Saving Graces (16 page)

Now, the bargaining stage—maybe I am still there, since part of my daily prayer is that God takes me and lets my son live. My head knows they are just words, but I feel it so desperately, when could I ever stop offering?

And there must have been depression, the fourth stage, but honestly, we so quickly threw ourselves into our post-death parenting—the WELL, the Short Fiction Contest, a bench at his high school—that we had to plow through whatever roadblocks depression might have put up. John was and is a great life force, a bright piece of energy. It was why I fell in love with him. I had seen that energy dimmed by Wade’s death, but he had relit himself, redirected himself, a sadder self for sure, and now he was pressing that life force against all we needed to do to parent Wade’s memory, pushing it forward. Depression was a poor match indeed for John and for me.

The last stage is acceptance. It is not an adequate word, and neither is resignation. Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poetry I have loved since I was thirteen, wrote, “I am not resigned to shutting away of loving hearts in cold ground…. Down, down, down to the darkness of the grave, gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” What is the word for the battle-weary, who at some place deep within him continues to rail but whose voice is now quiet, beaten finally into silent submission by reality? The levels of our being are like stories upon stories of a building through which a fire has run, weakening everything, making life on any of these other levels precarious, causing us not to walk to the edges but stay in the middle of the rooms with the false sense that we are there protected. (At least, we imagine, we might see another fire coming at us and might not be caught so unaware.) But on the floors that remain, we carry on with a life that seems, in its sad serenity, both to acknowledge the wreckage below us and to embrace the life about us. Maybe Yeats described it best, and certainly most simply: “I am accustomed to their lack of breath.” Not resigned, or accepting, just accustomed. I know I have a relationship with my son, a relationship that had been fuller and changing and promising when he lived, but now it is different, flatter, without promise, not so unlike the relationship you might have with a family member who has moved far away, about whose new surroundings you know nothing. So when you speak, it is easier to talk about what you do share, although it means your relationship is time-stamped on the last day you lived together. That’s what I have, and that’s what I make the most of.

The Learning Lab was getting built, so there were building plans to approve, wall colors to choose, study tables to buy and…the list kept us busy, doing in our lives what he might have done in his. I read a wonderful book,
After the Death of a Child
by Ann Finkbeiner, whose son TC died in a railroad accident. It discussed parents who had lost their children five, ten, twenty years before. My favorite parent was Lyght—not just for his name but for his gentle spirit. He worked for Hospice, in an unspoken way for his son. When Ann posted on ASG once, I wrote her, telling her how much her book had helped me, how I had followed her advice to let friends know that I would still hurt in the next decade and the next, and if they wanted to really help, they could remember Wade then. I told her how much I admired Lyght. And then I got an e-mail from Lyght. She had told him, and he had reached out. You see, we really are a big—much too big—family.

When we had asked his friends what they wanted us to do to remember Wade, I have to admit that they didn’t say a computer lab. They wanted a bench in the outdoor lunch area at Broughton High School. We went to Shaw University one day and I saw a lovely stone bench with a plaque on the back that said “In Memory of Anne Hollins.” That’s what I first had in mind when we went to Thomas Sayre, a sculptor and artist in Raleigh. Thomas was our age and a close friend of friends of ours, but we hadn’t known him. His vision for the bench exceeded our pedestrian expectations. He started with an idea of a series of poles in a spiral shape throughout the picnic area. Poor Thomas, the idea made me cry. Wade was already too scattered, I said, his image like the rings of a skimmed stone spreading outward but fading. I needed as much of him as possible gathered together. And Thomas, sweet Thomas, needed to find another idea, one that didn’t make me cry. And he did.

