Taking Flight (14 page)

That house is proof that survival is possible, even with a hole through your center.

The reunion was an all day affair. My cousins and I would spend the morning playing soccer or volleyball in the open field of the historic park while our parents mingled with our extended family. A few of those distant relatives freaked me out. They were missing a lot of their teeth and their kids ran around without clothes on, picking their nose with their grimy hands. They were the rednecks and we had become city folk, and sometimes I could appreciate my parents’ decision to leave Missouri behind.

After we had all eaten lunch we would leave the park and drive to the first of two cemeteries. At the first my Dad would walk around with his parents and siblings and leave plastic wreaths on the graves of people who mattered to him like my aunts and uncles mattered to me. It’s hard to expand your mind as a child to go outside of the family that you know and envision your parents having their own family before you came along. To do this means accepting that their aunts and uncles and grandparents have died, and one day, you will be at cemetery with your kids when your family has died.

The cemeteries didn’t scare me or make me upset; instead I was fascinated by the ancient tombstones. We were out in the middle of farm country, Amish country, and the headstones were often so faded with age that I couldn’t read most of the names. In that undisturbed land it was easy to picture a family, similar to ours, burying their own.

The second cemetery we visited was at the top of a steep hill. Our family would park their cars off of the gravel road as deep into the ditch as they could go. We would get out of our cars and make the climb up the hill. Once at the top we would stretch out on our bellies, arms pointed straight above us, and together we would roll down the hill.

There were a few headstones to maneuver around, but if you aimed right from the start you could usually avoid them. By the time you reached the bottom you could barely stand, you had to give your dizzy head time to catch back up with your body. Once you regained your balance it was back up the hill for another roll.

Everyone, including my grandparents, would roll down cemetery hill. Becky, my strictest aunt, looked like a little girl when she took her turn. Children adore the adults in their lives who get messy with finger paints and dig mud pies in the backyard. Watching my family roll down a dirty hill, getting covered in grass stains, at a place where we otherwise would be silent and respectful was a tradition I cherished. I knew it was unique to my family alone.  

My cousins and I would race each other down the hill, laughing hysterically the entire time. Our shoes would fly off our feet in our attempts to go faster. Sometimes we would hold hands and race in pairs. M was the most competitive and it usually cost him the contents of his stomach.

I imagine the people buried below us waited anxiously for our arrival every year, anticipating the sounds of laughter that echoed beyond death.

As much as I loved going to Missouri for Memorial Day, it was an exhausting trip. We would leave when it was dark out and return home at the end of the weekend just in time to unpack the car and go to bed. As a holiday weekend I’m sure Dad could have used the time on his plane, an extra paid day off to work in the garage. Yet we always went to Missouri. Family came first.

Memorial Day wasn’t the only turn-around trip home we would take. Every graduation, every birthday party, every baby that was born, we would spend sixteen hours in the car for eight hours worth of celebration.

My grandparent’s fiftieth anniversary and my birthday fell on the same day, and my grandfather’s birthday was four days earlier. To celebrate, my family threw them a huge surprise party. We arrived just in time for the big reveal and stayed until the last guest left, only to get into the car and drive all night home. We all had red eyes when the alarm went off Monday morning, but we had done the right thing in going.

During the party my Mom pulled me aside and apologized that my fourteenth birthday had been overlooked. I hadn’t thought of it that way until she mentioned it. Our family had bought a birthday cake for both my Grandpa and I.  We had each held a cake and had been serenaded by a hundred people. Grandpa kept trying to blow my candles out while twisting his cake out of my reach. My family didn’t leave anyone out, and no milestone was ever forgotten.  They were crazy and fun, loving and warm – worth every hour we spent in the car to be together.

There was an hour before your wake when our family could view your body, though the funeral director strongly advised against it. Mom and I ignored him, though most of the time I wish I hadn’t.

Diana and Marty arrived at the funeral home at the same time as Mom, Grandma and I. The three of them waited for Mom and I to go first, tissues at the ready.

Mom took my hand, her rings digging into my fingers, and led me around the corner into the parlor. Rows and rows of rich brown chairs sat on the taffy colored carpet. At the front of the room was the casket I had picked.

I couldn’t see you. Someone had draped a gauzy sheet from the top of the casket to the floor. It cascaded down, pink layer after pink layer. As we inched our way closer my heart started to race. Your body was in the box, under that sheet, and it was suddenly all too real. There were no more plans to make, no more decisions. You were in the box and the box was getting closer, and my legs forgot how to hold me up. I let myself go limp, falling onto my knees.

I cried out too, just a sound, no words. There weren’t words that could have described how it felt to know you were rotting a few inches away.

Mom knelt down beside me and wrapped her arms around me. After a few moments of crying she pulled me up, and with an even tighter grip on my hands we walked the last few steps together.

“Take the sheet away,” I demanded of the faceless workers that stood beside the casket.

Slowly they moved forward and lifted the sheet, folding it between them.

You didn’t look like you. Your hair was puffy and stiff with hairspray. Your face was swollen, deformed, the purple bruises peeking out from the layers of makeup that had been caked onto your waxy skin. I think your nose was broken. Your hands, folded together, were definitely broken.

The good thing about the fakeness of your body was that I didn’t trick myself into thinking you were going to breathe at any moment. Had you looked normal I might have convinced myself you were sleeping. The body before me left no doubt that you were no longer inside of it.

The wake was exhausting. I never sat down and I was always talking to someone. A long receiving line formed and Mom and I stood beside your closed casket shaking the hands of the people who had come to pay their respects.

