Saving Graces (14 page)

It wasn’t just bereaved parents who gathered at ASG. It was sisters and sons and girlfriends. We would be supportive, but we would also be firm. I wrote to Robin. Her boyfriend’s son had died, and her boyfriend was spending time grieving with the boy’s mother. Robin was sad, and she was angry. After I expressed my condolences, I added,
I do not mean to be harsh, but now you need to focus on him, on his needs, on his pain, on his loss. The more you focus on your own, the further you will be from him
.

One girl who lost her fiancé wrote about her mother wanting her to move on, and though I knew nothing about a loss such as hers, I wrote. Because that’s what we did. We tried to help.
Grief is a long process of untangling ourselves from the physical reality of the person and from our expectations of our future with them. You will not, I imagine, decide one day that it is time, that you are ready, and then go out and find someone. You certainly won’t do so because someone else, even someone with the best intentions like your mother, has decided it is time. It happens the other way, I suspect: you will instead discover—some day in the future—that you have made a new emotional connection. Then you will know that you have been ready for someone else in your life. I am the mother of a dead son and a living daughter. As the mother of a dead boy, I want to tell you to keep Bill’s memory a part of your life, but recognize, as much as it hurts, that it is but memory, that he is dead. As the mother of a living daughter, I want to tell you that you do not have to serve the memory to honor it; you honor him more by valuing the fullness of life
. It was a lesson I was having trouble practicing, I have to admit.

For now, almost everything I did was centered on Wade. The Learning Lab certainly, and we met with the North Carolina English Teachers Association—including a professor named Collett Dilworth, with whom I had gone to English graduate school a quarter century before—and set up the Wade Edwards Short Fiction Contest for North Carolina high school juniors, which awards college scholarships for stories that inspire. We went to the Wake County awards ceremony for literary arts and accepted an award for a short story Wade had written—given, fortuitously, by Jim Jenkins, the sweet man who had written the column in the paper about Wade before Wade died. And John read aloud from Wade’s short story at a reading of the literary arts winners at our local bookstore. So many children asked for pictures of Wade that I wrote to Lifetouch, the yearbook photography studio, and asked them—though it was past the time for ordering—if they could send more of his junior pictures. I enclosed a check, which they sent back when they sent the pictures. I wrote to the boys with whom he had gone to Outward Bound Colorado and sent them a story Wade had written that was loosely based on that experience. Letters from those children and the ones with whom he had gone to Washington three weeks before he died comforted us. We went to a reading by the splendid author Kaye Gibbons, and before she read from her new work, she read from Wade’s journals. “Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories,” she said. I could have lived for a month fed only by those words. We traveled to Myrtle Beach, where the trial lawyers’ association was announcing that the high school mock trial competition it sponsored would be named for Wade. A tree at his elementary school. There were so many gifts. And on ASG, I talked about the gifts, the ideas on which we followed through, the ideas left for another day. I gave advice on foundations and encouragement where I could. I hadn’t thought, though, how it all might be received.

A speaker came to my meeting of bereaved parents, a respite from our usual commiserating, I suppose. After he spoke, he turned to me and said, “What are you doing to honor the memory of your son?” Out of the blue. It hadn’t been the topic at all. But, coincidentally, that morning we had gotten the brochures from the foundation we were starting. It had pictures of him and descriptions of several projects in his name. I had brought one to share with Gwynn. Without thinking, I pulled it out, and it was passed around the table. And then he asked the other parents the same question. One woman, who had just moved to Raleigh and had little in the way of support, said, “I pick up money I see on the street; I always think it comes from my son. And I decided I would do something for him, so I counted the money, and it was $2.73. I didn’t want to add to it because the ‘found’ money was from him. Then in church they said they needed crayons for the Sunday school, so I used the $2.73 to buy crayons.” As she spoke, I slowly put the brochure back into my purse. What she had said was so sweet and lovely, and I told her so, but I could not erase my own blessing. Although she had been at every meeting before that, she did not come to the next meeting or the next, and it broke my heart. After that, before I posted a blessing on ASG, I thought of her out there, listening and alone. Of course, I am glad I am able to parent Wade’s memory so vigorously, but the height of the gestures measures nothing at all. They were all just expressions of our continued love, whether in the form of a computer lab or a box of crayons.

