Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Learning of Darcee's Death

Summer 1997


I walk out of the door of the Regimental Command Center at Camp Buckner. I told staff that I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t an excuse that carried much weight around West Point, but I was training to take over for the second detail which wouldn’t start for more than a week. I was redundant this week and today I wasn’t in the mood to be redundant.


I’d woken up the night before in a rage, grabbing my knife before I realized where I was. The adrenalin cranked through my blood as I tried to talk myself down. That wasn’t like me and it wasn’t like me to wake up despondent, drained of all energy with a pit in my stomach deep enough that a someone digging at the bottom would strike his shovel’s blade against the roof of hell.


It didn’t make sense. I was dating a beauty queen that I was wild for and I was about to take over my first major organizational role at West Point. Yesterday I had a bounce in my step and a nervous energy about tackling a job that I wasn’t sure I could handle, today I couldn’t feel my legs as they carried my burdened body away from work and into the woods.


I had a book of Hemingway’s short stories in the cargo pocket of my BDU’s. I would get away and read it in hopes that that Papa’s words would pull me away from the invisible ledge. I trod the trail around Lake Popolopen to a rocky outcropping where I’d fished from during some of the down hours during my summer training the year before. I lay down upon the flat gray rock and began to read.


Three pages beyond my bookmark, Hemingway’s character described a girl that he’d been friends with as a child. A wave of grief ran over me. I set the book upon the granite. I couldn’t move. Despair seized my limbs. I lay motionless for ten or fifteen minutes before fighting my way back into the reality of the warm New York summer’s day.


I walked back to Camp Buckner. The grief hit me two more times along the way, dropping me to a knee. I didn’t know what was happening.


I avoided the Command Center and continued on towards the guard station. I knew that I couldn’t work, but thought that I might be able to catch a ride with the duty driver back to the campus to retrieve some of the gear that I would need the summer. A simple productive task¸ something basic to get me moving.


The cadet on duty looked down at my name tag. He bit his lip, then said, “Matt Kuntz, you’re father has been calling for you. I’m sorry, but a close friend of yours has died.”


I felt the blood run out of my face. My dad hadn’t said who it was. I can’t remember what I said before leaving the guard shack and making my way towards the pay phones.


My stepmother answered the phone and told me it was Darcee. The tears rolled down my face. I hung up the phone as sobs shook my chest.


Darcee and I had been friends since grade school. We swam together on the Lion’s Swim Team as children and through high school. I’d done my best to help her with the anorexia that attacked her midway through her freshman year. I’d written letters to her every day that she was at the treatment center in Arizona and did my best to help her make the transition towards wellness when she returned home.


Darcee lived another handful of summers after her stay at the treatment center. She fell in love with the man of her dreams. Two weeks earlier I’d cooked her breakfast as she talked about moving to Missoula to be with him, hoping to eventually get married and start a family. I’d never seen her happier.


I didn’t know that the anorexia had transitioned into bulimia which was poised to overwhelm her gentle heart. My grief continued through her funeral in Montana and in the years that followed. Darcee was an unbelievable friend. I will always miss her and struggle with questions of why the Lord called her home so soon.


Beyond the loss, I realized for the first time in my life that I’d been shown proof that the universe was more complex that the reality I could perceive with my natural senses. I’d woken up in a rage at the exact time of her death over two thousand miles away from where she’d passed. The grief crippled me before I’d heard that she was gone.


It was my first sign and it was horrible. My only solace in feeling something both bigger than all of us and completely all of us was that I knew she wasn’t really gone. Darcee was gone for today, gone for tomorrow, but whatever I’d experienced had convinced me that the ones who loved her would see her again.



Side Note: On the plane back to Montana for Darcee’s funeral, I swore not to ever fight against mental illness again. It was too complex and horrible. Looking back at my naivety, I can’t help but think of the phrase, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.”


Thursday, October 21, 2010

Drop Your Hammer

February 2002

I lowered a spinning saw blade down through gray siding. It was cold and I had no idea what I was doing here.

For all of my life, I’d generally thought that God had a plan for me and if I waited long enough it would become apparent. I watched the excess siding fall into the snow and decided that it was pretty clear that that was no longer the case.

