The Baltimore Book of the Dead

by Marion Winik

  Years later, after I moved to Baltimore, I met a pair of twins at my daughter’s elementary school, then realized this man was their father. I saw him most often in summer at our neighborhood pool, tall and lean, with dark curly hair and a great, lopsided nose, swimming what seemed like hundreds of laps each morning. For some reason, my social anxiety is at its worst at the pool, where I make a beeline to a chair, stick my head in my book, and never speak to anyone. He was the only person not put off by my wall of bad vibes, stopping each day to say hello. He had a joyous smile that involved his whole face, his warm brown eyes and thick brows seeming to acknowledge that there are many reasons not to smile and we know that, but let’s smile anyway.

  He was seventy but looked fifty when he died in a motorcycle accident in Nepal, a bad one in the middle of nowhere or his remarkable vigor might have pulled him through. According to the slide show we watched at his memorial, the man simply could not be caught without a smile on his face, from his bar mitzvah in Brooklyn on out. And as brokenhearted as his mourners may have been, no one could speak of him without giving in to the urge, even his wife. Think of what he would want to happen, she said, and see that it does.

  The Babydaddy

  died 2018

  I HEARD THE STORY of The Babydaddy before I met him, from the mother of one of my fourth-grade daughter’s friends. She had briefly dated a man twenty years older than she; they broke up because he already had a bunch of troubled kids and an expensive ex-wife, while she had a ticking clock. Shortly after she met someone new, she learned she was pregnant with the older man’s child. Surprisingly, her new suitor urged her to keep the baby and volunteered to raise it with her. This was the guy I knew as the little girl’s father. While The Babydaddy had been tetchy about the plan at first—new support payments just as he was beginning his retirement—he ended up quite in love with the last addition to his family. They spent every Sunday together for many years.

  In eighth grade, the girls went on a trip with their Spanish teacher to Peru and parents were allowed to join. This was when I finally met him, a quiet, mostly good-natured graybeard with hair combed back from a widow’s peak, a man of moderate views and conservative habits. Then I learned he actually had two daughters on this trip, the other a packet of cremains in his suitcase. His eldest, dead in her forties of an overdose. Half of her went into the Pacific at Lima, and the other half almost didn’t make it to Machu Picchu, as heavy rains kept us in town for an extra day. Then the gods relented.

  His tall silhouette and his daughter’s small one, hiking up to the Temple of the Sun.

  That was the last I heard of him until the girls’ senior year of high school, when I got a call asking for photos that might be used at his memorial. At seventy-two, he had collapsed on a staircase, already dead when he reached the bottom. He didn’t drink, he hadn’t been ill—in fact, in his sixties, he’d become a gym rat, convening daily in the sauna with his retired cronies. I found two pictures of him in Peru. One bravely trying the local fermented corn drink, the other opposite his daughter at a long table in a restaurant. She in an orange beanie, looking wide-eyed at the camera, and he in profile, smiling straight at her.

  The Innocents

  died 1966, 1999, 2007, 2012, 2018 . . .

  IN THE CURRENT ISSUE of People magazine, it is sandwiched between “What Went Wrong Between Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux” and “Amy Schumer’s Surprise Wedding.” A two-page spread of a candlelight vigil, followed by the now-familiar story. The fire drill at the end of the school day. The gunshots, the text messages, the SWAT team. People doubled over, people covering their faces, people wailing into cell phones. I don’t know what hell is like but it can’t be worse than what I saw at that school. The roll call of the dead, their glowing faces and miniature biographies: a sports career, a college scholarship, a love of the beach, a smile as bright as a firecracker. I don’t blame People magazine for this. It is the news, it is what happens, right in the middle of everything.

  More often than not it is one of my children who first tells me there has been a mass shooting. Mom, I think something terrible happened in Colorado. In Virginia. In Las Vegas. In Florida. At the country music festival, the elementary school, the college campus, the nightclub, the church. The Amish schoolhouse. The Jewish community center. The mosque. The movie theater. The high school.

  It’s the image of children crossing a parking lot as if in a conga line, hands on shoulders, wearing the colorful jackets and bright, clean sneakers their mothers sent them to school in, that haunts me. Just as kids used to practice what to do in case of fire or nuclear attack, they now learn the correct procedures in case of mass murder. Get under the desk. Get in the closet. Stay away from the windows. Run. Our president has a suggestion: more guns. More yellow tape, more candles, more flowers. Teddy bear stock is on the rise.

  To be a parent is to have your heart go walking around outside your body, as the writer Elizabeth Stone put it. At every moment, it is exactly as terrifying as you can tolerate. There is so much you have to turn away from just to get through a day. Now the eerie conga line files through our dreams. The phone rings. This is too much to ask of us.

