In May 1985, just before the end of the school year, our class began gathering our favorite stories from the past few months to make a Mother’s Day collection. We revised and reillustrated. We decorated front and back covers, made from poster board, and punched holes along the sides to thread yarn through. I occasionally glanced over a friend’s shoulder to see what she was including in her anthology, not to make sure I was choosing the right stories but to confirm my belief that everyone else was lowering themselves to mushy, sentimental drivel, while I was putting together a true masterpiece.
When it came time to offer up our gifts of literature, the other moms in Mrs. Strock’s second-grade class received stories about family vacations to the beach and flavors of ice cream that were beloved almost as much as they were. My mother received the following:
A story about a cat with ten feet—and, unfortunately, leukemia—who died.
A story about Pokey, a turtle who longed to compete in track races but was never taken seriously, given his name. (Not, as seems more probable, because he was a turtle. In fact, all of the other runners were also turtles. One was named Speedy.) Midway through the story, Pokey was allowed to enter a race. As it ended, and the whirlwind of cheering died down, I wrote, “No one could believe it, but Pokey had won!” Next line: “No one could believe it, but Pokey had died.”
A story about a sister and brother who go to the fair, follow a clown into a balloon booth, and “got lost and were never seen again.”
A story about a family of pigs, illustrated with my own sideways fingerprints, on which I had drawn tiny hooves and curly tails. The pigs go on a walk, holding balloons, and one small pig is lifted into the air by his balloon. “He was lost and never seen again,” I wrote. “The End.”
There were a couple more, including an obligatory poem, where I got somewhat back on the straight and narrow with some roses and violets and “I love yous,” but the bulk of the book centered on dying and kidnapping. It’s a wonder my parents did not send me directly to therapy, or at least sit me down and review safe state fair practices, starting with, “Do not follow clowns into booths.” But they did not. My mother seemed pleased with her gift, and, later, when she nonchalantly asked why so many of my stories ended in a sad way, I explained that I sometimes ran out of steam or paper (the teacher gave me a limit) just as I was digging into a terminal illness, and this was the only way to wrap things up. No one—including that teacher, I’ll add—asked why “They lived happily ever after” or “They went directly home to their mother and ate Oreos” weren’t considered as possible endings. Maybe my mother knew that this was just how a second grader might process her fears or anxieties about death. That it was normal. Maybe she knew, long before I did, how much I reveled in a little shock value. She had already witnessed me, a couple of years before, asking her mother, my grandmother, to bring me her recently removed gallstone for my kindergarten show-and-tell. I carried it to school in a small vial of formaldehyde.
I give credit—or blame—to my dad. He thought those stories were hilarious. Throughout my eight years on earth, he had made death and kidnapping and all the other horrors of life fascinating and worthy of inspection and discussion. And for years after that Mother’s Day collection landed on our kitchen island at the end of the school year, he would echo my signature line. I’d lose him for a few minutes in a hardware store, and when he’d eventually come around a corner and see me, he’d rest his hand on the back of my neck, give it a squeeze, and say, “Ah, I thought you were lost, never to be seen again.” Later in my life, when I’d tell him I was struggling with a story assignment, he would say to me, “Well, Elizabear, you can always end it with ‘They got lost and were never seen again.’”
By the time I had my own children, my dad was watching fewer horror movies and more World War II documentaries, thanks to the proliferation of channels devoted 24–7 to such programming. He loved the Military Channel, the American Heroes Channel, and Turner Classic Movies, if the classic movie was about the Weimar Republic (or one of the Godfathers). When he would visit New York, especially in the last few years, when it was hard for him to go up and down the steps of the subway, his preferred method of travel, he’d watch a lot of TV with Julia on our couch. She had been flipping through coffee-table books about WWII since preschool, so cuddling up with her grandfather to watch Project Nazi: Blueprints of Evil or World War II: Confidential was heaven.
