by Thomas Lynch
THE WAY WE ARE
I hope my pony knows the way back home.
—Tom Waits
“I want to remember him the way he was.”
I GET TOLD this a lot by the ones who love the ones who die. Most times there is a casket involved.
“THIS IS GOING to be a closed casket,” they tell me, in the voice we are trained to discuss our options in. Like sunroofs or modems. It’s easier to talk about things than people.
“HE WOULDN’T WANT people seeing him like this.” As if the dead, safe in whatever heaven or oblivion they inhabit, give a rap about appearances. Maybe he got skinny with AIDS or prostate cancer, or went green with liver failure, or bulbous with renal failure, or flipped his semi on the interstate. Maybe he hanged himself from a basement rafter or drove his snowmobile into the side of a tree, or curled up fetal in the end, a shadow only of his former self.
“IT’S NOT HIM anymore,” they say emphatically.
Or “her.” These things happen to “hers” as well—the cancers and the cardiac arrests, the lapses of caution that do us in.
“I want to remember him the way he was.”
And who could blame them? Who’d want to see someone they love like this? Whatever way they got like this. Dead.
“But remembering him the way he was,” I say, slowly, deliberately, as if the listener were breakable, “begins by dealing with the way he is.” I’m an apostle of the present tense. After years and years of directing funerals, I’ve come to the conclusion that seeing is the hardest and most helpful part. The truth, even when it hurts, has a healing in it, better than fiction or fantasy. When someone dies, it is not them we fear seeing, it is them dead. It is the death. We fear that seeing will be believing.
We fear not seeing too. We search the wreckage and the ruins, the battle fields and ocean floors. We must find our dead to let the loss be real.
Confrontation, closure, catharsis, denial—these are words I learned in mortuary school. And for going on thirty years, I’ve stood with bereaved parents, the widowed and heartsore, in front of open caskets and over open graves. And I’ve waited with the families of abducted children, tornado victims, foreign missionaries, drowned toddlers, Peace Corps volunteers, Vietnam and Gulf War casualties—waited for their precious dead to be found and named and sent back home to them to be buried or burned, mourned and remembered. I’ve listened while well-meaning but ill-informed clergy, nervous in-laws, neighbors and old friends sought to comfort the living by telling them the body in the box was “just a shell.” The operative word in this is just. The effort to minimize the hurt by minimizing the loss, pretending that a dead body has lost its meaning or identity, is another tune we whistle past the graveyard. The sad truths I’ve been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away. For those whose sons and daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and friends went off alive and never did return, the worst that can happen has already happened. The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark. The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning.
But oh, so difficult, the tuition.
I want to remember my son the way he was.
He wouldn’t want people seeing him like this.
It’s not him anymore.
I want to remember him the way he was—that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school. I want to remember him in chest waders in the river with his brothers and me, or up at the cottage, those summers of his boyhood, a hero to his younger cousins, the pied piper with plenty of time, or with his stepmother on the roller coaster at Cedar Point, or there—there on the beach beside me before the divorce, it was July in that picture of the two of us his mother took—me on my elbows, him on his knees, me in my thirties, him at three and I’m showing him something in my hand—I can’t for the life of me remember—and his mother must have just called his name or said “Smile” because he’s smiling, the blue of the sea and the day behind us, that moment there, when everything was well. I have videos too—of talent shows and First Communion, soccer matches and skateboarding in the parking lot next door, or playing drums. God, he was really good on the drums. And the guitar—really anything with strings. I’ve some of him on tape—his first songs, his first recordings. I have his first paintings, his first notebooks full of still lifes, figures, portraits, body studies. He has such talents. I want to remember him the way he was.
I want to remember him the way he was, with one grandmother’s red hair and the other’s eye for shape and color, with his mother’s smile and my curiosities, before that first sip, whenever it was, first quickened in him the unquenchable thirst; when his body’s chemistry locked and loaded on what it was it had been waiting for all these years, this little bit of giddy oblivion, this alcohol, this sedation.
He wouldn’t want people seeing him like this—laid out, cold, pale, dead to the world, a corpse that has forgotten to hold its breath—smelling like so many corpses I’ve smelled for whom the issue of whether or not they had a drinking problem has become moot. Once they make it to the bright lights, porcelain table, universal precautions stage, when their bagged viscera smell like stale excess and their cranium is wadded with cotton and stitched shut by the morgue, once they make it to my embalming room, whether they are a dead social drinker or a dead alcoholic makes little difference. They are dead.
So if, thanks to guardian angels or maybe his sainted grandmothers’ interventions, he’s not dead yet, all the same, he wouldn’t want people seeing him like this—dead drunk, passed out, half in and half out of his clothes—horizontal on the leather couch, someplace between seizure and coma, dying by doses, dead to the world.
It’s not him anymore. It hasn’t been for some time now. Not since he was fourteen and the thirst became a sickness. It is the thirst and sickness that has dogged my people in every generation that I remember.
