Just before I shut the car door behind me I heard Dad groan. “You have got to be kidding me. That kid?”
The airplane was a sacred part of our family and special clearance was required from Dad to come within a ten-foot radius of his baby. There were times when he was really concentrating on an intricate piece that even I wasn’t allowed to get too close.
As the plane grew in size Dad needed help lifting and moving pieces around. Mom was first in command for the job, and the whole process usually ended in them snipping at each other until everything was set exactly how Dad wanted it. When a job required all three of us Dad would repeat the same instructions over and over, coupled with constant reminders to be careful.
Christopher and I were watching a movie one night when we heard Mom call for us to come to the garage. “Dad needs help moving the wings.”
Christopher and I had been together for over a year. Dad had allowed Christopher to eat dinner with us at my family birthday party, he had taken pictures of us in front of the fireplace before school dances, and every weekend he had driven back and forth from Chaska to Maple Grove so we could see each other. Through it all, Dad had been polite enough, but he had never been inviting.
When Christopher and I stepped into the garage, Dad was standing by the wing, his hands on his hips. He was wearing his Cardinals hat, turned backwards, a resolute expression on his face. He stared at Christopher for a moment, and then pointed to the wing. “I need you to lift that while I make some adjustments where it connects over here, by where I’m standing.” They stared at each other “Can you do that?”
Christopher nodded and took his place at the wing. For the better part of an hour, I leaned against the wall of the garage with Mom while Dad and Christopher worked on the plane. Christopher carried the plane cautiously, carefully, just like he carried my heart.
Dad never warned Christopher to be careful. I think he finally understood, as they handed the fragile wing back and forth, that no amount of warning could protect the wing from being mishandled. No amount of warning could protect me from a broken heart. As difficult as it might have been, Dad let go, trusting me to the first boy who would ever carry my heart.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
There is a stigma attached to families without a father. In my experience, it is assumed that an absent father is a deadbeat father. I have been faced with many uncomfortable interactions because of this. “Where do your parents live?” or “What do your parents do?” seem like harmless enough questions.
But what is the harmless answer?
If I only answer for Mom, then I leave the interpretation that you aren’t a part of my life.
If I answer for Mom and explain that you passed away, then I have to answer follow up questions. “How?” “A plane crash, really?” they say, amazed that it does actually happen. Then I get to hear about how scary flying is or how unsafe those little balsa wood planes are, as if you got what you deserved for taking such a stupid risk.
Regardless of how I answer, I inevitably find myself thinking that there are so many people in my life that you will never get to meet.
These people will only know the Sarah from after.
Few people can bring out the girl I was before you died. As my friends dropped out of my life I began to place a high value on anyone who was able to make me feel like I had before life had forced me to age ten years in the span of ten minutes.
There was a life I was meant to live that was destroyed after you broke my heart. There was a life waiting for me with a boy who I think I was meant to be with, once. The mistakes I made which cost me his love and friendship would not have been capable by the Sarah I used to be.
The loss of his presence in my life is the biggest regret I have in your death.
Much as I am sure children of divorced parents love differently than those raised by happy parents, a daughter who watches her mother crumble completely after the death of her husband barely loves at all. When you died I stopped trusting love. I was terrified of loving someone so much that I wouldn’t survive without them. Mom loved you so much that she lost herself in you. There wasn’t enough of her without you to function. The idea that I could fall prey to the same fate has been enough to keep my heart at a distance from men.
This brokenness in me, this fear, ruined something wonderful.
We were friends, and then we were more than friends. He wanted the whole package, until death do us part. But he wanted it with a girl I no longer was. He couldn’t seem to straddle the dividing line between who I was and whom I was turning out to be. I couldn’t be the child he had befriended, the woman he needed to be domestically bright and kind. He couldn’t have handled his Sarah swollen with tears or laying in bed unable to move after going on a bender of sadness and depression.
The relationship I would have had stretches out before me, distant but strong, like a dream that lingers in the mind long after waking. Both of us reserved, cautious, selective, we would have dated exclusively in high school and college. You and Mom would have gotten along fabulously with his corporate father and stay at home mother. The four of you would tell stories at our engagement party about all the times you had to yank the phone out of our hands when we lived under your roofs. You would have acknowledged that all along we had something special, that you all saw it years before we stopped arguing when people tried to call us boyfriend and girlfriend.
At our wedding I would have wanted to be as beautiful as possible for him. His vows would have been said only for my ears, and he would have loved me delicately and passionately, all in one embrace. I would have loved him more and more as the years passed. I would have been excited to have his children. I would have wanted to give him a big family. I would have been a good wife and an even better mother. He would have been an attentive husband and a compassionate father.
We should have had this life. Two best friends who could stop the other in their tracks with a smile, who could weaken the knees with a single kiss, who couldn’t bear to say goodbye at four in the morning with a full day of work only a few hours away. We were meant to be, once.