When Julia was in second grade, her classmates formed book clubs based on shared interests. There were enough kids like Julia who were interested in international conflict to form a world wars group, and in the final few months of school, she and her friends read books about Winston Churchill, FDR, and Anne Frank. Nothing about this group project raised alarm bells for me, given her proclivities, and besides, I had just given birth. As far as I was concerned, my children might have been spending six hours a day bagging groceries at the Columbus Food Mart up the block, while I was at home nursing their brother.
Leading up to the last week of school, Julia told us we’d be coming to her classroom to see her final book club project. I can’t recall if she told us what she’d made. In my sleep-deprived state, I heard her say, “Mooooooom deflagerbasket mumkinpunch.” I snapped sharply back to reality when we were waiting outside the door to her classroom on the day of the presentation, and Julia turned to me and said, “I made a diorama of Hitler’s suicide.”
By the time I got into the room, it was crowded. Several parents were clustered around a table with a working volcano. Another group was listening to their children talk about butterfly migration. I managed to squeeze through to a back table, where Julia stood beaming next to a partially flattened shoebox with figurines made out of Model Magic. There was Hitler with blood running down the side of his large, perfectly round head. Next to him was Eva Braun, wearing a pearl necklace and holding a cyanide pill. In front of them was their bodyguard, who Julia explained was not on board with Hitler’s philosophy but made too much money to turn down the job. It was pretty fantastic, I have to say. I saw Michael walk in the door. I mouthed, “HITLER DI-O-RAMA” to him from across the room, zombie-like, while other parents steered their kids away from our table.
If I were to guess what age it is developmentally appropriate to begin working through your questions and anxieties about death through creative writing or clay sculpting, I’d say it’s squarely in the latter half of second grade. Or maybe it’s just our family. Maybe it’s just those of us directly related to my dad. (By the way, I believe he was blacklisted from entering Julia’s elementary school after she explained to her guidance counselor, in the messy postmortem that followed that day in class, that he was the chief proponent of her Hitler fascination.)
When I told my dad about the diorama, he said, “Alright! Way to go, Julia!”
Like my dad, I’m comfortable now, as a parent, talking about death or war or the probabilities of home invasion with my children. I don’t even shy away from talking about my own death, or Michael’s, which really tests the limits of his patience, because the conversations usually happen at bedtime, when he’d rather be doing other things.
“Today, at Chuck E. Cheese, at that birthday party with James, I followed a kid around for twenty minutes because I couldn’t remember her name,” I said one night.
“What kid?”
“Phoebe! Whose name and face I’m extremely familiar with! They’re good friends! But I couldn’t for the life of me remember it at Chuck E. Cheese. It was worrisome.”
“Maybe they pump something into the air at Chuck E. Cheese to make you forget things, like they pump oxygen into casinos to keep you awake.”
“I wish. But seriously, I think I have early onset dementia.”
“No, you don’t.”
“You don’t know.”
“Then we’d better have sex. I mean, if you’re dying.”
Ten years ago, Michael gave his father a kidney, and even though he was exceedingly healthy and expected to sail th
rough the surgery, I made him look me in the eyes and tell me I could pull the plug whenever I wanted, should something go wrong. Now, when he gets a sore throat, he lies in bed and says, “It’s probably just strep. Please don’t pull the plug.”
Should one of my kids express a fear that I might die, I say that it’s entirely possible, because we live in a broken world, and death is part of that. Then I say, “But Daddy would marry someone else, who might even be nicer than I am.” And that’s when Michael tells me to take a walk or disappear into the bathroom for the foreseeable future.
The only reason I can talk about death so casually is a) because there is something wrong with me, clearly, that is tied to the genes of the man who pulled squirrel tails around the house and joked at dinner about eating our livers with fava beans and a nice Chianti for years after Silence of the Lambs came out; and b) because of Jesus. Believing in a God who overcame death and promises everlasting life doesn’t always calm my fears, but for the most part, it takes the dread out of talking about death. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” the Bible asks (1 Cor. 15:55). I can only enter into the unimaginable when I know there’s a God who went through it and rose victorious on the other side. Which is what I think about all the time now, when I think about my dad. He relished so many scary things—laughed in the face of them—without Jesus. He didn’t believe that, one day, Jesus would come back and tame every terror, wipe away every tear. How did the darkness not consume him? How did he make me feel so protected and give me such a healthy perspective on the bad, evil stuff of life, without relying on an Eternal One himself?
