A heavy rain moved in, unlike anything we’d had in months. The first rain of that long, hot summer. The first relief I can remember. We sat there in my dead little sister’s living room, on the furniture that we would take ourselves or give away or drag out to the alley and abandon in the days to come, and we listened. To the booming thunder. To the pelting of the raindrops on the roof. We didn’t say a word. We just listened. To the sound of Lydia’s departure.
I went to my house and picked up my dog and headed over to my parents’ house. Anna was already there with her husband, Sam. We sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Wept until our chests hurt, until our sternums literally ached.
You’re saying literally too much.
My father was inside a Guantanamo Bay jail cell when he got the news. He and Anna had joined a group that tries to get wrongfully imprisoned detainees out. The Gitmo Lawyers. Pro bono work. They’d both been down there a number of times by that point. Anna had to make the call to my dad, patched through who knows how many military connections before some jarhead had to pull him aside.
Mr. Holland, you have a call.
He was with his client Ahmed at the time, a man eight years into a post-9/11 detainment, a man my father would eventually spring. Long after that horrible day, my dad told me how Ahmed held him there in that cell, among the soccer magazines and expensive olive oils he had requested my father bring him; how the burden of representation shifted from prisoner to counsel in that moment, humanity over injustice.
“My problems are nothing,” he told him. “Go. Go home to your family.”
They airlifted my father out. Flew him to Jamaica, then Miami, then on to Denver, alone in his grief for some twenty hours. He was there the next day, the new patriarch of a shattered family. His baby daughter dead and gone.
I was supposed to go to a Rockies game the night of Lydia’s death, with the girl I was seeing, Katie. It was a big deal. We hadn’t gone on many dates. I was so closed off. But she was trying to get in and I was trying to let her; to stop navel-gazing my way through life like a stand-up comic and share myself instead; learn about someone else for a change. We both loved baseball, our Rockies. We were excited.
I called her up and told her what happened. She was so stunned she couldn’t even respond. Later that night she came over to my parents’ house. I met her outside, on the street. She’d never met my family. We had barely started dating. This was not the time. But she knew Lydia. She had met her at the Squire open mic a handful of times. And she felt my devastation. I could see it on her face. We walked down Montview to City Park. We walked around the lake, watching the bats fly low over the water spearing insects. We didn’t say a word. What was there to say? So I mouthed the only words I could think of, neurotically, over and over and over again, head down, barely paying attention to Katie.
Rest in peace, little doodle.
We staged a beautiful service. In Anna’s backyard. We had to police the numbers, the outpouring was so immense. So many were affected by her, enraptured by her. The little genius, suffering muse. Her collection of Colorado Springs misfit friends made the trek, heartbroken. There were more artists and musicians and comics assembled there than I had ever seen in one place. Her best friend Heather, Anna, myself, and my dad all spoke. My mom lay in Anna’s bedroom and listened, away from the crowd. That’s why we had chosen Anna’s house for the service. So my mom could be there without attending. She was so broken she couldn’t even stand. She opened the windows so she could hear the eulogies from the second story where she lay in her eldest daughter’s bed and listened to the funeral of her youngest. After my remarks I went and lay next to her and we listened to my dad’s voice boom over the PA, sounding like some great orator from years past. He went on and on and on, ten pages worth. He had so much to say. Normally we would tease him for being long-winded. That day every word was a gift. We could have listened forever. We smiled at his words; we laughed at his loving descriptions; we cried at his pain, because it was ours.
Lydia’s singer-songwriter friend closed the ceremony by singing “Amazing Grace” and playing guitar. We didn’t know he was going to; he just broke into it. It so moved my mother that she got out of bed and joined the mourners, left her post in Anna’s bed and headed down the stairs and into the backyard. Everyone wanted to hug her, the gutted matriarch, and she graciously received them all. We all took turns holding my nephew Henry and my new niece Sylvie in our arms. We practically fought over them. We needed them so badly in that moment. They helped remind us that this family, this lineage, would move forward. It did not stop here. It was not dead and gone. Even though Lydia was.
Of course the second they left our arms, it was impossible to remember that. It felt like everything was slipping away.
People say the service helped them. It did nothing for me. Funerals are not for the family. They are for the others. Families aren’t afforded the luxury of having one place to deposit their grief; there’s just too much. Especially with a suicide. It spills out everywhere. It’s impossible to contain.
We went out for drinks that night and more people came, those who didn’t feel right attending a service that was supposedly just friends and family, but people who wanted to pay their respects nonetheless. I drank with them all. I accepted every one of their shot offers. I did it a lot in the months that followed. We closed down the bar that night, everyone blindly shit-canned, many sobbing. It was like some ferociously tragic scene in a coming-of-age movie that Lydia and I would check out at the Esquire on a Monday at midnight. She would have loved it.
Our in-boxes filled with condolences, our mail slots with letters, our porches with flowers. Someone kept knitting small red hearts and leaving them on our fence posts and doorknobs. It was all so nice, so thoughtful and heartfelt. And none of it helped at all. People wrote little cards and notes and every one just reminded us of a pain we had never forgotten in the first place. Not even for a second. So we just thanked them for their kind thoughts while we lumbered forward broken, trudging through the haze, day after nightmarish day. The Magnificent Cayton-Hollands, down a core member. The best family in the world, now four, not five.