When I least expect it his face flashes in front of my eyes. I still grab my phone to call him and it isn’t until I realize I don’t know what number to dial that I remember we don’t belong to each other any more. It is the friendship we had that I miss every day. Sometimes I ache so much for my friend I have to stop what I’m doing and catch my breath. I’ve written countless letters to an old address, hoping someday he will respond because he still sees in me who I was. Because he forgives me for not loving him in the way he needed.
I would have been capable of tremendous love had you not died. I want to apologize to the man I love but who I hurt so shamelessly when I was lost in my grief over you. But he won’t speak to me. I broke his heart too badly.
I hate you for taking him away from me.
I met Dustin on a blind date. Dustin is just like me in that he is often overlooked, or misjudged to be a geek, unworthy of a second glance. (To be fair, he is a geek, but not the creepy never-leaves-the-basement kind.) If I could tell high school girls one thing, I would tell them to marry the geeks. My geek loves me in good times and in bad, in ways I don’t deserve.
Dustin has brought something out in me that I have never felt before, new to the girl I was and to the woman I am. It is with a quiet bravery that I reach for my husband. I know that with each laugh we share I am risking tears that could come. I think he knows there is a chance that he will never claim all of my heart, but that is only because my heart isn’t sitting in one place, whole and ripe for the picking. It’s stitched badly and beats erratically, but what remains beats only for him. In losing you I had to find a man who was strong enough to love me in pieces. I had to learn to let go of the fear of loss every day that I embrace our life together. I don’t want to miss anything, no matter how much it might hurt later, when death takes one of us away.
The pressure to be perfect and whole drove me away from my ol
d friend, my old love. I didn’t ask to be divided, but my old love never asked what I needed. He wasn’t capable of seeing his life with someone who was flawed. My grief was my flaw. My husband knows how much this loss hurts me, because I keep nothing from him.
Right or wrong, part of me will always belong to the time before your death. I don’t claim this to be fair. But I think the truth I offer Dustin is significant, and miraculously he appreciates it. I offer him every piece of me; my tear soaked pillow, my addiction to quesadillas, my fear that I can’t be enough for anyone, but for him I would like to try. I offer him every part of who I am now, including the small exception to what I can’t bring myself to let go of.
With my husband I will have a lifetime of truth, good and bad, calm and storm. He loves me, in spite of these things and sometimes because of them, and this is more real than anything I’ve been given before.
I look at Dustin when he sleeps on the couch beside our two dogs and I wonder who will leave the other first. This is my greatest fear. I tell God often that I would trade riches and success for the chance to grow old with my husband.
Here is what I know: no matter which one of us is left behind, we will not be left to rediscover who are separate form one another. We are each our own person, and we are one, and this is how marriages should be.
When I admit to myself that you taught me more about love and marriage in death than you did in life, that maybe these lessons will serve me better than if you had lived to old age, it brings bitter, angry tears to my eyes. It is a lesson I value, however unfairly I came to understand it. You and Mom had something very real. She has yet to remarry, because until she feels the same something she felt when laughing with you over spilled coffee, she doesn’t see the point in settling. So I guess I’m not angry, really, so much as I am saddened. I wish you could be here to meet Dustin, to shake his hand and call him son.
When I can’t think about you and the significance of what I have lost any longer, I squeeze myself between Dustin and our dogs, place my head on his chest and let his arms wrap me up in the easy comfort of a love I believe in.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I was looking through Dad’s high school yearbook once when I came upon an inscription inside the front cover that read, “Keep on trying, who knows, maybe someday we will make it to the big time. Just like the Beatles.”
I have a hard time imagining Dad hanging out in a garage or basement doing anything besides working on a plane. But there are small black and white pictures of my father holding a guitar pressed in the pages of that yearbook that prove that he wasn’t always so one dimensional in his hobbies.
One of the few new things my parents bought when we moved into our house in Chaska was a stereo. The stereo was huge; two speakers, the size of miniature refrigerators, connected to the double tape deck. On top was a five disc CD player. While I don’t think Dad would have ever posted to Facebook or sent a Tweet, I do think he would have appreciated the power of an iPod dock. The stereo took up an entire corner of the living room, competing for space with our twenty-inch television housed inside thick wood casing.
Dad was an obnoxiously early riser, and he could only wait around so long on Saturday mornings before he felt the rest of the house needed to get up and play with him. The stereo was usually cranked and rockin’ (more loudly than expected from someone of his age) by six-thirty.
As CDs began to replace cassettes my parents updated their music collection. The three of us could spend hours at Target or Sam Goody flipping through CD cases. Alanis Morisette’s “Jagged Little Pill” was my first CD purchase, and I was largely drawn to it because of the plane crash featured in the song “Ironic”. I played that song on the stereo for Dad sometimes, when the plane was still pieces of wood in the basement. We thought it was funny.
Dad’s collection grew and soon the voices of Patsy Cline, Elivs, Buddy Holly, The Eagles, Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Johnny Cash all had their rotation in his Saturday morning concerts. Dad kept the remote in his hand so he could flip from song to song whether he was in the kitchen or the living room. Dad deejayed for three or four hours straight, serving both as an alarm and providing breakfast ambiance.
