Saving Graces (18 page)

The dialogue was full of pain, even among the believers. There were those who had had faith that God could have intervened and saved their child, but that for some unknown reason God did not. Their faith was given the most pitiless test, and some felt immense anger. It is not surprising that Job—whose children were taken from him in a test by God provoked by Satan—found his way into many of our online discussions.
We are not Job,
I wrote,
though the wind took away our child. These deaths cannot be tests of our faith. The level of malevolence or ambivalence from a god that this conclusion requires is unthinkable. We may each, like Job, face questions of faith, including facing questions of our own pride. The lucky among us come to a complete and comforting faith. It is hard not to wish for us all the peace that comes with that acceptance.

I never accepted a God who might have chosen to intervene in the death of my boy but did not, who could have decided to stop the invisible wind that killed my son, but decided to do nothing. I listened to the Bill Moyers PBS series
Genesis
in which someone stated that what was not admirable could not be God’s motivation. The response was that we don’t have a God we want, we have the God we have. Both were right, maybe. God did not cause our children to die and did not wish them pain or suffering, and it was not that—this time and not another—he allowed such a terrible thing to happen. I came to understand and accept a God willing to stand back and not intervene in accident, disease, violence. It may not be the God we want—certainly it is not the God we now want—but it is the God we have, a God who lets man’s actions and the balances of nature take their course whatever the earthly consequences.

It was so in the Bible when God did not stop his beloved David from murdering Uriah because of David’s lust for Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. Where greed or jealousy results in murder, where the lack of moderation results in accidents, when nature is cruel and God does not intervene, we must not be surprised. The causes of grief have always been part of life. The love of God is very different from a promise of protection from tragedy or pain, as perhaps all love, which is so tender, must be. Whether or not our God weeps at man’s calamities, I do not know, but I believe in the promise of neither intervention nor protection but only of salvation and enlightenment.

I would speak to Wade of all that happened. Although I knew him well enough to know what he would say in response, he did not speak to me. As the weather got cold and the ground colder, we decided to place a bench at the graveside. It was meant to mark his grave until the headstone was completed, to replace the license-plate-shaped metal marker the funeral home had placed there. Our dear friend Thomas helped us lay it out. When we went to his studio, he had made a mock-up. Wade’s name along the side of the cardboard bench seared through me, the heat turning my insides to ashes. Thomas was getting used to seeing me cry. But I had to see it one day; I am just glad my first day was with John and Cate and Thomas. Within weeks, it gave me comfort to see his name there. And Thomas introduced us to Robert Mihaly, a young sculptor who had come to meet him before starting as an artist in residence at the National Cathedral. Thomas’ father had been dean at the Cathedral, perhaps its most influential dean, and Robert wanted to meet Thomas before going. Thomas told us about Robert and his work, and he arranged for us to meet this weird and wonderful young man. At our first meeting, Robert sat with a drawing pad on his lap, and he would lean down and peek into it, lifting the corners of the pages so no one else could see. We were enchanted and confused by him, and—happily—we agreed that he should carve Wade’s headstone. It was a great relief to know that it was under way, although it would be a year before the sculpture was in place.

The late days of autumn were gray. The cold and dampness never left. Even in the worst of summer, I could take my water jug and a book and sit with Wade for hours. As autumn closed, the cold settled in my joints and I was not with him long before I was thinking of myself, of my own comfort, and not of Wade, so I would leave. Robert, the sculptor, brought the plaster model for the headstone, and it was extraordinary, an angel caressing him. I told him I could live with it forever, which was the only test I knew. Our only hesitation was the scale, as Robert wanted magnificence and we wanted intimacy. An oak that was felled by the hurricane that had claimed Jackson Griffith came out, and we planted in its place a magnolia, as the magnolias had fared better in the winds. Things were coming together at the grave. We wondered, though, what would busy us when it was done.

