At Half Staff

by Gene Shelburne

An icy north wind tore at the flags on that Monday morning as I left Amarillo High School after teaching my Bible class.

Stressed to their limit in the gale, the flags popped and flapped. Their noisy protest caused me to look up and see that on that grim morning they flew at half staff, just two days after the tragic deaths of one of our graduates, Commander Rick Husband, and his valiant crew on the space shuttle Columbia.

When grief like that invades unbidden, words tend to fail us and we rely on symbols like lowered flags to express the pain that pervades our souls.

North Carolina poet Don Taylor, the husband of my high school classmate, Lanelle Selby Taylor, captured the complexity of such grief in a poem he titled “A Shadow Not My Own.” He penned these words on the Sun-day after the space shuttle disintegrated:

The shadow I felt this morning standing for a sunlit moment where the driveway empties

like a small stream into the larger river of the street, was not my own. Some other essence overwhelmed my presence in the world, splashed across the headlines of my Sunday paper and let me know there is life beyond the little reckonings I make—about how many cups of coffee I will take to start this day with a thump to the heart, or how I will die and with what fanfare before I am forgotten. Never having hurtled for even a second through space, nor freed my mind for long from much of earth, I cannot hope to imagine the disintegration that occurs many times beyond the speed of sound nor how the heart breaks over and over in so many places.

Grief is like that. It batters us with blow after blow, jarring our souls with recurring waves of heartache.

And we survive only because the mercies of God are also replenished repeatedly. They “are fresh every morning.”