Resilience (5 page)

I remember sitting on the plane from Boston to Raleigh on the afternoon of April 4, 1996, the day Wade died. Cate and I had visited private schools to which she had been accepted. I had insisted, over her objection, she apply because she was truly gifted, particularly in mathematics, and despite my constant prodding it seemed clear the large, well-meaning public school system was not equipped to challenge her. We went to startlingly beautiful places where they were anxious for her to attend, where the students were intimidatingly bright, and where spring was popping with promise. She had to love it, right? But she didn't, and the trip was far from perfect. It was like pulling a leashed puppy across a street; there was nothing elegant or pleasant about it. She didn't want to go, and though I didn't want her to leave me, I didn't want to fail her either by having her stay home when she deserved this kind of stimulation. So here we were; the trip was over but we were still tense sitting next to each other on the fight home.

Fortunately, the fight would be followed by a family spring-break trip to the beach and then her cousin's wedding in Key West, and maybe this tension would be broken. Unfortunately, or what I thought at the time was the most unfortunate part of my day, a young family sat behind us on the plane and while the mother tended to a crying baby, the father read a newspaper, and the son, nonstop, kicked the back of my seat. Hard. How silly of me, I now know, to get agitated about such a small insult. Even without Wade's death it would have been silly. At home, I would see my husband and we would travel to the beach, where our son had gone earlier in the day. The sun would shine, we would go boating, pick shells on the beach. But as the boy kicked and the father read on, I was agitated nonetheless, and I stayed that way, complaining to Cate and then continuing to complain to John when he picked us up at the airport. I suspect I complained all the way home about the ill-behaved child and the oblivious father. But within minutes, those two were gone. They were instantly replaced when a couple of Highway Patrol cars pulled into our driveway with the news that changed every day after that day, the news that Wade was dead.

Each moment of hearing the news is etched into me. I feel the cool wind as a warm afternoon is pierced by the beginning of evening. I see, first through the window, the troopers pull into our driveway, rows of blooming daffodils hidden behind their cars as they crested the hill to the house, the beginning of leaves forming on the maple tree above them. The firm sound, then, of their car doors closing,
crumph, crumph.
And the front door opening before me, closing behind me as I rushed to the porch. The left spring squeaks. The trooper closest to me touches his holster and then his hat as he moves toward me. Everything is in slow motion. The evening is no longer breaking in. There is only heat, massive waves of hot panic. I speak first. Everyone else was home; it had to be Wade. Tell me he is alive.

It didn't matter how many times I said it. Wade was dead. However close to perfection we had come the week before, we were now on the other side of the world, of the universe. About halfway to the beach, the wind had caught Wade's car and pushed it off the road. He had tried to correct, and whether it was the wind or the edge of the road doesn't matter; he could not get the car safely back onto the highway, and it flipped. And flipped and flipped until he was dead. The speed limit on the road is 70 miles per hour. They estimated he was driving between 68 and 72. He was wearing his seat belt. The air bags deployed. He never drank. He didn't smoke. He didn't use drugs. He wasn't even talking on a cell phone. He was just talking about what he wanted to do when he grew up to Tyler in the front seat, Tyler who walked away with a sprained ankle from the crushed car. And now Wade wasn't going to grow up.

Nothing in life made sense if this boy could be dead. What had he done? What had we done? I had grown up in a world that made sense: My father was in the Navy, and there, there was good and there was evil, and if you were good, there were rewards, and if you were bad, there was punishment. Not only were there ranks—those who performed moved up—and medals—all good is acknowledged—it played out into the lives of Navy families. The officers had the best quarters, and the higher the rank the nicer the house. Each failure, of the serviceman or his family, was recorded and opportunities would be withheld or promotions would never come. Families could be sent away, separated, if the conduct was serious. Life made sense to a young girl: Pride and shame were bookends, and with each came the consequences. But if that is the framework in which you grew up, how do you explain the death of a young sweet boy? The Old Testament is clear: In I Chronicles and in Psalms, the reward for a life well-lived is a longer life. Wade was as gentle and sweet as a boy might be, and yet he lived just sixteen years; where is God to put this right? Today made no sense at all; I had no frame of reference. How would I ever make sense of tomorrow? The world collapses, and nothing we can do makes any difference whatever. Why did we do everything right? Why did we learn? Here, now, when we need the reward and when we need the ability to move an admittedly large mountain, we discover we are totally impotent and totally without grace. We are spread on the floor, unable to stand. Resilience seemed a ludicrous word only uttered by those who had never felt so at sea.

