Read More: A brief Q&A with Susan Knox
Joan Didion wrote of her husband’s sudden death in The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion and her husband of forty years, John Dunn, were in their New York apartment, he sitting by the fire drinking his second scotch, she tossing the salad for dinner when he stopped speaking mid-sentence. He’d had a coronary. She poignantly captures the moments just before the heart attack, her call to an ambulance, the paramedics, the ride to the hospital, his death, her coming home alone. But the memory that sticks with me, her experience that made me say, “Ah. I understand that,” is when she is cleaning out his closets some months later, putting his clothes in bags to be taken to St. James Episcopal Church. But she can’t part with his shoes. He will need them, she reasons, if he comes home.
Nine years ago, my son Alan died in his sleep, unexpectedly, at the age of 38 and for months after his death, every time the phone rang, a happy thought lit up my brain—it’s Alan. His body, found four days after he died, had decomposed and on the advice of the undertaker, I had not seen the body. I knew he was dead, but part of me decided it was all a mistake. I decided that the landlord who identified his remains was wrong, that it was not Alan’s body in that bed. I decided that Alan had started a new life somewhere else and soon he would contact me, when it was safe. I decided to not think about why he would fake his death and whose body was in his apartment and why he had to hide. I knew I was being irrational, but I shoved lucid thought aside. I would concentrate on waiting for his call. It was all I could do.
Didion got it right—that deep, inexplicable, creative grief.
After 9/11, we profoundly mourned the dead. We had nightmares of planes crashing, office towers on fire, flaming bodies falling, roiling ash pouring down city streets, people running for their lives in front of churning cinereous clouds. A Manhattan child saw angels falling from the sky, a lament that touched us in the most painful part of our hearts.
After 9/11, I developed a deep racking cough that drove me from symphony halls and theaters and restaurants into restrooms and corridors to cough until I retched. When I consulted my M.D., she laughed and said, “Well, it isn’t anthrax.” Her dark comment made me wonder how many people she had seen with similar maladies. She could find no cause for my cough and gave me no medication, but my acupuncturist told me that according to Chinese medicine, grief resides in the lungs.
I was living in Eugene, Oregon in 1994 when the Physician-Assisted Suicide measure appeared on the ballot. I voted for assisted suicide. It seemed reasonable and humane to allow a person control over the end of life. But I had another, more personal reason for voting for yes. My son Alan had tested positive for HIV. In the early nineties, this was a death sentence and Alan and I knew it might be a long, painful death. I believed at some point my son would ask me to help him die. I knew I wouldn’t want to do it and I knew I would do what he asked. The measure passed and I felt relief that I now had a legal remedy if my son asked for my help.
Alan didn’t die of AIDS or assisted suicide. He started using methamphetamine after his diagnosis. I guess he thought he was going to die, why not enjoy himself. But the disease did not progress and after six years he realized he might be a survivor. He successfully completed a drug rehab program five weeks before his death, but the damage had been done. While I never got a definitive answer, I believe he wore out his body with speed and his heart failed him.
I’ve often wondered what I would do if confronted with a terminal illness. Would I exhaust every medical possibility hoping for a reprieve? Would I forgo further treatment, say my goodbyes, and fade from this world? Alan’s death has dissolved my fear of my own death. Or I think it has.
The University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery had a recent exhibition entitled “We’re All Going to Die (except for you).” One gallery held artifacts from the second half of the 19th century: heavy black silk mourning dresses, stuffed owls mounted on the wall, and two display cases of mourning memorabilia. There was jewelry made from the woven hair of the deceased: necklaces, watch fobs, pins, locket frames. There were black handkerchiefs, triangles of black lace, black armbands. There were photographs of dead babies in their coffins. I was startled by a photograph of a young woman and a girl where the child’s head had been snipped out of the picture. I puzzled over why someone would remove an image. Had she died and the survivor couldn’t bear to look at happier times? Had the child’s likeness gone into a locket? My heart stopped when I saw a ribbon on which needlepoint spelled out, “Remember Me,” and next to it, a porcelain teacup with pink roses and the same reminder printed in gold. “Remember Me,” as though the departed is speaking from a netherworld, shaking his finger at his mother, “Don’t forget! Remember me.”
