A Good Death

 

Picture from the Juneau Empire files

 

 

For my grandfather, Bill Ray

 

 

These are the sounds after a quick death following a long life: The telephone rings are steady, but not constant. Arrangements are made swiftly, with no big decisions, discussions or surprises. Voices are calm. You hear a lot of sighs. Only a thin layer of shock drifts by, like a cirrus cloud.

 

My grandfather lived to be 91. We loved each other and said so in later years, but we didn’t speak often. He was strong-willed and difficult with those he loved the most. He was a storyteller and a lawmaker. A liquor hawker. A secret-keeper and a gold collector. He was a name caller. A fisherman and a painter and a writer.

He was a child of the universe who was here, and now isn’t.

A constellation of ancestors, long twists and turns of accident or fate. A mother’s eyes, a grandfather’s nose. The birth name, Will, that he grew into, but later changed.

My best memories of him are when he told stories. He sits at a table, one hand on his coffee mug. He is already laughing, his eyes shining with anticipation. “This is a good one,” he says. “Wait until you hear this one.”

It’s the one where his father’s dog, Whitey, fell out of the fishing boat, perilously close to the falls. “‘What’d you do, Dad?’ I asked him.”
‘I said, So long, Whitey!”

He shakes his head and chuckles, his laugh still sturdy among the laughs of his listeners.

I wish I had listened better, had a better memory. I wish I’d written the stories down instead of letting them sing by, all wisps and trails. I wonder where do all those stories go when we die? Do they live on, swirling and hanging in the air where he was? In the cells of his great grandchildren who he never met? In the pages he wrote?

 

“Reaaad boooook, Mama,” my daughter says, pattering over to me.

She hands me Goodnight Moon. Her eyes are big and blue, her cheeks full and smooth. I start reading, my eyes taking in the flat greens and tomato reds of the book. By the time I get to And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush, I am in tears.

All those goodnights. The words of the book, a childhood favorite, reach back through my mind, unlocking the little girl inside of me. The one whose grandpa was larger than life, full of laughs and stories. He was big and handsome. He slipped her sips of beer in the kitchen. Sent her postcards when he travelled. He appeared on the radio and TV, making jokes and laws.
 

These are the sounds after a good death: Quiet sobs. Voices on the phone, shaky, but not shattered. Patter of small feet, new tales unfolding. Goodnight stars, goodnight air. The rush of memories, of stories, rising and falling, lifting into the sky.

 

Connections

image by Bas van de Wiel

For John Witham
 

I first set eyes on Portland on Valentine’s Day of 1998. I was 23. A friend and I were road tripping across America, and I wanted to see the city I’d read about in Stephen King novels.

We arrived in the evening, taking Congress Street to the east end and then looping back into downtown. The sidewalks were piled with snow, and the lights of restaurants and shops along the street glowed. Just a month earlier had been the famous ice storm, leaving power lines and branches laden with glistening ice. I don't remember noticing the paper hearts that peppered the city, the work of the famous Valentine's Day bandit. But as we walked the city that night, passing I felt like some warm, braided force was tugging at my feet through the packed snow, through the brick and cobblestone sidewalks and the earth buried below. I had left Alaska with a broken heart, and there was something about Portland that seeped into that empty part of me.

I met John when we parked my car in the lot he attended. He was warm and friendly, and he waved each time we retrieved my little red Subaru. When I told him the next day that Portland felt right to me and I might come back, he grinned.

**

My friend and I drove down to Florida, then to Mardi Gras, and then to Memphis, where we had tickets for a G Love concert. Lovesick, I thought of Portland the whole way. My friend caught an airplane back to Alaska. I headed north, then east.

**

John’s faced curved into a big smile when he saw me return to his parking lot. Over the weeks and months to come, he was a grounding force. I was 4000 miles away from Alaska and everyone I had ever loved.

John took me out to watch bluegrass at a pub between his parking lot and the Everett Hotel, where I was staying. Over cigarettes and drinks, we talked about his love of music and how I wanted to be a writer. The warm twang of the banjos and fiddles swirled around us. 

 
Another time at another bar, I watched him play. His stage name was the Hollerin’ Man, and I enjoyed his wholehearted bellow as he strummed his guitar. He played North to Alaska, dedicating it to me.
 

I sensed that John had a little crush on me, but he was twice my age and he never tried to cross the line of our friendship. He was kind and affable, but there was a sadness to him, too. A loneliness that didn’t seem to bother trying to hide. It spilled out into his voice when he sang. It scared me a little, because I recognized it as something I felt all too often. Something I see in so many creative, sensitive people, who often turn to addictions to try and dull that ache, that seeking. I could tell that John drank too much. He had a son who I don’t think he saw often, but when he talked about him, I could see the pride rise off of him like steam.

John helped me find a small apartment just steps away from my new job at Coffee By Design. The apartment was tiny, and I would crouch in the bath after work to scrub the coffee smell off of my skin. At night, through the wall by my bed, I often heard my neighbor having sex. Somehow that sound of connection through the paper-thin walls made me feel lonelier than ever. But I had a place to stay, and I was grateful to John for helping me.

