truvy
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Death & Planning
The young gay 17-year old had never been in real trouble. Sure, there was the time when he went to Rocky Horror for the 1st time at the Highland Park Village Theater with all his theatre-crowd friends - and was then interrogated about the life of drugs and sex his parents were sure he was having until he fell asleep in front of them. But other than provoking his parents with his smart mouth (he did know more than just about anyone, after all), he'd stayed out of any real trouble.
So, the morning he took a thermos of rum to school, 5 days before graduating high school, he was understandably nervous.
Leaving the thermos in the car and walking to the cafeteria for a coke, he was sure everyone knew what he was up to.
Drinking half the coke on the way back, filling the empty spaces of the can with Bacardi and going to 1st period AP English, he caught his first-ever buzz. It had worn off by lunch time - when he went off-campus with his senior-year "girlfriend" (nice girls who were saving themselves were so convenient, weren't they?) to Subway, for a 6" turkey with lettuce, tomato, lots of pickles, mayo, oil & vinegar and pepper (no salt, thank you, there's enough in your preservatives), but he made her drive anyway, just to be safe, since only 2 months before he had been spared a gruesome death himself by jumping out of the way of a drunk driver while on his pathetic Spring Break - stuck in suburban Dallas with only artistic films playing Downtown and his dear friend, a girl but of course not the girlfriend, for consolation and company. So, trouble was on his mind when he returned to 5th/6th period AP Biology with the amazing and illuminating teacher who, when she finished battling cancer for the 3rd time had given up nursing to teach eager high school kids how to dissect cats and differentiate between layers of cells in complex college textbooks. The note on his desk in Biology - the long black science tables with cubbies underneath for your books and instruments (both writing and quasi-medical) held a piece of paper, yellow, folded in half with just his last name on it in red. Heart stopping, he opened it to read "Go to the principal's office, NOW! NOW!"
"No, I'm not going!" was his first reaction. "If I wait longer, they can't prove I was drunk."
But, the rational side took over, as he'd never disobeyed any direct order at school in his 12 years there.
Smiling, carefree ('who, me? in trouble? drunk? impossible!'), he bopped into the principal's office, making sure his step had that extra bounce that would fool them all (when the only thing it really did was enhance his obvious-gayness).
Telling the school secretary his name, her face remained a blank mask, but she literally yanked the other pupil getting in trouble out of the principal's office. At that exact moment, he understood. "There's nothing I could have done that would cause the principal to delay someone else's punishment", he correctly reasoned. "Something has happened."
He looked at the principal, a stern salt and pepper bearded man in his 50's, and sat down, hearing, "It's bad, very bad", while being handed the phone. His only thought, which would haunt him and fill him with guilt for untold years, was "Please, just don't let it be Mom." It was his Mom's best friend on the phone, "Rob, honey, it's your Dad. He's dead. I'm coming to get you."
Stunned, the soon-to-be graduate made the appropriate plans for her to meet him out front. For whatever silly reason, he felt compelled to collect the plant he'd been growing as part of the Biology class, a bean plant he'd grown from a seed and named Beta. Beta had been the best plant in the class, sprouting and producing the most beans due to the combination of light and water given daily with great care, and this was entrusted to his best friend who took it to his home and whose family later used the beans in a salad - much to the boy's shock and dismay. He also had to tell his Spanish teacher and independent-study sponsor, his mentor who had taken him under her wing and ushered him through some difficult growing pains. All of this was done from inside a cloud, his senses dulled and without tears or apparent emotion.
His mother's friend took him to his Dad's apartment. 9 months prior, at the beginning of his senior year, his parents had gotten a not-so-acrimonious divorce. They still worked together and saw each other every day, but his father had moved to an apartment closer to the office. His mother had a bad feeling that late morning, and detoured from her usual route to drive by the apartment, praying not to see her newly-ex-husband's car in his space, but of course, there it was. Banging on his door, there was no answer. She got the apartment complex manager to unlock the door, finding him in bed, a book covered in blood on his chest, dead and already cold.
The ambulance/morgue workers in the apartment, getting ready to remove the body, was the sight that greeted the boy upon his arrival. "Do you want to see him?" his mother asked. No, absolutely not.
The three of them crowded into the 2nd bedroom to avoid seeing the stretcher being taken out, the boy flipping on the radio to cover the noise of the the body scraping up against the door, the workers unable to make the sharp turn without doing so. An insipid song by Richard Marx was playing, one that to this day makes him cringe slightly with the memories in stirs. Still, there were no tears, just comforting hugs to his mother, who was already blaming herself and wracked with guilt. Once the body was gone, the boy and his mother had the task of telling his sister. She was just home from her sophomore year at college, having started a meaningless job at some crappy retail outlet-mall. A neighbor who had been substitute teaching and who'd already heard the news stopped by the house to offer her condolences before the boy and his mother could get home. The sister didn't understand what the woman could be sorry for, but was in a highly alarmed state and had imagined several possibilities before learning the truth, that her father had died of what was likely an esophageal ulcer that had caused him to bleed out, or possibly a heart attack. They were never sure.
The remainder of the day was a blur. Calls were made - all by the boy - to family and friends around the country. "It's my Dad, he's dead", he had to say to aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of the family, colleagues of his parents.
Still in a cloud, funeral arrangements were swiftly made. The family felt an odd need to get it over with, and scheduled the funeral for 2 days after the death. The viewing was the evening before the burial, some 30 hours after he'd received the news. Getting to the funeral home, he finally broke down upon seeing his father, dressed in his new tan summer suit with the teal paisley tie he had just worn to his son's Baccalaureate service 4 days prior. The boy had chosen the outfit for the burial. Huge sobs racked his body and tears and snot began to flow uncontrollably. Now, it was his turn to be consoled, not even knowing how to respond to the whispers he heard, "He's been so strong for his mother" and "He hasn't even cried until now." Somehow, even in the midst of it all, these statements struck him as absurd. How else should he have reacted? He didn't know.
None of them were familiar with the church his father had been attending, but asked one of the ministers to preside over the funeral. The result was highly impersonal - nothing said by friends, no opportunity to share with everyone the thoughts and memories of a man loved by so many. That, too, has been a source of pain and regret for the boy, his mother and sister, but at the time they were still too much in shock to think of such things.
I've been reading in quiet amazement how a few fellow bloggers are planning for the deaths of loved ones.
The torturous luxury of knowing that someone's end is near has the aspect of an ambivalent blessing. You know your time is limited, so you try to make the most of it. I admire how it seems one has been able to approach the time spent with his loved one seemingly without the traces of despair by which I think I'd be overcome if it were my mother/father/grandmother.
I haven't ever been faced with that/had that luxury.
Deaths around me (with the exception of a few friends that have died of AIDS - and those were more friends of boyfriends, not really my immediate friends) have been swift, unexpected, devastating. I try not to think about my mother dying, but of course it's inevitable. I actually wish that I don't die before her, because I think it would cause her too much pain to see either of her children go before her. Not that we're all that special, but you know how mothers can be. Of course, I'm reminded of my father's death, and I've been turning the events over in my head, looking at them from the outside, thinking about their effect, about their sequence, about the convergence of people, places, things.
I compare his death with those that are more "planned". No, I didn't have time or the opportunity to tell him how much he meant to me, or to hear more stories of his childhood or his family, but then again, I didn't have to see him suffer. I don't know which would be harder, as I've only been faced with the one.
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