In 1942, the Christian writer and theologian C.S. Lewis published a work called The Screwtape Letters, dedicated to his close friend and fellow writer J.R.R. Tolkien. It is, as far as I know, one of the greatest fictional studies of the nature of man, the effects of temptation and sin, and the process of and need for repentance. It is presented as a series of letters between two demons - the apprentice demon Wormwood, who is on his first-ever solo assignment to tempt a human being, and Wormwood’s uncle, the accomplished demon Screwtape. At one point, Screwtape offers his nephew the following bit of insight into human nature - and I will paraphrase here:
“Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal…as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you [watch…a human] carefully you would [see] this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty."
I don't know that any man I’ve ever known embodied this principle as well as my brother Ben.
In 1984, Orson Scott Card published a novel which introduced to the world the concept of a “
Speaker for the Dead”; this is someone who attempts to retell the life of a deceased person “
in all truth, holding back neither good nor bad, so that the deceased may be better understood.”
Although I have not had much contact with him for the past twenty years, I shall try to share a brief picture of my brother in this manner - the good and the bad. For Ben was more amphibious than most of us; and swam in the deep waters of loss and strife as often as he stood on the firm ground of happiness and peace, if not more so.
I apologize now to anyone who finds themselves offended by my words; my intent is not to seek offense, but simply to give you as complete a picture as I am able to assemble of my brother. A Speaker for the Dead shares all truth, both the glorious heights and the darkest depths, in an effort to help those left behind begin to heal.
Ben was a protector
One of the earliest and strongest memories I have of Ben comes from sometime in my very early childhood, around first or second grade. I spent a lot of my life being bullied. On one of these occasions, a pair of twins a few years older than I had decided to take out whatever frustrations they were facing by beating me. I knew that if I could lead them to the part of the school where Ben would soon be coming out from, that I would be OK, so I led them on the most breathless chase of my young life. True to the faith I had in him, when Ben saw me in trouble he ran to my rescue and fought like a demon to defend me from the two bullies. Clothes ripped, covered in various bruises and cuts, Ben and I headed home feeling victorious.
Years later, shortly after my eighth birthday, Ben pulled me aside to have a discussion about the physical beatings we were taking from Dad. We resolved at that moment that Matt and Aaron would never know how angry Dad could be. I fished the plastic Knight piece out of my portable chess set, and Ben and I spent the next 10 or so years passing that Knight back and forth. Whenever Matt or Aaron would do something that we knew would lead to a beating, whoever was holding the chess piece at the time would take the blame. “I did it.” After the beating was over, the other one would take the chess piece and steel ourselves for the next beating. One of the worst ones I can remember is when Matt had eaten the last of a batch of popsicles in the freezer. Dad came into the kitchen and opened the freezer, and was very upset to find they had all been eaten - he had apparently been saving the last one for himself. Ben was the one with the Knight at the time, and so he claimed to have eaten the last popsicle, even though we had both watched Matt do it. I can’t recall with clarity the exact amount of time that beating went on, but it started upstairs in the kitchen and continued all the way to the stairwell, where Ben was kicked down the flight of stairs, and then on into our bedroom. I don’t know for sure how Matt remembers his childhood, but I have spoken to Aaron multiple times of those years, and Aaron was not even aware that Dad was physically abusive - he was never aware of the beatings Ben took on his behalf.
These are just two of the many moments I can offer of how I saw Ben try to protect those who could not protect themselves - either as a shield absorbing violence on their behalf, or as a sword dealing out a sort of “preventative violence” to stop what he knew was coming. I love Ben for that.
Ben was a tormentor
At the same time, something about the violence he received caused Ben to sometimes lash out with a rage he could not control, and I was the most common recipient of that violence until he left home. I was beaten with baseball bats, attacked with a shovel, pushed off a roof, and in many other uncountable ways physically and mentally tortured by my brother.
I can remember one particular event from our teenage years in Utah, where Ben picked up Dad’s incredibly sharp fish fillet knife and wondered out loud what it would feel like to stab a person; he suddenly turned and swung the knife down at me. Instinctively, I reached up with my bare hand and grabbed at the knife blade, where it sliced deeply into my right index finger - to this day, I cannot feel the tip of my right index finger, from where the nerve was sliced into. Screaming in pain and trying frantically to stop the bleeding, I fell out of my chair and laid on the floor. Looking up, I saw Ben bring the knife down on me a second time, embedding it deep in my hip. I know Dad came running into the room, but the rest of that day is a blur to me. However, as long as I live, I will never forget the look in Ben’s eyes as he brought that knife to bear on me - I was certain I was about to die. I lived in a near-constant fear of what he would do next, and helped Ben break many moral, ethical, and civil laws just to avoid bringing his anger down on me.
He let the dark abyss of our childhood swallow him whole, and never managed to climb all the way out of it, and I hated Ben for that.
Ben was a victim
By this, I do not in any way mean to excuse the choices Ben made; however, I don’t believe that any of us here could really ever understand the depths of the pain Ben felt. His heart was bigger than almost anyone knew, and he spent most of his life with that heart as a raw, exposed nerve open to every kind of evil, angry, and destructive force known to man.
