by Ben Dolnick
The night before the funeral the three of us were sitting around a table at the dark hotel bar, nibbling a bowl of cashews, watching people go back and forth from the lobby. My mom had started talking about an old neighbor of ours on Veazey Street, Marcia Popkin, who now had MS and was having to install a wheelchair ramp in her house. “I remember her husband just working out in that garden for hours,” my mom said. “In that big gray shirt. I never walked by when he wasn’t working.”
“Do you remember how nasty she was when I dented their car?” my dad said. “Do you remember that? The tiniest dent. And what was their weird little daughter’s name? The gymnast?”
I said I thought I remembered him denting their car and Eliza, the daughter’s name was Eliza.
“Were they the ones with the dog whose hair all fell out?”
“That was the Hirschmans.”
Occasionally, very occasionally, it would happen that the horror of Hannah’s being gone would recede for a few minutes and I’d get a window of dreamy, flu-ish distance from everything—this stretch at the hotel bar happened to be one of those times.
“Isn’t it astonishing?” my mom said, after a silence.
I understood that she didn’t mean Marcia Popkin’s MS, or the three of us being together, or even that my fiancée’s funeral was in the morning. Or anyway I thought I understood. Because my thinking, in these periods, had the same strange refracted quality as when I was on the edge of sleep, that same mix of lucidity and incoherence. And right then, as my dad signaled for the check, it seemed to me that my mom must have been thinking what I was thinking: that every house is a haunted house. I’d been thinking a lot about the Wright Museum, of course, and how unbearable it would be if I ever set foot there again. But now I was thinking about the house I’d grown up in, where my mom still lived—three stories, pale blue, with the beige driveway and the taped-over doorbell—and I could see it surrounded by the ghosts of men working in their gardens and girls carrying gym bags and dogs going bald. And I could see us haunting it too, younger versions of ourselves trailing around with bags of microwaveable popcorn and broken plastic laundry baskets and—but I was too tired to finish the thought.
My parents were standing up; my mom had her hand on my shoulder.
“You should go to bed, sweetie.”
“It’s an early day tomorrow.”
“Right.”
. . .
Hannah’s service was at the same enormous stone temple on Eighty-fourth Street where she and I had gone with her parents for Yom Kippur. I’d woken up with an iron-spike pain above my right eye, so I’d taken two Excedrin on top of the Valium that my mom had managed to procure for me. Men in black suits stood by the temple doors. The coat room off the lobby was as messy as a preschool cubby area. Hannah’s Oberlin friends, a gaggle of food-co-op-looking people, came up and hugged me one by one. Most of them were crying already. A blond man named Felix, who seemed to know me, and who had a tattoo of a fish poking out from the sleeve of his jacket, told me he would never forget, absolutely never forget, what Hannah and I had done for him when he’d been having such a hard time with his sister. The only thing I could manage to say to anyone was “Thank you,” which didn’t sound right, but it was all that would come out. “Thank you, thank you.”
One of my Michigan friends, Jason, steered me by the arm into the sanctuary. He’d morphed, in the couple of years since I’d last seen him, into a carpool dad. “Are you okay?” he said.
“No.”
That morning when I’d put on my suit I’d found a monogrammed paper napkin in my jacket pocket from a wedding that Hannah and I had gone to in Palm Springs that April (Tim & Lizzie); as we walked I wadded it into a sweaty ball.
“Tell me if you need to turn around or anything,” Jason said.
“I think I need to throw up.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know.”
I’m not sure how I’d failed to understand that Hannah’s casket was going to be on display. It was up at the front of the sanctuary, right in the center, on a stand with wheels, a shiny dark box with brass poles and a white cloth. My Valium evaporated. Jason evaporated. The Rampes had saved me a seat in the front row, but I couldn’t take a step—the casket felt like a too-close bonfire.
