Half a Life: A Memoir (12 page)

That’s why I went ahead and did it. I finally got my bravery up, I finally looked hard through the window of memory, a neat square cut into the years.

The timing of my decision to write at last about Celine wasn’t a fluke. There was a starting gun, composed of two barrels: new fatherhood and the calendar. I was thirty-six when Susannah became pregnant with twin boys. In early 2007, children of my own were on their way, and the accident had happened exactly half my life ago. (And if you lopped off the first few years, because one isn’t really quite
there
as an infant, it was more than half my life.)

These are the type of
holy cow–
grade changes that open a new passageway in one’s thinking.

I’d written three novels without laying a hand on the subject. I’d talked to interviewers, posed looking silly in magazines. My first book cropped up on bookshelves as I was turning thirty, and I wondered if the Zilkes noticed—if Mrs. Zilke thought it was enough. First novel about twins (one dies, the other can’t go on living); second novel about a guy who’s a con artist, a fraud, and an impostor all at once; most recent novel about a marriage where the truest thing between the couple never gets spoken. Historical and contemporary, first-person and third-, different fictional stories chiseled from the same real story. But was I pushing myself enough, succeeding enough for Celine and me both, for our two lives?

My moral and aesthetic codes argued against my writing an accident memoir, against my becoming one more person creating an entertainment out of misfortune, distilling honey from vinegar.

“Yes, that’s a valid consideration,” Susannah said. “On top of which, do you really want to publish something so personal?”

In all this time, I had never heard anything from the Zilkes; the last time I saw either of them had been Mr. Zilke in the courtroom. When I remembered him, it was always as a father offering iced tea and a coaster.

“I just feel like I have to, Sus,” I said. And merely having said it brought the buzz of certain decision.

“Okay,” Susannah said.

And she kissed me on the cheek—for a beat too long—before leaving the room.

But months passed and I still hadn’t made the jump. Instead I published the novel I’d been working on, Susannah and I bought and fixed up a house, we gathered all our stuff and moved in. I was living out a montage of decisions and their upshots—this could have been one of the lives I’d picked for Celine. I took a faculty job at New York University, and Susannah gave birth to our children.

My boys are named Beau and Shepherd and their arrival came like two hard kicks to the chest. Becoming a dad laid open a tender new flank of myself to life’s spikier
possibilities. My swerve-and-lawsuit past was back—it was shading the way I saw things, like a bit of private weather, or a visor I couldn’t take off. What I really kept thinking about: the Zilkes, the nightmare of what they had to live with. Or had the nightmare lifted a bit for them? Couldn’t the nightmare please have lifted a bit for them?

One very early morning, alone with my sons, just months into their lives: sleep was a coating I’d been stripped of, leaving my wiring all exposed. Another 3 a.m. had found me holding two babies and two bottles, had me opening another shit-slathered diaper. The typical new-dad distress; the predictable, slapstick wretchedness. But one of my sons now turned to me—and I could tell he was doing so, as it were, for the first time: his look bespoke a little recognition. So I’d been wrong when I’d presumed to lop off the very beginning of a life. We record things right away; what touches us matters. I grasped—with new, gut intensity—that my sons were
mine
. This deep-hitting awareness raked up my different selves. (But couldn’t the Zilkes maybe have found a strengthened, cautious love; couldn’t I just try, in thinking about who they’d become, to ignore the thorns and likelihoods?) Easing the bottle from Beau’s mouth, I could see him—for a half-second, until I stopped myself—as Celine. I had a thought, or at least an upsetting wordless brain throb, about what it might be to make and hold a life and then release it.

“How’s the thing going?” Susannah said, against all better judgment.

Whenever I tried even to think how to manage it, the wires would cross and spark.

I was afraid.

“Are you sure you even want to write non-fiction? Or would be able to?” Susannah said one morning, a provocation. One of Susannah’s attributes is that sometimes she doesn’t know when she’s arguing.

Who knows, I thought, perhaps she’d been faking her certainty of my innocence.

So why didn’t I just give it up? I had another good reason to. How do you grieve for someone before you start the work of understanding her? It’s like trying to worship at the blueprint for an unfinished temple.

