Alligator Candy (17 page)

As I looked out on all the familiar faces from different stages of my life, I spoke of my love for my father and his profound influence on me. I also shared the struggle I'd long had over a fundamental question: “How do we survive the death of someone we love?” I said, “How would I survive losing him?” But, I went on, I had recently found something of an answer. It had happened late one night not long ago after I had returned to my parents' house from visiting my dad in the hospital. I was having trouble sleeping in his office, under his shelves heavy with books on death and dying, his walls decorated with the stuff from his life: the Mr. Natural postcard I'd sent him from college; the black-and-white photos of his father leading a construction site in Palestine; the mouse pad with a picture of his grandchildren.

There between two thick and dusty books, I found a copy of a book proposal he had written about twenty-five years before. It was for what I remembered him calling his “book on suffering.” The proposal described how my dad, after Jon's death, began to study how other people suffer from loss and death. But what began as a kind of “self-therapy,” as my dad put it, evolved into an anthropology book he wanted to write on “the development and characteristics of individuals and peoples who have transformed the experience of suffering into positive approaches to surviving.”

My father never got around to writing the book. But, in a way that I'm sure would have deeply moved him, reading the yellowed pages of the proposal that night fulfilled something profound in me. As I told the mourners gathered with our family, it gave me a way of thinking and feeling about death, including his, that would help to support me in the many long nights to come.

“The observation that all relationships (including that with ourselves) end in separation and loss is almost banal,” my father wrote, “yet, it is important because it is a universal in human experience. Moreover, other kinds and degrees of loss threatening personal and cultural identity are common in life cycles of individuals and cultures. Often, there is, in literature, the suggestion that some, through means that are as yet unclear, make use of the experience of suffering to enhance growth, to heighten awareness and appreciation of the good and the joyous experiences that are also part of human life. In his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, the first survivor, Elie Wiesel points out that Yitzhak means ‘he who will laugh,' that Isaac transformed his suffering, that he remained capable of laughter, and that ‘in spite of everything, he did laugh.' ”

S
OON WE WERE
in the back of a town car, heading to the cemetery where my father would be laid to rest. We were short a pallbearer, and at the last second, I saw a familiar man being ushered over by my brother. It was Arnie Levine, the family friend and lawyer who had been so instrumental in helping us through Jon's case. As we walked slowly over the stony path to the gravesite, I thought how appropriate it was that Arnie was there carrying my father, just as he had carried him through such a hard time so long ago.

As we came to the site, I saw the marker for Jon's grave, the grave that was empty, since his ashes had been spread in the bay. But it was there, a reminder for me and everyone else of what had happened, and I'm sure it was on everyone's mind as the rabbi began his prayers. Something was happening, something I could feel: Jon's presence coming back along with my dad's.

This wasn't just something in my imagination. Reporters began calling the house, gathering information for a few stories on my father. Invariably, they brought up the story of my brother, asking me how my father got through the tragedy. Some of the reporters had been at our house during the week that Jon was missing, and the memories came flooding back. A story ran in the
St. Petersburg Times
, along with a photo of my parents from 1973, sitting on their couch and waiting anxiously for news on their still-missing son.

Daniel Ruth, the columnist, wrote about the awkwardness he'd felt when assigned to interview my parents after the discovery of Jon's murder, and how, to his surprise, my father reacted when he saw him at the memorial service soon after: “Gilbert Kushner walked over to me, shook my hand and invited me to join his family inside the synagogue for the funeral service. At the very nadir of this man's greatest personal tragedy, he graciously wanted me to know he wasn't offended” by Ruth's reporting. Ruth headlined his tribute to my father “A Man of Uncommon Grace and Courage.”

And the experience still lingered for Ruth, just as it did for me and the others. “Since 1973, I have probably driven up and down that stretch of [road near my parents' house] thousands of times,” he went on. “I am always reminded of what happened there. A little boy rode his bike to the store and never came home. And now with the passing of this man of uncommon grace and courage, in a sense a little boy has at last been reunited with his father—Jonathan Kushner has come home.”

How fitting it was, I thought, that all these memories were coming back around Memorial Day weekend. It felt as if something larger was at play, something that defied my usual skepticism, a sense that a story was unfolding around me. Throughout the week, we gathered at my parents' house for shiva, the mourning period when visitors come to the home of the deceased's family to say Kaddish, the memorial prayer. Every time the front door opened, I watched someone else come inside carrying his or her memories, the memory of having been in this house decades before during the shiva for Jon.

People approached me quietly, telling me as much, how they had been here at that time. They recalled how awful and surreal the week felt, how they watched in awe as my parents moved among them, lending their support to people who were coming for them. With each conversation, I felt the past coming to life. I spoke with Cindy Silverman, the speech therapist who had worked with Jon during his difficulties in school. For my entire life, I had been told that Jon had a learning disability, that he was slow, but Cindy explained that this wasn't the case: he suffered from an auditory deficit disorder, which had nothing to do with his intelligence.

The more I heard from people, the more I wanted to know. I saw an older Jewish man sitting on the couch by himself, and we got to talking. He was Stan Rosenberg, who'd helped lead the search party throughout the week for my brother, and had combed the woods himself. I spoke with his wife, Madelyn, who helped feed the volunteers along with dozens of other local women. I spoke with Arnie and his wife, Gail, about their support that week, and the efforts to find the murderers. And I spoke with other family and friends, not just about the horror of the week that Jon was missing, but the life they recalled leading up to that day.