Please don’t let her actual body be in there. Please. Let this be a symbol, a Jewish version of communion wafers. Let her body be elsewhere, or nowhere, please. I told Jason that I needed to turn around, but he hesitated and then an usher appeared and before I could say anything I was being dragged the last hundred feet to the Rampes.
The rabbi stood staring down at his podium. “…Just this morning, Terri asked me how the Lord could let such a thing happen, and I had to tell her that I don’t know. The ways of…”
Almost every single person at a funeral believes that their being there is a kind of lie, that while everyone else is feeling the exact degree of grief recommended by the American Psychiatric Association, they alone are worrying about whether this will end in time for them to make their train.
I’d been at funerals like that. I’d never been at a funeral like this, which is to say: shaking, weeping, unable to follow more than ten seconds of what anyone said. I have the impression that I kept having to stand up, and that people were hugging me, but I can’t really say.
“…When Hannah and I were just about to graduate…”
“…She was always the cool one, the one us younger cousins wanted to be like…”
I do remember the end, though. The pallbearers—three of Hannah’s uncles and a stone-faced family friend—rolled the casket down the aisle toward the lobby, slow as a dirge, and all of us who’d been sitting in the front row walked out behind them. Hannah is in that box. Hannah is in that box. An aunt of Hannah’s that I barely knew was clutching my arm, sobbing. The Rampes—Bruce, Terri, and Megan—walked just in front of me, and they could barely get themselves down the aisle; they staggered along, holding each other up. The looks they gave the crowd—people in the aisles kept reaching out to touch them, to touch me—weren’t accusatory, but cornered, as if we were wild animals caught in a trap.
This is our wedding, Hannah, I thought—and somehow that, imagining these rows of friends and cousins applauding instead of sobbing, cameras flashing instead of faces breaking, was the worst single moment I’d had since she disappeared. My legs went wobbly. The floor of my stomach dropped. Multiple hands appeared bearing water bottles.
At the cemetery, which was more than an hour away, in Long Island, there were bare trees and brown hills and so, so many graves. The hearse pulled up at the crest of a hill to a fake-grass carpet that led through the trees to Hannah’s plot. It had gotten cold enough that everyone was wearing their winter coats over their suits and dresses. Megan had had a panic attack in the car and she sat fanning herself on a bench, being tended to by the same aunt who’d walked me out of the sanctuary.
“…Burial is a sacrament that allows the…”
There were only ten or twenty chairs set up in front of the grave, so most people stood clustered on the sides, crying, crossing their arms. The Rampes and I sat in the front row. Bruce was sobbing, bouncing, barely making a sound. Terri was wailing. Megan pounded her fists against her legs. We looked, I remember thinking, like a line of prisoners facing the firing squad.
The hole was deep enough that I couldn’t see the casket at the bottom. The rabbi was still talking, but no one could hear him, his microphone was bad and the wind was making the tent flap, and it didn’t matter.
Burial is so brutal. We are apes, we are animals, we grunt and grope and scratch our names in the dirt and then we get dumped in pits like luau pigs.
“…And now, in keeping with Jewish tradition, if anyone would like to…”
I was back in my mom’s rental car, waiting for the heat to thaw out my hands, when I realized that everyone who’d been at the burial had left, everyone was back in their cars, except for Hannah, who was going to stay th
ere in the ground, in these freezing woods, all through the night, and then the next night, and then the next thousand after that—that that’s what this meant. My mom, pulling out, said, “Are you up for the reception? It’s fine if you’re not.” I stretched out in the backseat and moaned.
[Edmund Wright’s journal]
Oct. 22
…William has now visited me on five of the past fourteen nights & whether I have lost hold of my senses or have ventured further into the world of spirits than Hodgkins ever dreamt, I cannot say. Sarah has made plain that I pursue this work in direct contravention of her wishes; I have made similarly plain that my temperament offers me no choice but to follow my researches where they lead me.
