Saving Graces (15 page)

Cate was at the Talent Identification Program at Duke University. She had been the year before, and—whether or not she liked the six weeks of classes—she loved the program and the young people from across the South who attended. We thought it would be best for her to go again, to get out of our gloomy house for a while, and—bells, whistles, and fireworks—attend what I called “Math Camp.” Of course it also meant that for that time we were not in control of her life, that we couldn’t protect her. Three weeks after Wade died, a substitute teacher in one of her eighth-grade classes had asked how many in the class were only children. And it was about to happen again. Her precalculus teacher at Duke had called one day to let us know that he had decided to take a break in class and have the students write an essay. His topic: “What I like most about having a brother or sister, or being an only child.” He hadn’t known about Wade until he read Cate’s essay. Apparently she handled it. It was clear, however, that despite all the efforts to prepare those around our child, we could not count on that. We would need to prepare the child herself.

It was hard to prepare Cate because even at fourteen she was strong and independent. The next school year, her biology teacher interjected in class that the lovely old trees at Oakwood Cemetery, where Wade was buried, were large and full because they were fertilized by the decaying bodies around them. When I was told, I put my head in my hands. When she heard it, she just looked down at her book and willed herself steady. She had always done it. And it was hard to prepare Cate because she busied herself with making our lives easier, caring for John and me. Could she bring us dinner? Did we want to play a game? Want to walk down to the creek? How many times, then and now, I have thought of the line from Isaiah, “And the little child shall lead them.” For we were led by Cate, reminded of joy by Cate, and blessed with Cate.

So seeing Cate on Wade’s birthday helped. But the day was still hard. I wrote on ASG that night,
We need sometimes to place our feelings about someone in a box. We place the boxes on shelves in our hearts, some high, placed where we almost forget them, until some picture or invitation—maybe a song—reminds us to pull it down and open it. I had to place Wade in a box of his own. A dark cherry box long enough for a six-foot boy. It is difficult to write, for words and tears are poor company for one another. The tears must go to make room for the words, so I focus hard on a picture of Wade at ten, his head leaning against the arm of an old sofa at Holden Beach, his pale blue eyes wide and filled with as much love as any photograph could possibly capture. The tender edges of a smile cross his face. We had come in from the porch crowded with cousins and second cousins, come into the dark wood room away from the heat and the talk of family in South Carolina. Wade had come, too, and rested with us a bit. He was the oldest young boy, and as we sat and talked about how sweetly he had cared for the other children, how tirelessly and patiently he had played with the youngest of them, he let that smile in the picture come over him: happy to have been the one whose company was cherished, and proud that we thought his gifts to his distant cousins so thoughtful. And we told him, as we often did, how sweet he was, how much we loved him, and how proud we were. The camera captured the cherished boy smiling tenderly back at us. A moment it was, before someone came in and offered iced tea, and in that moment a perfect portrait that slid away, a captured moment that was Wade.

Sometimes the exchanges seemed odd when viewed from any distance, but we were all right there, naked and needing each other’s warmth. I remember a teacher of mine in graduate school. Dr. Eliasson taught Old English. (Didn’t know I knew Old English? Well, I don’t anymore.) One day he talked about the varieties of the English language and about the language of intimacy—the pet names, the peculiar phrasing, the shorthand we use with our families. That’s how I think of these exchanges, as the kind of family talk for which we give ourselves additional latitude, as when I wrote to Steve, who was so disconsolate over the death of his mother that he could not even summon anticipation for the upcoming birth of his first child.
Thank you for talking of your mother. My son died in April. I ask God daily to take me instead of taking my boy. I often think of what he would feel if God granted my wish and Wade lived and I died. He would, I think, be much like you, disoriented and lonely. I speak to you now as I would speak to Wade if he stood in your place.

You are my precious son. In the months I had you inside me and the years I had you beside me, I imagined for you every happiness. As you were my firstborn child, I had to learn to be a mother. I learned the names of trees so I could teach them to you. I would finish the books I read to you even after you fell asleep, with the same cadence and inflection, listening in the pauses to your deep breath. I would hunt for old lullabies to sing to you, picking out the tune on the piano until I had made the song my own, your own. And later I stayed up all night typing your papers as you dictated. I searched the stores for a special box for your first corsage. And I bored you with parables so that you would know instinctively the way to be a good man. You never failed me.

There was never a point in my parenting you when I would have chosen to hurt you the way you hurt now. And I grieve to think that in death I have caused you this pain, that I have made you feel even that the birth of your child will be insufficient joy. I meant to give you life, to give you joy for life. And when I died, knowing I had done all I knew to do to give you that joy, I died satisfied. My most important work was done. And now my death undoes that, unwraps my work, and leaves you without the tethers to character and strength and compassion that I worked so hard, so lovingly, to tie.

But, son, the best of me did not die. I gave the best of me to you. All I valued and all I cherished, all I knew and all I dreamed, I gave to you. It can die, of course, if you let it. Or it can live the full and magnificent life I hoped for you. And you can teach that baby all I taught you about living well, and I will live on again. My legacy—my life’s work—is in your hands. Take hold of life, son. It is all I really hoped for in life or in death.
Almost nothing else I wrote was as therapeutic for me, because I know Wade would, if he could, admonish me as I had admonished Steve.