We went to Wade’s spring Latin program—another blessing. It had been renamed Attic Night, for his name in Latin class, Atticus. The Latin class was small and had been together since freshman year. Each year the energetic teacher, Jennifer Holt, gave them new Latin names, and each year the names got closer to their personalities as she got to know them better. Atticus had been Cicero’s best friend, and he was emblematic of friendship and loyalty. He was also known as a mediator who used his persuasiveness and gentleness to forge compromises. It was the perfect name for Wade. But for the next year, for fourth-year Latin, Jennifer would give them all the names of gods in a ceremony that took place on Attic Night. We watched his classmates move up and on without him—that was the first time we had to do that—and as I sat there, I could see him, I could see him standing beside his good friend Todd, his head thrown back in laughter at the foolishness of comparing themselves to gods. The tears came silently, and we left quickly, John to our room and his books, me to the computer and my friends there. The writing on ASG was raw. We were all so unprotected, skinless really. I felt I could tell them everything, and I did. Four weeks after Wade died, I wrote,
Today is four weeks. This is the hour he died. The phone message light is blinking. Please be Wade, I whisper. “Hey, Mom.” If I could only hear that. “Hey, Mom.” Instead the words, “Hello, Mrs. Edwards.” My chest aches.

At three months, I joined a discussion about whether to change the room of a child who has died.
I know it has only been three months, but I do not know if I ever will be able to take it apart, since he put it together. Since he was only sixteen, he put so little together, I cannot take anything apart. There is already too little of him here on earth. I need the places to grieve, but I do not need them to feel close to Wade. I go to his room only in my worst moments. I pull his comforter back and smell him in the sheets. I take his things from his backpack and put them back again. I run my hands over his books on the shelves. But I feel close to him when I am sitting here, or when I sit at his grave, where he never was while he was alive. Or when I pass his parking place at school or when his friends come by. And when I look across a long yard or read a novel with a perfect image. Wade is with me everywhere. The beach house, his room, these are places I have to deal with. But I cannot confuse them with keeping Wade close to me.
Did it help Bob, who was trying to decide what to do with his daughter’s room? I don’t know. I do know it helped me. It helped me think about all the parts of this terrible uprooting, sort them out, and give them places. That was such an important part of what was happening: our helping, or trying to help, was helping us. It provoked me to think about how I had responded in the past when other children had died, and I thought of Kellam Hooper.

I dated Kellam a little when I was at Mary Washington College. He died in an automobile accident in 1969, our sophomore year, returning to the University of Virginia from a date with another girl in Fredericksburg. Ten years later, the year Wade was born, I went back to Charlottesville to interview Virginia Law School students for summer jobs at my Nashville law firm. I drove by the house Kellam had lived in, a house where he and I had once sat up all night talking, and I stopped outside, looking up at what had been his windows, and I thought a lot about him—as I had for years. When I went home, I wrote a story about him, a story I then put in a drawer. After Wade died, I realized I should have sent the story to Kellam’s parents. So I set out on a mission to find them. It was good for me. The search swallowed me up. Since Kellam had died before graduating, the UVA Alumni Association had no record of him. But they did have the address of Joey Tennant. It was Joey, wasn’t it, who had been in the car with Kellam and survived? I remembered his hair and his open face; I doubted he would remember me. When I finally reached him in Texas—he had been camping with his son’s Scout troop, I liked the adult Joey immediately—he said I was right, he had been with Kellam, and he added, “I think about Kellam all the time and wonder if other people do.” Joey gave me some hints about where to find Kellam’s family, and using them, I finally found Mrs. Hooper. Improbably, she had moved to Charlottesville. I called and spoke to her, and twenty-six years after Kellam died, I told her how I had so often thought of that remarkable boy over the years. She told me her husband had died a few years before, and I was filled with regret. I told her what Joey had said, and I told her I had written a story about Kellam and apologized for not sending it years before. She told me about getting her hair done that morning and about playing bridge, and she asked if I would send the story now. And I did. Seventeen years late.