Sometimes Mom would leave the concert early to take her shower or run errands. I suppose I could have left too but it was hard not to get into the whole thing while Dad was grinning, humming along and tapping his feet to the rhythms that thumped from the speakers. As much as I teased him about his cheesy and outdated music I would find myself singing right along with him.
Our Saturday morning music routine was set in stone. Even when I had friends sleeping over in the living room, konked out after we had stayed up all night, Dad would get his coffee, crank the volume as high as it would go and startle us all awake with “Crazy” or the full eight minute rendition of “American Pie”. I don’t think anyone ever got mad at him, because when we stopped trying to go back to sleep with our heads stuffed under our pillows we would find a peace offering of donuts at the kitchen table. Dad was annoying, but he treated my friends and I well.
As the CD collection grew Dad would sit in front of the stereo and take inventory of his music. That’s how he noticed the unusual pattern. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “Just about every singer I’ve got is dead!” After that, the search for additions to the newly dubbed Dead Guy Music Collection was on. The whole family was forever on a morbid scavenger hunt to find new CDs by artists who had gone on to perform on the stage in the sky. Mom and I would venture into music stores and ask the clerks if they had anything new by artists that were dead. Some of the employees began to recognize our faces, the pretty wife and the little girl looking for Dead Guy Music.
The creme de la creme CDs in Dad’s collection were by artists who had died in plane crashes. Patsy Cline, Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper got top billings. I never gave this a second thought – after all, we already scoured the stores for Dead Guy music. Who cared how they died?
I never considered that dying in a plane crash was a reality Dad accepted every time he flew a plane. Each day that passed that brought him closer to finishing his plane was one more day that brought him closer to an unlikely but possible death. Perhaps embracing the songs by those who had lost their life in a plane helped him to cope with any fear he may have had of dying in a plane crash.
On the morning of October 12, 1997 my parents’ radio alarm went off at its obnoxious volume, and like every morning I could hear it from in my room. I rolled away from the sound, trying to cling to a few more moments of sleep, when I heard the voice of the broadcaster announce that John Denver had been killed in a plane crash.
There was brief moment of silence as someone shut off the alarm. Then my father’s voice, muffled behind their closed door but still loud enough for me to hear. “Do you know what this means, Jan? Do you? We can buy every John Denver CD in the store! We have to go after work tonight.” He was absolutely giddy.
I groaned and stuffed my pillow over my head. I had seen plenty of late night John Denver infomercials, the ones where he peddled anthologies of his wholesome, syrupy songs while playing his guitar in front of a wooded forest or a fireplace in a cabin.
We began a weekly tribute to John Denver – he became Dad’s favorite Dead Guy musician. Our whole family proudly committed each word of “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” to memory. John Denver’s anthology is safely housed in my iPod, available whenever I need music to match the country roads that exist in my dreams.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The process of planning a funeral is similar to planning a wedding – each rite of passage has a distinct service, with programs and music – the difference is in the tears. People cry happily at weddings, at the beginning of a new life. There was nothing happy about being in a funeral home, sitting in a hideous floral print chair, facing a man behind a dark wooden desk who offered Mom and I tissues and a binder filled with floral spreads. He had the checklist memorized so we moved through the formalities quickly. Is i
t wrong of me to want to go back and relive it all? I feel like I missed something somewhere, something that would make me feel the closure everyone talked about that day.
We selected red and white roses for your casket to match the colors of your plane. Your plane was your life, it caused your death, and it was the focus of your funeral. We picked out two big flower wreaths to prop beside your casket. One had a ribbon that said “wife”. I asked for a custom made ribbon to be inscribed with “co-pilot”.
When we picked out the programs, the funeral director asked if we wanted any biblical verses or a quote on the inside cover.
“What about that quote that tells you to accept what you can’t change?” I asked.
Mom looked at me. “That’s the prayer they use at alcoholic meetings.”
“But think of the words. They fit us. Having the strength to handle this, the courage to know we can’t change it? I like it.” I looked at the man behind the desk. The guy profiting off of our suffering. I know, someone has to do that job, but I think I hate funeral directors more than I hate politicians. “We’ll put the ‘Serenity Prayer’ on the inside,” I said authoritatively.
When we had finished everything on the checklist the funeral director stood up from his chair and told us to follow him. I knew instinctively where we were going. He led us towards a staircase that took us down into a basement showroom full of caskets.
The basement was noticeably colder than the parlor. With a door off to the side of the steps, I understood that your body was hidden under a sheet, cut up in pieces, just beyond that door. The cold seeped into my skin, giving me chills. I hadn’t seen your body in four days. On bad days, grieving you feels like being trapped in that basement.
Mom didn’t want to be down there any more than I did. She looked around once and walked over to a light tan casket. “This is the one we buried your grandfather in.” She touched the satin lining. “It’s nice.”
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