When I was about thirteen and Ben was around fifteen, Dad told us one day to get in the car. Ben and I were terrified, whispering frantically as we drove up the hill away from Veyo trying to figure out which one of us had pissed Dad off, and for what. We drove like that for a few miles, then Dad pulled over to the side of the road and stared out the windshield for a few minutes. Without any kind of warning, he turned around and looked us each coldly in the face and declared “As far as I’m concerned, neither one of you is my son. I don’t love either of you, and I never will.”
Then Dad put the car back in drive, made a U-Turn, and drove home without another word. Mom was waiting when we got home to ask us what had happened, and you could see in her face the same fears Ben and I had been struggling with the whole way up, but somehow these words from Dad cut me far deeper than any beating he had ever given me. I cried and cried, asking Mom why Dad didn’t love me, and I looked over to see Ben sitting there, outwardly as calm as you could ever imagine, and he told me “Joey, you have to stop caring about what he thinks.”
Years later, when Ben was married and living in St. George, I would visit him and talk about that day, and he cried then as hard as I had on the day of the event itself. He wanted so desperately to be loved, and respected, but the pain he lived with every day so overwhelmed him that he kept turning to drugs, alcohol, and other forms of vice to distract and numb himself from the emotional and spiritual agony that twisted so much of his life.
As Bono mentions in the U2 song “Peace On Earth”: Ben “became a monster so the monster could not break [him]”, and I spent far too much of both of our lives being unfairly angry at him for not being stronger than he was.
At various times in his life, Ben was a liar, a cheat, and an addict; but he was also at times a hero, a hurt child, and a sad, sad man. In other words, Ben was an amphibian - half spirit and half animal, belonging both to the eternal world and to the world of flesh and time.
I want to draw to a close with a pair of poems that I think would resonate with Ben if he were here now. The first is a classic poem about strength of character in the face of adversity. Its title is “Invictus”, by Willam Ernest Henly.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
It is a beautiful poem which places upon each of us as individuals the responsibility for what we do with our lives, and I know Ben loved this poem – we spoke of it often. However, in the intervening years I have come across a poem that I wish I’d taken the time to share with him, which was written as a direct response to Invictus by Elder Orson F. Whitney, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, titled “The Soul’s Captain.” Continuing directly from Henley’s assertion “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” Elder Whitney responds:
Art thou in truth?
Then what of Him who bought thee with His blood?
Who plunged into devouring seas
And snatched thee from the flood
Who bore for all our fallen race
What none but Him could bear--
The God who died that man might live
And endless glory share.
Of what avail thy vaunted strength
Apart from His vast might?
Pray that His light may pierce the gloom
That thou mayest see aright.
Men are as bubbles on the wave,
As leaves upon the tree,
Thou, captain of thy soul! Forsooth,
Who gave that place to thee?
Free will is thine--free agency,
To wield for right or wrong;
But thou must answer unto Him
To whom all souls belong.
Bend to the dust that “head unbowed”,
Small part of life’s great whole,
And see in Him and Him alone,
The captain of thy soul.
I cannot assert to you that the following is doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am simply telling you the truth that lives in my heart. Some of you may not know that between Ben and Tina, there was another member of our family whose mission on this earth was so brief, we never got to know him at all. Our Mom miscarried a baby, and he is our older brother Jacob.
Ben and I spoke often of Jacob, and we both had multiple occasions in our lives where we felt certain Jacob had been there with us in spirit, guiding and protecting us. As Ben passed from this world, I know in my heart that our older brother Jacob was there waiting for him. I don’t fully understand what kinds of communication are allowed to pass from our side of the veil to theirs, but I hope Ben can hear me know as I say: I love you, and I hope that our family there with you can finally help you find some of the healing that so frequently eluded you in this life. I look forward to meeting you again someday at their side, and I pray that you will put in the work needed so that you can allow yourself to join into the eternal peace of our Savior.
To those of you still on this side of the veil with me: remember Ben. Not only the good parts, not only the bad parts, but as the complete amphibian he was. Find a way to draw strength from his positive examples, and find a way to learn how NOT to go from his negative ones. And, ultimately, I want each of you to know that I know my Redeemer lives.
One of my siblings recently asked me how I can have the relationships I do, knowing about some people the things I know, and I gave a terrible answer. The answer I should have given, the truest of the many possible answers to that question, is “I can because the Savior showed me how.”
Wherever you are on your path back to our Father in Heaven, I want to take this chance to call to you from the Tree of Life as Lehi of old called out to his family: there is peace here, there is love here, there is forgiveness here - both for you and for all who turn their hearts fully to the Lord Jesus Christ.
I spent too much time being afraid to say it to Ben, afraid I’d just anger him; I don’t want to be afraid to say it to any of you anymore. The gospel of Jesus Christ holds a balm that soothes all pain. I have felt it in my own, I have seen it work in others, and the world is replete with the stories of the healing He has done. Whatever is stopping you from coming to Him, please let it go. I love you all, and I know the Savior loves you too. Please come back to Him.
