Saving Graces (11 page)

There were things we had to do, impossible things that all parents who lose children have to do. We had to pick out a casket and flowers for our boy—cherry and a blanket of pure white roses—and ride around in the back of a sedan while Chuck Gooch from Oakwood Cemetery showed us the available burial plots. Sitting in that car, Chuck’s tender voice could not change the fact that he was driving a knife into us with each word.
Here’s where you can bury your son. Here’s where you can put him in a box and let us cover him with dirt.
I leaned into John.
Make it end
.

The visitation was on a cold rainy night, and I am told it lasted for hours, but time had no meaning for me. We stood in a long room with Wade’s casket at the one end. We had decided to bury him with letters from each of us. His father and his sister wrote long letters to him. I had sat with my paper and stared. “My dearest Wade,” I wrote. “You know.” That’s all I could write. We each placed our letters in the casket and had the top closed, so it was just a lovely box at the other end of the room. But it was Wade, just as surely as if he had been lying on that morgue cot, only a vinyl bag around him. The line of friends and neighbors, teammates and classmates, teachers and coaches went out the building and down the block. I had a moment, or should I say hours, of clarity, and I knew the name of every person who came through the line, even names I did not know I knew. Except for one. An older woman came up. She had to have waited in the cold rain for at least an hour, maybe two. I reached for her hands, searching her face. No, I did not know her. Then she spoke.

“Is this the line for Joy?” She was there for another visitation entirely.

“I am so sorry. This line is for our son, Wade. I don’t know where she is,” I said, then added as her tiny hands squeezed mine, “But if you find joy, please let us know.”

The funeral was the same. Our church was full. Even though it was spring break, people had come back—every one of Wade’s teachers, from preschool through his junior year, the boys with whom he played soccer and basketball for a decade and all their parents, the girls from cotillion, our friends, his friends, Cate’s friends, and family—including my niece Laura from Indiana, who was to be married the following Saturday, and my Uncle Troy from Florida, who had buried his dear son David after a car accident almost twenty years before to the day. They stood with us, and they cried with us, and they prayed for us and, more importantly, for Wade.

We had always sat in a pew about two-thirds of the way back, far enough back that it wasn’t a distraction that Cate, with a purseful of crayons, and Wade, with a nub of a pencil, were drawing during the sermon. That was our pew for fourteen years, but not today. On Easter Monday our pew was the first row, and at the end of the pew was the casket we had chosen. I suppose it was the one we had chosen, but honestly I do not know because I could not look at it. And I had to not look at it for an awfully long time, as the service went on and on. The three of us who remained were to speak, and Wade’s friends and some of the adults with whom Wade had been close. I could have listened forever to the voices of those who loved him. But first the associate minister spoke. He was a dear man, but he did not know Wade, and in what would turn out to be a terrible decision he chose to speak from
Lament for a Son,
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book about the death of his son Eric. It must have seemed a right choice, a love song to Jesus, really, occasioned by Eric’s death. And as the minister read, as Eric emerged, a selfish boy took form. “When I got angry at him,” his father wrote, “it was usually over his self-centeredness.” Who was this boy intruding on Wade’s funeral? He was not Wade. Wade was imperfect—we all are—but he was never once selfish, never once self-centered. Did anyone here think this was Wade? I wanted to scream out,
That’s not him
. The sermon about this stranger and his tormented father went on and on. I leaned into John.
Just make it stop.
On it went.
Please make it stop. Please.
And finally it did. It was finally time for the rest of us to speak.

Unimaginatively, we had always called Wade’s friends—who nearly lived at our house—“the boys.” It was now the boys’ turn to speak. They had met at the house of one of our neighbors and planned what each would say. They stood together in front of the altar, and each one in turn stepped to the pulpit to say one special thing about Wade.

One boy stepped up but couldn’t speak. His face was dissolving in grief in front of fifteen hundred people. It was all I could do not to leave my pew and go to him, for these weren’t just “the boys”; they were my boys. They had been a part of my every day for years. Another boy, the boy I always thought of as the closest to Wade in spirit, went to him. After they finished, Cate spoke, reading something she had written and speaking with the beautiful grace that has always accompanied that child. She was fourteen, and she transcended age.

John read from Wade’s Outward Bound journal. Wade had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with John the previous summer, and, in order to get himself acclimated to the heights, he had gone to Outward Bound Colorado to spend time at high altitudes. He had told me about the journal he wrote at Outward Bound, but we hadn’t read it until he died. The hardest to hear was the last he wrote. And John read it aloud. “The course director said that the solo is where you become a man. I disagree with that. I think that you become a man by slowly maturing. I think that it takes different experiences to help you mature and I think that you never really stop maturing and growing as a person…. I know that when this course is over I will be very proud of myself and very self confident. Whenever I have an obstacle to overcome in the future, I will think back to this course and know that I can conquer it. More than any other goal that I have set for myself I want to show my love and appreciation to my family for all that they have done for me…. I really want to do something great with my life. I want to start a family when I grow up. I am going to be as good a parent to my kids as my parents are to me. But more than anything, when I die, I want to be able to say that I had a great life. So far I have had a wonderful life (and I hope it keeps up.)” Across the church, people who had squirmed through the sermon were crying into Kleenex or the shoulder of a neighbor. And before this room full of sobbing teenagers, I got up and read a short poem by William Butler Yeats, changing the last word.
I sigh that kiss you, for I must own, that I shall miss you when you have gone.
My voice could hardly be heard.

