Saving Graces (13 page)

And I also had Matt Leonard, whom I had loved for almost his whole life, and whom I could fuss over like a mother while he fussed over the Learning Lab. He’d have to tell you if it was good for him—and time might give me a break on his answer—but I know it was good for me. I fussed too over the WELL, like a lioness protecting her den. John, and Cate, the WELL and Matt, the cemetery and the staff there—they were my companions.

And Wade, too. Every day I would sit beside him, on a blanket with a thermos of water, and I would read the Bible aloud to the place on the ground under which he was buried. I read from the Bible my mother’s parents had given me in 1957, a zippered New Revised Standard edition that was worn before I started. It got so much use in those next months that it is now too fragile to be taken from my house. After I finished that, Wade’s godfather, Glenn, sent me
Sages and Dreamers
by Elie Wiesel, and I read that aloud. When Wade’s senior year started, I read aloud all the books on the twelfth-grade reading list. The whole thing. As I did, I remembered our years of reading together, his head on my lap, his fingers linked in mine, as first he read and then I read and then it was his turn again and then mine until he would sleep and I could feel the deepness of his sleep in the long and even passage of each breath, and at last I could close the book and read the face of my child instead. And at the grave, I would do the same—read until I closed my own eyes, seeing then what I could not see with open eyes, the edges of his eyelids, the lashes soft against his cheek, the freckles climbing across his nose and around to the edge of his eyes and then fading into the soft short hairs at the tops of his ears. Where I once ran my fingers through his clean straight hair over and over, I could only finger my own, twisting it in dissatisfaction around my finger. And as I once watched his chest rise and fall beneath my arm, I could now—if I watched closely, and I did—watch tiny greenbugs work their way among the blades of grass above his coffin.

Chuck Gooch, the foreman, Wink, and the Montenard workers at the cemetery became part of our family. We would see them as we read and as we carried water for the flowers we planted. They would know we had been to the cemetery before them when they would find the fallen twigs in our section of Oakwood neatly stacked along the curb. They would stand back or spin their lawn-mowers off in another direction while we prayed or when we needed time alone. But they would join us at the grave while we worked or planted, asking if we needed water. Or Wink would come, shovel in hand, and dig where I pointed. We gave them presents on Wade’s birthday and at Christmas, and they replaced a small statue of an angel when someone stole a similar one from Wade’s grave. Just like family.

Mother’s Day, when Wade’s friends brought a pink dogwood for me, was a hard day. Six weeks. They had planned to plant it that afternoon, but in the early hours of Mother’s Day, a fraternity fire in Chapel Hill claimed the lives of five young people, including Ben Woodruff, who had been a senior at Broughton High School when Wade was a freshman. “The boys”—and some of their older brothers—were part of a wide, happy circle from which large shavings had now been cut, and the circle would never roll again straight and carefree. So the boys delivered the tree and went to be together, again, as they had when Wade died. Although Wade and Ben were not friends, Ben had been good to Wade in soccer and in Latin activities. It was startling to read his obituary. Born in Nashville, as Wade had been. Latin, soccer, Woodberry Forest Sports Camp, all like Wade. And now, like Wade, buried in Oakwood Cemetery. We went to Ben’s parents. The day before we went, we knew everyone who had gathered in their house better than we knew the Woodruffs themselves, and now, on the day Ben died, we knew Bonnie and Leon better; we recognized ourselves in their vacant eyes. I don’t have to see them often to know that we are forever linked.

When John and I came from seeing Ben’s parents, we planted the tree in the backyard. The girls brought a collage of photographs and a poem they framed. And they answered my request to dig through their pictures and find any with him in it. Wade worked on the yearbook staff—as I had done decades before and as Cate did in the years after him—and his friends there found pictures of crowds of students in which, they assured me, that was Wade sitting behind the fellow in the cap or leaning against the bleachers near the wall, as they pointed to a dot I could hardly see.