  The Leader of the Pack

  died 2012

  GOOD MORNING, LADIES OF the dog world! my neighbor would trill at 5 a.m. Since she was just on the other side of the wall in the duplex we share, it was a good thing that this was the very hour my eyes popped open of their own accord. My neighbor, a soft-edged blonde no older than I, lived alone with two dogs and a cat. Sally, being part border collie, was a bit smarter than her younger companion Kayley, a shepherd mutt. Chase the Cat had moved in from a few doors down.

  After that morning greeting, my neighbor would address a running commentary to her pets throughout the day, usually on topics of mutual interest, such as the weather, the plans for a walk, or the prohibition against eating poo. I say this not in judgment but as a woman who is more or less married to a thirteen-year-old miniature dachshund, a mostly deaf dog called by a dozen different silly names and serenaded daily with customized theme songs.

  Sally had a long decline, but after she could no longer stand, my neighbor called the mobile vet to come with her syringe. Kayley and Chase went to her son’s house during the procedure; when they returned, Sally’s body had been stowed in the back of the RAV4 until the opening of the crematorium at the SPCA. I learned all this when I came outside and found my neighbor gently leading Kayley to the car to view the body. After the dog had said her goodbyes, my neighbor took her inside and came out carrying Chase the Cat. I’m giving them closure, she explained.

  At the time, I thought this was over the top, but having just read a book on animal grief—the mourning of sea turtles, dolphins, rabbits, and horses—I learned she did just the right thing. Luckily, Kayley and Chase still had each other, and neither went on to exhibit the classic symptoms of bereavement: loss of appetite, lethargy, unusual howling or yowling, pacing or keeping vigil. By the time Kayley died three years later, my neighbor had begun to pad her pack. I think there might be three or four cats over there now. With my daughter leaving for college next fall, I’ve followed her lead, taking in a young puss to keep me and the dachshund company. Good morning, lovey pets, good morning!

  El Suegro

  died 2017

  THOUGH MY OLDER SON met the Ecuadoran girl who is now his wife back when they were in college, and has known her parents almost as long, I did not meet her father until just before the wedding.

  I first saw his picture the day of the engagement, which was an elaborate scavenger hunt all over Boston, at the end of which my son’s ladylove found him kneeling in the street with a ring. Her mother and I had flown in to take part in this extravaganza, but her father couldn’t make it. He had been formally asked for her hand, and had given his blessing.

  My son is very reserved about the fact that his own father died when he was six, which is kind of funny given all my published work on the su
bject, or perhaps makes perfect sense. It explains why my son’s mother-in-law-to-be saw a picture of Tony for the first time at the engagement party. She looked at me wide-eyed and found an old photo of her husband in her phone. When they were in their thirties, they could have been brothers.

  This resemblance seemed magical to me, especially knowing how much my son admired this man. He was a financier—my son’s field—and a perfect gentleman, a modest introvert who never talked about himself, with a unusual combination of South American Catholic traditionalism and intellectual openness. My son only learned much later the glamorous story of his career before the national financial crisis that inspired the family’s move to the United States.

  Immediately after the engagement, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He tried so hard to beat it, it almost seemed he might. It was a feat of pure will that the wedding went off as planned. That day, you might not even have known he was ill, so replete was he with the joy of the occasion that he almost filled out his tailored suit. In his welcoming toast, he spoke warmly of my son. For one short moment, I felt like fate was trying to make it up to us.

  After his father’s death, my son developed a phobia of hospitals, but in the last days of El Suegro, he was there all the time. I loved picturing him in the babbling cluster of Spanish speakers at the bedside. And I love seeing him in the fine wool coat he inherited, too, though it breaks my heart.

  The Living

  MY GOOD FRIEND HAS a last name everyone in Baltimore knows: the same as a historic neighborhood and its main thoroughfare. In 1839, his great-great-grandfather was one of the investors in the city’s first public cemetery—Green Mount, a classic name for a classic burial ground in the Victorian “rural garden” style. When you drive though the brick arch of the Gothic guardhouse, you could be traveling through time as well as space, from a rundown urban block in the twenty-first century to a misty moor in times gone by.

  It could have been Jared Leto playing the bearded watchman. He put down the book he was reading—E. M. Cioran—to sign us in and give us a map. Down Oliver’s Walk, we found the spot where my friend and his husband will someday lie. Beside his mother and father, near generals, mayors, and governors, among happy and unhappy wives and pioneer lesbians. On the back of my friend’s mother’s tombstone she requested a list of all ten of her children’s names. As much as any Civil War battle, an achievement of note.

