Prologue

I wrote this essay last October, about four months after mom died and two months before CJ died.

You know, it’s never like it is in the movies. In the movies you see the grieving widow, the forlorn and orphaned child, the devastated lover, the clichéd best friend. There’s usually a drizzling rain falling from a gray cloudy sky or, at the very least, there will be autumn leaves falling softly on dry, dead grass. (Think about it – how often have you ever seen a movie funeral on a bright, sunny day in the middle of July?) The actor’s grief is gripping in its’ intensity – it’s so real, so immediate, so alive. Then the funeral is over and the condolences have been given and everyone has moved on; this happens so the plot can move on too. Without the plot being able to move on you wouldn’t have a movie. More importantly, you wouldn’t have the plucky heroine or the down-on-his-luck protagonist to keep rooting for, knowing without having to be told (thanks to the countless other survivors of familial deaths you’ve seen in the movies) that they’re going to make it, they’re going to be all right, they’re going to pull through. In the movies, the story is never about the person who’s died, it’s about the people who live on after someone has died.

In real life, the hardest part is not the month of the actual death. It’s not the month you spent with the non-responsive, comatose loved one in the ICU. The month you spent every night sleeping in the bed-side chair, watching numerous other patients make it, pull through, come out all right. The month you spent everyday waiting for the neurologist to make his busy rounds just so you could ask if anything had changed –for better or for worse. The month you left home telling your husband, don’t worry I’ll probably be back next week, you know they say her chances are really good, she’s just being sedated to be on the safe side, don’t worry. When in all reality they’re not worried… but you are. The month you passed the time by staring at all the monitors, trying to turn every irregular breath or unusual heart beat pattern into something meaningful, something proving that she’s still there. The month when you waited and waited and waited, but the day they took her off the sedation meds she didn’t wake up like they said she would. The month she died, and you stood there and watched her die.

It’s not that hard right after, either. The month right after, when you make all the arrangements, and call all the relatives and close friends and long-lost friends, and the credit card companies. The month when you take care of everything because at least then you’re doing something. The month when you listen to a hundred different people tell you how sorry they are. Let me tell you something I’ve learned about the word sorry: it’s a comfort word. It’s a question word, begging not to be held accountable to your grief. It means, Gosh I really hate that this happened to you, but more than that I really hate standing here talking to you and looking at you, because I can’t fix it and it makes me uncomfortable, it makes me think that one of these days I may be in your shoes, and I really don’t want to think about that. People say “I’m so sorry for your loss,” and after awhile you learn to say “No, it’s ok”, just so you can make them feel better and get on with whatever business you have with them without having to see that scrunched up look on their face, the one that stares and gauges and estimates and measures the amount of loss they’re supposed to be sorry for.

None of that is the hard part of death though. You know why that is? It’s because we know that part of the story. We’ve seen it, we’ve heard it, we’ve thought about it, and in the vicarious sense, we’ve lived it. From Old Yeller, to Ghost, to Roots, to the six o’clock news - we’ve been inoculated with a kind of social training for the proper behavior for “surviving family”. We know we’re supposed to be the plucky heroine, the young widow, the heart-as-pure-as-gold orphan… we know we’re supposed to be strong… we’re the ones who make it, pull through, will be all right.

It’s the month after that that’s the hardest. The months after the funeral and the burial that you have no script for, no navigation chart, no cinematic role model. The month when you walk around and look at all the stuff, the debris of a lifetime, the flotsam and jetsam that is all that remains of what was once a vibrant and living member of your family. I really think that it’s the all the freaking stuff that’s hardest to deal with. The clothes that someone loved to wear, the figurines that she loved to let collect dust on the shelf, the miniatures ship models he would start and never finish. This stuff is the biggest metaphor for the life that’s just left, and the one that we’re left to. Unfinished projects stored in a drawer with proclamations of “I’ll get to it one of these days”, made when you’re young and stupid and don’t know that one of these days is going to come along and slap you right upside the head before you even turn fifty. Clothes with the tags still on that she bought because it was on sale and she couldn’t beat the price. The car that cost a fortune but she was afraid to drive too much because it was so nice; so she made the eight hundred dollar payment every month, but still drove the older one anyway, because it made her feel more comfortable. Goddamnit… why didn’t she just drive the stupid car when she had the chance?

When you think about it, in America you define yourself through what you own. I own books. My husband collects pirated software. My dad buys beat-up, broken-down tractors at auctions, and then rebuilds them to a second life. My sister has a collection of all manner of equine decoration and movies featuring men with large swords. Kids define themselves through clothing styles and rude t-shirt slogans. Each of these forms of ownership says something about who we are, and if you contemplate it long enough and have an imaginative nature, you can probably learn a lot about who people are by what they own, collect, buy and wear. You ever just go somewhere and look at the shoes people wear? You’d be amazed at the conclusions you can draw from a person’s shoes. Are they comfy and broken-in? Painfully stylish? Dressy heels or muddy work-boots? Cheap no-names manufactured in third-world China or thousand-dollar Italian loafers? A buck’ll get you fifty that you can divine deep and meaningful clues about a person’s job, their income, their health and their basic philosophy on life from one snapshot of their shoes. Now just imagine seeing their house, their possessions, the things they’ve had tucked away in drawers and closets and boxes for years. Imagine what you could learn about a person then; imagine what people could learn about you.

You see, it’s all this stuff and clutter, junk and treasure that really crystallizes the person gone, their hopes and dreams, their inner secrets, their hobbies, their nature, their daily lives and their very soul. You wouldn’t believe how many times the surviving spouse and children feel as though they’ve discovered a whole other side to their parent or wife or husband once they start to go through their belongings. Interesting word, isn’t it, belongings? That means that things belong to us, right? Not that through these things we feel that we belong… I’m sorry, I’m rambling. The point that I started out to make is that at the end of it all, after everyone else has gone home and it’s just you and the personal accumulated residue of the person you lost… well, that’s when it gets hard.