Christians in Photojournalism

SUMMER 2002


COMMENT	BY RON LONDEN

The clay-figure tightrope

y name is Ron Londen. You and I have been married for 21 years.” Christine laughed with her you’re-silly giggle. I didn’t think she looked bad. She returned the favor.

“You look so cute,” she said. “But why are you wearing black?”

“It’s tax day,” I said. “April 15th.”

“You look so cute,” she said.

I made small talk with Jennifer, who runs the equestrian center. She handed me a note with a brief description of the accident: “Bad fall…. Landed on her head and elbow… Never lost consciousness” was underlined three times, though debatable on some levels.

Only when Christine got up to leave did I get the full effect. Her back was sooted with the fine brown soil of the horse ring, her neck bearing the kind of coal-miner grime that’s ground into the skin. She was holding her right elbow with a makeshift bandage, already stained red.

Christine and I went off to the hospital. She said I looked cute.

“Why are we going to UVa hospital?,” she asked five times during the 20-minute drive. “Why not Martha Jefferson?” (where she works as a labor nurse).

“You’ve fallen off a horse,” I replied five times, between explanations that I was wearing black because of tax day. “UVa has better brain people.” In Charlottesville, big traumas go to UVa.

We arrived at the hospital and went in. She said I looked cute.

* * *

Back in December, Deonne disappeared.

Scrawny and scrappy, with a mutt’s desire to defend the home against intruders, visitors or random movements of air, Deonne burst into the woods one afternoon armed only with an oversized bark and an undersized brain. Her slower and smarter companion, Troy, prefers to “stay in the pocket,” never scrambling far from home and food.

By the time we realized that Deonne was seriously missing, she was seriously lost. She would never run off on purpose, but there isn’t very much actual purpose going on inside a dog blessed with no more brainpower than it takes to run a tomato. She ran off just far enough to have no idea how to get back. Probably not that far, we thought.

We put up signs. We drove around the neighborhood. We hiked into the woods. We put up more signs. We kept looking. We kept hoping for a long time.

By early February, Bethany—our youngest—asked me to take her looking one more time. Though there was no realistic chance that she was alive, we hiked through the woods anyway, both of us knowing we could find nothing good, so both secretly wishing to find nothing at all. We got our wish. Deonne was truly gone.

* * *

“I feel that—just now, just this moment—I am really coming out of the fog,” Christine announced, for perhaps the fourth time in two hours. “What horse was I riding?”

“Chewbacca,” I said, since I had no idea.

“There is no Chewbacca.”

“Then it was Meatloaf…” “Buttercup… “ “Hillary….”

She was less amused this time than my previous tries at that gag, so I decided to switch back to the memory test.

“What kind of car do you drive?”

“You look cute.”

“What kind of car?”

“A red Sienna,” she said. That was two cars ago, but she was getting closer.

“It’s a Highlander now. But it is red. So how many dogs do we have?”

“Two dogs,” she replied confidently. “Deonne and Troy.”

“Do you remember anything about the dogs? Anything about Deonne?”

“No, not really. We have two dogs, Deonne and Troy.”

The UVa doctors are picky. They’d taken X-rays and CAT scans, which showed nothing unusual. But they would not release my wife to go home until she returned to “baseline”—able to remember everything up to the accident. But now she had no recollection of Deonne’s disappearance, more than four months earlier.

Already, two people had come and gone from the bed next to hers. It was going to be a very long day. On the other hand, only one of us would remember it.

“I’m feeling ever so slightly nauseous,” she announced. “Why do you ask about the dogs?”

“I was testing your memory. Deonne’s gone. Do you remember anything about Deonne disappearing?”

“Deonne’s gone? What happened?”

“She ran off into the woods. She never came back.”

“When?”

“Four months ago.”

She rolled her eyes. “I must have hit my head really hard not to remember that. I’m feeling ever so slightly nauseous.”

Christine laid down for the first time. In moments she was out cold.

“Christine?” I shook her gently. “Chris!”

Is this sleep? Is she supposed to sleep? I thought you were supposed to keep a concussion awake. Should I go get a nurse?

