Little did I know a week and a half ago when I took a picture of this statue with Pikes Peak in the background that only about a week later we would be waiting with anguish to learn the outcome of the accident Jonathan's younger brother was in while he was riding bike on Rampart Range Road somewhere in or near the mountains pictured below.
Jonathan's sister Esther texted all his siblings with the alarming news of the accident, but details remained scant, and it was not known if Rob survived. If I was pacing the floor and praying in between trying to get a few odd jobs done, I couldn't imagine what Rob's wife and daughters were going through.
Hour after hour went by, with hope growing thin to non-existent. I texted another sister-in-law, but we said little because there was so little to say while in such awful suspense. Our pastor's wife, who used to work as a first responder and EMT, bewailed the fact that nowadays even family isn't given many details about an accident, if any, until often hours later. Well, we were experiencing this for ourselves.
I kept praying for Julie, who has faced more than one tragedy in her life already, and the girls. Sometimes the mountains one must climb are massive.
And sometimes the valleys are very dark.
The Lucas families began to walk a very dark valley Saturday night. Not knowing how many more hours we'd be waiting, and so exhausted that I was almost sick, I went to bed along with Jonathan. But when I heard his text ding, I was up again. I think he couldn't bear to know, but I wanted to know.
The text was very brief, three words. Quietly I brought the phone to Jonathan, and upon reading it, he instantly broke down in uncontrolled tears.
He had lost a brother. They had just been together a week earlier--Rob standing right next to Jonathan in the snapshot of the immediate family at their father's 90th birthday.
Nobody expected this to happen next. The 90-year-old grandfather was expected to go next. As his frail person trembled in the chilly air at the picnic table, someone wrapped his shoulders with a soft brown and white afghan, and others walked by him to steady his faltering footsteps if he needed an arm to lean on as he walked to and from the car.
"Tell Rob I want to hug him," Jonathan's dad had said, low, to me as he was about to try to make his way back to the vehicle to go home after the picnic. He had hugged all the rest of his children except for his youngest, Rob.
So I went over where Rob was visiting with another family member, and said, low to him, "Your dad wants to give you a hug."
And Rob went.
And I glanced behind me just long enough to see the quiet arms around shoulders.
That memory will stay riveted in my mind--a father and a son and a quiet hug.
Because, even before knowing it was the last time, it meant the world to me, and now knowing it was the last time, it means more worlds.
It was so good to know that when two siblings and a father were on a three-way call about the awful news when it finally came, the father would know he had made a special point of hugging his boy.
He had been afraid it would be his last time, perhaps, and he wanted a hug to be remembered.
And it is.
By me, and by angels, and by God.
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