The story of Robin’s death has been hard to write. I wanted readers to feel some of the loss I felt on that bad day. I wanted them to know him as I knew him. You’d think—or I thought anyway—I could quickly sketch out a context of our home life, happy some days, not so happy other days, maybe some homey details, meals for example. Robin would eat his baked potato and then hide whatever food he didn’t want to eat, liver, say, or green beans, down in the potato shell. That was the kind of thing I thought might tell a reader who Robin was, what he was to me. Or before that maybe a physical description, his sidelong crooked smile, his gray-green eyes, his delicate hands, his energetic laughter. I would write about the family dog, big and woolly-white as a sheep, the hilarious newspaper fights between me and Robin and Erik at night on the couch, the game Robin invented called Bowling for Cats, maybe some of the sadder things too, regrettable things, like the divorce from their mother. Robin was especially hurt by the divorce. For a while he spent most of his time at his best friend’s house, and even started to call his friend’s parents Mom and Dad. Robin never got to know Annie, the woman I’m now married to, and this strikes me as another sad thing I might write about.
In writing terms, the divorce might have become an effective foreshadowing sadness that would prefigure the deeper grief of Robin’s death. I’d planned to write about how well Robin was doing in college at the University of Arkansas, I’d planned say he had a good part-time job in a biology lab. Then I’d planned to tell how Robin’s friends suddenly realized that no one had seen Robin for a few days and that Elizabeth realized this too and got worried and called the police and then called me, up in Pittsburgh. I was already living with Annie by this time. I had wanted to sketch out not just how worried we all were, but how we had to keep on with the ordinary details of jobs and dirty dishes and bank loans, as if the days when we didn’t know where he was were like any other days of our lives. I thought about making a comparison with that Auden poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about Brueghels’s painting of Icarus, who falls to his death as the rest of the world goes on about its business. As I had imagined the structure of the piece, I figured I would finally come to the place where Robin’s car is found in the Arkansas wilderness with Robin’s decomposed body inside. I worked and worked on this, but I never could get it to come together. I couldn’t make my son’s life seem real, or important, I couldn’t communicate a sense of what it meant to confront that empty space in all our lives that his dying left. I had lost a son before, the baby Jesse Robert, who I had not really known, but even all these years later, when I set out to write, I was tongue-tied and inarticulate.
I can imagine one of Robin’s college friends one day writing such an essay successfully. In fact, I like to imagine such a thing. It would be a great essay, the one this friend would write. I can imagine him writing of going to Robin’s room in the fraternity house and finding the grieving mother removing clothes from the closet, picking up his smelly sneakers, gathering up a stack of vocabulary cards from a study session for the German test, putting his desk lamp into a cardboard box. Or I can imagine a girlfriend standing on a corner of campus, waiting for a bus back to the dorms, and seeing Robin’s car slide by, the silver Prelude being hauled along behind a tow truck from a local service station, and noticing that the Prelude is all covered in flies. I can imagine how puzzled she would have been. I imagine her getting on the bus and telling the driver which dorm to take her to and thinking, “I swear, that car was covered in flies.” All this might be in somebody else’s essay. I can imagine the smaller crevices of that girlfriend’s life being illuminated by the shocking memory. I can imagine her remembering a small gift Robin had given her, an insect locked in amber, and seeing this moment in her life as a similarly vivid silence. Maybe by the time the essay is written, the girlfriend is married to somebody else and not very happy and wondering how her life would have turned out if Robin had made another decision and lives had been allowed to go along their original paths. Maybe the fraternity guy who walks in on the mom and the smelly sneakers has some other kind of life and some other dreamy fantasy. I wish someone would write those essays.
But what can a father say? I find myself silenced by the magnitude of how much there is to say, by the inadequacy of words. Words are sufficient for a father’s death, a lover’s, but not for a son’s. That’s the wall I keep coming up against.
