This was like the fifth time he did something like this around the smoking. When Aaron got something in his head like that, he just wouldn’t let it go. I lost it and we ended up having a screaming match in front of the whole school.
He took Cancer personally and couldn’t understand why I would be doing something that was known to cause it. I was seventeen then, I didn’t understand the power of addictions like I do now.
That was our first fight.
He was at La Familia with a dozen roses when I got off shift that night. He said, “I love you and want to keep you as long as I can.”
I lit a cigarette in front of him, flipped him the bird, and walked away, convinced he was like every other boy that had tried to control me.
But he never gave up. Not on me—that night he ran after me with those flowers and insisted on walking me home. After a few blocks we were holding hands—it wasn’t intentional, just habit—and I couldn’t stay mad at him.
He kept on me about the smoking, but never did it again in a public place. For him I tried to quit smoking that year, but it didn’t stick.
Aaron turned eighteen on May 15, 1979. He took me up to Cedar Breaks to celebrate and rented us a little cabin in nearby Brian Head.
He took me out to see those bristlecone pine trees of his that he talked about. The park is at 10,000 feet and because of the spring snow, the park was closed to vehicles and we had to rent a snowmobile and then snowshoe through the gorgeous, snow-covered red- and salmon-colored rocks. He told me the story of his father taking him there when he was six. He told me that he too may be stunted and twisted, but he was still here. That he would fight for the beauty of life as long as he could. He told me that I was what he fought so hard to live for.
That night at dinner in a nice Brian Head restaurant, he kept looking at his watch. In fact, he was so nervous about getting us there on time for the reservation that he drove me a bit crazy. But it was a nice dinner and after desert he started looking at his watch every thirty seconds.
“What is with you?” I asked.
He looked at me, blinked a few times, and said, “Just five more minutes.”
I shook my head, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“And I’ll be eighteen,” he said, looking at his watch again. “I was born at 8:33 p.m.”
I still didn’t get it, but when the five minutes were up, he took a little jewelry box out of his pocket, got down on one knee in front of me, and asked me to marry him. This was his first act as a legal adult.
I blubbered and cried and said yes. Of course I said yes. There was clapping around us as I pulled Aaron up and kissed him, but I didn’t see any of them. All I could see were his happy blue eyes.
We got married on June 21, 1979, in a lovely ceremony in the Cedar City Cemetery. Aaron insisted. He wanted Big Ed Lopez to be there for it and Lionel too. It was summer solstice, the same day two years earlier where Aaron had proved to me that he really could see Lionel. Despite all the craziness of his near-death experience, he said he owed the ghosts his life and that they had brought us together. How could we do it anywhere else?
It was the talk of the town, believe me. In a small town like Cedar, the tongues wagged. No wedding was ever talked about as much as that one. About fifty uninvited people showed up just to gawk.
Aaron didn’t care and I didn’t either. We were married by Pastor West right in front of Aaron’s Uncle Don’s grave (he wanted to do it on the grave, but I put my foot down on that).
Billy and his whole family were there. Aaron’s parents. My parents—my dad brought my mom up for it, she had a good day and enjoyed being out of the care home. Fran and a huge gang from La Familia were there too.
I got to wear white and Aaron was dressed in a tux. Billy was his best man and I had Aaron’s mom Laura as my maid of honor.
At the end of the ceremony when we had a brief quiet moment, Aaron leaned over and whispered, “Do you think Lionel and Ann Edwards are here? Do you think they are happy now that they are together?”
I had to smile. He was such a romantic, he even wanted the murderous ghosts to have a happily ever after.
We had a huge party at La Familia afterwards and that night I moved in to Aaron’s little room with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
We had a few good months until the headaches started and the diagnosis hit. It wasn’t perfect—Aaron’s fastidiousness clashed with my sloppiness—but we were in love.
After the diagnosis, he went down fast. He fought hard, so hard, but it wasn’t enough. I said I wouldn’t talk about this, and I won’t, but there is one thing I should mention.
When it was clear how dire his diagnosis was, we tried to get pregnant. Actually, I asked, then begged, and then we fought. He didn’t think it was a responsible thing to do—father a child he might never see. I told him that if he wasn’t going to make it that I needed (desperately) something of him when he was gone.
I had almost lost him already so there was a sense of realism from everyone around the Cancer moving to his brain. He eventually agreed to do it for me and we tried. As much as his energy would allow, we tried. But it didn’t work. I feel bad about dragging him to a fertility specialist in Vegas when he was fighting Cancer, but I was desperate. As it turns out Aaron was sterile. One of his treatments along the way had done it. This wasn’t a surprise for any of us, and that just made me feel worse.
I lost it that day and cried in the backseat of the car the whole way home. It was Aaron’s father that drove us to the appointment. When we got back to the house, Aaron left the car without a word. There was so much he endured so gracefully, but my grief wasn’t something he could be present for.
“There’s still hope,” Henry, his father, said after Aaron was gone.
I snuffled and nodded. “I know.”
“We have to hope,” he said, his eyes so sad I started crying again.