For a time, the house was noisy with visitors, and then it was mostly still. The damp funeral flowers, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said in “Interim,” “strangled that habitual breath of home,” so we sent the lilies to the retirement communities around us, places Wade had gone with his Latin class to carol and to dance. The hours passed, then days, then weeks. Each evening two friends came to our house. David Kirby and Gwynn Winstead, who was a friend of mine who had lost her son eighteen years before. From dinnertime to bedtime, we sat in our family room, the television off, the music off, the only sounds our voices. We relived sixteen years with them, night after night, week after week. For months. Sally, the mother of Cate’s closest friend, came nearly every day. Hargrave and Ellan and Martha, who lived near me, kept watch. Did I need anything? Could they do anything? Jim, who had written a column in the paper about Wade a few weeks before he died, was a welcome sight at our kitchen table. Letters daily, wonderful letters about the difference Wade had made in his sixteen years. “He was the good one,” one boy said. Most of these gestures were small, but a walking stick is small compared to a man, but when a man needs one, that small stick is all that will do. And we leaned into it.

Still the quiet house was hard for all of us. The Weather Channel with no sound. The Weather Channel with sound. Then C-SPAN. Then news. Finally sports. But even that was background. In the foreground was silence.

In order to tell the real story of the extraordinary people who gathered around us then, I have to tell the story first of a noisy house. And I don’t mean it figuratively. Our house had been so full, so loud, before Wade died. Cate’s friends, who had sometimes gathered at our house, were now asking her to come to their houses, their parents undoubtedly thinking they were helping. Maybe they were, but they left behind the silence.

Before Wade died, Cate’s friends had gathered in lots of places, our house included, often locked away in her bedroom teaching each other to dance, talking about middle-school romances and middle-school humiliations. Wade’s friends, on the other hand, filled every part of our house every day—and every weekend night—for years. Our house was the hangout for his class. My kitchen would fill up after school until I chased them back to the basketball court or upstairs to the playroom. I had a sign on the drawer where I kept the snacks for lunch that reminded them they could not eat from that drawer and another on the cabinet where we kept basketball tickets and travelers’ checks that said, “If this isn’t your house, stay out of this cabinet.” But they ignored the notes, because it really was their house. They would tell me their grades, talk to me about politics, ask for my help with homework and projects. One Sunday night before Mr. Baker’s famous leaf project was due in biology, my kitchen was filled with children, and I mean actually filled, most of whom—but not all of whom—I knew. Until late into the night, I helped freshman boys, friends and strangers, mount and label pressed leaves, many the extra leaves Wade had collected just in case any of his broke while being mounted. Report cards, PSAT scores, driving test results, breakups with girlfriends—it was all reported in my kitchen.

Just as they were learning to drive, one or more among them decided to take a truck from our driveway. The housekeeper listened to their plan and was there when they left, but she didn’t intervene and went home soon after, without calling me. So when I did get home, the house, which was never empty, was completely empty. And the truck was gone. I called John at work.
Do you have the truck?
No. In every puzzle there is a most likely solution, and the most likely solution here, where there was a house with no boys and a driveway with no truck, was that there was a connection between these two facts. I moved my car to the neighbor’s driveway, which couldn’t be seen from our house, and walked back home. Watching from a window about a half hour later, I saw the boys—Ryan and Ellis in front, Wade and Tyler in the back—pull the truck into the driveway and carefully, very carefully, back it up and forward until it was precisely where it had been. They got out and walked up to the back door laughing and high-fiving one another. Until they opened the door and saw me. Then there was complete silence.

“Ryan, up to Wade’s room. Ellis, to the living room. Tyler, to the kitchen. And Wade, come with me.” Alone with him, I asked Wade what happened. Nothing. He told me absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t say who was driving. He didn’t tell me what the housekeeper later told me about his resisting the idea. He said nothing at all. I tried the others, one at a time. Each one caved, telling stories that differed only slightly, as the teller of each version and Wade were portrayed most sympathetically. Lots of “Wade and I tried to talk them out of it.” Lots of “It was not my idea.” Lots of “Ryan/ Ellis was driving.” After I had grilled all of them, I put them back in the same room. And I talked about the fact that they were fifteen and sixteen years old, that in five or six years they would be entering the same world I was in, doing business with me, trying to sell me a house or a car or insurance. And I told them they had to start acting like responsible people, because I wasn’t going to forget what they had done. They were getting too old for do-overs. Did they understand? They said yes, apologized, and started to get up.

“Not so fast,” I told them. “I have something else.” They sat back down. “You all are lousy friends. Really lousy friends. You have a lot to learn about loyalty. Every one of you—except Wade—told on your friends, not reluctantly, not eventually, but immediately. What kind of friend does that make you? If you want to have friends you can count on, you cannot wait until the day you need them. You have to be true and loyal friends every day before that day.” I had exactly the same conversation with those boys that I would have had with my son; it never occurred to me to do less. The relationship we had—and have today—wasn’t won simply by buying enough soda and string cheese. It was won in hard times, by treating them as if I cared about what happened to them. Which was easy, because I always have. I talked to them about everything, and Wade, bless his heart, would sit there—maybe embarrassed, but always patient with his mother. When a boy showed up proud with a hickey on his neck, I tried to explain that it was not a mark of passion but a mark of ownership. When there was a conflict at the high school over the Confederate flag, we talked about that. When they would twitter and laugh about a slang word that meant breast, we would sit at that kitchen table and, as coldly and dispassionately as I could, we would say every slang word for breast over and over until it was no longer funny, no longer cool. Girlfriends, teachers, politics, sports—nothing was off-limits. If they wanted to get away from Wade’s mother for a while, they would bound up the back steps to the playroom or run to the backyard and the half-court’s worth of cement that we called a basketball court. Wade would linger to the end, give me a hug, and then join them.