people we were are like characters in stories from a book; we are drawn to them, to their fullness and hope and happy naïveté, and yet we cannot reach them. It is nearly impossible to believe that once we were them. Where was the key that was going to put this right?
It was months later that I recognized there were no right answers, no elixir that would return me to the world where unbridled happiness was possible. Moving, not moving, being surrounded by their belongings, or being isolated from, these are the rearrangements of the physical and cannot reach a part of us that needs redesign. What I had to face was not something present, it was something absent. And although we can escape something's presence, there is no way to escape its absence. There was no place to go where he would not also be absent. So it was easy to say, what difference does it make where I am? But in practice, there are comforts and there are burdens in each choice. I wrote to a parent who had lost a son who had done carpentry work, “Ifyou move, you do not have to look at Chris's fretwork and molding, and yet, if you move, you do not get to look at Chris's fretwork and molding.” For myself, I did not expect to move from the place where he was known, where now and again I could hear, “Yes, I remember him,” or where I might pass his friends on the street.
Wade is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, beneath an oak so old that John and I together cannot reach around it. Another oak had stood closer to the grave, but a storm felled it. All will pass in time. For the first years after he died, I went daily. On bad days, I would go twice. For months John went with me and then I went alone, sitting at Wade's grave reading to him. First the Bible, then Elie Wiesel's
Sages and Dreamers
, given to me by Glenn, Wade's godfather, and finally the reading list for high school seniors, the books we would have read together had he lived for his seventeenth year. I planted a garden at his grave and Thomas Sayre carved a bench faced in Cate's words and mine. I cleaned around his grave and I cleaned the headstones of children buried near him. I needed Wade to be a part of each day. I needed to tell him when his SAT scores came in, when a short story ofhis won a statewide award. It may sound strange to others, but it is what I had to do. Cormac McCarthy in
The Crossing
wrote that “time heals bereavement … at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back.… Speak with them.” I needed him, so I did.
I wanted to believe, needed to believe that on some plane Wade also needed me still, maybe needed me even more dead than alive since he could no longer direct the impact of his life himself. He had done all he could and now it was my job, my new way of parenting him: to protect his memory. But first I had to come to terms with the fact that it was a memory, that I wasn't going to get him back by praying or wishing or standing completely still so God could turn back time and let Wade live. I won't lie to you—that is what I was waiting for, that is why I could not write on the blackboard: I had to make it as easy as possible for God, as Edna St. Vincent Millay had said, to set back the world a little turn or two. I did not want a new story; I loved my old story so.
I could not change his room at home in any way at all. His backpack sat on the floor near the chairfor years. Not days or weeks, but years. Why should I move it? What would that accomplish? And if I didn't move it, if I didn't change anything, he could walk right in. Millay captured this, too: “You are not here. I know that you are gone, and will not ever enter here again. And yet it seems to me, if I should speak, your silent step must wake across the hall; if I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes would kiss me from the door.” I read these words and fell into them.
It was months later that I recognized there were no right answers, no elixir that would return me to the world where unbridled happiness was possible. Moving, not moving, being surrounded by their belongings, or being isolated from, these are the rearrangements of the physical and cannot reach a part of us that needs redesign. What I had to face was not something present, it was something absent. And although we can escape something's presence, there is no way to escape its absence. There was no place to go where he would not also be absent. So it was easy to say, what difference does it make where I am? But in practice, there are comforts and there are burdens in each choice. I wrote to a parent who had lost a son who had done carpentry work, “Ifyou move, you do not have to look at Chris's fretwork and molding, and yet, if you move, you do not get to look at Chris's fretwork and molding.” For myself, I did not expect to move from the place where he was known, where now and again I could hear, “Yes, I remember him,” or where I might pass his friends on the street.
Wade is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh, beneath an oak so old that John and I together cannot reach around it. Another oak had stood closer to the grave, but a storm felled it. All will pass in time. For the first years after he died, I went daily. On bad days, I would go twice. For months John went with me and then I went alone, sitting at Wade's grave reading to him. First the Bible, then Elie Wiesel's
Sages and Dreamers
, given to me by Glenn, Wade's godfather, and finally the reading list for high school seniors, the books we would have read together had he lived for his seventeenth year. I planted a garden at his grave and Thomas Sayre carved a bench faced in Cate's words and mine. I cleaned around his grave and I cleaned the headstones of children buried near him. I needed Wade to be a part of each day. I needed to tell him when his SAT scores came in, when a short story ofhis won a statewide award. It may sound strange to others, but it is what I had to do. Cormac McCarthy in
The Crossing
wrote that “time heals bereavement … at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back.… Speak with them.” I needed him, so I did.
I wanted to believe, needed to believe that on some plane Wade also needed me still, maybe needed me even more dead than alive since he could no longer direct the impact of his life himself. He had done all he could and now it was my job, my new way of parenting him: to protect his memory. But first I had to come to terms with the fact that it was a memory, that I wasn't going to get him back by praying or wishing or standing completely still so God could turn back time and let Wade live. I won't lie to you—that is what I was waiting for, that is why I could not write on the blackboard: I had to make it as easy as possible for God, as Edna St. Vincent Millay had said, to set back the world a little turn or two. I did not want a new story; I loved my old story so.
I could not change his room at home in any way at all. His backpack sat on the floor near the chairfor years. Not days or weeks, but years. Why should I move it? What would that accomplish? And if I didn't move it, if I didn't change anything, he could walk right in. Millay captured this, too: “You are not here. I know that you are gone, and will not ever enter here again. And yet it seems to me, if I should speak, your silent step must wake across the hall; if I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes would kiss me from the door.” I read these words and fell into them.
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