And we did hope. Every day we hoped he would start to get better. Every day Aaron fought like a champion to stay alive, to stay positive, to enjoy the moments he had.
And then one day that fight ended. I was holding his hand.
Life has its strange twists and turns, as it has for all of us that were there with Aaron in the late seventies. I thought I would update you on us all. Where we are now, what has happened to us in the post-Aaron era.
Pastor West stayed at the Lutheran Church for two more years. And then in what must be called a cliché, he fell in love with Lisa Collins, his secretary, and ran off with her. Last I heard, he’s at another church up in Oregon.
Billy Chadow married a lovely woman of Asian descent in 1981. He met her on the campus of Southern Utah University. They are still happily married with six kids and five grandchildren. Billy became an accountant and now runs one of Cedar’s biggest accounting firms. He still loves comic books and I’m sure he still has a place in his heart for Barbara Bach.
Henry and Laura Wade were divorced in 1980. It was probably the most civilized divorce known to man. Henry kept Cedar Books and Such, and Laura kept most of the proceeds from the sale of the house. In 1981, she moved to California, where she remarried a few years later. I think there was too much of Aaron here for her then. Henry kept teaching for a few more years but hired someone to manage the bookstore and wasn’t there that much. I think there was too much Aaron there for him. It was “their” place, after all.
He eventually moved to Las Vegas to teach at a college there. He retained ownership of the bookstore until the early nineties and would be in town pretty often.
Henry and Laura have both been retired for a few years, and while I wouldn’t call them best friends, they still do talk from time to time. And Laura has told me that when they do talk, they usually talk about Aaron and that is actually a good thing now.
And now we’re down to me. I took Aaron’s death hard. Real hard. At first, I was mad at him and then I was mad at god, and during that time I would gladly be mad at anyone that got in my way (more so
than my teenage norm).
I told you that our wedding was a big deal for a little town, so was the funeral. Aaron was buried next to his Uncle Don right where we met, right where we got married. That spot holding so much of him, of us, was not something I could bear.
Reading Aaron’s words has been hard, it has brought me right back to all that happened and has made his loss seem so real again. The tears that I thought I long ago left behind on this have come back in force. I told Aaron so many times that I was strong, that I didn’t break easily, that I could take it, but his death broke me. A loss like that should break you, otherwise what kind of person are you, what kind of love did you experience? Aaron’s death broke all of us.
After he died, I moved back in with my father. I worked at La Familia and drank too much. Way too much. Six months later it took Aaron’s parents, Billy and his family, Pastor West, and my father staging an intervention to get me off that path. I went into rehab and got some counseling and started going to AA meetings. Actually, it took a lot of counseling to get my head straight.
Aaron’s mother, Laura, and I became very close. We shared a grief. Aaron was her son, he was my love. She took me on as her mission and wouldn’t stop until I was cleaned up and on a better path. No matter how I yelled and raged at her, she wouldn’t stop. I think she transferred all her maternal energies from Aaron to me. I was her daughter and she was my mother. I don’t think I would have made it without her.
I ended up moving to Sacramento where Laura had landed and going to nursing school there. We still talk several times a week and she is still a mother to me.
There are just too many loose ends to wrap up quickly here. And I think “loose” ends is a good way to put it, illustrating how our lives intertwine, tangle, and fray. My own mother died a couple of decades ago and I felt so bad for being away from Cedar, for not seeing her but once or twice a year, but Laura was a mother to me again then and helped me come to terms with it. She really is my mother, ever since I was seventeen.
It’s been a long, long road getting over Aaron. Actually, that’s not true. I’m not over him, and while I wouldn’t trade our time for anything, the ending still hurts. I still feel short changed by how little time we had.
I’m fifty-seven now. I’ve been married twice more, have a son and a granddaughter, and I’m still not quite over the boy I met in a graveyard in 1977 that could see a ghost.
After a long time away, I am back in Cedar City. I’m on my own now. I divorced my second husband, and my third died of a heart attack a year ago. Aaron was the only man whose name I took, and maybe that wasn’t fair to my other husbands. I don’t think I really understood why I did it at the time, but I think I was just holding on to part of him. I wanted to see the Wade at the end of my name even if it did hurt for the longest time.
My father’s been retired for a while and he is at the point where he needs a little help, so I’m back in the house I was born in.
I am still nursing and I guess I have Aaron as well as his mother to thank for that. It was the nurses that made Aaron’s time in the medical system bearable. The nurses were the ones that nurtured, that cared about the quality of his experience, not just his survival. They (and Laura) inspired me to want to do the same, and I have for nearly thirty-five years.
My granddaughter is coming out for the month of August this year. She’s going to stay with my father and me. I spent a lot of years trying to distance myself from 1977. But now that I’m back, now that Aaron’s diaries have been turned into this book, I feel the need to remember.
