DIED 1969
MY SISTER AND I had been at sleepaway camp in Milford, Pennsylvania, for almost half of our four-week sentence. Saturday, finally, was Visiting Day, when the parents would pull up to Nah Jee Wah’s gates in the family cars with boxes of brownies, packs of Twizzlers, forgotten hairbrushes and sweatshirts, awaited as if crossing the river Styx to visit us in Hades. But the night before, the head counselor came to me in the mess hall. Our mother and father had called. Something had come up; they couldn’t make it. What could it be, I thought, what could have gone wrong? I paced the dusty paths around the compound all day, eyeing other children with their parents. We had a funeral to go to, my mother wrote that week in her letter. It was a while before I learned that it was our eye doctor, a friend of the family, who had died.
I come from Nah Jee Wah so pity me, there ain’t a decent boy in CLC. And every night at nine they lock the door, I don’t know what the hell I ever came here for. Forty years later, our camp song is still stuck in my head. My mother tells me the eye doctor was a classmate of Daddy’s from school; his family owned a liquor store in Asbury Park. He was a bachelor, had served in the army. She doesn’t think he was gay. Then she recalls the cause of death was an overdose of medication he took for back pain, perhaps intentional, perhaps not. He was addicted, she says.
Like the flap of a seagull’s wing that changes the course of all future weather systems on earth, his death was a cause itself. Before long my sister and I would see another eye doctor, would be sent to a camp we didn’t hate as much, one where I ate seventeen pieces of pizza in a contest, was caught stealing another girl’s tiny china kitten, was in a production of Our Town performed for the parents on Visiting Day. It is remarkable to my mother that I remember the death of the eye doctor at all. Actually it’s not much of a memory—his moon face, my pearly eyeglasses, an empty picnic table—but it has turned out to be my job to collect things like that.