Mom’s family from Minnesota came, too. Brian and Bobbi carried Charlie and Marissa in their arms. The kids pointed to your pictures on the casket lid and asked where Uncle David was. Seeing them in their parents’ arms was almost too much to handle. I realized then that Marissa might remember you a little but to Charlie you would be all but lost.

Could I ever lose you? Was it age or years of collected memories that kept a person alive or was everyone forgotten in the end? Could a daughter ever forget that once upon a time she had a father?

Between handshakes and hugs I offered to drive A back to grandma’s house. It was a short trip and he was quiet the whole way, unusual for my constantly chatty cousin. With his developmental delays A was usually happy, but he sat emotionless at my side.

When we got to the house A went into the living room and sat on the couch. I was looking for the television remote for him when he asked me, “Why is everyone so sad?”

I sniffed. “Because they miss Uncle David.”

“But why are they sad?”

“Because we can’t see him anymore. And we loved him. And when people we love die it hurts.” I kept my back to A, unwilling to look at his innocent face.

“I’m not sad. Uncle David is in Heaven with Jesus. I know it.”

I had found a faith a while back but at that moment it was the last thing I could think to rely on.

“And I can see him. He’s right there.”

I turned around at the certainty in A’s voice. “Where? Where do you see him?”

A
pointed down the hallway, toward the bedrooms. “Right there.”

I followed where he pointed. I didn’t see anything in the shadows but the hairs on my arms stood up nonetheless.

“Right there,” A said again. “He’s with Grandpa. Don’t you see them?”

I don’t know if you were really in that hallway. But I did know that I could never, ever forget you. Your ghost would follow me forever, whatever that might mean.

Remember the phase I went through where I refused to get out of bed in the morning? Ok, truthfully if you asked my husband I’m still in that phase – I set two alarms and play them out until the last possible second. But do you remember when I was ten or eleven and Mom would literally have to drag me by the heels out of bed? You got so annoyed with our song and dance that one morning you picked me up and dropped me into a bathtub of freezing cold water. It was too funny for me to get angry at you, just like you were too busy laughing at my shrieks to stay angry with me.

I could have used you and the bathtub on the day of your funeral. I wasn’t asleep when Mom came to get me, but I wasn’t awake, either. It was stuffy in the bedroom but I was still tucked safely under the heavy quilt. Mom knocked on the door. “Time to get up, sweetie.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I know. But you have to.”

I dressed in black pants and a black tank top. I was never one for dresses, and as it turned out I was probably the most comfortable person at the burial. The temperature was already in the eighties and climbing.

Before we left the house I closed the bedroom door and wrote you a note. All I remember writing was how I didn’t want it to be my last letter to you. I wrote what I thought someone who felt sorrow would write. But everything was too big to be felt, too swollen. I folded a picture of me as a little girl inside one of those airplane rides at Chuck-E-Cheese into the note. I was undoubtedly in that plane because you had told me it would be fun.

We had one more peek into your casket before the funeral started. I slipped the note and photo by your arm, trying not to think about the gross things that would soon be happening to the paper and your skin.

Mom and I got rock star seating during the service. The two of us sat close together on an overstuffed couch in the front row while a pastor who had never met you read the eulogies our family had written in a thick southern accent.

Becky, Diana, Mom and I each wrote a eulogy. I don’t remember what a single one of them said, except for mine. I have never been fond of having others read the things I write aloud. It tends to make my ears bleed. But even I had to admit that the words I had written for you in less than an hour sounded like the voice of someone much older than sixteen. It was like hearing someone else speak, someone else acknowledging saying goodbye to their father. 

In my eulogy I told the mourning crowd that I didn’t hate the thing that took you away from us. It was what they wanted to hear and what I needed to say. If I didn’t hate it, if Mom and I still believed your pursuit of flight was the right thing, then no one was to blame for your destruction. More than the need to make everything okay was an undeniable truth – the plane was such a large part of all our lives. Hating the plane would be like hating you.

I don’t remember who carried the casket out. I do remember walking past everyone behind the casket, so many people were crying, wiping at their eyes, looking at Mom and I with pity.

Mom and I rode in a limo to the cemetery. A parade of cars followed us, and throughout the little town of Wentzville families who were still on fourth of July vacations had to wait longer at stop lights while we inched by. They watched the flashing lights of the police car, they all peered into the tinted windows of the limo. Their faces told me they were relieved it wasn’t them. I wanted to roll down the window and shout that it could be them any second, that a week ago I was just like them. I wanted to scare them, to spread my resentment at the family I’d been robbed from.

It was miserably hot at the cemetery. Without a cloud in the sky the sun beat down mercilessly on all of us. Your casket hovered over the open grave on poles with tons of flowers on top. The pastor said a few more words, none of which I remember, and then it was over.

You would think that getting a funeral over with quickly is a blessing, but in my opinion the funeral is the easy part. It’s easy to keep busy when the adrenaline is pumping and there’s so much to do. The hard part is the sudden whoosh of air that leaves your lungs when it’s all over, when there’s nothing left to do but start living.

We had the obligatory sandwich and dessert feast in a church basement following the service. Some people need to eat their grief away, but not me. The food made me sick to my stomach.

I was tired of talking to people and accepting condolences that didn’t make me feel better. I left the basement almost immediately after we arrived and went out to the parking lot.

Pam and Danny are the reasons Mom and I kept our sanity during those last two hours. Our best friends when we lived in Lake Sherwood, Mom and Pam are still like two teenagers, inseparable and always giggling. Danny followed me outside and though we hadn’t seen each other in a few years and regardless of the fact that he was suddenly several inches taller than me, the magical bond forged in childhood remained. He didn’t say much and neither did I; instead we just walked lap after lap around the cars, working up a sweat, Danny getting yellow dust all over his fancy black and white shoes.