An injury in Ranger School had led me out of the Army and my military resume was a square peg in the round hole of the civilian job market. I was the weak Number Two Man in a two-man construction crew. To be a successful carpenter requires an innate understanding of how material objects can fit together in a beautiful manner. I couldn’t even find the puzzle, much less put it together.

I was the cut-and-carry guy while Shane, my boss, worked his magic. One look at my hammer made it clear how bad of a cut-and-carry guy I was. It was monstrosity of gleaming metal and dull wood. The metal gleamed because it was so huge that I could barely swing it.

The clerk at Big R Ranch Supply who was helping me picked out tools had asked me how big of a hammer I swing. My cocky reply of “as big as you’ve got” left me with a brutal tool that would have been more useful prying someone out of a crashed car than framing a house.

Four years of West Point in order to be the worst construction worker in Helena, Montana? I’d given up on a divine plan, but I did need the ten bucks an hour. I picked up the cut of siding, walked over to the house, and raised it up to Shane.


Over the next two days we finished up the siding. The snow had melted then it froze and snowed again. Shane was up on the roof sweeping off snow so it wouldn’t melt and send water down onto the still-new masonry.

I was busy trying to look busy until Shane gave me another task. That generally involved carrying things from one part of the construction site to another part where they might be more useful.

I set another bundle of siding down by the saw. I heard a voice say, “Take off your hammer.”

I looked back at Shane, but the voice wasn’t his. He was still sweeping the snow off the roof. I glanced down at my hammer and then looked forward at the saw.

“Take off your hammer,” said the strong feminine voice.

I looked around again, but the voice wasn’t coming through the cold air. I protested internally. I can’t take off my hammer. I’m a bad enough construction worker anyway. I don’t need to point it out by gallivanting around without a hammer.”

“Go to the ladder.”

I didn’t want to disagree twice. I walked over to the metal ladder and looked up at Shane swiping the little green broom back and forth. The fresh snow tumbled off of the roof and onto my face.

I silently cursed the voice and wished my knit cap had a visor.

“He’s coming down.”

My head snapped up. I watched Shane stretch the broom wider then he grunted and slipped. The grunt turned into a yell as his body slid over the icy shingles. This lower body launched into the cold air. Shane grabbed for the edge of the roof, hoping to stop his fall. The feet pendulummed down towards the house and he fell again, now headfirst towards the concrete below.

I took a step to my right and lifted my hands, remembering the words of a military climbing instructor – brace don’t catch. I planted my hands against his dropping shoulders. I somehow remembered the hammer and shifted my right hip away from his falling body. Shane’s full weight hit me and plowed us both into the concrete.

I thought he died. Shane was unconscious. Blood soaked out of the hood of his sweatshirt. I called 911. Shane started breathing again. I tried to comfort him as the paramedics came. “It’s going to be alright. You’re going to be alright…”

I broke down after the ambulance pulled away to take him to the hospital.

Shane ended up with a concussion, broken collarbone, and a few broken ribs. They said he probably would have died if he hadn’t landed on me. Shane’s wife still has a husband and his kids still have their father.


I didn’t know how to say it at the time without sounding crazy (clearly I’m not worried about that anymore), but I knew that it wasn’t me that saved him. If anything, I probably botched my role. In better hands, Shane might not have even hit the ground. Thank God, I remembered the warning about the hammer. If I hadn’t have turned my hips, it would have went right through him.

I’ve wracked by brain for almost nine years trying to figure out the events of that day, why I received that warning, and why I haven’t had the same warning for other loved one that I’ve lost. I don’t have any hard answers, but I do have my own conclusions and hopefully I’m more courageous about telling them than I was about telling the truth about what happened then.

The only undeniable conclusion that I’ve come is that if a voice ever tells you to take your hammer off your tool belt - do it. Keeping your job is about to become the least of your worries.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Jesus and the Amazon Kindle

“Jerry said no,” Tom said. “CBS is out.”


The words burst out of the cell phone and hung in the warm October air. They were followed by others, but the cards were already on the table. My back had been against the wall and that wall had just collapsed.