As time passed, I made friends with co-workers who were closer to me in age, and I saw John less. When we did run into each other, he always had that big smile, and that sadness pooling just beneath.

I had been living in Portland for just under a year when my brother died. I went home to Alaska. I had a return airplane ticket, but I kept pushing the date further and further back.

For the next year, I lived with my parents again. I went to grief groups and wrote letters to my dead brother. I sat on the porch behind my brother’s rusting basketball hoop and smoked. I stared into the sky, looking for signs that he was still out there somewhere.

Sometimes I wondered about the life I’d left in Maine, and whether I’d find the strength to leave my parents again and return to what I’d started to build there.

**

In 2002, I returned to Portland.

Within the first weeks of being back, I was introduced to Scott. I got a job. I started recovery for my food issues. I bought a house. With surprisingly little effort, my life was being woven.

A few years later, I saw John. I had heard that he’d stopped drinking. We smiled at each other and he waved. He looked thin. I ducked away before we could catch up with each other. Maybe I was afraid of that sadness in him, and that it might still be lurking in me, too. Maybe I was tired or hungry. I regret that I didn’t go up to him and thank him. For his kindness, for helping me grow roots in Portland.

**

Recently, I found John occupying my thoughts. I hadn’t seen him in years, so I searched the internet to see if he was still local.

I found out John had died a few weeks before my son was born. While I was waiting, belly bursting, he was dying of liver disease. My son was born eleven years and one day after I’d met John.

I read about John’s life. I learned that after being diagnosed with liver disease, he’d received a transplant. The experience bled into his music. He’d gotten sober, written and sang about his second chance. Then his illness worsened.

I thought about how thin and tenuous the strands of our lives can feel, the way one person can appear and our entire course changes. I don’t know if I would’ve stayed in Portland without John’s friendliness and help. If I hadn’t stayed in Portland, my whole life would be different. My children, if I had them, would have different faces. Maybe I would be in Seattle or Alaska or Spain. Sometimes it feels like our lives are like bumper cars, colliding and shifting course, a fragile fate.

I wish I could sit with John over a warm cup of coffee. We would catch up and talk about music and writing. We would talk about our sons. I would say: Thank you for your kindness. For your smile. You changed my life. My good, good life. Thank you.

** 

“I’m taller than J.D., right Mom?” Max asked me this morning. Everything for him is a competition right now. I find it unnerving.

“Yes, you are. Some people are taller than others, some are smaller. People come in all different sizes and shapes,” I told him.

“But not shapes, Mom!” I paused and tried to squint through his four-year-old perspective. ‘Shapes’ to him means triangles and hexagons, not pear-shaped or muscular, top heavy or petite.

“Okay. But people are all different. But we’re also the same.” He looked at me. “I’m going to go play some music now.”

I said, “Okay.”

I want to tell him that we, like most everything, are made of the ancient dust of exploded stars. That our DNA is 99.9% the same. That the electric energy of the human heart extends several feet past where our skin stops. That we are all born lonely, and too many of us do crazy things to try and fight it. That the people running our country and the person in the little yellow car who just cut me off are different but the same. That the music he just ran off to play might be inherited from his uncle or his grandfather, who both died years before Max was born. That I had a friend named John who loved music, too. That our connections are like spider webs, sometimes invisible, sometimes glimmering. That sometimes we meet people who pivot us in different directions, for better or for worse, and we are forever changed. 



Is there someone who appeared like an angel at a turning point in your life?

Stains

This is from a prompt from my writing group last night.

Blueberry Hill, which I was sure the famous song had been written about, could be accessed just down the street from our house. I’d head up the little winding trail with my brother or my best friend, clutching empty yellow plastic margarine containers in my hands.

I turned the berries over with the pads of my fingers to quickly ensure the berries were whole; round, unblemished, wormless. I knew my mom would soak them in a big bowl of water and salt, evacuating the worms and leaving the rotten fruit to rise to the top of the bowl.

It was the summer I was freshly nine. The summer Cynthia Elrod was murdered. Everyone was talking about it; the murderer had not been caught, and we all knew that since you could only escape Juneau by boat or airplane, the killer had either hopped the next plane to Seattle, or he was still roaming amidst us and would soon erupt and kill someone else.

I didn’t know Cynthia, but her mom ran the store in the valley where we shopped for jeans. I’d skimmed enough in the newspaper to know that whoever had done this to her had cut her up. The pieces that had made her Cynthia—I can still see the small, grainy black and white newspaper picture with her short hair and plain, young face—those pieces were left in the bathtub of her mobile home. I remember the words “partially clad” in the article on her death, which was, and still is, unsolved. How foreign and clipped the word ‘clad’ seemed.

I don’t know why, but one rainy day playing in my bedroom, I told my best friend Jill that I had killed Cynthia. She didn’t believe me and so I got more and more insistent, until my friend finally yelled, “I’m going to tell my dad!”  
“Oh, I was totally kidding. Please don’t tell your dad!” Her dad was my godfather, but he had once told me, “I’m going to pound you into the ground,” and the words had made my heart pound. Jill went home early that day.

