If anyone got us through the emotional nightmare of mom’s death, the credit really does go to Dad’s secretary.
Grace.
Mom and Dad were only children, so we had no passel of aunts and uncles to descend and help. Mom’s father was dead, and her mother was in a nursing home back near Buffalo, New York. Dad had broken off all contact with his own parents years ago for reasons he still won’t share. About five years back I learned they were dead.
That big, happy family wasn’t us. Never had been. Mom was the glue.
When you lose the thing that keeps you together, everything falls apart.
Grace’s arms are the ones I remember reaching around me as I stood for hours after the burial, refusing to get in the limo, incurring the hissed wrath of Dad but not giving a shit. Andrew and Terry had complied with Dad’s order to get in the fucking car or else.
I chose or else.
No one except Dad cared that I stayed. They all went back in a long line of more than one hundred cars under police escort, headed for the Farmington Country Club for the sedate, tasteful gathering where appetizers would be served and wine and spirits would flow and we’d all have some closure.
That was Dad’s word.
Closure.
I’d stood staring at the mounded dirt over the hole in the world where someone had dropped my mom. Her body wasn’t just in there. My future was, too. Leaving her wasn’t an option. Once I walked away, once I got into that black machine and drove off and left her like everyone else, it sealed the fate of truth for me.
I’d killed her.
Dad had said that to me the day we’d gone to the hospital, the day he learned her throat had closed, swollen so far that no amount of love or drugs could pry it open. Andrew was hanging on in another room but Mom was dead.
Dead.
All we have are memories of the dead. No more kisses. No more arguments. No more forgiveness.
You can’t forgive a corpse.
Or, in Dad’s case, a son.
A wave of shame covers my body, a feeling I haven’t experienced in eleven years. Suddenly, Marie seems wise. Maybe she has a point. When you love someone, part of that loving involves digging deep inside yourself to a truth that is only yours. Whatever hurt and pain and grief resides inside you, that truth needs to be reached. Pulled out. Held up to the light of day and reconciled with the love you feel for someone who you feel did you wrong.
I was barely eighteen. In an impossible Catch-22. Saving my brother meant losing my mom. Saving my mom meant losing my brother and defying her panicked plea.
No way out.
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....
Mom helped me deconstruct that Yeats poem right before she died. It’s about WWI and the terrible ravage of a war that changed all the rules of brutality. All the rules of what was expected when things fall apart.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned...
How could Dad blame me? How could he not? I suppose I understand and yet I don’t. My gut twists every time I think about those wretched moments when she and Andrew were stung and the weight of the world was placed in my hands. Every time Dad makes a snide comment.
Every time a bee floats past Shannon.
Am I crazy to marry a woman who could die the same way my other did? I must be. A little. Two EpiPens can’t hold back the danger and the risk. My wealth means I can buy all the EpiPens in the world and sprinkle them liberally in every corner of every place where Shannon and our future children will be.
And it still might not be enough.
Love doesn’t care about randomness. Love embodies it, in fact. Embraces it. Knows that the random is the vehicle for spreading joy.
And pain.
So much pain.
Surely some revelation is at hand...
My father focused on the pain, never the joy. I followed in his footsteps. That serendipitous moment in the bagel store. Finding Shannon with her hand down the toilet. Having her walk into that meeting at my office and taking her to dinner...
Falling for her.
Loving her. Loving her so much I’ll risk letting my heart fall apart for the profound honor of her willingness to be mine. And to love me back.
The joy of being with her outweighs the potential pain. It’s a gamble of the heart that I’ll just have to take, hoping the odds are on my side.
“Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” I say aloud to my mom.
God, I love Shannon so fucking much I’m standing here in front of a gravestone muttering Yeats to a dead woman.
I’ve brought Shannon here before to “introduce” her and Mom, and we visited on Mom’s birthday and her death day. “Death Day” is one of the most macabre terms ever invented, but there isn’t a better term. Death Day it is. Shannon’s watched me cry here, seen me rage here, and we’ve also enjoyed a glass of Mom’s favorite wine while sitting on the quilt my grandmother knitted for Mom when she was pregnant with Terry.
Mom’s had a reasonable chance, to the extent that one can while dead, to form an opinion of Shannon.
It’s time to hear what the woman who owns the ring thinks.
Am I little crazy to be doing this? That’s a rhetorical question, right? Because no. Fuck anyone who thinks so. When you decide to propose to someone you talk to your parents, their parents, your siblings and friends and your secretary and the mailman and the barista where you get your macchiatos, right?
Why wouldn’t I have a lengthy conversation with a gravestone, too?
Loving wife to James, mother to Terrance, Declan and Andrew
How does a life sum up in one sentence carved in stone? She was blonde sweetness and light. Firm disciplinarian and kisser of boo boos. She taught us how to “read” an original painting, and why white space is important in art and life. Elena McCormick found a gentle peace in handwriting letters on fine stationery. She loved to walk in creeks barefoot and jump into the ocean before sunrise, freezing and laughing as Dad watched from the balcony of the beach house, cup of coffee in hand, shaking his head at her antics.