A recent earthquake in the Sichuan Province in China caused massive deaths, but we especially mourned the thousands of school children who were buried in the rubble of shoddily built classrooms that collapsed when the tremors reached full strength. Television news showed school buildings leveled while surrounding offices and hotels stood, the living looking at the destruction in a daze, parents mourning the death of their only child. A mother described the body of her dead nine-year-old daughter: not a bruise or injury anywhere, but her fingernails were gone. Sometimes we have to turn away; it’s too hurtful to see.
When we were in seventh grade, Carol Elton’s mother blew off her head with a shotgun. Mrs. Elton had lost her teenage son six months earlier when his tractor overturned on a hill, crushing him to death. Mrs. Elton was so grief-stricken that the living became transparent, her daughter’s loneliness and despair went unnoticed, and imaginings of Bobby’s last moments invaded her mind. The thought of joining Bobby became irresistible so she grabbed her husband’s twelve-gauge from the barn while Carol and her dad were at the grocery store. Carol went looking for her mother when they returned and found her in her late brother’s bedroom—her headless body in the corner, the blue-and-white-striped wallpaper splattered with blood and brains and bone.
Think of a mother’s grief so severe over the loss of a child that she can’t go on, can’t use the life of her young daughter as an antidote to depression, can’t see the double horror she leaves behind.
When Carol came back to school, our teachers warned us not to say a word about her mother. How alone she must have felt. I still want to hug her and tell her how sorry I am.
When a parent loses a child, well-meaning friends commiserate saying a child shouldn’t go before the parents, he had his whole life ahead of him, I can’t imagine losing a child. These sentiments did not comfort me. I consider how often these hollow condolences are offered when watching The Nightly News as they honor the dead soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan by showing their picture, name, rank, age, and hometown at the end of the program. I stop what I am doing and watch carefully, in respectful silence, reading every name, wondering how their families are coping, thinking how young to be gone, asking when will it end.
After the Iraq war began, Congress increased benefits to survivors of combat military dead; a beneficiary may now receive as much as half a million dollars. Imagine a mother and father receiving news of their child’s death in Iraq. Imagine their shock, the loneliness, the numbness of death. Imagine a military funeral, taps, a flag folded in a triangle resting on the mantel. Imagine the parents opening a thick, official envelope from the U.S. Government containing a check. Imagine their surprise at the large amount. Imagine their feelings: horror, anguish, anger, aversion, guilt, emptiness.
The morning after I learned my son was dead, I boarded a plane for Los Angeles. I wanted to go to his apartment, I wanted to feel his essence, linger in his last place, see if he left any messages that only I would understand. I was not in good shape on the plane. I felt dizzy and thought I might faint. I prayed over and over, “Please don’t let there be any life insurance.” Nine years later, I don’t know why I prayed for that; maybe I didn’t want to benefit from his death. Money had always been an issue between us, and Alan regularly called to ask for a loan. I had recently decided to not give him any more money. Our last conversation circled around my refusal to buy him a new suit for job interviews.
As it turned out, Alan did have life insurance through his workplace, the Long Beach Country Club. It was a $20,000 policy and I was the beneficiary. Alan had worked at the country club for six months, which was what the policy seemed to require. I applied for the benefit and learned that the waiting period is the first of the month following the six-month anniversary. Alan had died two weeks early. My prayer was answered.
Are there omens of death? Joan Didion recalls her husband asking shortly before his death if she knew how many people died in the novel he had just sent to his publisher. Later she found the long list in his own hand and she wondered why he used a pencil that made such a faint impression. What was the meaning here? Was he anticipating his own death?
There were no omens of my son’s death. I had no dreams, no bird pecked at my window, no prescient experience forecast his death. And beyond his death, he does not come to me—not in my dreams, not in symbols, not reaching from beyond. Even so, I think of Alan every day. I don’t need a needlepoint ribbon exhorting, “Remember Me.”
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Susan Knox writes creative nonfictions, short stories and is the author of Financial Basics, A Money Management Guide for Students published by The Ohio State University Press, 2nd edition 2016. Her stories and essays have appeared in Blue Lyra Review, CALYX, Cleaver, Forge, The MacGuffin, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. She and her husband live in Seattle, near Pike Place Market where she shops most days for the evening meal.
“Remember Me” originally appeared in CALYX.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Susan Knox