Our father watched him drop, and then from the bottom floor Mike watched him rush, jump, panic down the open staircase. He’d landed on a mound of scrap lumber and broken cinder blocks, plywood and two-by-fours, and because our father was unlucky but not that unlucky, Mike wasn’t impaled, his liver or kidney not perforated by a ten-penny nail, nor did he drop crown-first or else fracture his spine or neck on the concrete. He was not, in fact, injured at all.
So that was how he was able to see our father dashing down the steps after him, his grimace and panting impossible to mistake for anything other than uncut terror. And that’s what Mike was remembering now on the phone with me, not two weeks after our father’s death: the panicked look on his face as he bolted down crumbling steps after his youngest boy, the wayward one whom he expected to find unfixable. It was, Mike said, exactly what love looked like, and we wept there together on the phone.
That summer of death was also the summer of something wrong with my plumbing, an involuntary pause in urination, a caesura in my stream, and also an unclear rectal annoyance that often had me sitting sideways. This, I knew, was the body looted by emotion: intestines, rectums, urethras sacked by feeling, bowels squeezed by grief. The soul will show itself, will manifest its damage, and the most intimate precincts of your body will take the hit.
I saw a urologist who, without any type of test, was rapid in pronouncing “prostatitis”: an inflammation or infection of the prostate (and not, as one friend thought, “the disease of seeing too many prostitutes”). It would require a blitzkrieg of elect antibiotics because, said my urologist, the prostate is notoriously stubborn, a foul-tempered gland—it doesn’t want interference from us. And because I didn’t have health coverage of any kind, my canary-maned and boylike doctor gave me a week’s starter dose of pills, and then charged me only $35 for the visit, not his standard fee many stories north of $35. Perhaps this was pure and unprompted kindness on his part, but I think it’s likelier that I told him about my father’s death, that I hunted his sympathies—that I was being exploitative, in other words, manipulative with my mourning.
All that summer, I’d noticed, I had a loose relationship with the sentence My father’s dead, in part because my grief needed to let you know, needed not to pretend, but also because I had a new intolerance of empty exchanges, the void-filling chitchat everywhere, the false automation of How are you? and then Good, thanks, how are you? My reply to the opening nicety of What’s up? or How’s it going? was always My father’s dead, as if an insistence on this ruthless candor would make the world clear again, and that clarity would then allay my despair. Obnoxious and unjust, that’s obvious to me now, and my only excuse—I won’t call it a reason—is that grief can be both a puppeteer and a ventriloquist. It attaches to your limbs, puts you in contorted poses, walks you in unnatural gaits, speaks for you in words and lilts that are not wholly yours.
In certain moods, grief can also taunt, chide, lash, as if in rageful challenge to what it perceives as the good luck, the non-grief, of others. It can choose convenient targets for our ire when the true target is not present. The day after my father’s crash, the long drape of dark about to uncoil, Anna and I lay on a spare bed in the condo he’d shared with his fiancée. We lay looking at a ceiling fan, registering the upticks and falloffs of our shock. Then my sister and a band of her friends gathered at the picnic table beneath the window to smoke and talk, to be with one another, to do what people have always done in times of trauma.
And soon there was laughter, and this laughter, neither too raucous nor shrill, nevertheless lanced my efforts to register the shock on me, unsettled the already slow-coming cognizance of what my father had just done to himself and to us. I went to the window and raised the screen, and down into the dark I yelled for an end to that laughter, that sudden affront to my own suffering.
Several times that summer I behaved in ways I later wished I could reverse, and I’d start with that night: my sister, and the friends who loved her, who had arrived to support her, needed the lightening of laughter. How else to endure the many waterloos of living except through laughter? It was also the innocuous, nervous laughter of people who didn’t know how else to process their friend’s affliction, how to express their own discomfort with death. Why could I not see that? Why was I not on guard against this displacement of rage? Why didn’t I just shut the window and embrace the woman I loved?
