***
when i was 12 years old, my uncle was diagnosed with brain cancer. it took about four months from the time they detected the tumor until the day he died. i honestly remember very little about those four months – a hospital room, a pervasive confusion, a deep-set thinness in his face that i couldn’t help but turn away from. but i remember the aftermath.
they say hindsight is 20/20, don’t they? well, that’s not exactly true. and it’s not exactly true that i remember the aftermath. it’s more accurate to say that i remember particular moments, and yet forget a thousand details. i remember intangibles – things beyond language that we try to explain anyway.
in a way, though, it makes sense to remember what came after – to everyone but the one who has died, it is the time more full of sorrow, and so heavy with certainty. and i do remember the weight of the days, thick with august heat and humidity, stretching out and yet standing still. i remember moving in and out of my grandparents’ house on castle street through the side door, which is odd, as we usually came and went through the back door on the porch. i remember sitting upstairs in the funeral home, during the long hours of the wake, in a cramped office with my cousins watching a tiny t.v. propped on a filing cabinet. the funeral was three days before my thirteenth birthday. i remember the cramped limousines and the hearse, and standing behind the casket at the back of the church, my mother’s tight grasp on my hand, and the heavy wooden doors swinging open to a sea of sad, expectant faces.
i remember Ave Maria. i cannot hear the first six notes of Ave Maria now, nor do i imagine that i ever will, without an anchor being loosed from somewhere inside me, and the weight plunging down into a bottomless space.
***
i would say that was the beginning. it was a starting gun for a race that i did not know i had to run. but i learned quickly.
just after i turned 14, another uncle died of AIDS. four months after that, a friend – also a freshman in high school – was killed in a hit-and-run. when i was 15, my grandfather died. then, when i was 16, my grandmother followed.
(as i began to type those last two sentences, my mind pulled me up short – wait, is that the right order? it was him first, and then her, right? time warps and slides, like oil in a jar, and i have to wait for it to settle again.)
after my grandmother died, there was a period of relative calm. then, when i was 18 and finishing out my last week as a freshman at umass, the phone rang. the room was half-packed – i was taking down posters, and had to step down off the bed to pick the receiver up. slater, a friend from high school, had just been killed in a car crash, four days before his 19th birthday.
***
everyone has a list like this. everyone is running this race. but i wonder, sometimes, if i am not too tired, too soon. if i have already settled for just keeping pace.
***
the wake, as can be imagined, tied up traffic. hundreds of people came, lined the pathway to the front door of the funeral home and spilled out down the street. i stood with another friend from high school, shoulders warm by the late spring sun, wearing a black tank top and a long purple skirt.
i had already been to enough of these to know that wearing all black was of no comfort to me, or to anyone else.
what happened next has always stayed with me. a girl with whom i’d been great friends from seventh grade through high school graduation came out the front door of the funeral home. we had been close when we were younger, and just drifted apart after high school the way people often do. but she had been very close with slater – they had grown up living next door to each other, and i’m sure she could not remember a time without him. i watched her as she came down the sidewalk, hugging this person and that, and i was unsure of what exactly to say or how to say it. but when she came face to face with me, i didn’t have time to say anything, because i saw her knees giving way as she reached her hands towards me. it was less like hugging her and more like catching her, and people around us watched as i held her up and let her cry. i put my face to hers and spoke softly about how it was going to be all right. it was ok, it was all right. it was ok. and she cried in a way that i couldn’t anymore.
***
a few years ago, i had this dream. i am outside somewhere and it’s dusk. slater is there, and we are talking about something, what exactly i can’t recall. in the dream, i know that he is dead – he does not.
after a while, somewhere off in the distance, i hear sirens. the sound barely reaches my ears, but i know that this is the ambulance coming to the crash site. i know that when they arrive, they will take him away. but i don’t tell him this. we keep talking, and the sirens come closer and closer.
in the dream, i wake up before they arrive.
***
it is just after midnight as i am writing this. this is the end of the story, right now. i woke up from that dream years ago, now i am awake, and eventually i will fall asleep and dream again.
but sometimes, i feel like i never really did wake from that dream. sometimes i feel like i am watching the world move around me, slow and steady. i am talking and laughing and smiling like everyone else, but in the background, i can hear the faint wail of sirens. i know what it means. i don’t know how far away they are, i don’t know when exactly they will arrive, but i know what it means. i don’t say anything, though, because what good would it do? i just try to distract everyone around me – and myself – from the thin, low sound of their approach.
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