Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye
Ann Klotz
Word Count 854
We slide into the pew, about three quarters of the way back. It’s beautifully decorated, this mid-town sanctuary, and we are early because we know there will be a crowd. Both my daughters worked for and admired this young woman, who was killed in a mid-town shooting that had claimed the headlines two days earlier. Our older daughter tutored her children and traveled with them; our younger daughter babysatfor them occasionally. This victim of a senseless shooting had been a star—gifted, accomplished, kind, present, interested in mentoring all the young women in her life.
The night before, our oldest daughter had asked me if her friend, her employer, had suffered. Such are the mysteries that trouble us with unexpected, horrific death. Why her? And did she suffer? My daughter had texted with her the day before. And now she was gone. I think about her clothes hanging in her closet, her favorite foods still on the shelves of the refrigerator.
“No,” I answered instantly, “she would not have suffered.”
The center aisle fills with beautiful young couples, embracing. The women, in black, look etched, their sorrow all angles. The rabbis offer readings and her husband and father speak about this remarkable woman. Then, spontaneously, her daughter, 14, approaches the lectern and says the loss of her mom feels like a cruel prank.
Listening, I remember the girl I was fifty years ago, asking my mother if my brother had suffered when he was killed in a car accident, blinded by the sun.
“No, dear,” I imagine my mother, a muted version of herself, reassuring me. “No.”
My parents didn’t let me see my brother’s body. They wanted me to remember him un-mangled, alive, not dead. But, like this child of fourteen speaking with choked dignity, for a long while, I, too, had wondered if my brother’s accident might have been a terrible joke, if he might push through the swinging pantry door, lanky in khakis and the linen driving cap he wore—so pretentious--he died during his Gatsby phase—and grin, saying, “Ha! That was a good one, wasn’t it?” Then I could be angry at him for pulling such a stunt and be overjoyed that he was, in fact, alive. I’d wake up in the months following his death and forget that he was gone; the recollection would seep back into my consciousness, sticky, viscous.
Grief, they say, is in the details and the mystery. There are no satisfying answers to the question why. After the funeral, on a long drive back to Pennsylvania, I made a list of details I recall about my brother, Rod, now gone five full decades. He loved a girl called Mimi, his “green light.” She is my Facebook friend--now, a grandmother. We both had eczema and asthma. He was headed to Penn that fall. A lefty, who loved bacon sandwiches made with mayonnaise on white bread, he used the cellar door as his backboard as he practiced pitching throughout middle school. Once, our uncle sent tickets for the World’s Series when the Phillies played the Cardinals, and Daddy and my brother flew to St. Louis to watch the game. I didn’t care about baseball, but I was still jealous. He managed the ice hockey team at his New England prep school. He had a temper. He wore a driver’s cap and favored himself a modern-day Jay Gastby. He tortured the local police in our small summer community, organizing parties over the line of their jurisdiction. Like me, he was an excellent backgammon player, and his ping pong serve was almost un-returnable, the spin and speed perfected. He was the apple of our mother’s eye.
I turn the memories over, hoard them, examine them from different angles. It pleases me when I remember bits I thought I had forgotten. I think about all the people at that service who have their own memories of the woman who died too young–vibrant, alive, a future that should have spooled out.
Weeks later, I am still thinking of her, of my brother, of the fact that, for the rest of the world, shock subsides. Most people resume their lives, weep less, speak less often about the person who is gone. They are not callous, simply alive. And for some of us, those first weeks of loss are mostly blank before the memories crowd our hearts. Grief grips us for a long, long time—it seems impossible that the leaves change, that the sun continues to rise and set, that people will leave the service and go home to eat egg salad. Others cannot stay perpetually absorbed in loss. For me, one loss begets another, sends me spiraling back into questions for which there are no answers. And the mystery–any reasonable explanation about who lives, who dies or why–persists, always.
Last week, I placed a tiny potted succulent on my brother’s grave, a tidy flat stone placed between my parents, as he often was during his short life—his life that, ended, shaped the course of my life. Fifty years from now, her daughter will be my age. What of her mother will she remember?
Ann is a recently retired headmistress who splits her time between the UWS of Manhattan and Eagles Mere, PA. She is in a perpetual search for the strongest cup of coffee in the Northeast.