How did it get into my kitchen? Why was it flat on the floor? Had it flown in through the back door and I hadn't noticed? Had it hatched from a caterpillar hidden somewhere in the fuzz under my kitchen cabinets? I thought about these things for less time than it takes to form words around them and then snatched a cubical Rubbermaid container from the dish drying rack with its red lid. I bent down, touched the plastic box to the floor, tipped it up and used the lid to urge the butterfly inside. It went in easily and I held the lid over the top. The butterfly struggled a bit inside as I rushed to the back door, went down the steps, took off the lid and tossed the butterfly toward the meadow of Queen Anne's lace that used to be the grass in my backyard. It flew away and I returned to the kitchen, back to the task of pulling together a quick dinner for Eliza and me.
The proverbial "set it free" moment.
Twenty minutes later, when I took my plate of lemon chicken and healthy vegetables out to the patio table, podcast going on the phone tucked under my arm, the beer opened while cooking in my other hand, I thought ... Kris?
I have friends who've asked if I had "sightings" or "signs" or times when I felt my son's presence in the days and weeks and now years after his death. He died three years ago tomorrow, on July 24, 2017, after a brave and refining battle with ALS. It was a losing battle, of course, because that's what ALS is, and thus, perhaps, one should not call it a battle, because it's not fair and how hard you fight doesn't determine the victor. It doesn't even determine the meaning of the outcome. The point for Kris as he lived and died with ALS was grace. Grace was what he discovered and trusted in and told the rest of us all about -- God's grace. And what we saw, even in the battle, even in the obscenity of the disease, the awfulness of his fate -- what we saw was God's grace merging with what Kris called "Gronk's grace" — Kris Grahnke's grace. Something transformative. Something that transforms our lives into gratitude and reverence and awe at a world made by, made for, made of God's redeeming love.
Butterflies are symbols of resurrection, symbols of Easter, of new life and beauty and freedom. I am more sad than liberated, more mournful than lifted up, as I think about the delicate wings of the butterfly I tossed into the wilds of my backyard earlier this evening. The son I love so much is three years gone. Three years without a phone call, three years without a hug, three years without someone who shared certain family jokes with me, who loved his siblings almost as fiercely as I do, who had planned for his own family and a new generation of good times when he married his wife, Michelle.
He is free, living eternally with God, and what I know and can envision of that is dim. But Kris is, somehow, still here in surprises: the butterfly restored to the outdoors, the way I thought of him this afternoon and how much he and I enjoyed his sister's malapropisms, how he could imitate and understand her better than anyone. He's here in the approval that his friends bestowed on his younger brother's Instagram photo of himself and his girlfriend of the last year, two people who seem happy and well-suited for one another. He's here in the encouragement I've taken from his blog in the darker moments of this pandemic. He's here -- once it seemed in a startling tumble of books and papers at a certain moment not long after he died. He's here in the old snapshots I find of him and his friends in third grade clambering over each other on the playground. He's here in my heart. Always.
