I run back in to tell everyone that we can hear the ambulance—it’s coming. Then I run back out to wait with Scott. We don’t say anything, just stand nervously. The sirens are loud and clear but there is still no vehicle in sight. Minutes pass before lights finally crest the hill in front of us.
We wave our arms and a fire engine pulls up and parks on the street, next to the driveway.
“Hurry! She’s in here!”
Two paramedics stride in and seize Audrey in their blue-gloved hands. I watch from the front hallway as they run her outside, her body jiggling in their arms. An ambulance pulls into the driveway. We all get dressed and drive in two cars to the hospital. Two people—police officers, paramedics, I can’t remember—stay behind because they are required to investigate the house.
I park the car and walk into the hospital with Scott. In the emergency room, Donna and Seth stand outside a room where doctors and nurses are circled around Audrey. Donna pleads with the doctor to try using defibrillator paddles, to restart Audrey’s heart. I pace through the white halls of the hospital, feeling like a ghost, until my dad sees me. He ushers Gretchen, Scott and me away, into a private waiting room.
I sit and stare at the lotus pattern of the upholstered chair in front of me, trying to memorize every curve, every color. My mind is racing and I have no idea how to slow it down, how to calm my thoughts. I grip Scott’s hand. At first it feels like something to do, although I quickly grow afraid that if I loosen it, Audrey will die.
My parents come in to give occasional updates, but there is no good news. Audrey is not responding to any medical treatments.
A short, middle-aged woman comes in and tells us she’s a volunteer trauma counselor. She stands and stares at us, probably wishing, as we all do, that she knew what to say. Then she leaves.
Eventually someone—my mom? my dad?—comes in and, crying, breaks the news. Audrey has been declared dead. Donna and Seth are holding her, saying good-bye.
Later they both enter the room, red swollen eyes, blank stares of grief. They look like zombies. And in a way, they are. Audrey’s death has robbed them of their identities as parents, their dreams for their daughter, all those birthdays yet to come, the dress-up games, the dances, the wedding, the grandchildren. So much more than one life has been lost.
Scott, Gretchen and I drive back to the house to gather everyone’s belongings. My parents drive Donna and Seth to our family home in Takoma Park, the house I grew up in. For days, we hole up there, trying to comfort one another, trying to figure out what just happened. How could this blue-eyed, curly-haired toddler—beaming with the promise of a full life—just die for no reason? We will never get an answer. A months-long autopsy and extensive genetic tests will yield no explanations. Because Audrey was over a year old, her death will not be ruled sudden infant death syndrome. Instead, it will fall under an equally vague but lesser-known category: sudden unexplained death in childhood.
I have never heard my parents’ house so quiet before. The silence is punctuated by faint pulsations of crying, from behind a closed door. Or the gurgling of an empty stomach. Nobody sleeps. We sit or pace, our eyes glassy, our faces pale.
In January, I work nights and weekends to finish a series of articles about a young woman I met in the fall. Summer Stiers is thirty-one years old but has gray hair and walks with a cane. She was healthy most of her life until, at age eighteen, she began having regular seizures. In her twenties, her health deteriorated further. She suffered intestinal bleeding, muscle atrophy and brittle bones. Her kidneys failed and she relied on nightly dialysis treatments to stay alive. Doctors believe she is dying of an unknown genetic illness, and they are studying her in hopes of someday helping any others who turn up with her rare, unnamed disorder. I enjoy spending time with Summer—who somehow remains upbeat and grateful for what she still has—but she is also a reminder that death lurks around the corner.
I find myself obsessing over the animals I’ve killed while hunting. Was that shot I took at the goose last fall truly sporting? How young was the pheasant I killed during that women’s workshop? Had it lived long enough to enjoy any of its life? I worry that I have caused surviving animals to feel grief and pain similar to what I have endured during the past few months, and the guilt is almost unbearable.