It is really important for me to say, as I tell you about my journey, that there is not only one road map here. Like fingerprints, there are road maps that belong to each of us. I know my own, but I would never suggest that it is the single right path. I would never suggest that there is even such thing as a single right way, or twenty-five ways, to get from Day One after the death of a child to Year Thirteen. There are things that work for a particular bereaved parent, and there are things that don't. The ones that work for me are the right ones, but just the right ones for me. It is as simple as that. It is hard enough without measuring yourself against some standard your parents or your friends think you should be achieving “by now.” It is hard enough to find some balm that eases the burn for a moment without thinking someone else's balm is actually the one I should be applying. A bereaved mother is lucky if the same things that work for her also work for her husband. Just because it is right for one does not mean that it will be right for the other, and that tension makes a difficult road even more lonely. But the loneliness is not eased by doing what only makes someone else more at peace; in fact, it may create an even deeper sense of loneliness. I will tell you the story of my path, but only if you understand what it is: my path.

Life is a like a blackboard. We write on it the things we are, the things we do. We fill it up, sometimes erasing what we have grown out of. I am no longer a cheerleader, I no longer read Daphne DuMaurier. I grow up and erase them, or rather replace them with new activities, new passions, new friends. And it seems, when we step back from it as we grow up, that our blackboard is as filled as it could be: I was a mother, a wife, a lawyer, and a soccer coach and a Goodwill volunteer. Write those down. Go to sports cards shows with Wade or doll shows with Cate? Write those. Mark down going with the family to watch the Tar Heels. There is my book club, and there's PTA fundraising. Decorating the beach house. Sewing a Halloween costume. But there is always a corner into which some new friend, some new dream can be tucked. There was always room to add one more thing to the board. In the spring of 1996, my board was crammed full, and I had chalk in my hand.

And then Wade died.

In an instant, all of my blackboard was erased. And for the longest time, the blackboard stood empty. Nothing that I was doing before seemed important. And nothing I might do tomorrow seemed worthy. I could not have anything that I truly wanted other than my family. So I wrote nothing at all. And I did nothing at all. Day after day was the same. I went to the cemetery, I read, eventually I wrote, I tried to be a mother to our surviving daughter, Cate.

No place that Wade had not been was of interest to me. No one who did not know him was good company for me. I didn't eat, couldn't eat and became thin, but I did not want new clothes. He hadn't seen them, so I didn't want them. I wore a dress he called my bumble-dress even when it was two sizes too large. I had a narrow life that brought no joy but in which I felt safe, where I felt his memory was safe, where he seemed in a sense to be present. I did not yet trust his constant presence in my life. How much of him slipped away today. Would the boys who crowded into our house and played basketball in the backyard remember him next year or in a decade? How many of the details of his life, how much of the sound of his laughter would I be able to hold on to in that time?

I was changed. I so often felt outside of myself: the grieving mother, the once-solicitous friend, the dutiful parent of my surviving daughter, but all as if I am a puppeteer, stripped of the ability to evoke anything other than rudimentary motion in my puppet body. Real life is something other people had, something I once had and cannot imagine having again. The people we were are like characters in stories from a book; we are drawn to them, to their fullness and hope and happy naïveté, and yet we cannot reach them. It is nearly impossible to believe that once we were them. Where was the key that was going to put this right?