As he got older, my dad’s demeanor about scary stuff changed. I guess that’s what happens as you get closer to your own death; it’s more real, less science fiction. He didn’t laugh as hard when I’d make a joke about him dying from overconsumption of pastrami in a single weekend. So I stopped being as cavalier. One day, walking around their house in Memphis, where I was visiting for a week during the summer, he threw into a conversation that he had always wanted the last movement of Verdi’s Requiem played at his funeral.
“Sung by the black soprano from Mississippi? That’s the one you like?” my mom asked.
“Yes. Leontyne Price, I think, is her name,” my dad said.
I didn’t speak or make a joke. I just opened a note on my phone and typed in, “Funerals: Dad: Last movement of Verdi’s Requiem, black soprano from Mississippi, look it up.”
I began composing eulogies in my head, which sounds grim and awful, but my dad loved stories, and he loved mine. I thought I could have a road map, at least, to be ready. And I was always talking to myself while walking around anyway; this was just new material. I’ve accepted imaginary awards, had imaginary, one-sided arguments with my husband, and conversed politely with old boyfriends, all on the way to the post office or school pickup. I’d even thought about what I’d say to one of my parents on their deathbeds. It was as natural as going through my grocery list. In my mind, I took the worst-case scenario and boiled it down to a story or a clever phrase, and that made me feel at peace. Occasionally I would jot down the best stuff into the Funerals note.
. . .
When my dad had his stroke, I was in New York, furiously trying to finish some work (which you are holding) before going to Target to buy stocking stuffers. At the hospital in Charleston, the ICU team kept my dad on a ventilator all day, while my sister and my mom sat with him and read to him and played his favorite music. They kept him alive until I could get there that night and say goodbye. What a gift that was. What an opportunity to say something meaningful, profound, lasting, just before they took him off life support, and he slipped away. I walked into the hospital room, curled my fingers into his palm, ran my other hand over his smooth, warm forehead, and said into his ear, “You were a good dad.” Like he was a very loyal beagle. That’s all I could come up with.
We didn’t play Verdi’s Requiem at his funeral, because we had a short, private, graveside service with no AV equipment. We did not have a eulogy. We told stories instead at our house, drinking gin, with our closest friends and aunts and uncles and cousins, which is how he would have wanted it. What you need when someone dies is not iPhone notes. You need my aunt Patti, who showed up on Christmas Day, when we were still in South Carolina, to clean my mom’s house in preparation for visitors. She spent hundreds of hours in the days after dad’s death filling coolers with ice and setting out buffets of food and washing wine glasses. You need a logistics operator. You need my sister, who did not have funeral jokes in her phone but does have a business degree and a lot more common sense than I do. She had a pie chart of my father’s financial assets and every bank password organized within days. You need to hydrate. My friend Murff told me that. She was right. You cry a lot, and you drink a lot, and you forget to make it water. Funerals are like wedding receptions, in that everyone you’ve ever known shows up wanting to talk to you, except you are sad, and the whole affair lasts three days. Hydrate.
. . .
We’ve been programmed to think that death is a natural part of life. But really, it’s not. As several pastors have explained to me, death is the antithesis of what God wanted when he created us. Before sin entered the garden of Eden, everything was perfect, and there was no death. Death isn’t what he envisioned. It’s not natural. It’s heartbreaking, for us and for God. We aren’t supposed to smile and say everything is for the best. I think we’re supposed to sob and rage and call in prescriptions. I am supposed to fall apart when I look at Sam—a baby my father thought I was crazy to have but with whom he fell rapturously in love once he was born—and know that he’ll never know his grandfather. I’m supposed to be wrecked that my mom is lonely sometimes.
