White Hot Grief Parade

by Alexandra Silber

  SIGGY: I dunno. It’s supposed to be easy . . .

  (Bob moves his feet around, like a nervous foal.)

  BOB: Well . . . can you give me a handle on it?

  (Siggy puts down his video game and comes over to Bob at the end of the dock.)

  BOB: Thanks.

  Moments later? Siggy dives. And he dives because Bob helps him.

  Does Bob realize he is helping? I don’t know. Every time I see this scene, I change my mind. Sometimes I think Bob is innocent; he doesn’t know he is the most profound man alive, an all-knowing guru of almost spiritual depth. The next time I watch it, I think, Yes, Bob knows what he is doing. He may not be able to help himself, but he can help this little boy. Then back again. And again. I don’t know.

  I like that I don’t know.

  What I do know is this: Siggy faces his greatest fear. And he does because Bob helps him.

  I burst into tears, which was odd, because I had not yet cried. Not once.

  And there I was weeping into the strange unused cushions of an unfamiliar bed in my father’s old office, across the hall from the room in which he had died what felt like both moments and ages ago, and all I wanted was for Bob to reach through the screen and help me.

  18 And I hope you will.

  The State of Things

  Dad thought that the Silbers would look after us. Turns out, Dad was not just wrong, he was dead wrong. Also? Dead.

  Now, I cannot say exactly what happened. Partially because I can only suppose I was deemed too young to be told everything. Partially because I (along with my diabolical eulogy) was more than likely a large part of the quarrel. Partially because I was incredibly disinterested. Partially because what I do know and understand is not entirely my story to tell.

  But let us suffice it to say the following: I never saw the Silbers again.

  There were strongly worded messages, hearsay passed on by innocent casualties stuck in the middle of our cold war, and there was a great deal of flat-out appalling behavior. Yet, even though Mom wracked her brains for understanding, wept over the Silbers for a thousand infuriating reasons, even though we flung our arms upward wondering whether or not this was a Friday the 13th movie or possibly Communist China, we never found the logic behind the Silbers. We were left only to accept. As in any arms race, the first casualty is sanity.

  Perhaps this silent vacuum of guilt-laden non-communication is what Bob might refer to as “isolation therapy.” He might concede that the telephone was most likely disconnected. In this particular circumstance, Bob might suggest trying another telephone altogether.

  There are some key points to understand:

  Mom, Dad and I moved to Michigan in 1993, initially to escape the general collapse of Los Angeles (which felt particularly uncertain after the earthquakes and Rodney King riots), and, to start a new life pegged on the hopes of a potential business deal. Once we arrived, however, the potential business unfortunately dried up. We found ourselves rooted in Michigan with no concrete prospects. Despite the merger debacle years prior, Edna suggested Michael stay and join the family business—begging Michael to stay because Albert was “old and failing” and convincing Albert it was “Michael’s duty as the oldest son.” Within a year, my father had been diagnosed with cancer.

  If the only energetic currency one has is money, it has the power to strike panic into the hearts of those who crave the currency of your love. Withheld cash becomes equal to withheld love.

  When Michael earned commissions on business dealings, Albert would begrudgingly pay them out to Michael by deducting them from Michael’s “inheritance ledger”—a log he kept for all his decedents. Upon my father’s death, Albert was not legally obligated to leave our family anything. My father had given the last years of his life working to enhance the business but Albert unceremoniously absorbed his son’s share. Once Michael died, it was as if he had never existed, nor did we.

  Without the inheritance of his piece of the family business that my father had anticipated we would receive, my mother and I were left with my father’s life insurance policy (a small sum, as life insurance is grim picking for the terminally ill) and the value of our house. There was little else. It required us to be extremely frugal, but we made the most of it.

  We did, however, receive a whopping $250! Mom, Kent, and I made our way to the secretary of state office on Telegraph Road in Southfield to present Dad’s death certificate and collect his social security. The secretary of state in Michigan is where all voting, organ donation, automotive, and general legal business is sorted out—like a giant waiting room in Purgatory, soft rock blaring, fluorescently lit, and covered in lines.

  No, we thought. Absolutely not, this cannot be. We looked about us and shook our heads as one always does in any government-related or public-service office. Where’s the express line? Where’s the drive-thru? Where is the line for people that are suffering the loss of a loved one?

  Just like at the post office, no one ever budgets their time correctly at the secretary of state. Everyone always assumes it’ll be an in-and-out trip, even though it’s never been an in-and-out trip, not once. For anyone. I just want to mail this box from this part of Michigan to another part of Michigan. Where’s the line for that? You are in that line, bitch, and the people behind the counter don’t give a shit. Hi, they silently say with their flaming red eyes of indifference as you approach, I’m the only one on the planet who can sort out your future, and it is not a priority for me.

  When we realized that the line we were in was The Line, we knew we would have to wait in this line for longer than we could ever have anticipated. In fact, it was a good thing we were holding Dad’s death certificate, because if we all died there too, at least they would know which funeral home to call.