  In winter, Green Mount offers a panorama of quietly graying neighborhoods, splashed here and there with bright-colored murals and graffiti. In warmer months, the sycamore, locust, oak, and maple fill in with leaves; cardinals and ravens arrive to build their nests. Occasionally birdwatchers have seen a falcon or owl, probably as surprised to find this little utopia as I was. According to the philosopher-watchman, there are seventy-seven thousand dead at Green Mount; new arrivals are down to about ten per year. One day my friend will be among them, joining his ancestors in the earth of their shared hometown, his love at his side.

  For me, there is a lidded ceramic vase waiting on a small table in the corner of my living room, tucked behind two similar urns and an ice bucket. The urns contain the ashes of my first husband and our stillborn son. My mother was supposed to have the third, but while it was on order, she was temporarily stored in the silver ice bucket she and my father won for the 1965 Husband and Wife tournament at Hollywood Golf Club, and actually, that was just right. My father’s ashes were stolen from the back of a jewelry drawer by a misguided robber in the 1990s.

  As my friend said that day at Green Mount, I don’t mind the thought of joining them. But no time soon.

  Notes

  The Brother-in-Law: You can read more about his family in The Skater and The Quiet Guy in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

  Who Dat: I originally described the assisted suicide in an August 1994 commentary for All Things Considered; this grew into a section of First Comes Love. There is an essay devoted to the topic, “My New Neighborhood,” in Above Us Only Sky.

  The Artist: Steve is remembered as The Carpenter in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

  The Young Hercules and The Neatnik: The software company mentioned in these two is also the setting of The Democrat and The Wunderkind in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. The Democrat was the boss’s mother, also the Young Hercules’s grandmother.

  The Queen of the Scene: The quote is from “She’s About a Mover,” by Margaret Moser, which appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of the Oxford American.

  The Paid Professional Codependent: The friend who committed suicide was The Bon Vivant in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

  The Southern Writer: The book is Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Nordan. The comparison to the blues was originally made by Michael Harris, in a review in the Los Angeles Times.

  The Rancher: Her sons are remembered in The Texan in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

  The Old Rake: The third wife mentioned here is The Realtor from The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and that was the same trip to Venice. The lines quoted are Gary Cartwright’s, from Texas Monthly.

  The Belligerent Stream: I learned about the burial of the Jones Falls from a coffee-table book called Lost Baltimore, by Gregory J. Alexander and Paul Kelsey Williams, and read more about it in Sergey Kadinsky’s Hidden Waters Blog, hiddenwatersblog.wordpress.com. The secret waterfall appeared in Kill Me Now, by Timmy Reed.

  The Very Tiny Baby: My own stillborn son is the subject of The Baby in The Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

  The Leader of the Pack: The book I mention is How Animals Grieve, by Barbara J. King.

  Acknowledgments

  For every piece in this book, there is at least one person who got a phone call, email, or Facebook message from me out of the blue, asking for help. Thank you so much, Joyce Abell, Amy Abramson, Patricia Albright, Maria Baquerizo, Lori Beveridge, Sarah Bird, Jessica Anya Blau, Steve Bolton, Cindy Bonner, Dorothy Browne, Kathy Caruso, Victoria Caruso, Kay Curry, Carolyn Dryden, Ellen Ducote, Laura Emberson, Judy Frels, Mary Friedman, Sarah Gleason, Meredith Jones Gonzalez, Sandy Goolsby, Liz Hazen, Debbie Heubach, Dallas Hlatky, Morgan Jones, Jeff Joslin, Cathy Kapschull, Nancy Kirkwood, Kendra Kopelke, Kathy Korniloff, Pete LaBonne, Liz Lambert, James Magruder, Kim McGowan, Jane Metzendorf, Naomi Shihab Nye, the Payne family, Doug Preston, Jan Ralske, Timmy Reed, Sandye Renz, Dubravka Romano, Kristen Romano, Jane Sartwell, Nancy Seeback, Jessica Shahin, J.C. Stamler, Pam Stein, Ava Taylor, Havely Taylor, Scott Van Osdol, D Watkins, Robin Whitney, Hayes Winik, Vince Winik, Holly Winter, and Carla Work. Thank you, Jack Shoemaker, for saying yes, and thank you, Jennifer Alton, Megan Fishmann, Wah-Ming Chang, Barrett Briske, and Katie Boland, for your help and enthusiasm. For the beautiful cover image, my admiration and gratitude to Andrew B. Myers, Jenny Carrow, and art director Nicole Caputo. Thanks also to my darlings, Beau and Squash, always by my side.

  Longtime All Things Considered commentator MARION WINIK is the author of First Comes Love, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, and seven other books. Her Bohemian Rhapsody column at BaltimoreFishbowl.com has received the Best Column and Best Humorist awards from Baltimore magazine, and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and many other publications. She is the host of The Weekly Reader radio show and podcast, based at the Baltimore NPR affiliate. She reviews books for Newsday, People, and Kirkus Reviews and is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. She is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore. Find more at marionwinik.com.