Perhaps because that’s one of the other characteristics grief picks up: near-total self-consumption. The griever is by definition a solipsist; he can grieve in groups, with other grievers, and there’s some balm in that, but the exhaustive work of grief can’t be lessened by giving some of that work away. It is his, entirely his, and so he labors as he knows how, his gaze narcissistically inward. The griever can thus become very precious to himself, and protective of himself, which doesn’t mean that he can’t be helpful to others in pain—I hope I was, in whatever way I was able—only that later he had best feel some remorse for that solipsism and have an apology at hand.
My urologist’s blitzkrieg of antibiotics didn’t work, not even a little, and two weeks later I was back in his office, this time to be given that medieval procedure called a cystoscopy. Into the urethra slides a tubal scope so that we might spy upon my bladder’s liquid privacy. We could see the bladder on the screen, that blank pouch, undefiled by tumors or whatever badness my doctor sought. My bladder wasn’t as blank as its computerized image of blacks and grays, because when he retracted that seeing tube, there came an unpreventable cataract: onto my shins, onto the linoleum, onto the doctor’s Italian wingtips.
He mentioned then a possible colonoscopy, if things didn’t improve—that bit of barbarism that would no doubt turn my colon into a semicolon. But for now, more antibiotics, a mightier genus this time. I was on them all summer, for naught. When school started up again in the fall, I saw a different doctor, who let me know that I didn’t have prostatitis—“You’re much too young for that”—but rather IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome.
“Any stress in your life?” he asked.
“My father was killed in May,” I said.
“That’ll do it. It’s IBS. It’s not a serious case, from what you’re explaining. It’s a nuisance, I know. Exercise, meditate. It’ll go away when the stress goes away, I’m certain.”
The IBS abated as he said it would, but slowly. I’d been on a regimen of antibiotics for four consecutive months, a combative regimen with nothing to combat, and so my immune system was defanged, worthless now. In December of that year, I’d be abused by a lionhearted flu: two weeks of weeping murder, twelve straight days in bed, one overnight stay in the hospital, fevered hallucinations, phantasmal visits from my father, cared for by friends in medical masks and latex gloves, the ugliest illness of my adult life. People toss about that tiny three-lettered word “flu” like it’s made of nickels, but when the flu comes for you, really comes for you, it comes with the full force of nine quarters: influenza.
False cures, whether antibiotics or displaced rage, are not only false, they are injurious. They offer not relief but remorse, compounded problems to heap upon the pile you already have. I’m hesitant to speak of literature as a cure or corrective for anything; it can deliver pleasure, and beauty, and wisdom, but it can’t eradicate personal or social sickness, can’t undo a damaged soul. When Matthew Arnold suggested replacing religion with poetry, he understood that religion is poetry. And yet, in the weeks and months after my father’s death, literature was, as it had always been, my only hint of solace, the only medium equal to my woe, the only effective accomplice in the arduous work of return, of returning to some version of myself before my father’s crash, a self irrevocably altered but one I might still recognize in my midnight. From Book VI of The Aeneid, as rendered by Dryden:
The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the tas
k and mighty labor lies.
That is literature’s unkillable value, what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.” Literature turns us all into Adams naming animals: that assortment of animals inside us, all that hisses and coos. I sought the right words to wed to despair, entered into consultation with eminent voices of anguish. All summer it was Eugene O’Neill, all fall John Donne—the palliative pathos of Long Day’s Journey into Night, the ecstatic desolation of the Holy Sonnets—and they ministered to me in a tongue no priest, no therapist, no doctor owned.
VII
The death certificate appeared one afternoon in the mail and my grief had fresh details to focus on, new items with which I could try to reconstruct my father’s final moments, and perhaps solve the agonizing unknowables. That was the illusion, anyway, that a fixation on documents and language, on what could be established and known, would soften some of my disquiet. I would obsess now over the details of my father’s dead body just as I had obsessed over the details of my own body during my muscled teenage years, the minutiae of diet and training that were the largest part of my every day.
