write a book with Denver? And if He did, what would I write?

  I thought I’d begin my search for answers in Europe. During my art-dealing career, I had often found Italy a refuge. I loved the pace of life there—walking up narrow stone streets, waiting for the pizza place to open, finding a vista and a sidewalk café where the only thing you have to do is dip your biscotti in your espresso. I’d spent wonderful times in the village of Positano, famous for lemons so bountiful that the scent of them floats on the air all summer. And who could resist the food—bombalonis (fresh-fried donuts), fresh gelato with crushed raspberries, that wonderful pizza. People might think I’d be looking at art, but when I’m in Italy, I’m eating.

  And now maybe, I’d be eating . . . and writing.

  After a ten-hour flight, I landed in Rome and checked in at the Hotel Columbus, located a stone’s throw from the Holy See. Standing in the cavernous lobby, I gazed up at the frescoed ceilings arching overhead, marked with beams of dark wood painted with geometric designs. The lobby had been slightly modernized, but through a broad passage I could see the colonnade leading back to the pope’s former residence, which stood right at the ve
ry entrance to the Vatican.

  A coincidence struck me. The Hotel Columbus was named for an explorer who five hundred years before had set out on an adventure. With little to go on but faith, he’d braved treacherous seas to discover a new land. Now here I was, fifty-five years old and also facing a new land, a new future entirely different from the one I’d envisioned less than two years before. But unlike Columbus, who was commissioned by a king to discover a new world, my King had exiled me to a world I hated bitterly, a world without my wife. And unlike Columbus, I had no faith. Mine lay six feet down at Rocky Top, having been buried deeper with every turn of the grave diggers’ spades.

  As I went through the motions of checking in, I reflected that I didn’t really have a solid plan for how I would begin to write Deborah’s story down. I only had some fuzzy notion of camping out in this venerable building and scribbling down the memories now darting around in my mind like ghosts. I was sure many prayers had been lifted to heaven from the old rooms over my head. The pope had lived in this building, after all, so I figured God had to be familiar with the address. Maybe He would see me here, clinging to my pen, and help usher my task along.

  It was not to be. I had barely settled into my room, with a view of Via della Conciliazione, the grand boulevard leading into the Vatican, when a fresh storm of grief blew through my heart like a typhoon. Day after day, I sat by the weathered windows, staring out at the Holy See. My anguish was a black chasm, the pain physical, as though grief were a fanged monster that had invaded my torso and was feeding on me from the inside out. I felt condemned and abandoned, self-righteous in my anger with God.

  In certain moments, I was struck by a realization that I had it better than most, and I felt a little guilty for grieving so extravagantly. After all, who would commiserate with a poor millionaire relegated to a fifteenth-century palace to sip Pinot Grigio while nursing his broken heart? Suddenly, I grieved for the thousands of people who buried their spouses on Sunday and had to show back up at work on Monday to earn money to pay for the funeral. By comparison, I had been blessed. For the two years of Deborah’s cancer battle, I had been able to set aside my work and stay at her side. Now I could afford to take some time to heal. This thought, at least, was a lighted buoy that flashed a glimmer of gratitude over the dark sea of my rage.

  But it wasn’t enough to move me past despair. Not yet. Rome’s aura of romance, art, and architecture had rolled up like a cheap window shade, replaced by images of Nero at the Coliseum and me being dragged off and fed to the lions. Unable to write, I decamped and took a train to Florence, managing not to blame my lack of literary productivity on the pope.

  I arrived on a cold, snowy day, unusual for Florence, and moved into Villa Angeli—Villa of Angels—a fifteenth-century country retreat tucked into the hills above Florence, just below a monastery in the tiny Etruscan village of Fiesole. Built seventy years before Columbus discovered America, the property was known as one of the most beautiful villas in the world. My friends Julio and Pilar Larraz, who live there, offered me refuge. My bedroom offered a view of the red-tile roofs of Tuscany below and, above, the monastery nestled in an ancient olive grove.

  There in the Villa of Angels, I finally began writing. Scribbling in blue ink on a yellow legal pad, I poured out scenes of hope and trepidation: the first day Deborah and I went to the mission. Hope and fear: the first day we met Denver. Hope and victory: the formation of deep friendships with Denver and other homeless. Hope and terror: Deborah’s cancer diagnosis and her nineteen-month battle to live. Then hope extinguished, replaced by desolation: where I had lived since she died.

  As I wrote, I paused for long moments and gazed across the misty Tuscan hills at the Duomo, Florence’s central cathedral, consecrated in 1436. No one could deny that I had landed in one of the most beautiful spots in the world, a backdrop of living inspiration for great artists and writers from Dante to da Vinci to Michelangelo. But for me the city that so inspired them was cloaked in the colors of mourning—smoggy grays and charcoal black, shroud colors unsuitable for the joyful journey that was Deborah’s life.

  I reread what I had written so far and thought of the first important exhibition of modern art in America, the New York Armory Show of 1913, where critics lacerated the works on display, declaring they weren’t even worthy to be tossed in an ash can.

