My boys were only 6 when their uncle died. Their Dad’s
brother had been living with us for about a year when his motorcycle betrayed
him and sent his 6’ 8” frame unbelievably and mortally into a sapling. I was
there that night, I heard him come home. A Saturday night in August, 10:30. I was
tucked into my desk in the newly finished basement and I heard the garage door
open, then paced his long strides across the tile on the main floor, and up the
carpeted stairs. I should go say Hi,
I thought. Let me just finish this email…
And then the front door slammed and I assumed he had left again. Fifteen
minutes later the doorbell rang and I assumed he had locked himself out. I
sprinted up the stairs and opened the door for four uniformed policemen. I was
relaxed and smiling as they asked if this was his residence, and said yes, and
they asked if my husband was home (he wasn’t). They kept asking if he had a
wife or when my husband would be home. Shifty-eyed; they didn’t want to tell
me. What has he done? I asked,
assuming he had been at fault somehow, arrested for a fight or something…not because
it was characteristic of him, but at that point I still equated police
inquiries with broken laws or broken jaws, not broken bodies, not splintered
bones and crushed flesh not the end, not the forever gone, not that, not that. And I won’t dip into the well of
emotional memory that was created in me like a gash that night, black ink of
absence dripping through me, filling veins that ought to have carried blood,
but how can someone be gone, someone who was just here, someone whose footsteps
still echo, still burn across that floor, the place where I’m standing? How can
that be? How do you tell his brothers, his mother, his girlfriend? How did I omit
his ex-wife in my haze of shock, how did I not insist they send an officer to
wake her, to tell her, to tell her, to tell her that their daughter now had no
father? I made them send someone to his mother, even when they floundered
because she lived in the next county, Uh…could
you send a local cop?? Oh, they said. Oh,
yes, I guess we could. And that was all the brilliance my brain could
muster, I suppose, but it was almost enough, and then hours later remembering
his girlfriend and finding her parents’ house in the morning and asking them where
to find her. And her Dad (built like her, like a Finnish bird, with the accent
to match, and steel blue eyes) pointing the way, and she knew, she knew she
knew when she saw me. She crumpled like a delicate white rose or a house of
cards built on hope and desire and she thought he would always be able to
protect her, because she could practically fit in the palm of his hand, like a
little china doll, and he would save her, he said, but why couldn’t any of us
save him?
He was too tall to die,
it was an abstract feeling at first, because the words didn’t form, but as they
did, they were all that I clung to, in the first hours after the news, those
hours between making the horrific phone calls and waiting as brothers trickled
in, oh god, now there’s only 5, now there’s only 5, now there’s only 5! How can the tallest be gone so soon? You’re the tallest now, buddy, said one
of them to the youngest…it was too soon to hear such a thing, but no one knew
what to say, how to keep breathing, how to exist in this disordered universe.
I visit his grave every time I visit Utah, but my boys had
never been. Seven years have passed and I felt like it would be good. They were
funny; he would have loved it. They couldn’t remember what he looked like, but
I assured them there was a picture on his headstone—a beautiful, colored
photograph etched into an oval next to his name. Oh yeah, they said. He was so
tall…
I blamed myself for a long time. If I had only gone up to
say Hello, maybe. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone out at all, to play with the
“YOUR SPEED IS___” sign, zooming back and forth on our little suburban street
to see the numbers. Maybe I would have said, “Don’t forget your helmet!” Maybe
he would have invited me out to watch, and maybe I would have had to see it
happen…maybe he would still be here, and they wouldn’t have named the
Philosophy Department scholarship in his honor, and his daughter would know his
faults, and he would have lost his truck…but maybe he would have graduated, and
she would never see his faults, and he would have sold the motorcycle. Maybe.
But then, who would I pray to?
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