A Place in Time
is one hundred feet long, most of it a long weaving tiered bench that forms the tail of a comet shape. The head of the comet is a small courtyard, with an inscription, written by Wade at the end of his sophomore year in an essay in Latin class. “The modern hero is a person who does something everyone thinks they could do if they were a little stronger, a little faster, a little smarter, or a little more generous. Heroes in ancient times were the link between man and perfect beings, gods. Heroes in modern times are the link between man as he is and man as he could be.” He was fourteen when he wrote it. At the front edge of the little plaza is an irregular wall made up of eighty blocks, large pillows of concrete on which the handprints of the people with whom Wade had grown up were placed—children with whom he had gone to child care, classmates, teammates, and friends. Each child went to Thomas’s studio and placed their right hand slowly, evenly into a wooden box of warm wax. Thomas poured cool water over their hand, and they could feel the wax harden. From those molds came the seventy handprints that formed the face of the wall, seventy hands coming forward, pressing themselves against the plaza’s space. Thomas described the hands by saying, “The head of a comet is made up of a lot of parts. And one of the continuities of life is that there is community that lives on, that gets replenished.” The bright light that was Wade was passed on. The bench is public art, and so now and again someone will skateboard across it, leaving black scars on the edges of the benches. I fought it at first. And then I cleaned it. And Thomas cleaned it. But now I don’t really mind. It means that it is a living piece, with young people, not so unlike Wade, enjoying it.

Cate had started high school in the school Wade attended, in math classes with his classmates, since she had gotten ahead of her own classmates in that subject, passing his friends in the hallways, and I grieved for her. At her first open house, John and I walked through her schedule, just as we had done for Wade three years before. How many laughing faces of parents turned to see ours and a look of great sadness swept over them? We couldn’t say,
Don’t be sad for us.
They wouldn’t listen even if we could say it. I honestly didn’t know what to do. In being a mother, I relied on instinct and intellect. In parenting a child who has died, I had no resources. And despite our wide circle of support, sometimes I needed even more. I signed up to substitute-teach.

My first substitute teaching assignment at Broughton was hard. It was supposed to be honors chemistry, but there was a mix-up, and it was AP physics. Wade had signed up to take this course, and the class was filled with his friends. As the children worked in groups on worksheets that the teacher had left, I could not help myself—where would he be in these exchanges? I finally asked Maggie Whit-meyer, one of his friends. Right here beside me, she answered sweetly. While the children worked, I tried to push out the images, tried to read a book of essays I had brought with me,
The Devil Problem
by David Remnick. But the title essay was about Elaine Pagels, the religion professor at Princeton who lost her husband and five-and-a-half-year-old son within fifteen months. Quite a remarkable and thoughtful woman, but I needed to close the book on her. So I picked up the papers from the classroom floor and watched the children eating lunch outside. One of the papers was the ballot for Homecoming Court, much different from my high school days—all seniors still, but boys and girls. Of the twenty-five young people who served as pallbearers and honorary pallbearers at Wade’s funeral, three of them went to boarding schools away from Raleigh, while the other twenty-two went to Broughton—and all twenty-two were nominated for the court. Wade’s life passing on without him, Wade’s class talking and exploring and learning without him, Maggie with an empty desk beside her. I let my mind wander.

The fall was very hard, on me, on all of us, as Broughton High School was in perpetual mourning. A drunk driver severely injured a student getting out of a car at 7:30 in the morning. Another boy was in a coma after a car accident. The assistant minister at the Presbyterian church—a favorite of many of the children and the father of one—succumbed to a cancer that had been attacking him for years. Jackson Griffith, from Wade’s class, the captain of the wrestling team, was playing in the swollen creek across the street from our house after Hurricane Fran came crashing through, and he was grabbed by a whirlpool near an old dam and—though he was strong—held under the muddy water for days. Endless painful days. He had been studying Japanese, and his classmates marked his death with the Obon ceremony I had loved as a child in Iwakuni. But it was all impossible. And about to get worse.

On October 29th, we called back to Raleigh on our way home from a soccer trip with our daughter and a car of girls. “I have bad news.” Another child from our school. Our school of just under two thousand, children who mostly grew up together in the part of town where people do not move, where the children have gone to the same schools, played ball in the same Y gym winter after winter and soccer on the same teams, gone to the same camps, belonged to the same youth groups.