  Those works of art didn’t merit that criticism, but my first written words did. Before returning to Texas, I tossed them in the trash.

  I don’t know if it happened on the train ride to Rome or while clearing customs at the airport. But somewhere inside me, a switch flipped. And on the eleven-hour flight home, the words began to flow in earnest, faster than my hand could drive my Hotel Columbus ballpoint pen.

  Although I know they were there, the people sharing my row of airline seats vanished. I don’t recall eating the cardboard-flavored in-flight chicken that I’m certain I was offered. I only remember being shocked, as the first officer announced our final approach to Dallas, to find I’d written ninety longhand pages—a manuscript longer than any term paper I had ever written at Texas Christian University and all without Cliff’s Notes.

  Bleary-eyed, I trudged through US customs, clutching my newborn manuscript. At the baggage claim, I looked up to find three grinning ladies clustered around me.

  “Excuse me. We don’t mean to bother you,” said the one sporting a Gucci bag and a lilting Texas accent. “We couldn’t help but notice that you wrote and wrote all the way from Rome, and you look real familiar. Are you by chance a famous writer?”

  I smiled, exhausted. “No, I’m not famous, and I’m not a writer. But I am working on a book.”

  “What kind of book?” the lady asked, glancing excitedly at her companions.

  I thought for a second. How could I summarize the maelstrom of compassion, pain, friendship, redemption, and grief that had been my life for the past four years?

  Finally, an answer hit me.

  “A love story,” I said.

  14

  Denver

  “I want you to know that I forgive you,” Deborah said [to the woman I had had an affair with]. “I hope you find someone who will not only truly love you but honor you.”

  Her grace stunned me. But not nearly so much as what she said next: “I intend to work on being the best wife Ron could ever want, and if I do my job right, you will not be hearing from my husband again.”

  Deborah quietly placed the phone in its cradle, sighed with relief, and locked her eyes on mine. “You and I are now going to rewrite the future history of our marriage.”

  She wanted to spend a couple of months in counseling, she said, so we could figure out what was broken, how it got that way, and how to fix it. “If you’ll do that,” she said, “I’ll forgive you. And I promise I will never bring this up, ever again.”

  For the next three and a half years, mostly at Lupe Murchison’s breakfast table, me and Mr. Ron wrote us a book. Of course, I couldn’t write or read at the time, but I told Mr. Ron everthing I could remember, and he wrote it all down.

  But we hadn’t been workin on it for long when, one morning at Rocky Top, I just all of a sudden decided to shut my mouth. We was sittin at that big ol’ table Miss Debbie picked out for the ranch kitchen, and I just went quiet and commenced to sippin my coffee. Mr. Ron was sittin across from me, writin everthing longhand with a pen on yellow paper.

  “What is it?” he said. “You haven’t shut up all morning. What’s got your tongue all of a sudden?”

  I didn’t look at him. “I been thinkin ’bout forgiveness,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Well, there’s been a lotta forgiveness in these past coupla years,” I said, finally lookin up at Mr. Ron. “Miss Debbie forgave you for steppin out on her that time. And I done forgave the Man for makin me work all them years without no pay. And God forgave me of all my sins . . . ”

  I could see Mr. Ron noddin along, encouraging me to keep goin.

  “Mr. Ron,
we speaks a lot about forgiveness,” I went on, “about how God forgives us and we is supposed to forgive others. But there’s a whole ’nother kind of forgiveness you don’t know nothin about!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you know . . . it’s that statue y’all call Lamentations.

  “You mean the book of Lamentations in the Bible?”

  “No sir.”

  Mr. Ron looked at me real hard, like he was tryin his best to figure out what I was sayin. “A statue . . . ?”

  “Yessiree, a statue of Lamentations.”

  “Oh . . . you must mean the Tower of Babel! That’s kind of a statue, and it’s in the Bible.”

  “No sir,” I said. “This ain’t got nothin to do with the Bible. It got to do with the Man. You know what I’m talkin ’bout. This is the Man’s law that says after a lotta time has done gone by, you don’t got to go back to the pokey no more for somethin you done way back in the past.”

  Mr. Ron started laughin then. “Oh, you mean the statute of limitations!”

  “That’s it!” I said. “If we gon’ write this book together, I got to know all about that statue before I tells it all!”

  It was May 1968. Now in case you ain’t heard nothing ’bout Angola [Prison], it was hell, surrounded on three sides by a river. I didn’t know this then, but in those days, it was the darkest, most vicious prison in America.

  A few days after I got there, a prisoner I had met back at the Shreveport jail saw me and reached out like he was gon’ shake my hand. Instead, he gave me a knife. “Put this under your pilla,” he said. “You gon’ need it.”

  The reason I needed to know about that statue of Lamentations was ’cause a’ somethin that happened to me after I left the plantation. One time when I was a bad man, I held up a bus. Now, you might already know I had to go to the pokey for that. Ten years they gave me, and that was a long stretch. So I wadn’t gon’ be tellin too much more about the pokey if I was gon’ have to go back to the pokey for tellin it!