ARLENE S. BICE
Three days after having a hysterectomy, I was home from St. Francis Hospital and moving pretty slowly, inching my way across the kitchen and into a chair. I had made a light lunch and cleaned up and now looked forward to relaxing while I read a book. A neighbour knocked on my door. My son Guy had been in a boating accident. He had gone down into the river and had not come up. With that said and nothing more, the neighbour turned away and left me alone.
Dressing as fast as possible, trying to be careful of my stitches, I prayed, “Please, God, no. Don’t let this be happening, let it be a mistake.” My heart pounded to the rhythm of the words.
I wanted to run as fast as my mind was running, but couldn’t. I took tiny steps, trying not to pull my stitches loose. Bordentown Beach was two blocks away but it might as well have been miles. The stitches pulled if my steps were too fast or too long. I was terrified that I would lose Guy and terrified that I would lose the work done by the surgeons.
At the end of the sidewalk, I inched my way forward to where the potholed gravel road splayed out to form a beach. Another obstacle. I forced myself to stay calm, at least on the outside, and took in the scene before me. Bordentown Beach is supposed to be a place for fun. It isn’t sandy, but it’s still busy. People usually gather on it to watch pleasure boats slide in and out of the river. Today they were standing in pairs and small groups, looking out at the water. I found a place to stand away from everyone. I didn’t want to talk.
In my peripheral vision I could see heads turn toward me. I heard the whispers: “That’s his mother.” I moved closer to the water and watched the Hope Hose Humane First Aid Squad without understanding what they were doing. I couldn’t ask them questions. I was too afraid my voice would break or I would cry. Instead, I eavesdropped. I overheard the word dredgers and knew a little more.
I had visions of Guy as the smiling baby he was, with his white blond hair and dimpled cheeks, of photos of him as a grinning kid in elementary school. I saw him marching around the house with his brothers in step with the children’s music on the console. I recalled Christmas with Guy in his red-and-white Santa Claus outfit. I saw him in the Superman Hallowe’en costume I made for him. When he put it on, he leaped off the six-foot high back porch because he thought he would be able to fly. He was lucky that he didn’t break a leg.
Someone had called my son Bret. My other son, Ralph, didn’t live in town anymore. Bret now strode toward me from his truck. He was twenty-six years old, two years older than Guy. He kept his face rigid, but his emotions showed in his shoulders, his walk, and in his fists, balled up like he wanted to hit someone. Trying to keep the terror out of my voice, my words broke up as they jerked out of my mouth. If I began sobbing like I wanted to, the surgeon’s handiwork would tear apart like my heart.
“He’ll be okay. They’ll find him.” I said. “This can’t happen twice in one family.” I was referring to my other son Kenny who had passed away in a car accident six years earlier. He was twenty-four at the time. I never did get the whole picture of what happened on that dark, rainy night outside Washington D.C. It made his loss hard to accept.
Grief had created a dead zone inside me. I knew Kenny was gone but I had never gotten used to it. Sometimes I thought I saw him in a crowd then stopped short. I would remind myself, “Oh, no. He’s gone.” I could not believe that I could lose another son.
On this sunny afternoon, there were plenty of witnesses. People stood around discussing the accident. They would not approach me but they talked to Bret. He went over to a few of the fellows he knew.
When he returned to me, he filled me in on the details.
“Guy was staying in to watch the game on TV. He’d been out late the night before and didn’t want to go anywhere. But Bud wanted to put his new boat in the water and needed Guy’s help.”
Guy was always conscious of a friend’s need. And of the two, he was the ace swimmer. How ironic. Damned ironic. The boat tipped and flipped. Bud managed to get to the shore. Guy didn’t. When he couldn’t see Guy in the water, Bud ran for help.
Bret jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and wandered off into the nearby woods. Minutes later, I heard his scream, an animal sound, like the screech of a banshee. People started to run toward the woods, but I held up my hand to stop them.
I knew what was happening. Bret was in agony. He needed the trees around him, not people asking him questions. I still recall the chilling sound Bret made that day, the sound of despair. It’s buried deep inside me.