For the first week of February, Scott and I go on a backcountry ski trip with friends. It should be relaxing, a chance to get away from work and the trauma of Audrey’s death. But I see danger everywhere I look. When we ski, I worry about avalanches. When we get back to the remote cabin where we’re staying, I fear Scott could die in his sleep.
On February 10, Scott and I sit down on the couch after a long day of work. The phone rings, and Scott walks into the dining room and answers it.
“Hi, Mel,” he says.
It’s my dad. I glance at the clock—a little after nine, past midnight for my parents on the East Coast. Shit. This isn’t a good phone call. Next, I hear Scott say, “She is, just a second. Hey Lil?” I immediately think of my dad’s father, who is eighty-eight and getting weaker by the day.
I take a deep breath and pick up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Lily, it’s Dad.” I have never heard his voice sound so sad. Whatever he’s calling about is even worse than I’d thought.
“What’s wrong?” My heart races and I sweat, just like the night Audrey died.
“I have terrible news. Nathan killed himself tonight.”
The past tense is what hits me first. Killed. He’s gone, it’s already too late. Later, my father will tell me that I shrieked. That the sound made him feel like he’d punched me in the gut. But in the moment, I don’t even realize that I’m making noise. If he had punched me, I wouldn’t have noticed. If I’d been run over by a truck, I wouldn’t have noticed.
In the exact moment that those horrible words slip out of my father’s mouth, I feel every ounce of pain and sorrow that will take turns pummeling me over the next hours, days, months, years. There will be times when a single memory or a sudden pang of guilt hurts so deeply that I fall to the floor in sobs. But there will never be another moment when all of it hits me at once: The gaping wound left by my only brother, my companion since birth. Co-holder of the memories that my parents sometimes fudge or forget. The one who introduced me to Top 40 music and later encouraged me to reject it, explaining that it was so much cooler to find my own taste than to accept what’s popular. The person who convinced me to eat pig tail—it tasted like an especially fatty hot dog—during one of my visits to Brazil.
The details of Nathan’s death are relayed to our family secondhand and through a translator. During an argument with his girlfriend, he grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through a net that stretched above the railing of his balcony. Then he plunged seventeen stories to his death.
I spend the rest of the night on my living room rug. I panic when I try to remember my brother—anything, any scene with the two of us, any lesson he taught me—and I can’t. Nothing. Scott rubs my back and tells me that the memories will come back when I’m not in shock anymore. Every once in a while, I call my sister and we cry together, she in Los Angeles, me in Bend. Even her sniffling comforts me. When we hang up, I curl up on the floor and convulse in sobs. My stomach twists and churns. I picture him jumping. Even in my own head, I can’t stop him; he leaps again and again. I imagine what he must have thought as he fell. I hope—as I always will—that his last feelings were not remorse or panic but liberation and calm. I hope that somehow he found peace. How could he have lost control of himself so completely? Nathan always had a fiery temper, but I never imagined it could kill him. How did I not think to call him? The last time I saw Nathan was when Scott and I visited him before we were married. Between then and now, a few simple words could have made all the difference: Are you okay? I love you. I want you to live. The distance that grew between us these last few years becomes a talisman of self-torture.
The next day, Scott and I walk Sylvia al
ong the Deschutes River near our house. It’s sunny and unseasonably warm. Hordes of geese and ducks bob along the river. We stop midway across a footbridge. Scott peers into the water to look for fish. I watch the birds, which sit on the surface but are as blurred through my tears as fish under water. I am reminded of the birds I have killed, the rabbit I have killed, the fish I have killed, and another wave of sadness batters me.
Nathan’s daughter, Sofia, was born on the same day I shot my first pheasant, and at the time I was thrilled to have both occasions coincide. Now the pheasant’s death and my brother’s will be forever linked, and I couldn’t be more ashamed of the ecstasy I felt over killing that bird.
I’ve long thought of death as something that happens during old age. But the truth is, of course, that children like Audrey die. Young adults like Nathan die. Middle-aged people like my co-worker Jim die. People die at all ages, of all sorts of causes, many of which are “natural.”
