Eight Twenty Eight by Ian Murphy

Author:Ian Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion/Christian Life/Inspirational
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2014-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

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Ian was scheduled to come home on April 30. I had a job interview that day, which meant I couldn’t ride home in the ambulance with him. I had first declined the interview for that very reason. I wanted to be there when he said goodbye to his therapists and doctors. I second-guessed myself, and then Steve second-guessed me. I called them back to accept.

But because I couldn’t be there to ride home with him, I drove down the night before and stayed at the Heasley House. When I got into Ian’s room that night, he was wide-awake.

When I came in the next morning to say goodbye and drive to my interview, he was wide-awake.

When Steve and Mary came that morning to put his clothes in bags and take him home, he was wide-awake.

He knew.

Even in his coma, he knew. Because comas didn’t separate him from God.

He knew that he was going home to the house on Warren Road with the yellow siding and the backyard sized perfectly for a small baseball diamond. Eleven years of boyhood were waiting for him there with pencil marks on the doorway to the laundry room marking each brother’s developing heights, year by year.

April 30, 2007

He’s home:)

That’s all we needed the blog post to say because the word home meant more than an ambulance ride from Pittsburgh. Ian grew up in a home that wasn’t just layers of concrete and siding and shingles, but was a place of gathering. Mary made her home to bring comfort. So this new life at home meant being back to his parents and back to the kitchen where he used to eat breakfast in his boxers before class. It meant coming back to the Murphy smell, a smell that Ian would maybe now recognize because he’d been gone from it so long. A smell that every family possesses but is immune to its recognition.

Moving home for Ian meant a new bedroom on the back of the house on the first floor, below the other bedrooms. It had thin slats of Pergo instead of well-worn brown carpet like his old bedroom. His new walls were of the same Celtic Folklore green paint chip as the living room. Ian always commented on how relaxed he felt in the living room, and Mary wanted him to feel the same way now. His new room had lamps and a mirror and blinds that Mary had picked out to make the room feel masculine, like a place where a man would want to recover. And temporarily, thanks to our friend Vikki who snuck over before the ambulance arrived, Ian’s room was also filled with a full constellation of welcome-home balloons. She knew we were on our way to celebrate.

Then . . . Ian was home.

He came inside the lower level of his house, into the kitchen and dining room and living room and den. He didn’t need to go upstairs because we’d brought everything down to him. He had everything he needed.

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