Wade, then Ben in a fire, then Jackson drowning, and Edward in a coma. And now Betsy Draper, a sophomore, a promising soccer star, fell to the floor while dancing with a friend in her bedroom. That night, we were told, she was unable to breathe on her own and was in a coma with a cerebral hemorrhage. It was grim. And the children who remained were reeling. What were we to say? The world makes no sense? Your life is held by the thinnest of threads? And with their innocence gone, they did not want to leave each other’s side. The girls in the backseat huddled, holding hands. So like what Cate and I had done six months before.

The next day I wrote to my family at ASG,
I have four images in my mind. One is a picture of Wade I carry with me, three weeks before he died, handsome, happy, at peace. The second is Wade’s still face as he lay in a permanent and cherubic sleep. The third is the flat empty faces of the children I saw today at the hospital, uncomfortable where they were, unable to be anywhere else. The last, juxtaposed oddly, is an image from this weekend’s soccer tournament: the girls, having won the semifinals in a shoot-out, linked arms and skipped across three fields to where the championship game would be played. The perfect picture of blissful childhood. Eighteen hours later, there was no joy whatever in those faces.

As I type, Cate has pulled out Wade’s yearbook from last year, looking for pictures of Betsy, I know. She will not find what she really seeks: some reason, some explanation for the injustice of these tragedies. I want to hold her and tell her I will keep her safe, but now, such words would be wasted: she knows better.

The deaths of our children confound us. The foundation blocks of living have been upset. As time passes, we start putting together the crumbled wall, trying to find in life enough rationality that action, even the action of living, makes sense. But the assault is too fast: do not rely on fairness or right, we are reminded over and over. When Solomon speaks to his son in Proverbs, he promises that a righteous life will be a long life; it turns out that is not true. The story of Cain and Abel is the truth: no one will step in and protect the pure from death. And if that was not enough, we learn we cannot rebuild the wall even with mercy and grace, for too many of the blocks are now missing. I am so very tired.

I used to think that the greatest gift you could give a child was the sense that anything was possible. Now that gift has a horrid twist: anything is possible. You tempt death as you sleep, as you drive on a clear day, as you walk, as you dance. Maybe this is all naive. Maybe the cocoon never was there. Instead it is like the public service announcements on breast cancer,
I wrote eight years before finding out I had breast cancer.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you get breast cancer. One, two….

Tomorrow I substitute-teach at our high school. I will try not to look at them as targets of irrational tragedy; they will try not to look at me as the symbol of a dead child.

In the midst of this, the Learning Lab was about to open, the bench about to be dedicated, and we wanted to find a grand way to do that. I wasn’t much in the business of making things joyful these days, so my friends—my dear friends—took over. Tricia, who had experience organizing such events, took control of a day of celebration, and everyone pitched in, including women I didn’t know well. The dedication of Wade’s memorial wall and bench went as well as I could have possibly hoped. The day was cloudless, with only an occasional breeze. Wade’s high school is an old stone building with a clock tower in front. There was a large white tent in place before the front doors, seventy yellow-clothed tables topped with pink geraniums. There was nothing reminiscent of sadness. It was to be, and looked to be, a celebration. There were eight hundred people there, eating lunches made by a local caterer, the mother of one of Wade’s closest friends. Thomas was beyond eloquent, describing his sculpture as the image of a comet like the short life of a child, brightening our skies and then extinguishing. John spoke of the Learning Lab and how it would level the playing field for students of different means, as Wade had wanted, and of the generosity of everyone who had come. Governor Jim Hunt spoke and was quite good, as education is his chief interest and gentleness came naturally to him. And I spoke of Wade, and of Ben, and Jackson, and Betsy.

“When we sat after Wade’s death and wondered what he would have us do, we first wrote the things for which he stood. And then the things for which he cared. We recognized, as we wrote, how well Wade had followed the Apostle Paul’s last instructions to his young companion Timothy: to be an example in love and honor and charity.