I began to get dizzy with memories, feeling the feelings of everyone here, hearing their thoughts, their fears, their sadness, their admiration. At one point, I found myself by our piano, talking with a Hassidic Jew, the son of the rabbi at the local Hillel, the Jewish student group for which my father was the university liaison. I asked him what happens now, as far as he was concerned; what happens to you after you die? His eyes met mine compassionately and eagerly. He told me how my father would be buried in the traditional Jewish way, and how, when the messiah comes, all the dead Jews will roll from their graves underground to Jerusalem, where they will come back to life.

Needing time alone, I retired to my dad's office in the corner of the house. I shut the door and sat at his desk under his shelves of books on death and dying. I wanted to feel his presence, to derive some comfort during a time that seemed so overwhelming and uncomfortable to survive. How had he done it? How had he gotten through the deaths that he had experienced? How had he lived knowing that death was everywhere, that murder was real, that you could walk out the door one morning and never come back? I wanted to know everything. I wanted more memories, more knowledge, more reality to help me through this time, through the rest of my life.

Near his desk, I saw a cloth folder stuffed with papers, and reached for it to see what was inside. There were dozens of pages of notes, typed recollections that he had accumulated over the years. My father was meticulous about keeping track of his professional work, his contributions, his bibliography. I leafed through it all, hoping the residue would smudge my skin and impart the sensation of his fingers pressing on the keyboard.

He also had personal notes, little entries about his life during retirement, his joy of cooking, of shopping, of embracing the domestic chores that felt so simple and fulfilling. And then, on one page, I saw something titled “On Grief.” From the second I started reading it, I felt like he had left it for me to find this day. “You
will
get thru this,” my father had written, “much as you might
not
want to get thru it from moment to moment right now.

You will get thru it because you have no choice, really . . . it just happens . . . no matter what you may feel now. There's something built-in that enables most human beings . . . not all, to be sure . . . but most, to get thru this . . . like feeling very tense and tight and getting into a hot tub and finding there is no way
not
to be relaxed in the hot water because the water does wonderful physiological stuff to you and emotionally too that you cannot avoid. It is built-in to enable us to get thru, to enable us,
force
us, to survive, to stay alive. The question then becomes, after you've understood that it
will
be different, less raw, that the death can not be undone, that you will continue to live and that you will return, a different person, to the life other people define as “normal”: “What shall I do with the rest of my life?”

1. the situation is real and will remain so.

2. there's nothing you can do about it, nothing at all.

3. now what happens to you?

4. who do you want to be?

As I sat there holding the paper, I felt like my dad was there with me, talking to me, asking these questions of me now: What happens to you? Who do you want to be? I knew the answers. I knew them then just as I had known them for years. I wanted to be my brother's brother. I wanted to be the writer of his story. I wanted to harvest the memories of everyone I could, to read everything I hadn't read, to pour over the case file, talk with the cops, talk with Stan, Cindy, Arnie, my mother, Andy, Jon's friends, Jon's teachers. I wanted to dig up the past, with the help of others, and tell this story of freedom and fear, of adventure and loss, of murder and mystery and survival.

I thought about the canon of Holocaust memoirs, of the Jewish idea of bearing witness, of remembering, of telling the stories, in all their horrific detail, so that people remember, so that no one forgets. I thought about Passover, and how for thousands of years, Jews would gather around a table and recite the story of when we were slaves in Egypt, and how the Haggadah, the prayer book for that holiday, uses the plural first person,
we
: when
we
were slaves, it reads; this is the story of us.

I thought about my own children and the world they were in now—how they rarely went outside; rarely rode their bikes. What happened? I wondered. What happened to my generation? How had we been the kids with so much freedom, who then grew up to deny this freedom to our own children? This adventure. This sense of discovery and danger and risk and recovery. The answers were larger than me, but, I realized, by telling the story of our family, the murder, our survival, perhaps I could help others to think about all of this, why this happened, how we got here. And along the way, I could do something that felt at once inevitable and perhaps a bit megalomaniacal. Who did I want to be? my father asked. I wanted to be the memory harvester. I wanted to learn and tell the story, the whole story of everything. I wanted to bring Jon back to life.

H
E WAS A
funny little baby,” my mother said about Jon. We were looking at old photo albums. She was showing me pictures of Jon as a newborn, square black-and-white snapshots of him, a tiny bundle of new life, shortly after he was born in Minneapolis in 1962. “The nurses would comb his hair to a point,” my mother said with a smile. “They tied his red hair in a bow.”

It was November 2011, and we were in the living room of the house where I had grown up: the white-tiled fireplace, the shelves of Wiesel books, the jazz albums lined up beneath the stereo. She was dressed in white and beige, with gray hair now.

It had been over a year since my father had died, and the drive to finally write the book on Jon had become a reality. I had been in Tampa now, interviewing people, poring over research, spending days at the library, IDS, and elsewhere. It wasn't that I sought “closure” by writing the book. That word always troubled me because it suggested that it was possible to somehow end the grieving, to put a stake in something that was always present and evolving.