The Learning Lab busied me. I worked on developing a web page for it, but, with no experience and no tutor, I was lost. I finally put something up using the free Geocities pages that had easy instructions for even the most simple-minded, in which group I was apparently included. It kept me busy. And children came to use the Lab when I was there, whether it was technically open or not, so I had company. All of which made John, who was deep into his trial, feel better, allowing him to concentrate his energy where he should, on the precious child, Valerie, whose future was in his hands. Cate was bringing home the same worksheets Wade had brought home three years before, asking me the same questions he had asked. I was busy, but it didn’t always help. I so often felt like a used decanter, a circle of wine in the bottom, the smell of wine at the top, and completely empty in between.

So now we were back to just the usual pain. And there was plenty of it, as Christmas was approaching. I got an e-mail from a friend. His son, Elliot, was in a class taught, coincidentally, by a woman who had lived in my Atsugi neighborhood when we were in high school in Japan. So I heard about Elliot’s essay through his father and then again through his teacher. Misty had asked her students to write about the one gift each would most like to give that holiday season. Elliot wrote, “If I could give a gift to anyone in the world, it would be to Wade Edwards…. He died in a crash while going to the beach for spring break…. If I could give him a gift it would have been to let him reach the beach house. He deserved to live a full life. Also to be able to become the lawyer he wanted to be. I think he would write a book because of how good of a writer he was. I never met him but when I asked my mom about him there were tears in her eyes.” I wrote back. “You did give a gift today. Your paper gave a gift to us, Wade’s family. I, too, wish Wade were waiting at the beach house, wondering what in the world was taking us so long to get there to join him. It cannot be, however. Wade, as a human being, is now only a memory. And memories are very fragile things; they can break apart and the pieces can be so small that no one can even imagine what the remembered boy was. So it is really important to parents who have lost a child that people take good care of the memory of their children. You, Elliot, are taking very good care of Wade’s memory, and that is a wonderful gift, maybe the best Christmas gift we will get.”

I love Christmas. I love the decorations and the music and the smell of the kitchen. I love the caroling and the Hallelujah Chorus and the live nativity, the little girls draped in sheets with tinsel and coat-hanger halos and little boys in their fathers’ shirts and mothers’ scarves around their heads, broom handles for staffs. I love the wrapping paper and the elegant lights and the gaudy ones, too. Every Christmas for the previous twelve years we had had an open house. It was one of the best-known parties in Raleigh because we invited children as well as adults. How often we heard from parents that their children wanted to know if the family Christmas party invitation had come yet. The children liked to think they were coming to an adult party, but in truth the children were upstairs with cookies and punch and the adults were downstairs with slightly better food. We started it when Wade and Cate were small and we had to hire sitters for upstairs, who were given the instruction not to let any of the older children throw any of the younger children out the windows, and if possible no blood. The year before, Wade had been the primary sitter—and he had spent a good deal of the night, his last Christmas party, trying to find a lost Barbie doll. We would send four hundred or five hundred invitations, maybe more—I would handwrite each one—and usually about eight hundred people came. I would make all the food myself and never pretended to be a hostess. If you wanted to talk to me, come to the kitchen. It was loud and happy, and it was a hard tradition to give up, but it was an impossible tradition to repeat this year. Cate relented and agreed that we could forgo the party. But the truth was that I didn’t want Christmas at all this year.

Sally and Gwynn, then Tricia and Ellan, came by to help decorate the tree. The usual three trees—one for the children that they decorated themselves, one for Hallmarks and other ornaments, like the children’s old mittens and handmade ornaments, and the last for my glass ornaments—would be reduced to one tree for Christmas 1996. The glass tree had fallen three times in recent years and the sight of smashed Radko ornaments that I had collected and cherished had been hard in easier times, so I left the remaining Radkos in a box, and we hung the more unbreakable ornaments on a single tree. If it is possible to decorate a joyless Christmas tree, we were doing it.

