Because He Loves Me

It has been four years since Emily died—four years and I had never been to her grave...until yesterday. It was a miserable day. The sky looked like slate and the air was filled with a ghostly haze that dribbled a layer of grayness on the grass. The gray wetness seeped into my shoes and crawled up the cuff of my jeans as I walked through the cemetery, peering at tombstone after tombstone. Bare tree branches crisscrossed the sky like black spider webs. I finally found Emily’s grave at the back of the cemetery. A yellow primrose sat on the black marble slab. Everything looked dead except for that yellow flower—like a misplaced smudge of color in the middle of a black and white photograph. I looked at the little flower and I knew Emily was not there. Perhaps her body was decomposing beneath my feet—but Emily, the Emily I remember, was not there.
I met Emily five years ago when she transferred from Inglemore High to Christ Church Academy, a small private school of seventy students. At Christ Church Academy – as in most private Christian schools – it was completely uncool to act Christian. I was very uncool…until I met Emily. Almost every student at Christ Church Academy changed when they met Emily.
I remember the first day Emily walked into school. No…. not walked. She bounded, frolicked, floated…or something akin to it. Emily was a head taller than most girls, with yellow hair and a smile as bright as a million watt light bulb. I was a little afraid of her and purposely avoided having conversations with her. But Emily cornered me on the first week.
“Hi! What’s your name?” she asked with a smile. I pulled my head quickly out of my locker, where I had been rummaging for a textbook.
“Oh um…hi,” I said. “I’m Emily.”
“My name’s Emily too! How cool is that!”
Emily’s smile widened, till she looked like the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. I thought that would be the end of our conversation, so with a nod I ducked my head back into my locker.
“Hey, what’s your last name?” Emily said.
“Huh?....Oh, uh Hart,” I answered from inside my locker.
“Oh that’s perfect!” Emily giggled. “Mine’s Heiber. You can be Emily Ha and I’ll be Emily He… He ha!”
She took a step closer and gave me a massive hug. With another smile, she turned and bounced off to her next class. I stood stunned in the middle of the hallway, staring quizzically after my new friend. I never had had a nickname before – or been hugged by an almost complete stranger. But that was just Emily’s way.
Over the next year, Emily and I became friends – not close friends – just friends. She was older than me, but you no matter how old you were you had to be a bona fide jerk not to be Emily’s friend. I was not quite a bona fide jerk, but I was the next worse thing – a prude. If you have ever known a tattle telling, stuck up, insecure high school student, I can assure you I was worse. If we were required to write a two-page paper, I wrote three. When we had a lunch break, I spent half of it studying Latin. And if anyone planned a party, I respectfully declined. Eventually, my classmates stopped asking if I wanted to hang out- they already knew the answer. I did not have any close friends and I did not need any.
Emily came to school during my junior year, which was passing as slowly and uneventfully as any year before it. My classmates punted paper footballs across the aisles during lectures and held contests to see how many spit wads they could make stick to the whiteboard before the teacher noticed. The girls gossiped and read magazines during class and most of the guys got themselves suspended. I did my best to remain clueless to all the craziness.
There were only two kinds of students at Christ Church Academy: students who stressed out trying to follow the rules—like me, or students who could care less about the rules and got themselves suspended. Emily was a new breed of student. She was not stressed about keeping the rules but she kept them nonetheless. She was all smiles. When we had a pop quiz—she smiled. When we all flunked a math test—she smiled. Even if a teacher assigned a ten page research project—she smiled. And when Emily found out she had advanced brain cancer...she still wore the same unfading smile. Through chemotherapy, losing her hair, and multiple operations, Emily was unexplainably joyful.
A few months after she was diagnosed with cancer, Emily plopped down at my lunch table.
“Hey guys!” Emily said. She had cut her hair short when she started chemotherapy but now she was wearing a wig. It was a cute wig – sort of a reddish brown and flipped out at the ends like Jacqueline Kennedy.
“Oh...hi Em,” I said. I turned to the girl next to me. “Hey... Anne,” I said. “Alice and Natasha had to go to the principal's office again today.”

“Uh oh...busted!” said Anne.

“I know... I thought the whole thing about the guys getting suspended was all settled.”
“Isn’t it?”

“I guess not. I overheard a teacher say that Alice and Natasha knew the guys were goofing off the whole time...but they never fessed up. Now they are in big trouble.”

“Uh...guys?” Emily said. “I don’t think we should be talking about this.”