  After three hours of waiting, Mom and I presented Dad’s death certificate, and we were informed that because my father was twelve years older than my mother, she was too young to collect his social security yet. Mom would get to collect that in over a decade. But that’s OK, because today they did have a $250 death package from the government for us. As a consolation. I will continue to deny that on the way out of the secretary of state office I attempted to violently shake some money loose from the pay phones.

  With my father’s family out of the picture and my mother estranged from her own dysfunctional family, we were left to our own devices.

  Except we weren’t totally on our own.

  There was Kent.

  And Grey.

  And Lilly.

  And a house full of memories.

  Only Connect

  On the news, everyone was still talking about September 11.

  I hated September 11.

  I didn’t hate it just because it was the most despicable, horrifying act of terrorism in recent American history (though of course that, too). I hated it because I was jealous. The victims’ families had the sympathy of the entire world while my father’s funeral barely made the obituary section of the Detroit News. And I envied them.

  I know that it’s a terrible, inhumane thing to admit. The whole world was coming apart, yes, but our world was coming apart, too.

  But it’s true. In my selfish, grieving, eighteen-year-old heart, I was infuriated that it was everywhere.

  If I had been a victim of that horrible day I’d be infuriated too: I would have wanted people to stop talking about America and start talking about how my loved one was actually dead. Children wouldn’t know their parents. Husbands and wives separated in death by an act of incomprehensible extremism. The back of America had been broken, another age of innocence, lost.

  People were dead, and I was jealous. In the most repugnant way. Because all there was in my world was silence.

  One of the things no one ever tells you about death is how awkward it is after the first week. You have counted off an entire week of days one by one, and have most likely been swept into a flurry of activity surrounding memorials and relatives and been distracted by that flu
rry—making plans and picking people up from airports and cleaning your home so that people can see how clean your bathroom is in your darkest hour.

  Then there is the tsunami of flowers, donations, dishes of casserole, plus the cards and phone calls (all ranging from the shallowest to the deeply felt). There was what seemed to be a state park forest of trees planted in Dad’s name in places we’d never heard of, and, if you can believe it, even a small, terribly special collection of sympathy e-mails.19 While staring at a swimsuit competition-style lineup of fruit baskets, I was an emotional fruit basket.

  Ten days after the funeral, the food and cards and letters and trees being planted in Wherever, America, all stopped coming. The fruit baskets began to rot. Borscht went bad in the refrigerator. The mail returned to its normal flow of bills and unsolicited advertisements. The mailbox would open and all one could hear was the crashing silence of other people moving on.

  But then came the letter from Judy Chu.

  Well into my senior year at Interlochen, I had been presented with a problem—I needed another liberal arts credit in order to graduate with highest academic honors and, as a fully fledged perfectionist, I wasn’t about to let three intense acting scenes, a budding secret romance, or a father with cancer stand in my way. I reported to the admissions office to comb through my options.

  The options were sparse.

  “What about Psychological Lit?” I asked the counselor, Kelly.

  “Full.” she replied.

  “Political Process?”

  “You already took it,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “What is available?” I asked desperately.

  “British Literature,” Kelly said, smiling broadly at my predicament.

  The world was ending.

  British literature? Was this a joke? I envisioned weeks of irritatingly quippy Austen and dreary Brontë passages ahead of me—weeks upon weeks of discussing “the colonies,” impending marriage proposals, unexpressed emotions and the weather. Christ. I couldn’t cope. I buried my head in my hands and realized this was not only my fate but my fault.

  “Who teaches it?” I inquired, hoping the answer would improve things—perhaps my favorite teacher taught it and I simply didn’t know it.

  “Judy Chu.”

  Who on earth was Judy Chu?

  Judy Chu, as it turned out, was a young, energetic, yearlong adjunct teacher from Southern California, brought in to cover for a liberal-arts teacher on sabbatical.

  “The students really loved her first semester,” Kelly explained. “Her classes are very exciting. Enrollment is light because so many of you want to take the ‘greatest hits’ before you graduate—but you are a bit late to the party. Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  I signed up and left the admissions office in a mood, reporting to third-period British Lit the following morning, to a class of only eight other people, most of whom were procrastinators just like me.

  Judy Chu began with a bright smile, and asked each of us why we had enrolled in British Literature.

  Dear God, I thought, not wanting to admit the truth, and I think I squeezed past the issue by explaining that fate had brought me here.

  But fate had indeed brought me to Judy Chu. Her class became the most important literary experience of my life.

  This thoughtful young teacher was tough but fair, with complex weekly handouts and uncompromising standards for grammar, essay construction, and literary criticism. Plus, I can honestly say she taught me everything I’ve nearly forgotten about punctuation, verb tenses, and second-person voice.

  But nothing will ever expunge the greatest lesson and gift she gave me: Judy Chu taught me how to read, and perhaps more crucially, why. Lady Chu (which I named her myself, for she is a lady first, if you ask me) was bibliophilic magic. She handed you a book and ostensibly gave you magical incantations that allowed you to leap inside the pages—like the children in Mary Poppins jumping inside Bert’s sidewalk chalk painting. That final semester of high school was just the beginning.