We used a check we got from Wade’s small life insurance policy to buy Cate a pearl necklace. It was her present from Wade. As far as I was concerned, there was no other gift in the room. Christmas began and ended with opening that box, fixing that clasp, and imagining a brother’s pride in his beautiful sister. The rest of the days were minutes to get through. There were nice things: Jim, the columnist who wrote about Wade, had his articles framed for us. I do not wear jewelry, but I asked for and received the obligatory bereaved mother’s locket. And more books. I even bought us new bookshelves, for the floor in the bedroom was nearly covered. We ate a late Christmas dinner with Gwynn and her daughters.

Driving home Cate asked if my Christmas was merry.

“I loved being with you.”

“It is not what I asked.”

Caught. “Merry is too much to ask. I don’t know when I will be able to describe myself as merry again. You made it the best it could have been made. I hope that is enough for you, for it is enough for me.”

The last, of course, a lie.

Nothing could raise my spirits, although, bless her heart, Cate tried. She gave me a book entitled
One Thousand Things To Be Happy About
—but the only thing that was making me smile was the child handing me the book. The week before Christmas I posted on ASG.
And his stocking is hung. No little boy in new red sleepers will sit on the steps until it is time to come downstairs. No young man in a flannel nightshirt will complain that his father is not yet awake. I will not spend my afternoons running my hands over sweaters he might like or my evenings wrapping them. Instead I went today to the nursery; the gardenia at his grave the latest casualty of nature, pansies and lavender for remembrance now in its place. And as I stood there at the counter of the nursery, my arms full, my heart broke, again, as I bought for his grave instead of for his closet. A magnolia now stands where the oak that shaded his grave once stood, the one I liked to think was a part of a thread that started with the oak at Allon-bacuth, the oak of weeping at Deborah’s grave. Nature again, furious, had felled it. Winds more powerful, but less terrible, than the wind that took him. All of this, the oak, the gardenia, the season, the stockings, the tears, it all comes and goes, the wind a fitting metaphor. A young man carves a piece of marble for his headstone; it, too, will pass in time. The only thing that will not change in my life, in generations, is that he is dead. Where is solace, where can you find it, when all there is is mutability and death? Death. The counterpoint of a gay stocking in needlepoint, made years ago in that naive belief that I could make the world gay and perfect for him. I see him sitting on the sofa, that stocking in the curl of his leg, awaiting his turn to discover its contents, laughing at whatever foolishness was in his sister’s stocking, anticipating someone finding his contribution to their stocking. That image, too, is impermanent. If I can carry it with me until at last I too die, as I hope I can, it will die with me, and one more piece of him will be extinguished. The only thing we cannot touch will be the last to stand: he is dead. How I wish that he had children and they had had children and something of him would pass through the years, mocking death’s attempt to cut him short. How I wish…but what use is it? The girl he never kissed, the baby he never held, the stocking he never filled. Death has won. All that is left will fade, will erode, will die. He is beaten, and so am I. The house is still again. I will never become accustomed to the permanence of this silence
.

The most faithful stepped up, as I knew they would. But Christmas was having its way with all of us. Sue, whose son Wally—about Wade’s age—had died, resisted her husband’s efforts to celebrate.
We do what we do now for others
, I wrote.
My husband played Santa this year, as he did last year and the year before, for a child care center in the housing projects here. He and his partner provide Christmas for sixty-five children there. The office staff are “Santa’s Helpers” and last year, when Wade worked in his office as a runner, Wade was a Helper. A couple of the kids had clung to him throughout last year’s party, sitting on his lap, playing with his Santa hat. He dearly loved children. This year, without saying so to anyone, I know John was Santa in memory of Wade, giving whatever joy he could. It was a sad day for us, highlighting as it did Wade’s absence, but our sadness is permanent. The joy of Christmas for these children is so fleeting, a bright moment in a life filled with less light than a child’s life should have. For John, maybe for your husband, it was not a celebration in the way you use the word
.