Not long after Isaac died, I was asked to direct and choreograph a children's musical called Honk!, a retelling of the Ugly Duckling. Directing a show about a duck while grieving my own son is not a sentence I ever expected to type, and yet here we are. I said yes without reading the whole script first, which is either faith or professional recklessness, and I've genuinely never sorted out which.
Here's the story, for the uninitiated: a mother duck named Ida finds an unusual egg in her nest. It looks different from the others, and the other barnyard animals are quick to say so. Someone calls it "a turkey's egg." Someone else suggests it would be kinder if it simply never hatched. When it does hatch, the duckling is bullied for being different, made to feel unwanted, and eventually lured away from his family entirely. And Ida, who has every reasonable excuse to just stay put with the ducklings who are left, goes after him instead.
I could not stop hearing the parable of the one lost sheep underneath every rehearsal. A shepherd with a hundred sheep, one wanders off, and he leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one. Not because the ninety-nine don't matter. Because the one still does, completely, without a discount applied for inconvenience.
Every day seems to be more empty than the last. Every tear a mother cries is a dream that's washed away.
There is a scene near the end where Ida believes her son has died, frozen somewhere out in a winter storm she couldn't follow him into. She collapses in the snow, sobbing, asking the question I have asked God more times than I can count: what was it all for? What was the point of a life this short, this cold, this apparently unfinished? I directed that scene through tears I was not able to hide from a cast of children, which is, I promise you, a uniquely humbling way to run a rehearsal. Nothing humbles a director quite like sobbing next to an eight-year-old in a duck costume.
I know that particular kind of clawing-at-the-snow exhaustion personally. I have wanted, more than almost anything, to hold my son alive, and I did not get to. So when Ida's duckling rises up out of the snow at the end of that show, no longer "ugly," dressed in white, whole in a way he was never allowed to be while everyone around him was busy deciding what he was worth, I did not experience that as a plot device. I couldn't have, even if I'd wanted to. I experienced it as the truest thing in the entire production. I saw my son as a resurrected being. Perfect. Whole. Finished being judged by animals who had no idea what they were looking at.
Here's what nobody tells you about that kind of grief, the kind that makes you direct children's theater with mascara running down your face: it doesn't resolve into a tidy answer to "what was it all for." What it does, if you let it, is teach you who's doing the searching. You are not the one wandering the barnyard alone deciding your own worth. Someone left the ninety-nine for you. Someone is still out looking, snow or no snow, long after everyone else has gone back inside where it's warm.
You don't have to have the answer to "what was it all for" to keep believing that. I don't, most days. I just know Who went looking, and that has turned out to be enough to build an entire life back on top of.
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