'Achak, where are you?' she asked. 'Call me back immediately.' I called her back, and reached her voice mail. I was going to be busy that day, I told her. I'll call you after the meetings are over. She called again, but by then I had turned my phone off. At four o'clock, when I turned my phone on again, the first call was from Achor Achor.
'Have you heard anything?' he asked.
'Anything about what?'
He paused for a long moment. 'I'll call you back,' he said.
He called back a few minutes later.
'Have you heard anything about Tabitha?' he asked.
I told him I had not. He hung up again. My only guess was that Tabitha had been trying to reach me through Achor Achor, and that she had gotten upset, perhaps even said some things about my remoteness, callousness. She said such things whenever she wanted to reach me and could not.
The phone rang again and it was Achor Achor.
He told me what he knew: that Tabitha was dead, that Duluma had killed her. She had been staying in the apartment of her friend Veronica, where she had gone to be safe from Duluma. Duluma had found her, called, and threatened to come over. Tabitha was defiant, and despite Veronica's protestations, she dared him to come over. Veronica did not want to open the door but Tabitha was unafraid. Holding Veronica's baby in the crook of her arm, she released the door's lock. 'I'll handle this poor man,' she told Veronica, and she opened the door. Duluma leapt through it, holding a knife. He stabbed Tabitha between her ribs, sending the baby soaring. As Veronica recovered her child, Duluma threw Tabitha to the floor. Veronica watched, helpless, as Duluma sank his knife into Tabitha twenty-two times. Finally he slowed and stopped. He stood, breathing heavily. He looked to Veronica and smiled a tired smile. 'I have to be sure she's dead,' he said, and he waited, standing above the body of Tabitha.
After Tabitha was dead, Duluma walked out of the apartment and threw himself off an overpass. I asked Achor Achor if he was dead. He was not dead. He was in a hospital, his back broken.
I left the conference and walked alone for some time, where the campus overlooked the highway. The road was busy with cars, loud with speed and indifference. It was too soon to believe, to feel. I was sure, though, in that hour I spent alone that I was alone completely. I lived without God, even for a time, and the thoughts I entertained were the darkest my mind had ever known.
I returned to the conference and told Bobby and a few other men what had happened. The conference ended that day and they tried to comfort me. I wanted to fly directly to Seattle but was told by Achor Achor not to. The family was too upset, he said, and her brothers did not want to see me. I could not yet contemplate the reality of her death, so on that first day I thought about causes and solutions, vengeance and faith.
'God has a problem with me,' I told Bobby. We were driving home from the conference. He said nothing for some time, and his silence meant to me that he agreed.
'No, no!' he finally said. 'That's not true. It's just-'
But I was sure that there was a message being directed to me.
'I'm so sorry about all this,' Bobby said.
I told him there was no need for him to be sorry.
Bobby fumbled for answers, and urged me not to blame myself, or to read anything about God's intentions into Tabitha's murder. But many times during that drive he banged his steering wheel and yelled, and ran his hands through his hair.
'Maybe it's this stupid country,' he said. 'Maybe we just make people crazy.'
This was four months ago today. Though whispered doubts have ringed my head and though I have had certain godless hours, my faith has not been altered, because I have never felt God's direct intervention in any affairs at all. Perhaps I did not receive that sort of training from my teachers, that he is guiding the winds that knock us down or carry us. And yet, with this news, as we drove, I found myself distancing myself from God. I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than happiness, and thus I have found ways to create more distance between us. Now I have the same thoughts about God, my faith, that I had for these friends. God is in my life but I do not depend on him. My God is not a reliable God.
Tabitha, I will love you until I see you again. There are provisions for lovers like us, I am sure of it. In the afterlife, whatever its form, there are provisions. I know you were unsure about me, that you had not yet chosen me above all others, but now that you are gone, allow me to assume that you were on your way to deciding that I was the one. Or perhaps that's the wrong way to think. I know you entertained calls from other men, men besides me and Duluma. We were young. We had not made plans.
Tabitha, I pray for you often. I have been reading Mother Teresa and Brother Roger's book called Seeking the Heart of God, and each time I revisit it, I find different passages that seem written for me, describing what I feel in your absence. In the book, Brother Roger says this to me: 'Four hundred years after Christ, a believer named Augustine lived in North Africa. He had experienced misfortunes, the death of his loved ones. One day he was able to say to Christ: 'Light of my heart, do not let my darkness speak to me.' In his trials, St. Augustine realized that the presence of the Risen Christ had never left him; it was the light in the midst of his darkness.'
There have been times when those words have helped me and times when I found those words hollow and unconvincing. These authors, for whom I have great respect, still do not seem to know the doubts that one might have in the angriest corners of one's soul. Too often they tell me to answer my doubts with prayer, which seems very much like addressing one's hunger by thinking of food. But still, even when I am frustrated, I look elsewhere and can find a new passage that speaks to me. There is this, from Mother Teresa: 'Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy. Remember that the passion of Christ ends always in the joy of the resurrection of Christ, so when you feel in your own heart the suffering of Christ, remember the resurrection has yet to come-the joy of Easter has to dawn.' And she provides a prayer that I have prayed many times in these last weeks, and that I whisper tonight in my car, on this street of overhanging trees and amber streetlights.
Lord Jesus, make us realize
that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves
and our self-centered desires
that we can come to live more fully;
for it is only by dying with you that we can rise with you
.
Tabitha, these past months without you, when first I wondered where you might be, whether you were in heaven or hell or some purgatory, I have had the most intolerable thoughts, homicidal and suicidal. I have struggled so fiercely with the harm I have wanted to do to Duluma and the futility I have seen, in my darkest minutes, in living. I have found some respite in the nightly consumption of alcohol. Two bottles of beer typically allow me to sleep, if fitfully. Achor Achor has been worried about me, but he has seen me improve. He knows I have been here before, that I have approached the precipice of self-termination and have walked away.
I never told you of those dark days, Tabitha, when I was much younger. Achor Achor does not know, either, and had he and I been together then I might not have fallen so low. We had been separated at Golkur, though both of us were on our way to Kenya, to Kakuma. We were on the same road, but days apart. The last I had seen Achor Achor he was in a Save the Children medical tent, being treated for dehydration. I had been cowardly; I thought he would surely die and I could not bear it. I ran away and did not say goodbye. I left the camp with another group, wanting to be away from his imminent death, from all death, and so I walked with one of the first groups into the wind and desert that awaited us in Kenya.