She pulled her arms against her chest and made a quiet sound I can’t describe. I tried to pull her arm away from her chest, but could not.

My wife was having a seizure.

* * *


It was during pregnancy that Janet Sowienski started having seizures. Six weeks after delivering twins, on tax day, April 15, she had brain surgery to remove a malignant
	'Perhaps it’s what we don’t know that allows us to keep going. We are clay figures walking on a tightrope we don’t understand over an abyss we cannot see.'

tumor. After chemo and radiation treatments, she was left without memories or reasoning abilities — symptoms resembling Alzheimer’s disease.

From the very beginning, Dick Sowienski resolved to care for his wife at home.

He had the infant twins and a 3-year-old child, but with the support of family and friends, Dick was able to establish a routine for Janet’s care. Over the years he looked after his wife and raised their kids. The family missed out on some “normal” things—vacations and the like—but they grew close as the young children learned for themselves to help care for their mother. And they had the kind of sublime blessings that Dick wished he could have shared with his wife.

Janet was able to stay in a conversation for brief times, as a very young child might, but she could not care for herself in any meaningful way. Over time, her health slowly declined. A few weeks ago, a bout with pneumonia made things gravely worse. After a mercifully brief number of days, Janet Sowienski left this world as she had lived in it for many years: surrounded by family. The twins are now 17 years old.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 4:17, “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

Clay breaks easily when dropped, and we don’t get to choose how it falls. Dick Sowienski would never have chosen for himself the path his life has taken. But if the choice had been his, he would never have discovered a measure of grace that only that path could have found.

* * *

Although I expected a scene from “ER” following Christine’s seizure, we got instead a kind nurse who’d seen it all before. She ran an IV—for extra fluids and to deliver a dose of whatever it is that stabilizes blood pressure. I felt like asking for some for myself.

Soon Christine was feeling better and asking what horse she was riding. She said I was cute. I asked her again about Deonne and again had to break the sad news.

The hours passed. I kept testing her memory. Deonne’s story kept coming up.

Eventually, I knew our daughters had come home to an empty house. I called to let them know what was going on.

“Dad!” Kate seized the conversation before I could tell her the news. “You’ll never believe what happened. Somebody just found Deonne! She’s alive!”

On a remote bike path on the other side of town, some college students found a dog in obvious distress, barely able to lift her head off the ground. In a very few days, perhaps less, she would have died out there. Instead, after nearly five months on her own, Deonne was on her way home.

I ran back into Christine’s room.

“Remember I’ve been asking you about the dogs?” She nodded. “And remember that I told you we didn’t have two anymore, that Deonne was lost?” She nodded again.

“Well, it turns out you were right, after all. We do have two dogs. Somebody just found Deonne alive!”

After ten hours in the University Medical Center emergency room, doctors released Christine to go home and rest her head and her very sore elbow.

At home, my wife wasn’t the only one needing medical care. Deonne was suffering from—as far as I could tell—everything bad that can happen to a dog without killing it. Deonne had parasites, labored breathing, intestinal difficulties as well as the troubled air of one who’d been on the losing end of several skunk encounters. The vet bills ran 30 times what we paid for the dog to being with.

Dog and master convalesced together, and within two weeks both were mostly back to normal, except that Deonne was less scared of the weather and Christine was more scared of a horse named Journey.

* * *

“You can never really know what almost happened to you and Chris,” my friend Gordon Pennington told me a few days later. “How close you both came to something much different. How close you came to discovering new things about yourselves, about the depth of the love you have for your wife, about God’s ability to carry you through a tragedy. You’ll never know how close you came to a life you never would have expected.”

He’s right, of course. I can’t know. Dick Sowienski knows, but I can’t, not really.

Perhaps it’s what we don’t know that allows us to keep going. We are clay figures walking on a tightrope we don’t understand over an abyss we cannot see. We can neither acknowledge the danger nor truly understand the grace that keeps us on that rope. Better just to try to walk straight—a task made easier for me by a loyal dog and wife who still says I’m cute.


The clay-figure tightrope	A marriage of necessity	Sincerity vs. reality