As a creative type you tend to self-mythologize. And in that solipsism it’s impossible not to wonder what the point of the whole story is; what it all revolves around, the through-line, the arc. And then one day it hits you like a ton of bricks, like a bullet to your little sister’s fucking head: oh, this is it. This is what the story has been all about. All that time you spent thinking it revolved around you, you weren’t even the main character, you idiot.
She was.
And now she’s gone.
So you walk around, lesser, with a giant void inside of yourself and you pray that you can close the book on this story soon and move on to another. Which, of course, you can’t. Because this is the story. The only story. What happened to Lydia, that’s your cornerstone, the event around which you now calibrate yourself, your narrative. Your family’s narrative. All your stories are linked to this one, irrevocably. Everything that happens to you from here on out, it will always come back to this new horrific truth. It will always be a story of how the world became a sadder, crueler place for you. Your life will forever be viewed through a lens of profound absence.
Until the day you join her on the other side.
MEMORIES WITHOUT HER
We rented a house outside Fort Collins soon after Lydia died, in Roosevelt National Forest, near the Red Feather Lakes. We had to do something. We were just barely limping along. It was important to try to make new memories together as a family, memories without her. That’s what one of the shrinks my parents went to suggested anyway. That we start building up new experiences without the deceased as soon as possible. As if we had a choice. Every experience since July 31, 2012, was without the deceased. Every night I sobbed until my rib cage hurt; every time I instinctively went to call her and see what she was up to and remembered Oh yeah. All I had done was rack up memories without Lydia, mem
ories I didn’t want. I didn’t see how sitting in a house together with the nuclear unit minus one was going to do anything to help us move past Lydia’s suicide. But here we were.
This is what broken families do. One foot in front of the other. Rent a mountain house. Cook meals together. Sit in the hot tub. Play Trivial Pursuit. Attempt normalcy.
Anna brought Sam and her two kiddos, Henry and Sylvie. Henry was three at the time. Sylvie was not even six months old. Sam had offered to keep the kids, to let his wife go be with her brother and parents and grieve, but Anna wanted them there. This experience involved them too whether we liked it or not; this was now a plot twist in their narratives as well. The ghost of Aunt Lydia. Mom’s sister. Henry was cognizant of what was happening. They had to explain death to him, the same way my parents had to help me with those starving African children in the commercials. And Sylvie felt the weight of the blow whether she knew it or not. After Lydia’s death Anna could barely produce enough breast milk to feed her baby. She was too weak.
The house was beautiful, with a huge deck that looked out over an enormous rock outcropping, from the top of which you could see all the way to Wyoming. You could see all the damage from the recent fires. We climbed it every day, mostly myself and Sam, but sometimes my dad too. After we became more familiar with the terrain, Sam decided Henry should come with us. It wasn’t all that difficult and Sam would bring along the baby carrier so he could throw Henry on his back if need be. Anna was nervous about the idea, understandably overprotective. Sam politely insisted. It would be fine. We set off together through the grasslands one morning, Henry excited to be out there with the defining men of his young existence: Papi, Dad, Uncle Adam. My mom and Anna called after him from the deck. He looked back at them, blowing on their steaming mugs of coffee and tea. They were waving at him, smiling. Henry laughed and waved back.
When we were kids my aunt and uncle and cousins came out to visit from Virginia and we took them up to Rocky Mountain National Park for the day. We had a picnic lunch in a remote field deep in the park, and when Lydia was done she asked if she could go play. My mom told her to stay where we could see her. Lydia said she would, but after a while she headed off toward a small cluster of trees on the far side of the clearing; they were all huddled out in front of the wall of the forest, like a portico into the woods. My mom yelled at her to turn around and come back but Lydia either couldn’t hear her or pretended not to. She was exploring.
“Goddamn it,” my mom said. “What’s the one thing I told her not to do?”
From the far side of the clearing, to our right, we noticed movement. One by one a herd of elk emerged from the woods. There must have been two dozen, led by two impressive males. It was almost mating season, when visitors flock to the park to witness the iconic bugling of the Rocky Mountain elk. It’s also when the animals are at their most dangerous. Not a year went by that you didn’t hear about some dumb tourist in Estes Park getting charged or trampled or gored because they got too close. Now a herd of them was heading directly for Lydia. We tried to distract them, to veer them off their course. We stood up and yelled and waved our hands. But they were steadfast. They continued along their path undeterred, eventually disappearing into the small thicket that contained my little sister. We went silent, held our breath. We listened for sounds of . . . anything. Time moved so slowly. Then the first elk emerged on the other side of the grove, then the next, finally the entire heard. Once they were safely out of sight, Lydia emerged from the cluster of trees as well, from the opposite side that the elk had exited. She ran to us as fast as she could.
“What is wrong with you?” my mom yelled. “I told you to stay close!”