I left my job as a corporate attorney three years ago. I believed that I was following that path that God had laid out before me. The path that began after my step-brother’s death from a PTSD suicide. I started fighting to force the military to take better care of our returning heroes’ traumatic stress injuries. I ended up in a challenging position for lower pay trying to improve the lives of people who live with serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and PTSD.


While it was the right path to make a difference in people’s lives, it was a major blow to our young family’s finances. The effect was exacerbated when my wife became ill and had to cut her hours at work. Our house construction went over budget and my attempt to start a business on the side backfired.


Every month the debt grew deeper, but I was working with a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter-director to sell a television series. What had seemed like a long shot a year ago looked like a lock for the past three months. Today it went away.


I was devastated. My wife was back in the hospital again and the bills were stacking up even further. I cooked the kids’ dinner and tried not to think about losing the house. I put them to bed and lay in my own. I pray every night, but usually just prayers of thanks, requests for forgiveness, and asking Jesus to help me take the path that He wants me to take.


Tonight was different. I told Him that I didn’t have the power to fix my family’s finances. I’d done my best to follow where I thought He wanted me to go, but I had failed. I admitted that I couldn't fix this financial situation myself and begged for help.


I woke up that morning in a horrible mood. I checked my email a little bit after eleven. One of the messages was from someone named Jason who claimed to be from Amazon. Jason said that he was talking to a handful of the most successful self-published authors on the Amazon Kindle and he would like to talk to me. It was a blatant scam. I was a lot more likely to be among the Kindle’s bottom five authors. I had never figured out how to market ebooks on Kindle and my nine or ten sales reflected that.


That made me curious about exactly how low my Amazon Kindle sales had been. I knew that they were bad, but I wanted proof of how wrong this “Jason” was for our later conversation. I opened up the sales report for the past six weeks. I had a sale five weeks ago and another two scattered over the next few weeks.


Then my eyes popped. Two weeks ago I had over six thousand sales. The following week was about the same. The total royalties for those two weeks’ sales almost matched my regular salary for the past year.


After taxes, the royalties would be almost to the dollar how much we owed.


I talked with Jason from Amazon later that day and he told me that Amazon had run a major Kindle marketing campaign this month. They dropped some titles down to nothing in order to get people reading on their Kindles. Amazon would pay the authors and publishers the royalties that they would have been due for the sales.


Any of my thoughts that maybe writing was finally getting the attention that I thought I deserved evaporated. This wasn’t me. It was Amazon and Jesus.


To top it off, I had been all but giving the books away in an attempt to draw in readers until just a few weeks ago when a book reviewer recommended that I raise the price from $0.99 to $9.99. If this woman that I’ve never met hadn’t told me to crank up the price, the bumper crop of sales wouldn’t have made any difference in our family’s finances.


While others may be able to come up with justifications for how this chain of events may have occurred without divine intervention, I cannot.

I was begged for help and it was provided. All I can say is thank you.

Friday, October 15, 2010

I'm Not Qualified to Write This

Anyone who has known me for more than five minutes can list a handful of things that I've done wrong. If they've known me longer than that, then they'd better get more hands. I thought about providing a list of some of those things, but I've got a feeling that most of you will believe that I've got more than my fair share of flaws and that many of them run deep. Anyone who doesn't believe that yet will eventually.

That flawed existence has scared me from telling a broader audience about some of the spiritual things that I've experienced and seen. I was afraid that my ability to transmit the message would be obscured by my own sins and I know that many of you will not be able to look past my faults. I cannot argue against that judgment. Your heart should always be your guide and if it tells you that I'm full of it, then you're probably right.

This week I had another amazing experience that I cannot attribute to anything other than the act of a higher power. It was powerful and life-changing. After a lot of thought, I've decided that it's my duty to tell the stories about how I've been blessed and what I think I've learned. Although, I'd be lying if I claimed to have even one millionth of the answers. I'm just searching for Truth with dirty glasses.

I know myself and this world well enough to be certain that I'm going to fail and sin throughout the writing of this blog. I ask that you please try and overlook my continued failings to focus on the meaning of what I've seen and experienced. It is more beautiful than the teller is not.

Thank you,
Matt