The first three encounters did in their bare outlines resemble the first: the solitude of the study, the sense & sound of another in the room, the liquid approach & the subsequent dissolution. On the night of his fourth return, however, I summoned the courage to stay fixed in my seat & the spirit, at the point when he had, on nights previous, disappeared, now touched my very skin & in so doing absorbed into me. The limits of language foreclose precision, but the feeling was as of being a dry rag placed into a cool liquid, & once it was done William, or this insubstantial distillation of him, seemed to inhabit the quarters where that which I call “I” customarily dwells. Never without laudanum have I stood so far from the banks of ordinary experience.
For a moment I sat awash with bliss, overcome by the sweetness of reunion—but before the feeling could ripen, my senses were immersed in a scene as horrible to me as it was familiar. Here was the road by our house, here was the gray October evening, here was the resting carriage, here stood Smuggler tall & noble. Notably I was not myself but William in this vision & so it was as my son, racing across the lawn & then mounting the wheel, that I lived the horror I shall not here record, terminating in a blackness whose depths I cannot approximate.
When I came to at my desk no more than a few minutes had passed; my papers were speckled in perspiration & my shirt was sopping. Such, I told myself, are the wages of progress. As the naturalist at sea clutches the railing & fixes his eyes on the horizon, so shall I endure…
Summer 2031—Connecticut—Age 50
You are standing in the shower bare bright red feet under scalding water you rub the soap against the washcloth start with your left arm stomach chest always the same the body moving without thought spinning like a car on an assembly line even this thought you’ve had how many hundreds of mornings how much of life is like this now the shampoo fingers through hair eyes scrunched your son calls from the living room Mom I’m leaving his voice is deeper now than his father’s deeper somehow than it will eventually end up you call out okay and hope he doesn’t hear your fear that he too will stand numb under who knows how many hundreds of showers you scrub the long scar on your stomach the pale splotch on your thigh you hear the door close downstairs you turn off the water and stand dripping for a second thinking this can’t be what a person is for you must be tired you must have had too much to drink last night you reach without looking for the towel…
2
The strange thing—the thing the grief books all tell you but that you can’t quite believe until you experience it—is that the first days are horrendous, and then the next bit is worse. Those days right after the funeral, during which I thought I’d felt as bad as it was humanly possible to feel, I’d been numbed, it turned out; what I’d been feeling was only half strength. And whatever those numbing chemicals had been—the same ones my body would have deployed if my leg had been torn off by a lion—I only had a few days’ supply.
One of the main things I’d been numb to, it turned out, was my suspicion that Hannah had killed herself. I drifted around the city for a week or so after I checked out of the hotel—a few nights with an old music friend in Washington Heights, one night with a cousin of my dad’s on East Sixty-seventh Street—and the question of Hannah’s death came up in me like a rash. It was all I could think about; it was waiting to pounce on me at the end of every mental hallway. I’d wake up from a dream in which I’d found Hannah hanging from a beam in the Wright House, and then I’d spend the rest of the night—you can’t fathom how long these nights were, sweating in strange beds—tormenting myself with even worse images: her bloated corpse, her face gasping for air, her hair floating like river weeds.
Of course I couldn’t tell anyone about any of this—the thought of Hannah having killed herself felt literally unspeakable. My friends and parents had enough trouble knowing what to say to me as it was, and the Rampes—I went to see them most days, since I had nowhere else to go—seemed to be staggering on in their own grief-blind obliviousness. So I sweated, and I read nightmarish online message boards about suicide, and I carried on an endless court case entirely within the confines of my head: She would have left a note, she wouldn’t have left a note, what about the canoe, what about the Risperdal, she would never, you don’t know…
In the middle of this, the Rampes told me I could move in with them. This was a Wednesday in the first week in December. I’d spent the day at their apartment helping them go through condolence cards, and now I was ostensibly taking a nap in the guest room while they decided what to do about dinner.
Bruce came in and sat down next to me on the edge of the unmade bed. I hadn’t been asleep, of course. The guest room happened to be where the laundry machines were, so the dryer was chugging and shushing a few feet away from us.