There were things that came up that spring and the next year that Wade would certainly have done. Honors breakfasts, literary magazine readings, assemblies. The only question for us was whether there would be a hole where he would have been or whether we would fill it. So there was no question at all. We went. And sometimes there was a moment of grace. At the spring honors assembly, Wade was to get several awards. We went to receive them for him. Watching the children who marched in together and sat in the honorees’ chairs was one of the hardest moments I’d had. I could only bury my face in my hands.
It was stupid to come,
I thought,
stupid, stupid, stupid. What did I expect?
When we stood to accept his first award, however, the entire student body rose in a spontaneous standing ovation—the other honorees, then his classmates, the whole school applauding him softly, then strongly as they stood. We were overwhelmed. Their love for him that day convinced me always to be where he should be, whenever we could, no matter how hesitant we might be to face his absence.

I went every day to Wade’s grave until our second daughter, Emma Claire, was born, because that was what felt right to me. Whatever we do—going or not going to our children’s graves, sleeping with a toy, or closing the door to their rooms—has only to be what we each need, what we require to make it through each day without them. There is no other yardstick. It served me best to visit Wade’s place daily. On my way through the cemetery, I passed the graves of other children I knew to be well loved and did not often see their parents. In some ways, I suppose, I envied that they had a way of facing the death of their children that was not so vulnerable to weather, that did not require checking the papers to schedule around large funerals, that did not have a locked gate at sunset. It meant nothing to me that they came less often; I didn’t think then or now that they loved their children less than I loved Wade. We were, undoubtedly, different people before our children died, and we are different yet, with different ways of reaching for some measure of acceptance of this.

I went to Oakwood then, and I go now—though less often—because the rest of the living world ends at that cemetery gate. There his body lies, surrounded by the bodies of families, by stories of lives long and short, and there the inevitability of death seems like but another chapter. And there I could not help but speak to him. I read him letters that people had written to us about him as if they had been written to him. I took his SAT score out to him when it came in the mail. He would have been able to go to Carolina, where he so wanted to go. I told him, too, that Matt had gotten a good score. Before Wade died, I had kept trying to chase his great friend Matt home when he and Wade would sit at Wade’s computer, Wade helping Matt prepare. “Wade has to prepare himself, Matt,” I would say. But Wade wanted to help, and Matt stayed. And when Matt happily shared his score with me, I shared it with Wade’s grave. But it wasn’t just Wade I talked to. I also spoke to Oliver and Gerald, young brothers who died, each at two years, half a century ago, before I was born, and their brother Robert, who died in World War I, and to Ben and Emily and Betsy, who died within months of Wade’s death. I would speak to Wade and pray and read aloud. And I planted and tended and cared for the space that now surrounded his body. I cleaned around Wade, like cleaning his room, and I cleaned around the graves of the children like Oliver and Gerald, since next to each child were his or her parents, who died after them and were unable to tend the graves themselves. I placed flowers on the grave of Barbie, who fell from the Bay Bridge in Maryland; her parents lived too far away to place them there themselves. I never knew her, or them, but when I read her obituary, read that she would be buried at Oakwood, I thought how Wade, who was her age, surely would have liked her. I cared for the grave of Ida’s baby daughter, and I cleaned the cross of John, who died at twelve, carefully washing the dirt that had gathered in the words inscribed on his cross:
In his mouth was found no guile.

It doesn’t matter to me whether all this sounds odd. I did it because it made it easier for me, easier for me to think that there were mothers who would come after me and tend to Wade’s grave when I no longer could. Easier to think that we were all in this together, that we formed a bond, a community—these long-dead mothers and I, and the mothers who would come later—and the creed to which we all subscribed was the sanctity of the graves of our children.