The same truth holds for other animals. By hunting, I have cut short the lives of my prey. Though I don’t know their ages, all of my birds and rabbits appeared to be in the prime of life when I killed them. Again I ask myself: Was the killing worth it? Were these deaths really justified for a few special meals? I feel like a monster.
That night we take a red-eye to Washington, DC. When we land, it takes all the strength I can summon to put one foot in front of the other and walk off the plane. I know as soon as I see my parents that Nathan’s death will become even more real. I’m not sure I can bear it. Yet somehow, I do.
Over the next few days, my parents scramble to plan a funeral. Those questions that Scott raised during our ride home from Jim’s funeral swirl through my mind. Our immediate family has no religion to pave the way. We celebrated almost every holiday when I was growing up, the fortunate result of my Catholic-raised mother and Jewish-raised father. My parents had left behind their respective religions by the time they married, so our celebrations were unburdened by Church or Synagogue or even much of an explanation. On Easter we hunted eggs; on Sukkot we built an outdoor fort; during Chanukah we ate latkes; on Christmas we praised the miracle of Santa. This is not to say that we weren’t spiritual in our own ways. Nathan explored Judaism during high school and college, then devoured books about Sufism as an adult. But he never, as far as we know, reached any confident conclusions. His beliefs, what ceremonies he would have wanted—these details are all left for us to guess. Friends and family descend on our house, bringing food and kind words, sharing our tears. They weave a sort of human cocoon around us, one that I am reluctant to leave.
Two weeks later, Scott and I return to Bend. We get home just in time to attend the funeral of Scott’s favorite uncle, who died ten days after Nathan, ending a long battle with multiple myeloma.
Another cousin goes into labor four months early and her baby boy dies just after his birth.
Summer Stiers dies.
When I call my father to wish him a happy Father’s Day, he tells me that one of my uncles has died of Alzheimer’s disease.
Raymond, our neighbor, falls from a chair and dies of a head injury.
I struggle with anxiety. At times I am overwhelmed by fear, terrified that I could lose anything and anyone at any moment. This horror creeps into my life in strange ways: I buy travel insurance whenever I fly, and develop an intense fear of heights. Perhaps because I read so much fiction and watch so many movies, I have a ridiculous tendency to see my own life as the plot of a novel. So much of life is determined by luck, I know this. And yet I am quick to spot literary devices such as foreshadowing and symbolism in the random everyday. Maybe these deaths are trying to tell me something about what to do, or what will happen. I worry that somehow I have caused all of this death and despair, that these people would still be alive and well if they hadn’t worked with me or become friends with me or been related to me. Should I just bid my friends and family adieu and lock myself in my house until the dying stops?
“It’s not you,” Scott tells me. “It’s life. People die.”
Working at the newspaper each day is a struggle. My cubicle is near the police scanner, and when news of a fatal car accident buzzes through the air, it stings me in a way that it never used to. My imagination is lean and agile from the interval training of these past few months. It strides easily to the conclusion that the driver—the one found dead on arrival—is Scott. I stare at my cell phone and steel myself for an ominous ring.
Reporters deal with tragedy on a regular basis, and we develop coping mechanisms to separate our own lives from those we write about. That’s not to say that certain stories don’t move us. Just that sometimes we have to deal with three or four tragedies in one day of work. We find ways to laugh through them, to detach from them and get through the business of writing. But grief has sloughed off my calluses.
For fleeting moments, I feel angry at my brother, which experts say is a common response to suicide. How could he do this to all of us? To his daughter, especially. And to my parents. Almost immediately, pity displaces my anger. Even battered by grief, our lives go on. Nathan, on the other hand, has lost everything. We remain close with Luciana, and when she emails us photos of Sofia, opening each file feels like I’m being stabbed in the chest. Sofia looks so grown-up, less like a baby and more like a real person. Yet Nathan will never get to see her like this. Her first joke, her first day of school, her first bike ride—he is missing everything. As are Donna and Seth. Now that Audrey is gone, they face a future unlike anything they have imagined since her birth.