Kellam’s mother, the bereaved parents at the Compassionate Friends meetings, my new family at ASG—we were linked. It is why I felt linked with mothers whose children had died—and those who feared for their children at war, mothers I hugged and held as I campaigned across the country in 2004. We were alike in the most essential of ways. We wanted—needed, I suppose—to hug someone who truly knew. Like the men and women who sat alone in front of monitors and typed out their fears and tears and nightmares hoping for a listener who understood.

Write as we all did, there was no elixir that could return us to the world where unbridled happiness was possible. We were all searching. Keep his things? Pack them away? Change his room? Move altogether? Not moving, moving; being surrounded by their things, being isolated from them—these were but rearrangements of the physical and could not reach the part of us that needed redesign. What we all had to face was not something present but something absent. And although anyone could escape something’s presence, there was, we each discovered, no way to escape its absence.

The picture I need to draw, to be accurate, is not an engaging one. We weren’t really trying to escape. We were trying to immerse ourselves. We all sat reading and writing about dead children. I wrote about my dead child and, for hours on end, I would read about theirs. I did this for them, for their child, and they would do it for my child. It is selfless and selfish all at once. What you’re afraid of, as a mother of a child who died young, is that he will be erased, and there is nothing you can do about that. Acknowledging these children is an affirmation that we won’t allow them to be forgotten. In that society, you were not alone. When I was with the parents of my son’s friends or my daughter’s friends, their sons were alive, their daughters were alive; I was the different one, I was the oddball. In ASG, I wasn’t the oddball. We were all the same, wounded. In Annie Proulx’s magnificent book
Shipping News,
Quoyle is a misfit who moves to a community in Newfoundland, a land that’s unforgiving and hard and bitter, and all the people who are there are one form of misfit or another. And there miserable Quoyle becomes happy with this life—the odd man out who finds comfort and happiness in the community of like people. I too was out of place anywhere else. I couldn’t express myself fully anywhere else. Here everything that I felt could be wide open. And so I’d walk in there and open my coat, and nothing could have been better for me.

It functioned in the very best ways communities can function. Everybody comes in need, and everybody wants to get their needs filled, at the same time they understand that they have a role in filling everybody else’s needs, too. The one thing I hated to happen was when somebody would start a thread and nobody would respond. I felt obligated to post something in that thread so that that person wouldn’t feel like they were just shouting into the void. Because that’s exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to be. It was the very best functioning community—and it was made of people who were probably not functioning at all in their real lives. People who didn’t know me well would offer me antidepressants. I had my antidepressant, this wonderful community of support. I didn’t need a drug, didn’t want one. A drug would just make me feel numb. These people made me feel like I was home.

It was nearly Wade’s birthday. What had been such a day for celebration was now what? When Wade was born, John had said to me, “Thank you for giving me what I always wanted.” Could we still celebrate the gift of his life? We could try. We went to Pullen Park, where we had taken Wade and Cate so often, and gave the concession stand the money we would have spent on his party. Then I made a card, with Wade’s picture, that read, “July 18 would be the 17th birthday of Wade Edwards of Raleigh. Please use the attached coupon to celebrate his birthday.” As we had arranged, the coupon could be turned in at the concession stand for an ice cream treat. I went to Kinko’s to have them print the cards on nice card stock. They printed them, but they read them, too, and they wouldn’t let me pay. John and I took the cards to the public pool at the park and handed them out. The children were dubious when we started, the littlest ones asking the older children to read what it said and asking about the boy pictured on the card, but the first child who returned from the concession stand with a Nutty Buddy convinced them to join in the party. We stood, satisfied if joyless, in a sea of children with circles of ice cream around their mouths. Wade’s seventeenth-birthday party. And then we drove to Durham to see Cate at “Math Camp.”