DIED 2008, 2012
FORGIVE ME FOR PUTTING two of them together, as if I could lure this story once and for all into a very small pen, shut the gate, and run away. It’s the one where the highway and the weather, the big cars and the tiny errors steal her forever, our precious golden girl with a heart full of good. One was a sixteen-year-old on her way to a birthday party, a dear, down-to-earth philosopher-tomboy who loved summer camp and golf. One was a twenty-year-old driving to her job at Francesca’s at the mall, saving for a move to Montana. She was an artist, a dog lover, and a tree hugger, the beloved baby of her family. They both were. And their mothers—one my sister-mom in Texas, one my student in an MFA program in Pittsburgh—got the same phone call. The one where they tell you there was nothing that could be done.
After the moment when nothing could be done came the avalanche of doing. People sent messages and placed phone calls and made pots of chili and bought boxes of scones. They pushed back the furniture, filled plastic cups with forks and spoons. They went to the drugstore, they booked airline tickets, they went through photographs. They went to buy tissues, retrieved crumpled tissues, pulled white tissues like doves from the box. Some people were just doing their jobs: conducting investigations, delivering flowers. Finally all that was over, and everyone went away. Back to their unharmed children, their familiar tasks and uncomplicated conversations, back to the world where even the T-shirts insist life is good.
Oh, my sweet ladies, friends of my heart! Broken like a vase or a bone or a car, broken beyond full repair or even the desire for it. If you wait long enough, I’ve heard, the pain somehow eases. Very slightly, very slowly, one notch at a time. I will be there, I swear. I want to see.