In the coming year, once joyous holidays will become overwrought with sadness. This is particularly true of Christmas, which will roust all the trauma of Audrey’s death. Anxiety and depression loom over all of us. I mourn not only these lost family members, but also the family that we were before the deaths. I will never again see Audrey or Nathan. Nor will I ever see that earlier, happier version of my parents or my cousins. Whenever I stop and really think about that, well, it still sucks the breath from my lungs. And for some reason, I hope it always will.
Meanwhile, friends of mine begin to bear children. Two of my closest girlfriends in Bend tell me, within weeks of my brother’s death, they are pregnant. I spend the summer knitting baby gifts and planning showers. All of these deaths and births start to feel like the circle of life is pulling tighter and tighter around me.
What is the universe trying to tell me? Here I go again.
I question the decision that Scott and I have made to start a family of our own. The way I imagine myself as mother is nothing like it was a few months ago, before the dying began. I am so much more fearful now, more aware of how ephemeral everything important really is. Where I once pictured baby clothes, giggly baths and finger painting, I now see miscarriages, birth defects and spinal cord injuries. If Scott and I do have children, how could I bear the constant anxiety that something bad could happen to them?
Life is full of risks that could bring death: Driving down a highway with thousands of other drivers, any one of whom could be drunk, exhausted, distracted or enraged. Flying on a plane when a storm hits or an engine fails. Crossing the street while a bus runs a red light. Riding an elevator that was overlooked during its last inspection. Eating tainted food. And that’s not to mention internal dangers. Aneurysm. Cancer. Sudden cardiac arrest.
Intellectually, I have always known this. But now I know it viscerally. I can close my eyes and see Donna performing CPR on Audrey’s perfectly plump little body. I can hear the agonizing scream she let out when she found her baby. I can hear the tone in my father’s voice when he said, “I have terrible news.” I can feel my pulse quicken as I brace for his next words. These events, these sensations, they have changed me to my core.
Fatal hunting accidents are extremely rare when compared with, say, car accidents. But compared with other, more popular pastimes such as playing video games, hunting is downright perilous. I don’t usually consider myself a physical risk taker. I have no interest in skydivin
g or bungee jumping. Looking back on it, though, I appreciate the danger involved in hunting. It has been meditative to me, spending so many hours so aware of life’s high stakes.
Human life used to be full of risks like these. Not too many generations ago, in places like Oregon, the majority of residents killed animals for food on a regular basis. Wild predators, weather events and even minor infections posed serious threats. Today we have complex safety laws to prevent deaths that just a couple of generations ago were commonplace. Science has provided all kinds of treatments and prevention, even extreme interventions that can keep a body pumped full of blood and air when there’s no brain left to dictate how.
We may live longer than any generation in human history, but eventually we all die. Death is an essential part of life. Yet we acknowledge it so seldom. Most of the time, we don’t even call death by its real name. We prefer euphemisms—passed on, crossed over, gone to a better place or, simply, gone.
The last few years of hunting have forced me to take a rare, honest look at mortality. Hunting has everything to do with death. You can’t kill an animal—watch its eyes flicker for the very last time—and not think long and hard about the finality of it. Nothing could have prepared me for these losses, but I feel grateful that I have, even in some small way, spent the last couple of years facing death. Of course, each kill has been the relatively easy, bearable loss of a wild animal. But deep down I have known that the next death in my life could be of someone I love.
I obsess over the guns I keep locked in an upstairs closet. Gunshot is the most common method of suicide in the United States. In fact, gun-inflicted suicides outnumber gun-related homicides and accidental deaths combined. My brother did not shoot himself. If he had, I would probably get my guns melted down and molded into some peaceful symbol. My heart aches for every victim of gunfire, and I worry that as a gun owner, I am somehow complicit in this violence.
Call of the Mild Page 17