My son’s death was a suicide. He was obsessed with the thought of death, tortured by it. The first time he thought of suicide was in seventh grade, after a small disappointment in the middle school marching band formation. He asked his Oiuja Board when he would die. The obsession continued. In high school he started to drink. With alcohol he drank himself into deathlike stupors, he threw a chair through a plateglass window in a fraternity house because he saw his reflection in it. Who is at fault in my son’s death? Isn’t someone to blame for this horror besides the boy himself? I am. What is a responsible context for the writer to put that piece of information into? Even random murder would seem simpler to write about, somehow. Still—No matter how much I have grown spiritually over the years since Robin died, no matter how much therapy I’ve had, no matter how much more I know about depression than I did then, still there are days when the only context that seems reasonable is that I was an inadequate father, that if hadn’t lost my temper that time, if I hadn’t succumbed to alcoholism—in short, that my son’s death was my fault. The self-blame book is not the book I want to write, and not one I suspect anyone wants to read. Indeed it’s not the life I can afford to live. Self-blame is usually a way of avoiding something more hideous anyway, something you’re willing to be punished for but unwilling to change, or even something terrible in the imperfect structure of the universe. What I am left with is this lengthy complaint that I don’t know how to talk about my son.
MANY PEOPLE TRIED TO comfort me at the time, of course. Some relied on the old tried and true “I’m sorry for your loss” remark, which shows they’re up to date and know that nothing really helps anyway so they might as well say this lame old thing, but at the same time pretty much prove themselves to be idiots who can’t think of anything more personal or creative to say. Others misapply what they learned in therapy or church and tell you this will make you a stronger person.
“What don’t kill you makes you stronger,” one guy said.
“God never gives us more than we can handle,” countless others have said.
Others want to help you to curse God, which ironically is no more comforting than the admonition that your boy’s death is part of God’s larger mysterious plan or that your son was too good for this earth and God needed him in heaven. Others related deaths that they had suffered to prove they knew exactly what I was going through.
One of these deaths was a ninety-six-year-old grandparent in a nursing home—“When that good lady died, why I—.”
And another woman—I swear to God, this sounds like a lie, but it’s not—related my loss to the death of her seventeen-year-old cat. “I know just how you feel,” she said. She went on and on about the cat. I ended up comforting her. “I had that cat for seventeen years!” she wept.
After about a year, another woman told me, “Get over it, you can’t grieve forever.”
Others avoided me altogether. These are not hateful people. In fact, they’re my friends, some of them people I love, including the lady whose cat died. They too are limited by the enormity of a son’s suicide.
The persons who came closest to being helpful—and there were a great many of these—were the ones who said, “Nothing could be worse than losing a child.” It didn’t help, because nothing helps, but you had to admire the attempt. Momentarily they submerged all their losses in favor of mine. It is an elegant gesture, and the elegance is helpful. They were acknowledging that in the grief event of life’s Olympics, I had taken the gold and they, the losers, would present me the medal. In some cases even this turned out to be a selfish act, I suppose. Sometimes such people were simply and suddenly scared shitless that their own children were capable of the same act and would die, and so by their generosity to me they might win a reprieve. Or maybe not, maybe they only had caught a glimmer of a clue.
It’s not quite true that nothing helped. One guy helped. I have to admit, this one old guy in Pittsburgh made an impression on me. His words were not really any different from a lot of other people’s. He put his face in his hands and shook his head back and forth and said, “Oh my God. Nothing could be worse.” The difference was, when this guy was seventeen years old he was imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen and was forced to watch as his whole family was murdered by the Nazis. So what he said about my place in the hierarchy of grief carried some authority. This helped. Maybe one other person helped as well. When Robin’s body had been autopsied and then cremated, it took a while for the ashes to be sent from Little Rock to Fayetteville to be interred. During the time when we were waiting for them to come, I was walking around the church grounds with the Episcopal priest, a big guy who had once been a college football star. I liked him. We stood by a pool of goldfish and chatted. He explained that “ashes” were not really what we were waiting for; what was left over after cremation was actually bone fragments. We talked about a lot of different things. There had been a lot in the news recently about the ineffectiveness of the U.S. Mail service. There was a joke that four more numbers were being added to the zip code because too much mail had been getting through.
I said, “I hate to think of Robin having to travel by U.S. Mail.”
We looked at one another and laughed. We walked a little longer on the ground, we fed the fish. This priest was about six-five, so it’s hard to picture him with an impish grin, maybe. He said, “You know, he could end up in the Dead Letter Office.” We laughed our damn heads off.