I was too cowardly to view the footage of the crash on my father’s camera, or even to ask my brother about it. I needed facts, but not too many of them, and not the wrong kind, not images. Images would be dispossessing, a glut at the tree of knowledge. I did not feel able to trust or manage images—they are not my medium—but I’d requested the death certificate because writers, if they have any hope at all, have hope in language.
The coroner’s name was Scott M. Grim. How could I have made up such a name? The registrar who signed the certificate was Sandra P. Vulcano. So: Sandra the Vulcan and Grim the Reaper. To name a coroner “Grim” in a novel would be a witless move, and yet our lives deliver us these witless facts and then leave us to be confounded by them.
In the part titled “IMMEDIATE CAUSE (Final disease or condition resulting in death),” Grim had typed MULTIPLE TRAUMATIC INJURIES in clangorous caps. Underneath that, on a line labeled “DUE TO (OR AS A CONSEQUENCE OF),” is MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT. Under MANNER OF DEATH, the “Accident” box is X-marked. Under PLACE OF INJURY is ROADWAY. And then there’s this:
DESCRIBE HOW INJURY OCCURRED: OPERATOR OF MOTOR-CYCLE THAT STRUCK GUARDRAIL.
LOCATION: SLIFER VALLEY RD., .18 MI. E. OF WALNUT LN., SPRINGFIELD TWP.
PLACE OF DEATH: DOA.
TIME OF DEATH: 3:26.
TIME OF INJURY: APPROX. 3:06 PM.
DATE OF DISPOSITION: 5-11-2000.
PLACE OF DISPOSITION: Sacred Heart Cemetery.
BIRTHPLACE: Manville, NJ.
A curious document—dull mint-green paper, heavy stock, watermarked—because it bears my father’s name, yes, but also because of its seemingly arbitrary capitalizations and peculiar diction. Not “road,” but “roadway”—is there a difference, I wonder, to the eye of a coroner? The tautology of “due to” and “as a consequence of.” The use of “that” instead of “who” in the description of the injury, which makes it sound as if only the bike struck the guardrail (if that were so, I’d be penning a different book). There’s “disposition,” with its multiple meanings: we dispose of trash and the unwanted; your disposition is your temperament. The discrepancy between the time of injury and the time of death: twenty minutes, which means he might have had those minutes to know, to suspect, what had befallen him, and where he was falling.
There’s the capped triad of “MULTIPLE TRAUMATIC INJURIES,” its nonnegotiable decision, such stubborn finality. And then the stamp of “DOA”: no bothering with periods between letters, and no mistaking it for its twin, “Dead or Alive,” since the second half of that formulation was not possible for my father. On the certificate, DOA describes “place of death,” but DOA is, of course, not a place. It’s a manner of arrival, the condition in which you are gurneyed into a hospital. Slifer Valley Road is, will always be, the actual place of his death. His dying happened there on that asphalt, beneath that guardrail.
Manville was not the place of my father’s birth. No one’s born in Manville except by accident; it doesn’t have a hospital. His nativity happened one town over, at Somerset Medical Center. Why did the coroner make this error? The “INFORMANT’S NAME” on the death certificate is William Giraldi, Jr.—Pop. Not “informer,” but “informant,” with its connotative stirrings of cloak and dagger, intrigue, whistle-blowing. Pop must have given all the personal data that appears on the death certificate, and he must have given it on the afternoon of the crash, when he and Parma went to the hospital to identify my father’s body.
He gave Manville as the place of my father’s birth because he wasn’t present for it; he was directing mortar fire on a mount in Korea. Also because he was walloped by shock. Also because my father was conceived in Manville. But mostly because in every dilating chamber of his heart, Pop felt that my father should have been born in Manville. It’s not equal to the early Christian framers changing the birthplace of Christ from Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to fulfill the necessities of a Jewish prophecy, but it suggests some of the visceral importance of being, really being, from Manville.