CHAPTER 7

RALEIGH, AND NOT RALEIGH

I
FOUND A
special place to share what I couldn’t share with every stranger and what I couldn’t inflict on every friend. Wade had introduced me to the Internet back when Prodigy and CompuServe were the only commercially available providers. He and I bid on sports cards on the sports card group on AOL with people like Stratfan and Bocephus69; I argued about grammar on the English-usage newsgroups with Bob Leiblich; I shared song lyrics on the music lyrics newsgroup with Ron Hontz. And when I needed it, I found the grief newsgroup. A newsgroup was—and is—like a bulletin board where someone posts a message and other people post responses. Sometimes a message gets no responses, and other times there is a long line of responses, called a thread.

One night, when I could not sleep, I found alt.support.grief, the newsgroup for the bereaved. I later discovered GriefNet and, there, grief-parents, an e-mail group for bereaved parents, and I found Tom Golden’s wonderful website on grief and healing. All of these became homes for me, but at first, it was only alt.support.grief, ASG. For several nights I read the stories of those who had died posted by those who buried them. The pattern was the same. A new poster would tell his or her story, and the family of ASG would comfort him. And soon the new poster would be the one comforting another new griever. When Astrid, who lost her son Christian, introduced herself and him in wonderful stories about his too-short four and a half years, I responded in much the way all first responses were framed.
I am so sorry about the death of your son, Christian. His death is part of the incomprehensible workings of a world we once naively thought fair. I hope that you find in this group what you need. Some of us will be angry on days you need resilience. Some will be cheerful on days you need to wail. Some will feel exactly as you feel on a given day. But all of us will be in pain on every day on which you feel pain. And in that, oddly, is the gift, the bond that allows us to be gentle with each other. You know that the person across a continent of irrationality understands the immense weight that emptiness and absence can have inside you. Do not misunderstand: no one else has lost Christian; no one else knows just what an incredible boy he is. But all of us are willing to learn that from you. There is no time, not months or years from now, that we will tire of him. With great regret, I welcome you to alt.support.grief
. It was what I truly felt, and it was my part of the great web we were weaving—each strand weak and vulnerable, but all together strong, or at least stronger. And I was stronger for having curled myself around Astrid’s tender thread. And so it was.

I flip through the printouts of my e-mails now. “
Fred, I am so sorry about the deaths of Maritta, Regan, and Jeff
.” “
Stefan—That your father hid from himself in a bottle does not mean he loved you less than he should; it means only that he loved himself less than he should.
” “
Joanna, I remember vividly the accident that took Ginger
.” “
Irene, I am so very sorry about the death of Gabe
.” And on and on. It is a chain today and tomorrow that will not be broken.

There were threads on how to decorate a gravesite at Christmas and what to do for birthdays. People shared poems and lyrics. There were threads of pain and threads of hope. And those people and that place were home for me for the year—and more—that I needed it. I wrote at ASG words I could not say aloud, words too raw for the stranger in the restroom, words too hard for the friend who dropped by to check on me. In that safest of places, I described the importance of it, and places like grief-parents, when I wrote:
In our families, we nurture and protect; our pains hurt those who love us, so without thought, we temper the manifestations of pain. Can I really let my mother, who hurts so for my son and for me and for herself and his grandfather, can I really let her see the depths to which I go? I cannot. But there is here. Thank God, there is here
.

And, honestly, those people are as real to me today as if they were standing beside me. Bill Chadwick was almost always the first to respond to any post. I have never met him, so I don’t know what Bill looks like in real life, but in my mind he is a bear-like man with huge hands he uses to grab your shoulders and an open face that he brings close to you when he speaks, telling you that God will help you as He helped Bill when his promising son Michael died. Lana must be small and strong, with a face perfected by weather, and she might offer to plant your child’s favorite flower in Brooke’s Garden, her form of parenting her daughter’s memory after Brooke was hit by a train. Sue and her son Wally. Pretty Shelby and her precious toddler Chase. Eloquent Carl and Wilem. Gigi and her seven-year-old Kelsey. And Christian, sorely missed by Astrid. We paid attention to each other, trying to anticipate the shards that would hurt our friends. Lana was from Massachusetts, and when I read of another train accident in North Andover, another child killed the way Brooke had been killed, I wrote. It’s what we did. There are more than a hundred names I kept in a book by my computer, their birthdays and death days marked so I would remember to send my prayers and wishes. It was simple: none of us wanted our children to be forgotten.