Even after all this time, nothing had forced me to examine the accident, or Celine herself; everyone had let me slip through, and I realized the only person who really had the authority to force that examination, for better or worse, was me.

I shouldn’t even say I realized this yet; I was only starting to get it. But I knew enough to not give up, when I had given up so often in the past. We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.

A September 2009 item in
The New York Times
said that every U.S. death affects, on average, four other people profoundly. Of these affected survivors, something like 15 percent can “barely function.” And this decisive suffering—which lasts and lasts, and offers “no redemptive value”—has been given a name, to distinguish it from what used to be called sorrow:
Complicated Grief Disorder
.

Complicated Grief Disorder sounds a lot more potent than what I suffered—though perhaps not so different from what Celine’s parents suffered. (It’s chronic and intense. It’s people deciding that, because their beloveds can no longer walk the streets, they also are unfit to walk the streets. One mother told the
Times:
“Eric couldn’t have any more birthdays; why should I?”)

The treatment for this affliction is an unprecedentedly rigorous form of the talking cure. And also, maybe, a breakthrough: therapists force patients to relive the details of the death, making them repeat the minutiae of their pain into a tape recorder in front of an analyst. The patient then replays this tape—this doting agony chronicle—at home every day. For months or even years. This would seem, at first glance, like a religious observance or a torture.
But according to the
Times
, the therapy is totemic. It’s not about making the tape, or listening to the tape. It’s about possession, about having the story in one place. “The goal is to show that grief, like the tape, can be picked up or put away,” the article said. In “Treatment of Complicated Grief: A Randomized Controlled Trial,”
The Journal of the American Medical Association
declared this tape-and-torment approach “twice as effective” as the conventional therapy used to treat chronic grieving. (Another plus: it also worked much faster.)

In a separate
Times
article, George A. Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia, called the available mourning data “embarrassingly bad” and said “[conventional] therapy for bereavement in general is not very effective.”

No one says this new treatment is a complete salve for heartache, nor even that it should be. The
Times
again: “Diagnosing a deeper form of grief, however, is not about taking away anyone’s sorrow.” “We don’t get rid of suffering in our treatment,” said one of the doctors. “We just help people come to terms with it more quickly.”

Isn’t that what we’d all hope—even the dead? That those who have died can lose their hold on the living? That the dead will lose their spell over these poor people.

I hoped to make this book my tape.

“Are you nervous?” Susannah asked, dropping her eyes before looking back at me: a quick shyness that was uncharacteristic.

My 10-and-2 grip on the steering wheel tightened.

“Yeah, a little, I think.” My voice sounded surprisingly meek, too.

I fixed my gaze on the windshield. It was ice-crusted; this was in February. I’d been trying to anticipate and then solemnize each brief hill as we climbed it, and all the grassy clearings we passed. This was a strip of road I hadn’t seen for more than half a life. I was preparing for the moment when the background—a sheet of stones, trees, lawn, and shoulder—would become the hard foreground, would become the thing that had remade me.

Here I was on West Shore Road, near Bar Beach, where my past had located itself. I was back and, I hoped, changed. A traveler from the world of grown-ups.

Our sons were six months old and fuzzy-headed, and they sat babbling to each other in the back of our Honda. It irrationally frustrated and wounded me that the boys had no idea where we were driving, and I wanted to say—because I know this is true, too—that we were going to the
place that had allowed them to be born. I would’ve been a different person had the accident not happened. Without Celine, I wouldn’t have become a writer, I don’t think. And therefore I wouldn’t have met their mother. I find it an amazing stroke of luck to be married to Susannah. To be a parent with Susannah. That’s the meter you come up with, as you approach forty. If your relationship fills you with a sense of luck, you’ve chosen well. I wanted the boys to know all this, but they couldn’t understand it. I don’t think even Susannah could understand it as much as I did. The boys kept up their babbling.