I clung to the idea that Guy had swum to the Pennsylvania side of the river. He was an excellent swimmer and had learned to swim underwater with his eyes open before he could even walk. When the boys were little, their father, a mason contractor, had built a cinder block swimming pool in the yard for them. It was about two and a half to three feet high. The summer before Guy turned a year old, he swam as naturally as a fish. He was fearless. And he was a union stonemason, strong in the arms and upper body. It didn’t make any sense to me that he could drown in the river.
The day slipped by with no signs of Guy. My stitches pulled from standing so long; my strength drained. My mind raced with more images of Guy. I remembered how the birthing pains I had with Guy were all in my lower back. It had felt as though my spine was cracking into two pieces. A gurgling baby came from that pain. What could possibly come from this?
People drifted off, tired of waiting. Others arrived, curious. Some of Guy’s friends heard about the accident and, hoping it was not true, they came to join the vigil. Guy had a lot of friends. He was a congenial sort.
Afternoon turned into evening and I walked the two blocks home to get a sweater. The early June air was turning cool. Any hope of finding Guy was fading. But I couldn’t give up. I held onto the thought of his excellent swimming.
Mayor Gloria Schooley joined me when I got back to the beach. She stood by my side, sometimes making small talk, as people do. Sometimes she just stood there in silent comfort. She was the first female mayor of Bordentown City, and I knew she was not there as an official but as a mother and as someone who cared. She stayed by my side until the wee hours of the morning when it was time for me to go home. I felt drained, like my reproductive system they’d removed only three days before was going to fall out again.
When I returned to the beach the next morning, the crowd was gone and the dredgers had pulled their gear out of the river. I took my leaden self home and waited as millions of mothers have waited. I was a zombie. My insides were dead.
“What the river takes,” they said, “it will give up in three days.” Three days later on June 9, Guy’s body was found snagged along the river’s edge in Fieldsboro, the next small hamlet south of Bordentown. His body was recovered and taken to Huber’s Funeral Home. I cried then. This was the third time I had needed to call Huber’s in six years. My son Kenny passed away in ’82, my mother in ’86, and now in ’88 I had lost Guy. Grief was no stranger to me. I cried with my two remaining sons and in the arms of Guy’s many friends who had come to say goodbye. I cried into my pillow. I cried all the tears I had held back before.
It was Bret who identified the body. He saved me the agony of seeing what a river does to someone after three days. Because of Bret, I could remember Guy alive and happy.
In the year after his death, Guy’s spirit visited me from time to time. He would flick the lock of hair behind my right ear and I knew he was with me. One day when I was at the cash register at my bookshop, a lady came through the open door and walked toward me.
She smiled and said, “Oh, your son is standing behind you!” I must have gone pale. She said, “Oh! I’m so sorry. I hope I didn’t upset you. That just popped out.” She covered her open mouth with her hand as if to shove the words back in.
I smiled. I had already sensed he was with me.
It took me ten years before I could talk about Guy’s death with Bret or Ralph. Ralph and Guy had been close, less than two years apart in birth and as tight in friendship as identical twins.
“I just don’t understand it, what with Guy’s swimming ability,” I said to Ralph.
“The boat was a small one, more suited for just one person,” Ralph said. “When it flipped up, it must have hit Guy on the forehead and knocked him out.”
That made sense. Now I knew. He had not struggled facing death as he had struggled in his young life. Guy’s time on earth was over and, in some realm, he was a truly happy kid again. His visits to me proved that. The awful emptiness I felt not understanding what had happened began to heal.
Giving birth, I never expected to outlive two of my four children. It is so unnatural. Yet I have. As a result of my losses, I have read about what happens when someone dies, about life after life. I find comfort knowing that, although I am without two of my sons, they have completed their journey for this lifetime and we will meet again. We will live another lifetime together. Hopefully a longer lifetime.
To love completely is to let someone go. Mothers who lose children suffer the pain of giving birth and the pain of grief. My hysterectomy was a part of that loss, too. Part of what made me a woman was gone.