I can still feel the seed of shame I felt after telling her the grisly lie. I still wonder what gripped me to say something so terrible about that poor killed girl.

That same summer, Dr. Moss’ daughter had been killed by her boyfriend, who then turned his gun on himself in a driveway. I didn’t know his daughter either, but he gave me stinging allergy shots in my right bicep every week. A few times a year he would listen to my heart while I watched his serious face, waiting to hear if the murmur in my heart was still there. I kept watching his face after that summer, trying to gauge if it had gotten more serious now that he had a dead daughter.

I was picking blueberries on Blueberry Hill late that summer. I was plopping the first layer of berries into the cup when I heard sirens. They were far away; maybe across Gastineau channel, downtown, or maybe out near the hospital. But I heard them. I absorbed them. It felt like they were inside me—roaring and pulsing, buzzing and zapping and I stopped mid-pick, my hands stained purple from the berries, my eyes, wide and scared. What had happened now, in this tiny town that was everything I knew? Who had been killed now? I ran home, the yellow bottom of the cup still visible.

 

 

Chatterbox

I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I just flashed back to a ferry trip I took 11 years ago. For three days, I rode the ferry from my hometown of Juneau, Alaska to Bellingham, Washington.

The slow, quiet rocking gave me time to process a major transition. One of my closest friends had just died unexpectedly. I had finally, after eight years, graduated with my BA, and I was preparing to leave the west coast for Maine. For the second time. For three days I slept in a sweet, tiny cabin with windows looking out to the silver grey sea. I wrote in my journal. I stared at the waves, trying to conjure up an image of what the next part of my life would be like.

 

Partway through, I was eating alone in the ferry cafeteria. At the next booth over, a woman sat with her very chatty young son. “Why does that woman only have one leg?” the boy asked his mother. I knew who he was referring to; I had seen the passenger on the boat with just one leg.
“Well, I’m not sure why,” his mother said.
“But how does she walk? Does she hop?” I spied the young boy grabbing a French fry. “The lady with one leg goes hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop,” he sang, to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.”
I silently dipped a curly fry into a pale plastic container of tartar sauce. The mother tried to explain why sometimes people only have one leg. I couldn’t believe she was letting him dramatically reenact this woman’s handicap with greasy ferry fries.


Today, my four-year-old son has been talking since he woke up at 5:30 this morning. My husband needed to work this morning, so except for a blissful break at my gym, which boasts free child care, my ears have been steadily assaulted all morning.

We picked my husband up and the four of us headed out to lunch, where the verbal parade continued. The part that most frustrates me is that the majority of what my son says makes no sense. “If you’re doing what you can do, you might think there’s two people.” Oh, okay. Right.

As I tried to enjoy my sweet potato wedges and veggie sandwich, Max’s one way conversation took a new turn.

“Does everybody have rolls in their neck?” he asked. I followed his gaze past my toddler daughter, who had managed to cram most of a piece of toast into her mouth. My eyes stopped at an older woman at a nearby table. I instantly knew he was referring to the saggy hammock of skin beneath her chin.
“Does everybody have them?” he asked again.
“No, not everybody does,” I whispered.
“But that lady does!” he said, pointing.
“Maxie, if she heard you say that, it might hurt her feelings,” my husband, Scott, explained. “Oh,” Max said. “I didn’t know women could eat those,” he said, pointing to my veggie sandwich.
“Huh,” I said. “Maxie, women can eat anything men can.”
“Oh. I KNOW. But I’m saying, I didn’t know WOMEN could eat that.”
“Okay…” I trailed off, hoping he would, too.
“That man is smalllll,” Max announced.
“Shhh,” my husband said.
“But why? That is a small man!”
“Shhh. Eat your rice.”
For half a second, the rice effectively blocked any words from departing Max’s mouth.

Then, a young woman entered the restaurant, assisting an older woman who walked with a cane.
“Why is she helping her? Why does that lady have a sad face? Why is that lady so small! But look, right now her face is sad!”
“I don’t think she has a sad face,” Scott said.
“But she just did! She just did have a sad face!” I glanced at the woman, who had the taut, frozen frown of a stroke victim. We briefly, quietly, attempted to explain that the younger woman was helping her walk, because sometimes people need help.
“Eat your rice.”

 I see the scene I witnessed all those years ago on the ferry differently now. The mother had been locked up on a boat with her little curious chatterbox for 48 hours straight. She had probably been fielding questions about whales and French fries and captains and barnacles and ladies with one leg for most of that time. She probably wanted to poke her eyes out but she knew if she did, her son would ask her why she didn’t have any eyes and what could he put in the holes where her eyes used to be and maybe he would try to make a French fry eyehole sculpture.

I love that my son is curious, as was my cafeteria mate on the ferry all those years ago. Max is beginning to notice peoples’ differences. That some of us are old or have different shades of skin. Some of us have neck wattles and are short. I love that he is trying to understand this beautiful, aching world. I just wish he would take a breath once in awhile. Wish I could, for just a few hours, float on a ferry in the mostly quiet in-between.