By the time I got to ASG, I had already found some relief at the keyboard. Wade and I had been bidding on sports cards when he died, and the auctions were still ongoing. We had a good reputation for paying promptly, and I didn’t want that to be tarnished. I felt, and still feel, a responsibility to his reputation. So I asked a friend to post on the board what had happened, promising that I would pay for whatever Wade had won and asking that the sellers be patient. They were much more than that. Understand first that this is a community in which sports cards were auctioned. Souls were not bared, confidences not shared. This was sports cards. Or so I thought. Within days of Wade’s death, the e-mails started coming in. Stratfan, from whom we had bought many cards, wrote that we had “after such a long time, become friends through this forum, and that trust and friendship will never be forgotten.” He told me, too, the story of his son, Ronnie, with whom he had collected, describing the same intimate enjoyment Wade and I had shared. And then he told me that two years before, on Father’s Day, Ronnie had drowned. He warned me that the pain would not go away, and he promised to stay in touch and did. But it wasn’t just the bereaved who reached out. SptInvstr, whose real name was Brad Drown, wrote,
All of us who are here online are to some degree a family, and the fact that we’ve never met doesn’t matter at this point. We share your sorrow.
And so it was from DeputyCarl and Blankster, KidFlash 95 and Bottom9th, from RiSpec and Pogman, and Jim Harpp, known as Bocephus69. They may have had silly names—okay, they did have silly names—but they didn’t just coast through. Even in this online venue, which allowed the least personal of interactions, they made it personal. And they made it better.

I had an even closer group online. For a couple of years I had been corresponding in e-mails with some UNC basketball fans. We had first posted on the America Online bulletin boards made for UNC fans, but it became increasingly peopled by “anybody-but-UNC” fans, and we found refuge in private group e-mails. We were spread out across the country, e-mailing our comments about the program, the recruits, and the games to one another. We’d cheer when someone’s child would be admitted to Carolina. We told each other our triumphs and our defeats. Though we had never seen each other, we were friends. In a lull in the season—Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1995—I had noticed that one of the participants, John Schoo, had an interest in adventure travel. Over several weeks, I talked to him about Wade’s trip to Kilimanjaro and his desire to go on another adventure with his father the following summer. I asked him what he suggested, and he told me of a trip he had taken with his son. He sent me a picture of a handsome blonde young man and himself perched in an open-topped Jeep in the Nagar Valley out from Hunza in the north of Pakistan, six of the seven tallest mountains in the world at their back. “The most important trip of my life,” he said. John Schoo and I lived more than a thousand miles apart, but we had close friends in common—his brother-in-law and I were godparents to the same twin boys. And through that connection, I heard why it was his most important trip. Months before he joined our group, his son, Nielsen, had died, falling over in his living room, maybe as the result of an aneurysm. Whatever it was, it killed him. When Wade died, John told me about Nielsen. And the telling and my outpourings to him opened the gates of grief again for him. I know the price he paid for every letter of support he sent me over the next months, and I love him for it, always will. It was John Schoo who wrote the day after the funeral and reminded me that Wade had a life away from me and John among his many friends, a life and stories and photographs they would be happy to share, but I would have to ask. So I did. And he was right. Before we were about to meet for the first time at a basketball game in the fall, he warned me,
If you think I am immune from the tears…think again
. Other members of my e-mail group—people I had met only once or not at all—wrote immediately, wrote constantly, wrote gently, checking on me, reminding me of things I had told them about Wade, which meant they remembered, and cried with me, too, when we were finally together. Catherine. Tony. Eddie. Now more than just names on an e-mail header. Now family, too.

