The End of the World as We Know It (2 page)

People kept asking me if there was anything they could do, if there was some way they could help, and I kept saying no, partially because I was such a control freak and partially because I really couldn't think of anything. We had cleaned up the house and cleared out my father's room. We had put his few junky clothes in boxes to be thrown away, and we'd put the dining room table back in there, and the chairs, so it looked pretty much the way it always had before my father had retired from the world. My sister and I worked like dogs, which is what you do after somebody dies. Everything was done, so we just sat around, listening to anecdotes and eating ham and going over in the hot afternoons to swim in my sister's pool. The hours seemed languid and long. In times of grief, you're waiting for something to happen, but the thing you're waiting for has already taken place.

The morning of my father's funeral, I woke up at six o'clock and realized that there was one thing that hadn't been done. If my father was going to be buried next to my mother, there wasn't any hole to put him in. Nobody had thought to dig a hole.

Claudie would have done it. Claudie would do anything. But I had forgotten.

So I got out of bed and put on some ripped jeans and an old T-shirt and some Top-Siders and went down and got a shovel and jumped over the wall through the box bushes into the little
plot where my mother was buried. (We never said
boxwood bushes
. It was tacky.) I picked up the unicorn statue—it was very heavy and already warm from the heat—and I started to dig in a spot I thought might be next to my mother. I hit the box my mother was buried in, so I shoveled the dirt back over and moved a foot to the right and started digging again. There had been a huge thunderstorm the day before, with torrential rains, and the dirt was wet and caked. It seemed to take a long time, the digging, and I was crying and sweating like a pig because I had drunk so much gin the night before. I was drinking straight out of the bottle by then, and I was pretty much bagged all the time.

I kept measuring the hole with the shovel handle to see if it was deep enough and, when I thought it was, I put the shovel away and went into the kitchen and ate some ham on a roll and had a shot of gin out of the bottle, just to take the edge off, and then I went upstairs and took a bath and shaved and put on my suit and my immaculately polished shoes and wandered around the house, smoking and taking the occasional shot, waiting for my sister and brother-in-law, who were going to take me to the funeral service in the church. My sister pretty much didn't trust me to drive anywhere at any time of the day, and she was right.

When they showed up, I told my brother-in-law I had a question and led him out to the grave I had dug. I asked him if he thought it was deep enough and he said no, so I got the shovel and jumped though the box bushes and started digging again. I dug down about another foot, and when my brother-in-law said that was enough, I put the shovel away and we went to the funeral. The air-conditioning in the car dried the sweat that soaked my shirt.

They always leave spaces for the family to park at funerals, so we parked right in front and went in and sat in the front row, along with my aunt and uncle and my other aunt and uncle, my father's sister and her husband. The funeral was a standard issue funeral service out of the 1928 prayer book, and then it was over and we got up and filed out, surprised at how many people there were, people from all over the state we hadn't seen since we were children. It seemed odd, filing out before everybody else, like a wedding without the bride, but people looked at us sympathetically, and we smiled back at most of them as though nothing were wrong. That's what you do.

Lunch is kind of a blur, but it happened, and people ate chicken salad and sliced tomatoes and ham, and cold melon, and the children grabbed a sandwich and then swam and waded in the creek to cool off. People laughed a lot. People told us what a wonderful man my father was and how much they would miss him. I can't tell you how much I hated my father, but I agreed with all of them anyway, because that's what you do, as well. Anyway, what good would it have done to say it now?

I had thought I would jump for joy when my father died. I had thought the weight of the world would be lifted from my shoulders. Instead, I was overwhelmed with grief, as was my sister, who had genuinely loved him and taken care of him in every way, no matter how creepy he was.

By one o'clock, most of the people, the people who weren't as close to my father as some of the other people, had left, and the minister came, carrying with him the box with my father's ashes in it. He changed into his vestments in the room off the sitting
room and then we were ready for the burial part. The ashes to ashes part.

Somehow the family squeezed into the little space inside the box bushes, and the other people stood on the terrace and looked down at us, the children standing on the wall in their bathing suits, rapt with curiosity—the family group, the minister in his cassock and cotta and his stole, holding the gray box that looked basically like a piece of Tupperware.

The minister read the service, which is very short, and he named both my father and my mother, and I could feel my aunt's exhalation of relief and regret for her sister, and then he turned and handed the box to me.

It was surprisingly heavy. I had expected it to be light as the ashes you clean out of the fireplace, light like artificial whipped cream, but it wasn't. I could see bits of bone through the milky plastic. This was my father in my hands. This was the final sum of my history with my father, and I felt the weight, not just of the box, but of the past, the weight of the anger, the weight of the disaster of our relationship. I had thought I had forgiven him.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do with the box, and then I realized I was supposed to put it into the hole I had dug that morning. I knelt down and put the box in the hole. I looked up and saw the stares on the faces of my father's friends, the children craning to get a better view, and I realized it wasn't over.

I began to shove the dirt in the hole with my hands. I felt like crying, but I knew that would just be a mess, and anyway, it was like planting something, and I had planted things a million
times. My sister, bless her heart, knelt down beside me, and with her beautiful slender hands, she shoved dirt as well, watching it fall and cover this man she had loved. This man whose toenails she had clipped, whose hair she had cut.

When it was finished and the last of the dirt was mounded over the box in which my father's ashes would lie forever, I took my sister's hand and we stood up. The people on the porch were still staring, and the minister waited patiently to say his blessing. So I turned and stamped down the dirt with my feet, and then I picked up the marble slab and the heavy statue and placed them over the freshly dug hole. Then the minister said the final blessing, the Lord bless us and keep us, the Lord make his face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance and give us peace, both now and forever.