It was months later that I recognized there were no right answers, no elixir that would return me to the world where unbridled happiness was possible. Moving, not moving, being surrounded by their belongings, or being isolated from, these are the rearrangements of the physical and cannot reach a part of us that needs redesign. What I had to face was not something present, it was something absent. And although we can escape something's presence, there is no way to escape its absence. There was no place to go where he would not also be absent. So it was easy to say, what difference does it make where I am? But in practice, there are comforts and there are burdens in each choice. I wrote to a parent who had lost a son who had done carpentry work, “If you move, you do not have to look at Chris's fretwork and molding, and yet, if you move, you do not get to look at Chris's fretwork and molding.” For myself, I did not expect to move from the place where he was known, where now and again I could hear, “Yes, I remember him,” or where I might pass his friends on the street.

Wade is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, beneath an oak so old that John and I together cannot reach around it. Another oak had stood closer to the grave, but a storm felled it. All will pass in time. For the first years after he died, I went daily. On bad days, I would go twice. For months John went with me and then I went alone, sitting at Wade's grave reading to him. First the Bible, then Elie Wiesel's
Sages and Dreamers
, given to me by Glenn, Wade's godfather, and finally the reading list for high school seniors, the books we would have read together had he lived for his seventeenth year. I planted a garden at his grave and Thomas Sayre carved a bench faced in Cate's words and mine. I cleaned around his grave and I cleaned the headstones of children buried near him. I needed Wade to be a part of each day. I needed to tell him when his SAT scores came in, when a short story of his won a statewide award. It may sound strange to others, but it is what I had to do. Cormac McCarthy in
The Crossing
wrote that “time heals bereavement … at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back.… Speak with them.” I needed him, so I did.

I wanted to believe, needed to believe that on some plane Wade also needed me still, maybe needed me even more dead than alive since he could no longer direct the impact of his life himself. He had done all he could and now it was my job, my new way of parenting him: to protect his memory. But first I had to come to terms with the fact that it was a memory, that I wasn't going to get him back by praying or wishing or standing completely still so God could turn back time and let Wade live. I won't lie to you—that is what I was waiting for, that is why I could not write on the blackboard: I had to make it as easy as possible for God, as Edna St. Vincent Millay had said, to set back the world a little turn or two. I did not want a new story; I loved my old story so.

I could not change his room at home in any way at all. His backpack sat on the floor near the chair for years. Not days or weeks, but years. Why should I move it? What would that accomplish? And if I didn't move it, if I didn't change anything, he could walk right in. Millay captured this, too: “You are not here. I know that you are gone, and will not ever enter here again. And yet it seems to me, if I should speak, your silent step must wake across the hall; if I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes would kiss me from the door.” I read these words and fell into them. I cannot change the hall or his room unless I am willing to risk missing his sweet eyes kissing me from the door. That feeling—that you are waiting for him, that you need only wait and he will call or come—will not easily recede. What we know is apparently no match for what we need. All of my being said to accept my son's death, and some days I suppose I almost did. I'd seen his face, still and cold in the small morgue; I knew he was dead. And yet, it must not be true, it could not be true; love and justice have only to find a way to pry open death's fingers, I thought.

The truth, of course, is that the carousel ride—first forward in fits, then backward, only makes the ground spin and leaves us unable to walk even when the whirling stops. It is like the mocking, disturbing, contortions of the carousel in Ray Bradbury's
Sometimes Evil This Way Comes
, which Wade (and I, for I read what he read) was assigned in freshman English. And all the starts and fits and love and wishes and prayers are for naught, as no one gets what they want. In the end, every day was the same: The house was still quiet and the soil above his coffin undisturbed. The most I could wish for was the respite of sleep where logic had no dominion. I wanted him back so badly that the reasoning part of me, the part that had dominated my life until April 1996—the debater, the lawyer, the logic puzzle addict—laid down its arms, even in the daylight. I wanted my boy, and no amount of logic would stand in the way.