I’m going to tell Stella, my granddaughter, all about him. I’m going to walk her by the old Wade house. Take her to where La Familia used to be (it’s a Greek restaurant now). I’m going to show her the Adam’s Memorial Shakespearean Theatre, the tree Aaron and I used to meet under on campus, and the place where Cedar Books and Such used to be (it’s still a bookstore but has a different name).
The theatre that they opened in 1977 is no longer in use. They’ve replaced it with something bigger and more modern across the street. Word is that the Adam’s is going to get torn down one of these days. I hate it. Aaron was so excited about the theatre and what it would mean to Cedar, and indeed the Utah Shakespeare Festival has grown as has Cedar City, but I really hate that they’re done with that theatre.
I haven’t been able to walk into the bookstore yet. I’ve only been there once since Aaron died to see his father, Henry. I lost it. Completely. After that we’d meet at other places. Too much of Aaron in that bookstore. Maybe with Stella and all the years in between I’ll have the courage to walk in.
I’m going to take her to the graveyard and show her where her grandmother was first married and where the first man she loved is buried. I’ve driven by a few times but haven’t stopped.
In the early days I would go, I would stroll the narrow roads under the cottonwood and firs and cry and talk to Aaron as if he was a ghost, as if he was there, needing to believe he could hear me. Ghosts are real. I know that, but I have no idea if Aaron was a ghost then. In my heart, I know he’s not there anymore. It would be a terrible shame if he was there all these years later.
And I’m going to take her up to Cedar Breaks and out to Aaron’s bristlecone pine tree. I’m going to let her gaze on its twisted trunk and limbs and tell her all about Aaron. About how we can be like the bristlecone and endure so much. How, if we love with all our heart, who we are endures long after we’re gone.
Stella is seven. I think she’s old enough to absorb some of this. I hope so. And in any case, it will do me good to remember the good times and the passion Aaron and I shared.
The last word Aaron said before he lapsed into a coma was, “quality.” It started as a long conversation about quality versus quantity, an idea his father had talked to him about early on in his Cancer journey. About how we all had limited time, so we had to make the best of it. In the end, we shortened it to the one word. When things were tough one of us would say “quality” to the other.
After he said it, I squeezed his hand as his eyes fluttered closed. He took his last breath five hours later and I was still holding his hand.
God, he was such a weird kid, but I loved him so.
Helena Monfort-Wade
June 2017
Cedar City, Utah
Afterword
This book has taken a very long time. Much longer than my first novel, even. I drafted it at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 and then things got intense with my mother’s care and then she died on the last day of 2016, and then…
Well, I had a backlog of books to get out that were in a similar state and I was not sure if I was going to write anymore. My mother had dementia and her last few years were very difficult. Dealing with her disease, all of her things, her finances… it was an honor to be there for her, to try to give back some of the gift she gave me in bringing me into this world, but it was so very hard. At the start of 2017, I didn’t know if I wanted to be so busy, to add all the time writing and producing and marketing books on top of my day job.
And this book. It deals with family, a boy growing up in the seventies in a high desert town with a mother he had a complicated relationship with. Laura Wade is not my mother, but I did grow up in a high desert town (Arizona not Utah) and my family wasn’t exactly normal (in different ways than the Wade family). So I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do anything with this book.
My wife, Aleia, is my first reader. That means I read my stories to her first, before anyone else sees them. She’s often cooking with me sitting in the hallway, reading to the wonderful sounds and smells of her amazing culinary creations. It’s become something we both love, a way for us to share this strange thing I take so much time doing.
In early 2017 when we were still numb from what we’d been through, Aleia wanted me to read to her so I pulled this manuscript out. I hadn’t looked at in nearly four years and… well, it was good. I had enough distance that it really seemed like I could see it
a lot more clearly than most of my books and it was good. Really good.
Spending those many hours reading to her, cleaning up the manuscript, immersing in Aaron’s life was healing. Not completely, but I could start to breath a bit deeper and I remembered why I love to write so much and I knew I had to get this book out. It still needed work. I had to get the location right. I needed to review all the medical stuff and make sure it worked for the time period. But I had to get it out.
This book is why I kept writing, why I am still writing. This book helped me come back to myself after a very difficult time.
I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope you have family in your life (biological or chosen)—they are what makes this precious life worth living.
Robert J. McCarter
August, 2019
P.S. Cedar City and the Utah Shakespeare Festival are wonderful. Aleia and I discovered it sometime in the 90s when we were exploring the stunning beauty of southern Utah. Cedar is close to all those parks and does an amazing job with the plays. We got to see a play there for the first time in a while in 2018 while we were there doing my last bits of research to finish this book.
If you are in the area, do check it out. Highly recommended. And there’s a nice bookstore right on Main Street. When I walk in, it feels to me like Aaron and his dad used to run the place, like Helena and Billy used to come visit. Like all of this really happened.
Acknowledgments
So many people to thank on this one.
First off, my wife Aleia, without whom this book would not exit.
To my mother, who I dedicated this book to. Our relationship was not simple or easy, but she always loved me and she valued family above everything. I love her and I miss her. I think she would have liked this story.
Unlike many of my books, I am very aware of the inspirations for this book:
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