THE STAND

A Christian brother of mine shared a story from Field & Stream with me earlier this year. It’s a story that I felt worthy of my time to retype to share with you. Happy Veteran’s day! Enjoy.

The Stand

It started as a regular deer hunt but became a revelation. By Bill Heavey(Field & Stream MARCH 2015)

  THE MOST ORDINARY deer stand can somehow turn itself into a spiritually powerful place. I don’t pretend to understand how this works. I do know that you can climb into one with a stranger and come down four hours later knowing things about him you probably don’t know about your best friend.
  I was sitting on a folding chair in a tower stand in central Arkansas on a raw October morning. I had the barrel of a loaner rifle, a 6.5x55 Swedish, resting on the rail as Mike Romine and I scanned a big cutover field with pine woods on three sides. He’d warned me that the deer on his club’s lease rarely showed themselves for more than a few seconds. Mike is 58, with hands calloused from a lifetime of working outside. I’d only met him the day before, but there was something about him that I liked immediately. He seemed uncommonly aware of the gift of being alive.
  Around 9 A.M., Mike rattled and a big 8-pointer came to the edge of the woods 300 yards away. It was a trophy—the biggest rack seen on club property in years, I learned later—but it was farther away than I felt comfortable shooting. I was almost glad that brush shielded its brisket. The deer melted back into the pines. We just sat for a good while. Then Mike, still watching the field, started talking in the singularly casual voice that some men reserve for the weightiest things. A little more than two years ago, his wife’s younger brother had committed suicide in his favorite stand not far from where we sat. Mike had been 21 and Barry 13 when they met. “Basically, he was my little brother. We loved each other. I was the one who got him into deer hunting and the club. He loved hunting and loved this place.” Mike was the last to see Barry alive and the first to see him afterward. He’d arrived to find blood spattered on the walls of the stand and his brother-in-law on the floor next to a 20-gauge slug gun. With an EMT on speakerphone, Mike had administered chest compressions and breaths to a dead man until a police car arrived.
  I didn’t know why Mike was telling me this. The reason didn’t matter. What did was that I’d just entered his world. Beneath his calm voice, I felt the emotional annihilation a suicide inflicts on the survivors—devastation, anguish, anger, and bewilderment. When Barry had blown away his heart, he’d taken a great many others’ with him. The news had just about done in Barry’s parents, his four sisters, a slew of nieces and nephews. I was overcome by this rush of knowledge and by Mike’s selflessness. Here was a man in great pain who was nonetheless more concerned with others’ suffering than his own. I blinked back tears and pretended to study my side of the field.
  Mike had watched the coroner bag up Barry’s body. He’d stood there alone and watched as the little caravan of cars appeared and disappeared as the road rose and fell and finally curved away. He’d thought of how our lives were like that road—with highs and lows and places where the way ahead seemed to have washed out altogether. Mike believed that God had given us the promise of everlasting life, but that first we had to do due diligence to this one, see it through even the bleakest times. And that we had a responsibility to love each other along the way.
  What a man, I thought. What a tough, brave, tender son of a gun.
  I remembered reading somewhere that most suicides were cases of mistaken identity. Which I understood to mean that acute depression—a tidal wave of unbearable self-loathing and despair—fooled you into thinking that your suffering and feelings of worthlessness were your identity rather than things you were going through.
  I didn’t say anything, but I reached out and clamped Mike’s shoulder for a moment. We didn’t say anything else about it. Mike rattled a couple more times. We saw two does cut the corner of the field as they traveled from one section of woods to another. But we didn’t see the big buck again or any others. Two hours later, two men who had been strangers climbed down from the stand having shared something that I still can’t quite put a name to. I felt richer for it and hoped Mike did, too. I hoped that the telling of his grief had lessened its weight.
  As for me, I felt a mix of things. There are few honors higher than having a stranger trust you enough to share his deepest thoughts. And I did feel deeply honored. But I was also a bit anxious. Now I had to be as good a man as the one Mike had taken me for. While walking away, I glanced back at the stand. It looked like any other. Its power was as mysterious to me as anything else that had just happened. But I knew it was real. I’d felt it.

  As we give honor to our veterans today, let us not forgot those veterans that suffer from depression and those that have taken their lives as a result of it. God bless. JS