“You know you’re welcome to stay here with us,” Bruce said.
Instead of answering, I burst into tears—this was, fortunately, as unremarkable an act in their apartment as sneezing—and Bruce, not understanding that my tears meant Dear God help me I think your daughter killed herself, uneasily touched my shoulder before standing up.
Living at the Rampes’ seemed, at first, to help somewhat with my suicide obsession. It wasn’t that the thoughts about Hannah’s death went away, but they lowered to a semi-tolerable volume. Dozens of times a day I told myself that if it were actually a rational thing to be thinking about, if this weren’t just a cruel habit that my exhausted mind had fallen into, then the Rampes would have brought it up. The grief-stricken mind is unusually vulnerable to delusions and misperceptions. Where had I read that? Anyway, Bruce and Terri had known Hannah at least as well as I had. Their sense of her psyche was just as good as mine. If they weren’t worried, then I shouldn’t be worried. All the things I’d resisted believing with all my strength when she was alive, I now flung myself into like a baptismal bath.
I wasn’t the only extra person in the apartment; Megan, Hannah’s sister, had decided to stick around too. This was less of a problem than it might have been. Megan had always been the trouble daughter: rehab, credit card debt, the disastrous marriage. For the first couple of years that I’d known the Rampes, Megan could be counted on to contribute at least one drunken, tearful fight to every family gathering. Now she seemed to be in a good phase—the purple half-moons were gone from under her eyes; her hair was a more or less normal color. In her reconfigured family, she seemed to have taken on the role of caretaker. She’d venture out to CVS or Fairway when our supplies of pills or food ran low. She would force smoothies on us (she’d once worked at a health food store in Providence, and had an abiding faith in kefir and matcha powder); she’d turn on lamps whenever we found ourselves just sitting in the dark. “You look bad, Dad,” she said. “I’m getting you some tea.” I’m reluctant to say anything positive about the feeling in the apartment, because the baseline was so awful, but there was—compared, anyway, with suffering alone on my college friend’s futon—something almost cozy about it, recuperative, a sense of huddling around a fire on an inhospitable planet.
And conversation in the apartment, just like conversation around a campfire, came mostly in gusts between silences, addressed partly to whoever happened to be sitting nearby and partly to the air. One night the four of us were sitting in the living room—we’d finished a dinne
r Megan had made of Moroccan chicken, and we were working our way through a second bottle of wine—when Terri told a story.
“You know what, years ago, this must have been five years ago—which probably means it was ten years ago—a girl in Hannah’s class at Oberlin died, I think her name was Nicole. Beautiful girl, very waifish, almost see-through skin. She was with a boy who’d had too much to drink and he’d driven off the road and of course he’d walked away fine. And she’d been killed instantly. Or maybe she died the next day, I don’t remember. You probably know, Megan. But in any event this happened, and she died, and of course it was an enormous deal for the entire school, Oberlin is very small, there were assemblies and they brought in counselors and the head of the school wrote us all emails about how our kids were coping and what we could do to help. This was the first death, the first death of a peer, that lots of them had ever dealt with. I think they decided to rename a room in the library after her, the Nicole-something reading room.
“And I remember having the thought, I remember it very vividly, I was right here in this room: So, that’s the one. Because every class, every group of kids when they’re growing up, has to have their little tragedy. In my class it was Lewis McKay. For Megan it was John Wolff. These things are shocking, but they’re also predictable, in a funny way: you expect to be shocked at some point. And if it was Nicole, for Hannah’s group, then it wasn’t going to be Hannah. Like a lightning rod. I don’t think I quite put it to myself like that, but that is how you think, as a parent.”
She stopped for long enough that I thought she was finished, but she wasn’t, quite.
“I remember feeling guilty about it at the time,” she said, looking over at Bruce. “Well.” She took a big gulp of wine. “Not guilty enough.”