Pop would not have noticed that the hospital in which he stood giving this data on his dead son, St. Luke’s Hospital, was located in the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Nor would he have cared to notice the coincidence that Saint Luke the Evangelist is the patron saint of lace makers. Pop himself worked in a laceworks factory for extra income just after my father was born. These coincidences meant something to me, though, as if they could coalesce into something significant, some coherence I could wield in order to see my way through this.
I know too that it was Pop who gave the personal data because under DECEDENT’S USUAL OCCUPATION—another unexpected choice of diction, “usual,” as if assuming the dead was a job-hopper; and consider too the link from “descendent” to “decedent,” a decedent’s descendants, deceased too soon and he doesn’t leave any—Grim had typed “Self-employed.” Under KIND OF BUSINESS/INDUSTRY, he typed “Builder.” For Pop, self-employed was a tag to be proud of. It suggested Emersonian agency, a man not shackled to an overseer. And “builder” was how he insisted on referring to himself and his sons, never “carpenter.” He heard a dignified toll in builder that was missing from the more pedestrian carpenter. Pop didn’t care that Christ is said to have been a carpenter too, and not because he knew that handyman comes closer to the Greek term tekton, but because he had no patience for the Nazarene’s unmanly meekness, his turn-the-other-cheek masochism.
I called Grim’s office one morning, and his assistant, who had worked on my father, notched out some time to speak with me. I quickly jotted down these notes as he spoke: fractured neck; inter-cranium damage; massive head injury; helmet pulled up on neck upon impact with guardrail; fractured larynx; fractured lower part of cranial vault; possible chest injury; knocked-over lung; air in chest outside lung.
I said, “Would it have been possible for him to talk? One of his buddies said he heard him talk.”
“Not possible,” he said.
“What about move his arm? Two of his buddies said they saw him move his arm.”
“Not possible.”
The notorious unreliability of eyewitness reports. Two of his fellow riders had said they saw my father move his arm onto his chest, and both of them were mistaken. How, why does the mind bamboozle the eyes into seeing what cannot be there, what the body cannot do?
“Do you think he suffered?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That wasn’t possible, not with those massive head injuries. There was no suffering.”
And then, unprompted, he told me this: “Once, when I was an EMT, years ago, we responded to a suicide on the train tracks. A guy got cut clean in half. It was a real mess. I took his bottom half, my partner took his upper half, and we loaded him in the ambulance. On the way to the hospital the guy woke up and started walking on his hands, trying to get to his bottom half. Imagine that, the guy walking on his hands, dragging his bloody
waist across the floor, trying to put himself back together. That lasted about six seconds, I’d say.”
And then this: “I once had a mother punch me in the jaw and then pull her dead eight-year-old daughter off the table. She dragged her all the way down the hospital hallway by her ankle, trying to get her home. She punched nurses who tried to stop her—she was a big woman. Security had to restrain her. Meanwhile the dead girl is just naked there on the floor in the middle of the hallway.”
Grim’s assistant, that soldier of truth who had literally peered inside my father, left me with those stories: the dying who won’t die even when they want to, the bereaved who refuse to accept, to bury, their dead. And he left me with those nouns, larynx and cranial vault. They split like thin, sunbaked shale. Human evolution had no way of anticipating steel and speed and asphalt, and so we are like graham crackers in the grip of some furious, defective child. Our bodies, adapted to the African savanna of one million years ago, are now just waiting to be minced on the macadam of civilization. What must it feel like in the blood, that lust for speed? How do some men come to crave it? Milan Kundera: “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.” He called it “pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed,” and when I first read those words, I knew Kundera was speaking about my father.
Before we finished our call that day, Grim’s assistant solved for me the niggling riddle of why the motorcycle wasn’t demolished, as it should have been. My father’s chest and lung injuries were caused by the bike itself. It didn’t splinter into fifty pieces because his body came between it and the guardrail. Right till the last, even when the physics was wildly, irrecoverably beyond his grasp, he was trying to save the bike.
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