Eternity in Ten Seconds

We stand next to eternity every day of our lives. Some are closer it seems to the profound nature of being in the world than others. They have no need to question their actions. They simply respond to a higher natural order than the rest of us. And so it was for a man named Isidor Howson of Kazabazua, a humble 40-year-old carpenter. 

Isidor is just a man. A man living his life. He had a fairly long drive home from Shawville to Kaz and as he usually does he left his shoes unlaced so he could take them off if he wanted to. That Saturday he hesitated undoing the laces. He didn’t know why he hesitated but he did. But then he untied the laces. Just outside Shawville he saw a house on fire. Two older women were standing by the road. He stopped his truck to help. 

The women were shaken. They told him there was a man inside. He hadn’t come out.

Isidor immediately ran to the house. How many of us would have done that? With the flames on the roof now fierce, the heat rattling the air, the smoke acrid in the wind? Isidor tried the front door, the back door, the windows. Through the front window he could see a man in a chair in the living room. And despite the screaming and banging, the man did not respond, already perhaps overcome by the smoke. Isidor only describes his actions as driven by a higher will than his own perhaps. By right action, by adrenaline, by divine providence. That’s the mystery of men like this. When asked, Isidor confused almost by the question simply says, “it was the right thing to do. I’d do it again."

Isidor went to the front door and began kicking it in. He lost his shoe in the process. His laces were untied. He was cut, bruised and shaken but managed finally to break in. He retrieved his shoe, and just 10 seconds from having broken in the door he reckons, the entire upper floor caved into the living room burying the man in the chair.

Isidor was 10 seconds too late. 

That’s how Isidor told the story. That’s how Isidor remembered the story: he was 10 seconds too late to save the man. If only he had not stopped to get his shoe. If only he had laced them up. If only. And Isidor went home eventually broken and haunted. It was 10 seconds. And that defines a man like Isidor. He did not see it as 10 seconds where he himself could have died (as his friend eventually pointed out to him), but as the time he did not have to save the man. What makes men like this? Who can really know? Just a man. Just a man living his life.

But life has a way of making its profundity manifest. It has a way of teaching us things we don’t understand. For a man like Isidor, who was haunted by those 10 seconds, by the unlaced shoe, there was no comfort really. Only perhaps time would heal. 

Isidor went reluctantly to work the next day at a construction site in Wakefield, exhausted from a sleepless night. Why he happened to be standing right there when his co-worker took a phone call from his wife, Isidor doesn’t know. But that co-worker was from Shawville and his wife told him their neighbour had set the house on fire and then shot himself. Isidor could not have saved the man even if he had had those 10 seconds. These were facts that Isidor may never have known if he hadn’t been standing there to hear it. The details are still under wraps.

Isidor could not have saved the man. Instead he was given 10 seconds of grace. And that 10 seconds saved his own life. That is how providence works. That is the irony, the twist of the archetypal story. Isidor thinks about how he could have died for nothing if he hadn’t lost a shoe.

No longer haunted, but simply sad. It is a story to tell now for Isidor. Not the one he thought it was, but a different one altogether. It is a sad story but a transformative story for him in ways words can’t describe. He is just a man. Living his life, 10 seconds away from eternity.