My grandfathers were vaguely bingey men who’d learned to consummate big deals with drink—the wakes and weddings and baptisms, hunting and fishing trips, Fourths of July, Christmases and family crises. My mother’s father died young, of a big heart, huffing and puffing to his purple end, before we formed many memories of him. My father’s father, when my father went to war, swore off the drink in a deal he made with God for his only son’s safe return. And when the young marine came home, my grandfather kept his end of the bargain. I remember going with him to the bars up and down Six Mile Road. “Bumming,” he called it—hanging out with his pals, talking local sports and politics, showing off his grandsons—but he’d drink only Vernors ginger ale, and died sober and happy that his son had outlived him.
But World War II and the First Marines taught my father more than fear and killing. They taught him fearlessness and drinking. He came home skinny and malarial, as in the snapshots, our mother’s name tattooed on his arm, enrolled in mortuary school, married his sweetheart, moved to the suburbs and began making babies and a future for us. I remember the cases of Stroh’s beer on the basement landing, how he and his pals would play cards some nights, or sit out on the porch on a Sunday listening to ball games. They would talk and drink and laugh and be happy.
I don’t know when my father’s drinking turned on him, when his thirst turned to sickness. I don’t know. I saw him drunk only once.
I was sixteen. His father had died eight weeks before of a sudden heart attack. Now it was New Year’s. My mother couldn’t get him out of the car. He claimed he was having a heart attack. The doctor came and called it “sympathetic pains.” My mother wasn’t buying “sympathy.” Whatever it was for my dad, for my mother that
night was enough. She wouldn’t cover for him anymore. She wouldn’t pretend for him anymore. She wouldn’t keep his dinners warm or secrets anymore. It was her threat, if his drinking continued, to send his sons out looking for him, up and down his haunts on Woodward Avenue, that got him to swear off. And swear is what he did. God damn it. He could do it. He would show her. He would show us all. A year or so later, when he missed my youngest brother’s birthday party, getting too blurry over a boozy lunch with a casket salesman to get home for the cake and ice cream, the remorse and guilt were more than he could bear.
That night he went to his first AA meeting. I was not quite eighteen, working at the funeral home, when my father told me he was an alcoholic. He could not promise he’d never drink again. But he said he hoped to be sober that day. He asked me to pray for him.
Twenty-five years later we buried him with a bottle of whiskey under each elbow, in case, as he sometimes speculated, maybe in heaven he could drink again. His quarter century’s sobriety was a gift.
If most of his sons and daughters inherited his disease, most likewise followed in his sobriety. Whether blind luck or the grace of God kept us from killing ourselves or someone else, hard as we tried to, is hard to say. Either way, we all outlived our father and our mother and found ourselves having to make our own peace with drink and drugs and their afflictions. Whether we were problem drinkers or not, whenever there were problems, we were drinking.
For me it happened after years of successfully ducking punches and dodging disasters. I never liked the beer they were drinking in high school, but learned in college to like whiskey. Marijuana mostly put me to sleep, and I mistrusted the way it turned ignoramuses into philosophers. I tried some uppers when I worked at the state hospital, which made me jumpy, and I got sick on wine, and vodka seemed medicinal, but whiskey was lovely and the drinking of it made me feel mannish and Irish and worthy and numb.
By twenty I’d gotten into fights, fallen off of buildings, driven into ditches, lost my way—mayhems within the “normal,” “acceptable” range of youthful dereliction. After I married and the family came along, I became more cautious. With more to lose, I learned how to manage my drinking. I stayed close to home, mostly drinking with poet friends and Rotarians—genius and business providing good cover. I’d get a little tight on Tuesday nights from cocktails at Harold Hansen’s house, followed by dinner with the Rotary, followed by afterglow at the local drinkery. About the time I could not feel my jaw, it would be time to drive home, less than a mile, and since the police chief was a fellow Rotarian, his deputies might follow me home for safety’s sake, but unless I ran into or over something I was left alone. Weekends I’d binge a little with neighbors and friends, at dinner parties and barbecues, card games now and then. There were a few “episodes,” but nothing to panic over. I made only the usual fool of myself. I was your garden-variety suburban boozer, and for the most part it made me happier than sadder. I might look a little stupid, blather on too much, get a little sloppy, but I didn’t scream or get into fights or ignore my duties, so what harm? I was functioning. I might’ve gone on like that forever.
This sickness, this thirst, this alcoholism, I’ve come to think of as a card that comes in everyone’s deck—a joker, maybe—but it is there for sure. When it is going to turn up is anyone’s guess. For most, I suppose, they never get to it. It’s down at the bottom where it is supposed to be. They don’t outlive their possible draws. For some the deck is shuffled differently, maybe by genetics or the luck of the Irish or the star-crossed heavens, who’s to know? But they get to the joker that much quicker. It turns up when they’re fortyish, fiftyish, sixty or more. Others find it earlier, or it finds them. The more they drink the less good it does them, but the joker keeps winking at them as if everything is fine.