My turn then for the doldrums. Another day without Wade. That’s how I started a post three weeks after his seventeenth birthday. It wasn’t getting any better.
Today two letters drifted in, two late voices wishing us comfort. A few days over four months since I heard my son’s own voice. How sweet to hear these, and yet I read them once and put them down. I have no strength to face his death. Even comfort about his death brings me to the floor.

I cannot look it in the eye. I cannot sit there with his picture before me and look at the edges of his smile, at the fold of his eyelids, or his thick soft clean hair across his forehead. I cannot sit too long with his handwriting before me, the uneven line of letters, so painstakingly drawn or so haphazardly scrawled; there is no way to tell the difference now, I cannot ask him. I cannot sit on his bed and pull out the drawer, knowing I will find the things most precious thrown beside the things that meant nothing at all. A small notecard from his sister on which she had written “Good Night, Wade. I
you. Your sister,” and left it on his pillow. And he had saved it, as he had saved each thing he treasured. All the little pieces of his life up there in that room. Papers from every year tucked in folders, neatly labeled in his desk. Lists of things to do, including the last list of all, which we took from his pocket.

And what am I supposed to do without him? If I cannot face his memory, have I nothing left of him at all? This boy is the dearest thing I ever knew, and now must I ache even to say his name?

Last night I dreamed of him, which I do not often do. A shallow sleep, and a remembered dream. He got out of his car and spoke. He had heard the most awful thing about himself, but he would not tell me then, for we needed to be together first without my knowing. I searched his eyes. On his cheek there was a spot of blood, though his face had not been cut at all when he died. We drove in silence to no place at all, and I did not speak because I knew the awful thing was that he had died. And we both were silent, loving and protecting the other, holding on as long as it might last. For while we did not speak of it, he was beside me. There was no sleep afterward.

Today I opened the laptop I had not used since he and I had traveled to Washington three weeks before he died. We had gone for him to accept an award. Between events, we sat on the hotel beds, and he would tell me what to type for his junior term paper. The Development of Labor Unions During the Depression. Now the battery has run down in the laptop. So today I plugged it in. The day and date had to be reset. So I set it for April 1st, three days before he died. I pressed Enter, and I hoped that God would finally take me up on my offer to move back in time, to let me take his place. Enter. Nothing. It is still August. The rain has stopped, and the steam rises from the slate outside the study.

I don’t know how many days without him I have left inside me. When I was little I used to make-believe that I only got so many total steps in life, but I had convinced myself that steps that I took while eating a Saltine cracker would not count in my total. So I walked around with a long bag of Saltines in order to save my allotted steps for later in life. That is what I am doing now. I only have so many days in me that I can dream of him or really look at him. It uses up my life. So I live the other days by looking at the edges, the high part of his cheek near his ear lobe where the soft nearly invisible hair is short; there I can look. But I do so miss looking my boy in the eyes.

Does this make any sense? Looking at the edges because I cannot stand it if I do not look at all. Save the eyes, the freckles with a glimpse of God, for a day when I can crawl up against that shoulder. You’re so pretty, Mom. You’re such a sweet liar, son.

Where are you, merciful Lord?

Bill Chadwick, the “father” of ASG, always warned about putting on the clothes of grief. And there was, admittedly, plenty of that, as we felt sorry for ourselves. But it was our children’s loss, not ours that was the real loss. I wrote to Sharon, whose son John had died,
I have seen, in the months we have shared this sad place, you carry your love for John higher than you carry your grief. It is not as common as it ought to be.
But it was not unnatural, either. Our children became not children but the cause of grief, as solicitous friends would tell us, “You have been in my thoughts.” What I wanted was that Wade, or Lana or Nielsen or Liza, be in their thoughts. No matter how I managed to work with my own grief—work through, I suppose, the stages of my grief—I could never work around Wade’s losses: his loss of love, of his own children, of his successes and failures and pleasures. Nothing in the books I read could tell me what to do about that. But there was plenty on grief.

There are five stages of grief, according to Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneer in the field. Denial and isolation come first; I suppose I went through denial. I drove past people mowing their lawns or planting a tree and I wanted to yell,
Stop, don’t do that, don’t change anything, God is just about to grant our wish to turn back time and you are only making it harder.
I would open a drawer, and as I closed it I would see something unfamiliar that caught my eye. I would open the drawer again, and I knew I was looking for Wade. I did it from the first: I had only to find him and bring him back. I looked in his towel closet and under the clothes in his bureau. Certainly this was denial. I thought so often of the book Wade and I had read together for his freshman English class, Ray Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes.
In it, there is a carousel of death run by a satanic figure. Goodness, in the form of two boys, finds a way to move it backward, to move back in time. So round and round we continued, hoping against reason to move fast enough forward or fast enough backward to feel his face and hear his voice above the screams inside my head.

The second stage, anger, I never felt. With whom should I be angry? There wasn’t anyone. It was the wind. Physics and engineering and meteorology took him. Science took him. There is somewhere some blasted equation that can be written to explain why he was dead. It was something that could be explained fully, and something that could never be explained satisfactorily. So there was no one with whom to be angry, not even ourselves, except that we failed in some larger sense to keep him safe. Many parents blame themselves, play a tortured game of “What If?” I wrote to one such parent once:
His is not a life you might have saved by some different action. We who have lost children to accidents all think “if only” we had done one thing, a phone call, a chore, even an argument, we could have changed the course of time. But which “if only” is it? My husband called my son before he left the house, I did not. If we each think we are responsible, I would have called and he would not, and Wade would have been where he was nonetheless. It is not us. It is not you. It just is.