Forty minutes earlier, we’d trussed them into their infant seats. The city had thinned and scattered into the placid array of North Shore Long Island. I was driving across that crocodile’s back again. Buildings, as if getting the okay sign that the coast was clear, became wider, turned into homes and lawns. Now the talking stopped, and the radio, too. Uphill, downhill, then the road grew bare of towns altogether. It was just a place between places, a place you had to get through, nowhere anyone wanted to be.

“Is this how you pictured it?” I turned my flustered face to Susannah. “Is it?”

There were cars everywhere, people who drove this road every day. The sad thing was not that they had no idea. It was that it wouldn’t have mattered to them if they had.

Minutes later I was outside, putting my hand up to oncoming traffic and jogging across the pavement alone. I was moving toward the median strip. Sunlight knifed through
a few small areas of snow. My gloves were the kind that have a leather palm-patch to improve the grip. And here I stood, folding my arms for warmth, on crunching grass—the spot where it had happened. Or my approximation of that spot. If Celine lived anywhere, it was here. If the person I’d been before colliding with Celine was anywhere, it was here. February air hurt my cheeks. The breeze felt grainy; there was moisture in it. No crosses or markers set this part of the road off from any other. I looked down; heat from my boots was melting the crust in a small oval around my feet. Which is how insistent a body is, how much energy it has, even when you do nothing.

I spent a long time just looking around. The wind lifted the slender grass shoots every so often, ruffling what seemed like a field of tiny bobbing heads. I stood here taking shallow breaths. I tried not to look over my shoulder at Susannah and the twins. I cleared my mind. I was here again. The February sun, that cold-burning bulb, threw off a faint blue glare. West Shore Road, treeless and homeless, stretched a long way behind, a long way ahead. It must have been the nearby Long Island Sound that put this blue nuance into the air; but I couldn’t see the water itself—it was a hunch, a rumor. Maybe Celine’s tire had caught on some of the blown sand at the road’s edge.

And then I did look into the blue grainy distance, at my family. They waited in the car for me. (But so why had Celine swerved all that way—over
two
lanes, first crossing into one and then, after a wait, into the other?) Maybe she’d
been startled by a noise. Or a bee had gone after her hand a couple times. But wasn’t there something
I
could have done differently? The only noises now were the muting sound of water someplace else—a whispering repetition—and the gathering and receding swish from an occasional car. These passing cars made our Honda rock a little bit. The two sounds sounded pretty much the same. I was surprised there weren’t accidents here every day. What could I possibly have done differently that morning with Celine?

My heart sped up, just as it had a few minutes before, when we’d driven to this place. Whether at any moment she was vivid or faint, forgiving or disagreeable, or nearly gone—Celine had stayed with me. Today’s sun was no more than the harsh glower of my past. I saw an office park: big glass Rubik’s-Cube buildings across the road, not very far off. There hadn’t been an office park here before. The cars on the road were makes that hadn’t existed when I’d had the accident. The grass was new, the nineteenth season of new grass. Maybe some of the sand on the shoulder was the same. I felt sad and distracted. Maybe the vaguely respiratory beach and road sounds were the same as they had been. Just sad in a distracted way: that was all I felt. I waved to Susannah and the boys. I don’t think they saw me. Or perhaps it was just that I couldn’t see them: the windshield was showing the rags and pinks of the sky, and I couldn’t make out Susannah’s features, only the shape of her head. (I say distracted because the sadness felt docile, and fuzzy.) There was nothing profound about feeling only
sad. The car sound on the acoustic asphalt evoked a bit of anti-nostalgia: all the lonely schoolbus waiting of childhood, plus a death. My eyes were dry. I couldn’t do what Mrs. Zilke had commanded me to do. If I was able to have just this one life from here on out, what would Celine Zilke do without me now?

I wrote and wrote and listened close for whatever the past was trying to say to me. It was still tough even to think about this girl who died.
⁴

I omitted a thousand things, because a life is so much the same thing over and over. I omitted my being a ski bum in Aspen with some friends, including good old frontseat-passenger Dave, and getting so drunk the first night in town that my shoulders went numb; I omitted losing my virginity, or trying and failing to lose it—urging an evening to curl itself away and vanish. Those are what life is, but they are not at all Celine.