But just like family, they couldn’t spend every minute with me grieving Wade, and the conversation had to turn back to basketball—it was healthy for it to do so. But not for me. I wasn’t ready. And I had found friends with a need that mirrored mine at ASG and grief-parents, and my e-mail box, once full of news about recruits, was now full of misery and grief, as—it is odd to say straight out—I needed it to be. All grievers in these online communities are not the same. Among the grieving, there were a couple of dozen I wanted to meet and hold, whose children’s pictures were taped on the wall behind my computer monitor. There were two to whom I was particularly drawn.

I started a conversation with Gordon Livingston, who, impossibly, had buried two sons. The Emily Dickinson poem “My life closed twice before its close” might have been written of his life. And the end of it befit him:
So huge, so hopeless to conceive, as these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell
. I have now known Gordon for a decade, but I have met him only once. We had dinner in Durham when his daughter Emily started at Duke. Gordon, who lets life in and lets it have its way against his great powerful soul, is forever a part of my life story. To Gordon I could even write about the limitations in support others offered and not worry that he would think me an ingrate. To Gordon I could write,
Someone else writes me to ask why I am not getting professional help in my “recovery.” He views mourning as a goal-directed task: rally the troops, make a list, get it done! That has so little to do with the way I feel, and I cannot find words to make him understand. How can I tell him there is no cure for me? I cannot express how deeply this boy had grown into my being, and how I will suffer his loss every day that I breathe. I cannot be cured of it, any more than I can be cured of breathing itself. I suppose there will come the day when I will need to clean the dining room, when I must box the pictures, when I will decide what is to become of the things in his closet, when I will not be able to visit his grave each day. But we simply eat in the kitchen, and I do not walk into his room, and I make time for the cemetery and Wade, because it is important to me that he have some time in each day that belongs just to him. And if I started putting him away and blocking him out of my day, would I be recovering from his death? Well, the problem is that it also seems awfully like ignoring his life. The image I have for our family is grapevines, twisting around each other, interweaving, leaves pushing through until it is impossible to separate the vines without destroying much of their beauty. And this vine was, without warning, ripped from us and from among us. We heal only by growing around the wound, in constant recognition of its absence. It reminds me of a story my brother told of a woman who, having lost a son, was seeking some way to reconcile this loss with what she thought she knew of life. She went on a retreat where she was asked to walk into the woods and find a tree, her tree, to contemplate, to look for answers. She balked, it sounded useless, but she walked anyway and picked out a tall old tree for no apparent reason. She sat there for some time, staring at it without seeing it. Finally, bored, she approached it and studied it. There was an odd place in the bark, and as she fingered it, she realized that a stake had—some time before—been driven into the tree. The tree, obviously, could do nothing about the stake, so it had grown around it, acknowledging the injury but living nonetheless. I have had, in a sense, to reinvent myself, a mother of a boy who was, for I can never have an existence that does not acknowledge him. I could not excise that spike even if I wanted to.
Our conversation paralleled and then exceeded the conversation on ASG, as his voice, time and again, pulled me back from the abyss into which I could write myself. It still does.

And then I found Phil Lister. He came to ASG before the then-inevitable death of his younger daughter, Liza, claimed by leukemia, which also took Gordon’s youngest son, Lucas. Phil had come to the newsgroup asking for advice on what books to read. He’d been met by a chorus of the best books on grieving, but it seemed to me that was not what he was after. I thought he meant something else, and I recommended Eudora Welty, and that is, in fact, what he wanted. We didn’t unlink. Phil’s voice was—and is—what the word
dulcet
was invented to describe. Dulcet and mournful. He would send his extraordinary poems, and I would read them aloud to John, and neither of us tried to stop the tears that formed silently as I read of the tree they planted at Liza’s school or the sofa on which she had lain and died. One of my favorite things of Wade’s was a box in which he kept his most treasured belongings. When Phil and his wife had a son, I sent a box for a boy.