But death is not the end of the story. “They got lost and were never seen again” is not how it goes. Christians believe that Jesus is coming back to fix this mess for good. And until then, we take some comfort in knowing that we will see other Christians in heaven.
I’m not sure if I’ll see my dad in heaven. The Do-Over is a sketchy personal philosophy to cling to. My mom is sure though. She never wavered in her hope for his salvation. She prayed for him constantly. And she climbed into bed with him and prayed just before he lost consciousness on that last day. She is confident he’s with Jesus.*
I’m open to being surprised. Just like when that lady’s head spun around.
TWENTY-ONE
JESUS AND THE RADIO CITY ROCKETTES
ONE CHRISTMAS SEASON, BEFORE I HAD children, I went to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular—otherwise known as the Rockettes—and I hated it. I went in expecting to hate it, because it embodied everything I was trying to avoid at the time: sentimentality, entertainment that seemed designed only for tourists, and midtown Manhattan.
For the life of me, I can’t remember why I went. Maybe my parents were visiting for Christmas, and we thought it sounded fun? But I definitely remember feeling like I was too worldly for this nonsense and would rather have been downtown at some bar you had to enter by crawling through an unmarked doggie door or entering a secret code in an abandoned phone booth. Those kinds of places were big in the early 2000s. Also: this has since changed, but the Rockettes show used to include a 3D sequence of a kid playing a video game that made me feel like I was going to throw up.
I am not anti-Christmas cheer, not at all. My birthday is on December 20, so by law I am required to be twice as psyched as the average person during the week leading up to Christmas. Think about how much pressure this was for me as a child—the two biggest days of the year smashed into less than one week, bang bang, one after the other. It usually ended in disappointment, as certain family members would give me the dreaded, single birthday-Christmas gift, and the letdown all kids feel on the twenty-sixth of December was doubly depressing for me, with the thought that I’d have to wait 359 days for fortune to shine on me once more. In elementary school, we were always already out for the holiday by the time my birthday came, s
o there was never a cupcakes-in-the-classroom moment, and scheduling a birthday party in the middle of the holiday chaos was almost impossible. My mother did her best. Two separate years she asked the school cafeteria to rinse and collect all of the kids’ milk cartons after lunch; she then picked them up in an industrial-sized garbage bag from the back door of the school, glued them to pieces of cardboard, attached graham crackers to the outside, and hosted my friends for a gingerbread house decorating party. Just thinking about that—it so happens that I’m writing this chapter in the middle of December, and I’m up to my eyeballs in unfinished holiday business—gives me hives and an urge to buy my mother something really nice for Christmas this year.
Yet even after her selfless act of gluing forty-something miniature milk cartons onto cardboard, I found reasons to fault my mother’s party planning. Gingerbread houses were still Christmas-y, I said; my birthday was still not adequately siloed off as a separate occasion. So, in third grade, my mom gave in to my request for a class-wide roller-skating party. Her one caveat, which it took me years to forgive her for, was that every kid bring a gift for ten dollars or less, and we’d put them in a huge sack, and there’d be a grab bag. Everyone got a gift to take home. “You don’t need twenty-five presents less than a week before Christmas,” she said. She was right, but you can imagine how this went over to a nine-year-old. It was birthday party blasphemy. No special treatment for me, the birthday girl? I got one gift, randomly picked, like everyone else?
Of course, I picked the lemon. What I really wanted was a bath sponge shaped like a baseball mitt that came with a baseball-shaped soap (the friend who brought it tipped me off, and I frantically tried to feel for that shape in the sack, until my mother hurried me up, and I whiffed). What I got was a pin—not a pen, which could have been cool, but essentially a brooch for a child, crafted from wire and dense foam, that someone’s artsy mom had clearly picked up at a museum gift shop. It was a human-ish figure, a cross between Gumby and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the scientist from The Muppet Show, with a coil of hair made from a spring. As a forty-three-year-old, I’d love that pin. At the time, I was devastated, to say the least, and even more angry at my mother than I already was. Only in adulthood, once I had my own children and would give anything to limit the plastic crap flooding my house, could I sympathize with her reasoning.
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