  When she assigned Howards End, she blew my literary mind. The copy still sits proudly on my bookshelf adorned with well-thumbed pages, color-coded highlighting, and adorable teenaged margin notes (such as “Love is a ‘He?’” and “When you show your homeland to a foreigner how do you show it all?” and “Oh . . . more LIFE!” and, of course, “Is love the only way to connect?”). I can still remember how much I grew to love it more with every turn of the page. The deeply feeling narrator (perhaps the voice of Forster himself), the poetry in the slightest of prose, the humanity, and of course, my beloved kindred spirit—Howards End’s heroine, Margaret Schlegel. With every word Margaret uttered, my heart leapt in recognition, for Margaret Schlegel lived in me—her flaws, her resilience, her optimism, and her heart. I had never identified with a character like this before, and it was because Judy Chu showed me how to personalize literature.

  At the end of the year, Judy Chu bid Interlochen farewell, but not before leaving our tiny class with one final handout. The simple sheet of white paper quoted Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” and T. H. White’s The Book of Merlyn (beckoning us to learn) on one side, a personalized note to every one of us on the other. I still have this piece of paper, which held a very simple message:

  “Al: You are Margaret Schlegel to me.”

  A few weeks after my father’s death, I stood outside beside the mailbox in clothing I had worn for days. A light rain was spitting down from a sheet-white sky. I pulled from the mailbox a small envelope about the size of my hand with the mark of a black and red Chinese dragon traveling from back to front. I recognized the small, perfectly neat handwriting immediately.

  Dear Al, the letter read. I know that you, with your strong, strong heart, shall see pain through to hope and prosper. With love, Judy Chu

  I held the letter to my heart. It said so little and meant so much. I wrote back to say so. It would be the first of a lifetime of letters. Letters to and from Judy Chu to every single address I would ever have in my adult life.

  19 Note to everyone: never send a sympathy email. Or, for that matter, a sympathy text.

  The Walk from 1367

  Here is how you take The Walk.

  1. Head Northeast on Fairway toward Pleasant Street. (Take a look to your right and behold the long line of hanging American flags that adorn almost every home on the street, all the way down to the Presbyterian and Methodist churches on Maple Road).

  2. Continue to follow Fairway Drive past Golfview Boulevard, pass by Greenlawn Street. (Do say hello to passersby, especially Don and his dog Daisy at the top of the hill).

  3. Turn right onto South Cranbrook Road. (The street is very busy here, so feel free to walk on the incredibly large lawns of one or more of the neighbors.)

  4. Turn right and loop onto Greenlawn Street, then get back onto Fairway. Or, alternatively, if you are feeling frisky, walk all the way to West Lincoln, pass Seaholm High School, and reconnect with Fairway at Pleasant Street. (Don’t miss the absolutely beautiful garden of the elderly woman with the Dalmatian tucked away behind Hillside, or the dreamlike barn house with the bright green door that must belong to a growing family).

  5. Enjoy the walk back down Fairway (which is entirely downhill), especially in the early morning or as the sun is setting.

  6. Round the Rouge River Park as you reach the home stretch.

  7. Turn left into the driveway.

  8. You are home.

  This was the walk my family took almost every day of our lives since the time we moved to 1367 during the summer of 1994. We’d head up the hills after summer meals; we’d trudge through snow and leaves and rain. My parents would discuss the world, and we’d sing and laugh and greet our neighbors as they passed. The childless German couple down the street threw an Okto- berfest gathering that included beer and an actual appearance of lederhosen. The aloof couple next door with their pack of adopted greyhounds. Tom and Sal became the first gay couple on the
street when they moved into the corner house with their beloved dog Riley. Bill and his beautiful baritone voice and love of classic radio lived with his wife Pat and their flurry of offspring on the kitty-corner. Dick and Anne lived directly across the street; Dick was gruff on the outside, soft within, Anne a Southern belle. She watched the phones the day we all trudged off to the funeral home declaring in her Virginia drawl “why it would be my absolute pleasure y’all, your father once kissed me on the cheek and I blushed because he was so handsome.”

  The almost frighteningly bright family of four next door with whom we shared so many wonderful dinners. The Kuhnes, who lived around the sharp curve of the street with their two gorgeous daughters we all watched grow up. They moved away in the late nineties, but we never lost touch with them because we continued to check in, laugh, and meet for dinner in our very own downtown Birmingham. My neighbors on Fairway Drive—we used to get together for picnics and barbecues. We drank sangria in our backyards those summer nights, then walked along the River Rouge that flowed behind our houses.

  At the end, The Walk was not possible for Dad. Making it to the end of the driveway was a victory. A breathless, crushing victory.

  It was on The Walk in the days that followed the funeral that it happened. Mom and I would walk together—both of us closer to the person we had lost and now getting to know one another as if from scratch. All history had been stolen and erased, and only on the pavements of Fairway Drive could the stories be rewritten.

  On The Walk, I truly got to know my mother.

  “Tell me a story from your childhood,” I would say.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Well, I suppose because I would like to know about when you were little. I bet you were very cute.”