I did not say anything. But my brain seethed, I am the butt of this whole school. I get gossiped about all the time. I have a right to talk about all those guys who are finally getting what they deserve. If I was not so shy I probably would have said it out loud, but instead I just sat there sulking as Emily changed the subject.
“So yesterday, I was at the mall and....” I stared at my half eaten sandwich, still pouting and waiting for her to finish. But she did not finish. I looked up at Emily. Her eyes were closed and her body was shaking. I felt frozen. I had heard Emily’s brain cancer caused seizures, but I had never seen anyone have one before. She kept shaking. Her wig slid sideways, revealing a closely shaved head with several bald patches. I felt a lump rise up in my throat. The next moment our science teacher was there holding Emily’s head as she convulsed. As Emily finally started coming out of the seizure she began mumbling:
“Because he loves me...because he loves me...I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.”
She was quoting Psalm 91. She was having a seizure and she was quoting Psalm 91. Finally, Emily opened her eyes. I could tell she did not see any of us.
“Because he loves me...” she said again with a smile. Emily’s eyes focused. She took a deep breath and her body stopped quivering. She gave us a helplessly apologetic look. The teacher helped her stand up and phoned her mom to come pick her up.
Things were different after that. It was like the day I finally got glasses. The whole world looked bright...sharp...focused. If Emily could quote Bible verses in the middle of a seizure and come to school every day with a smile on her face when she knew she could have a seizure any moment – then what was my problem? Why was I such a reclusive grouch? For the first time I wanted to be different. I wanted to be like Emily.
Emily graduated that year but I saw her during the summer. She stopped and asked if I was excited about being a senior next year. I did not really know. I thought my class was not ready to be seniors. Emily invited me over to her house to pray about it. I told her I would come, but I was a little reluctant. There were a lot of things I was afraid of, but there was nothing I was more afraid of then praying out loud.
But I swallowed my fear and went. It was a hot day. I could feel the heat radiating up from the pavement as I walked up the steep driveway to her house. As I neared the top, I heard a bark. The next moment an overfed golden retriever tackled me.
“Chester…” I heard Emily call, “Chester, you bad dog!”
Emily shoed the beast named Chester away from me with a swat on the bottom.
“He’s trying to be friendly,” she said. “He’s just forgets that he is so big and fat…and he thinks he’s a little lap dog.”
Emily made up for Chester by giving me a big hug and flashing a smile. She had changed. I noticed it the moment I hugged her. She was smaller – much smaller and bony. Her wig was replaced by a red handkerchief, tied at the base of her neck. A few thin hairs poked out underneath. Her rosy cheeks had shrunk and her blue eyes looked too massive for the rest of her face. The only thing about her that had not changed was her smile. I can still see it in my mind’s eye, gleaming like a half moon in a clear midnight sky. I smiled back at her.
“I’ve got apple pie and ice cream,” Emily said. “Do you want some?”
Of course, I did. We settled ourselves on the back porch and watched our ice cream slowly melt into the apple pie. This was the most unconventional “prayer meeting” I had ever been to. I imagined we would have to stand with our eyes closed and our heads bowed. But there we were lounging on Emily’s porch, eating pie and ice cream on a sunny afternoon. Emily’s idea of a prayer meeting was a good conversation where God was part of the conversation. She included him in our discussion as if he was sitting right there with us enjoying his own pie and ice cream.
That day Emily let me in on her secret of how she was able to look cancer in the face and smile: she was in love. I could tell every time I looked into her eyes—she was in love with Jesus. I had been a Christian for twelve years but that summer sitting on Emily’s porch I fell in love with Jesus too.
That September, I took a deep breath and prepared to face my first day as a senior. I felt like a different person than the shy junior of last year. I wanted things to change at Christ Church Academy so desperately. To my surprise things were already different. Spit wads and paper footballs no longer flew through the air during class and we managed to do more than stay awake during chapels. In fact, chapels rocked! It looked like a bunch of Emily clones had taken over the school. Sometimes I wonder if Emily had planned “prayer meetings” with each of my classmates.
After one particularly great chapel I noticed Emily in the back. Even though she was a graduate, she still came in occasionally for chapel. She was sitting in a wheel chair- same red handkerchief tied over her head. I felt like my smile was almost as big as hers, as I walked over to her.
“It’s happening Em,” I said. “Everything we prayed for...God did it!”
Emily just looked up at me from her wheelchair and smiled. She understood me but she was too weak to say anything back. That was the last time I saw Emily.
I suppose that was the reason I went to find her grave yesterday. I wanted to see her again and I wanted an answer to a question that had immobilized me for the last four years. Why God? Everything was just changing and getting better. Why did you let Em die? Emily’s epithet was simple, not at all profound, unless you knew the person buried underneath but it answered my question. It read:
The pure in heart shall see God.
Emily M. Heiber
Mar. 9 1985- Sep. 29 2004
I finally realized Emily had already answered my question four years ago during a lunch break. The answer was the reason that she did everything, “Because he loves me… because he loves me...” she had said. Not only did he love her but she also loved him. So much so that she could not bear to be separated from him by the veil of this world. She wanted to see him and now she was seeing him. I kneeled on the grass by Emily’s grave. The gray wetness seeped into my pants but I did not care. The yellow primrose and I cast shadows over Emily’s grave. Then slowly our shadows disappeared as the sun muscled its way through the slate sky and filled the little plot of grass with yellow light. I sat there looking down at the black marble tombstone and whispered, “Thank you Em....Thank you....”