“That was incredible!” Lydia said, gasping, out of breath.
She had been exploring when she heard a branch snap. She looked up and saw the first elk, not twenty feet away. It huffed, alarmed by her presence. It had not expected to see a little girl in the woods, nor Lydia an elk. Yet there they were: sudden new acquaintances. Then Lydia noticed the other elk behind the first, all completely still, watching her. She said they seemed on edge. These elk had no doubt seen humans before, maybe even humans with weapons. They were sizing her up. Calmly but as quickly as she could, Lydia climbed up a tree until she sat on a branch, far above them. They eyed her dubiously, but eventually determined she wasn’t a threat. They continued along their way cautiously, beneath Lydia’s dangling feet. She watched them go, breathless. And then they disappeared from her field of vision, a memory, a magic moment in the woods.
My mom tried to act mad, but we were all as amazed by Lydia’s story as she was. We listened to every detail, rapt. Just like we did for Henry when he returned safely from his big hike with the men, babbling excitedly about prickly pear and wildflowers, butterflies and grasshoppers.
I found Henry that night in the house, wandering around, confused. He was crying. He had gotten up in the middle of the night and didn’t know where he was. And he was terrified. I was asleep on the foldout couch in the living room.
“Rooster, what’s the matter buddy?” They’d started calling him that in the womb: Rooster. He came out with red hair and it stuck. Poor little Rooster Dooster, wailing in the strange, dark cabin.
I picked him up in my arms and he sobbed into my chest, clutching me tightly, trembling. I carried him downstairs to the basement room where Anna and Sam and Sylvie were all sleeping. I shook Anna awake by the shoulder. She snapped to.
“He wandered upstairs and didn’t know where he was, the poor thing,” I explained, lowering my nephew down into my one living sister’s arms.
“Come here, baby,” Anna cooed.
She took him from my arms and pulled him against her, his face buried in the nape of her neck. She whispered thank you to me and faded off back to sleep with her family, intact there in that basement, safe and warm.
You’re fine, Rooster Dooster, I wanted to whisper to him. Never mind the strange shadows in the night. Never mind the darkness that’s always waiting there, just around the corner. Don’t concern yourself with that. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to you. You hear me? We’re the Magnificent Cayton-Hollands. And you’re one of us now. And yes Aunt Lydia is gone but you don’t worry about that now, buddy. That pain is not for you. That’s for us. Let it go. You just sleep next to your mom and your dad and your sister and know that you’re going to be okay because we’re looking out for you, from now until forever. Now more than ever before. Trust me, Henry, nothing bad is going to happen. Not again. We won’t let it. I won’t let it. I promise.
I’d whispered similar words to myself as a child, when Lydia almost drowned. I wondered if Henry knew they meant nothing now.
The next morning, after breakfast, something was off. It was too quiet.
“Where’s Flannery?” my mom asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s Annabel?”
Our Chesapeake Bay retrievers were missing, mine and my mom’s. They’re sisters, both from the same litter. My mom owned their mother, Sylvia. She was the best dog we ever had. So my mom bred her. There were seven puppies. I took Annabel. My mom took Flannery. They love each other. Best-friend sissies. That’s how we refer to them in our dumb dog-voices. Best-friend sissies.
And now they were missing.
We sprung into emergency mode, panicked. Of course we assumed the worst. That was all any of us could do anymore. That was our collective mind-set. Two missed calls from dad?! Someone’s dead! Mom not answering the phone?! She fell down the stairs. She’s hurt. Something’s wrong. Something’s terribly wrong.
We searched the house and found a tear in the screen door in the basement. Annabel and Flannery had barreled through it. Best-friend sissies gone exploring. We searched for the next hour but couldn’t find them. I could sense that my mom was on the cusp of a breakdown. Maybe I was just projecting. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Not my dog. Not Annabel. Please God I can’t take anymore. Anna’s dog Belden died shortly after L
ydia. It was too much. Death was coming at our family from all sides. Why did this keep happening?
We speculated that maybe some coyotes had herded our dogs off and then turned on them. Or what if they had encountered a mountain lion, or black bear? We gathered on the porch and tried to act rational. Formulate a plan of attack. Call the park ranger, Google the closest shelters, make missing animal posters.
Then we noticed movement, on the horizon, like the elk in Rocky Mountain National Park, but smaller, faster, fewer of them. Annabel and Flannery, back from an adventure, tails wagging. We called out to them and they came running as fast as they could, happy to be back in their safe spaces. They smiled those guilty Chessie smiles, lips curled up above their goofy teeth. They knew they had done wrong. When they finally reached the porch we went to embrace them only to be hit by the sheer force of their smell. It was putrid. They had gotten into something foul.
“Good god!” I said. “What, did they roll around in shit somewhere? Do you think they went to those horse stables?”
“That’s not horse shit,” my mom said. “That’s something dead.”
They had found a carcass out on the land around the house, some deer or fox or raccoon and gone to town in its remains. Canine ecstasy: backs on the ground, legs up in the air, gyrating, rubbing it in deep. Doggie heaven. And they reeked.
Tragedy Plus Time Page 11