I always tell men who grieve for their fathers that it never turns out to be what you expected. I tell them that, no matter how much you think about it, no matter how deeply you've decided in advance that you know how you will feel when your father dies, the reality is far deeper and stranger than you can imagine.

I always tell people that if you want closure, as people say now, if you want some finality, you should get up at six o'clock in the morning and dig your father's grave. You should shove the dirt over him with your own hands and stamp it down with your English shoes.

But it's not true. It's not true, the thing I tell people about digging the grave and stamping down the dirt.

I had thought the demons would be laid to rest. I had thought the rage and the hatred that Southern men can feel for their fathers, a rage and hatred so old and terrible they can't be described,
I had thought it would all be lifted from me and I would feel free.

It wasn't. Not for a day. Not for a goddamned hour.

My mother had varices, which is what happens to you when you drink so much your liver can't process the liquor anymore. The blood backs up and begins to seep through the tiny capillaries in your throat, and then down into your stomach, where it causes pernicious anemia. If you have it once, they can cure it, or stop it or whatever, but it means if you ever drink again, you're pretty much going to die.

I carried her in my arms, against her will, out of the hospital, and laid her in the back of my father's car, and took her to a drying out place, but they wouldn't take her because she was too ill. When we sat in the office, she couldn't even sign her own name. They sent her to the hospital at the University of Virginia, and she was there for six weeks before she was even well enough to go to rehab. She stayed for months in rehab, longer than anybody I've ever known, and when she got out she said to me one day, “My life will never be wonderful again.”

I understand what she meant. I still think of drinking with a light and a sweetness that in no way resemble the actual circumstances of those days. Except for a few occasions, it was just being rode hard and put away wet, and I wept at my own behavior almost every night. I lost a decade of my life, just lost it, the way you might lose an umbrella on the bus.

My mother tried to stay sober, I guess. I mean she knew her medical condition, even if she didn't understand it, and she'd been in rehab three months and she had heard the lesson over and over and over, but she thought nice people didn't go to AA meetings and my father kept drinking and it was a hopeless cause. She was an elegant and intelligent woman and she hated her life. I don't know why. She was always unhappy, and nothing would mollify her. No amount of love or tenderness or extravagant gifts. Even getting things she'd always wanted, like the house she lived in, didn't change anything. I'm the same way.

One night I was putting dishes away in a china cupboard, low to the floor, and she leaned over me and whispered, “I can smell liquor on your breath.” It was venomous.

Hopeless. She began drinking iced tea or Sprite with vodka in it. She began hiding liquor bottles in her sewing basket. She began hiding liquor bottles in her clothes drawers. She set fire to her mattress. I guess her life was wonderful again.

I took her out for a drive in the car. It was a summer evening, early summer, when it's soft and not too hot and the mountains are still crisp and blue in the distance. I stopped the car on the side of a country road and I turned to her and spoke. “I know what you're doing,” I said. “We all know what you're doing. And I want you to know it's going to be long and excruciating and I want you to know that none of us has done anything to deserve what you're about to do.”

“I'll stop drinking,” she said. “I'll stop drinking for you.”

“Don't stop for me,” I said. “Don't make me responsible. Don't make me the bad guy.” I started the car and we drove home.

One time that summer I was down there for a visit, and I was
going out for drinks with some friends. I set the table in the kitchen, three mats and napkins and my grandmother's silver. I told my parents I'd be home at seven, we'd always had dinner at seven-thirty, and we'd have dinner at seven-thirty, like always. I got home at five after seven and they'd already finished their supper.

It was the only time I ever exploded with rage at my parents. “I bought you a fucking house,” I yelled. “I come home to see you as often as I can. I never take a vacation, never go anywhere else but here. I bring you presents. And you can't wait five fucking minutes to have supper?”

My mother got up and walked out of the room. My father sat there and said nothing, as though he'd been hit by a baseball bat. I served myself some food and ate in silence. Later, when the twilight was coming on and the light was turning blue, I found my mother in the house and asked her to go for a walk in the garden. To look at my aunt's roses. My mother had long since given up on her own roses.

She said she didn't want to go anywhere with me. I said, “Look. This is what happens in real families. They have fights. They make up. They go for a walk in the garden.” I lived in New York. That was what New York families did. My mother, who supposedly was not drinking, rose unsteadily to her feet and we headed for the door.

To get to the roses, you had to cross the gravel driveway and, in the middle, my mother fell down and scraped her elbow very badly on the rocks. She tried to get up, but she couldn't, so I picked her up in my arms, she was light as a leaf, and carried her back into the house, up the stairs, and laid her on her bed. She
and my father didn't sleep in the same bedroom anymore. My father snored. Maybe that was the reason.

No, the real reason was that my mother would go to sleep around nine and then she'd wake up at midnight and the liquor would be too far away and she couldn't get back to sleep so she'd lie in bed and play solitaire for hours, sometimes all night. Many, many nights, both drunk and sober, I'd lie in bed and listen to the slap of the cards as she tried and tried to get a perfect run.

Her elbow was raw and bleeding. She had changed into her nightgown and her arms were so thin, the front hanging limply on one side where she'd lost a breast some years before. She was hunched over with the pain. I went into the bathroom, looking for some Neosporin and some gauze, but there wasn't any gauze and, because I had had some drinks and I was in a rush to go out to a party, I pulled some Icy Hot out of the medicine cabinet by mistake and went back to her bedroom and rubbed it all over my mother's wound.

She gave a small distant cry. “Oh. That hurts so much. It hurts.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks. I ran to the bathroom and wet a washrag and went back and tried to wipe away the burning Icy Hot, but of course it was deep in the wound by then, and it wouldn't come out, and I was late for the party, and I finally said, “There. It'll be all right now.” And I left her, I left her in burning pain, and I've never forgiven myself.