It was after I divorced that it began to turn for me. It was, mind you, a divorce made in heaven. She deserved better. So did I. We agreed on almost nothing—money, religion, the rearing of children. We made beautiful babies and enjoyed doing it, but otherwise we were at odds. I never really much admired her. I could live with her, but I could live without her too. It seems she thought as much of me. When it was over I was left with physical custody of our toddler and preteens, half my estimated life expectancy, a double mortgage on the house, and this low-grade, ever-ready anger at anything that moved. And there was this fear, like a knot always tightening inside me that could be loosened a little by nightly doses of alcohol. The blather began to turn bitter, the foolishness turned calculating, I seethed. My children were caught between my fears for what might happen to them and my anger at what had happened to me. They were damned if they did and if they didn’t.
I ruled by guilt and shame and sarcasm. My ever-shifting mood kept them on their toes, always trying to curry favor with me. It was easier than reason or listening to them. I don’t know how long we lived like this. Whether it was weeks or months or years—I just don’t know. And I don’t know if the divorce was coincidental with my drinking going bad, or correlated to it, or the thing that caused it. Like a tumor or infection, it is hard to say when or why drink gets malignant, when the thirst gets terminal. But once it does it no longer matters—what happens or what doesn’t happen. I drank because that’s what sick drinkers do, whether to celebrate the good day or compensate for the bad one, whether shit happens or doesn’t happen. Because it is Friday is reason enough. Because it’s November will also do.
But I remember, and pray I always remember, the morning in April, it was a Monday, making bologna sandwiches for the bag lunches and shouting orders to the older boys and their sister about their homework and their school uniforms and how they’d better hurry or we’d be late and I was harried with house duties and hung over from a bottle of Bushmills that I had finished the night before to celebrate nothing in particular and I had to drive them to school and get back and shower and shave and get dressed for a ten o’clock funeral because I was the guy whose name was on the sign and if I didn’t do it it wouldn’t be done right and here it was Monday and I was already playing catch-up-ball with the office and the carpool and the cash flow and the kids and I’m slamming the apples and cookies in with the bologna sandwiches and cursing my fates and barking out orders and wondering what a guy has to do for a drink around here when I see my darling boy who is nine in this memory sitting at the counter with his bowl of Froot Loops and orange juice in his blue shirt and the look in his eyes as he’s looking at me is fear, godhelpus, and he is afraid of me, of my anger and of my fear.
I didn’t know if I was an alcoholic. But I knew that I never wanted to see that fear of me again in the eyes of any of my children. So I didn’t drink that night, and the next morning, all other things being equal, I was not as angry. And the morning after that was calmer still. And whether or not I was an alcoholic, the removal of alcohol made things some better.
For months I stayed dry for the sake of my children and was feeling like “what a guy,” and no wonder the court-appointed shrinks found me the more “stable” parent and the judge had “awarded” me custody, what with my willpower and moral courage and the rest. I was feeling pretty special, kind of like a sacrificial lamb, or local hero, or martyr for the cause; kind of like a guy who gave up his one wee consolation for the kids, kind of like I imagined moms must feel like most of the time.
That October I was traveling through southern California, giving poetry readings at schools and libraries, afraid that I hadn’t written a line in months, afraid that my children were three thousand miles back home with my woman friend, afraid that none of my poems would last fifty years, afraid that my mother was dying of lung cancer, afraid of what would happen if I bought a bottle and took the day off, afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.
Instead of taking a walk on the beach or writing the great American poem, or staring into the Pacific, I spent the whole day holed up pacing and vexed, wondering about a drink. Not drinking was taking up as much time and energy as drinking would have taken
. There had to be an easier way. I found the number in the phone book on the first page of A’s. I called and told them where I was. They told me where to go. That’s how I got to my first AA meeting—at a church called All Saints on a beach in Santa Barbara. The first time I said that I was an alcoholic, I wasn’t really sure. And when I said it—“My name’s Tom and I’m an alcoholic”—it felt like diving into cold water on a hot day. Still, the sky didn’t fall, the earth didn’t quake, the folks at the table responded as if I’d told them Wednesday follows Tuesday or the Yankees play ball. Later, when I told the people I really loved that I thought possibly there was this off chance, one in a million really, that I might be alcoholic, “Oh, really?” they said. “Do tell! What was your first clue?” Neither perfect strangers nor my nearest and dearest were very startled by this intelligence. It seems I was the very last to know.
In time I went from dry to sober. In time it seemed less like giving up something and more like getting something out of the blue. In time the fear gave way to faith, the anger to a kind of gratitude. The shit that still happened did not overwhelm. I didn’t have to drink about it.
The conventional wisdom among recovering drunks is that the sickness leaves us three possibilities, like that old game show Let’s Make a Deal. We get well. We go crazy. Or we die. I keep wishing there was another choice, say, behind Door Number Four, where we can all have a drink and talk it over. But it seems that there are only three. We stop drinking and get sober. Or we keep drinking and spend a lot of time in jail or hospitals or asylums or on the street. Or we keep drinking and spend a lot of time in the cemetery.