While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there
were potholes and too many trees by the side of the
winding road. The first to go were two juniors who
were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do,
driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl
while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed.
They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by
the road. They died. There were others in high school
who died in car accidents, too, though at this point
I mainly remember the names of the survivors
(thanks, Facebook,
with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother
died,
I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my
own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and
dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits
me more than others, generally when I’m feeling
low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in
weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an
hour or two a day writing out the details of
illness and death for my novel manuscript. And
I’ll have dreams about these
people,
the dead from high school, usually as represented
by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one
who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time
the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like
Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of
birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone
for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my
dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather
shows up less and less now as I deal with the past,
though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is
to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people
who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest
times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad
it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past,
something that I keep thinking should be a “dead”
itself at this point, as I was having a good cry
after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our
Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the
kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and
inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat
or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and
was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years
old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room,
petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur
was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind
her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't
stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite
transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the
lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies
and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams
into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep
cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory
of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was
in seventh grade, about six months after we left my
grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out
when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the
mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was
halfway across the street when a car came tearing
past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver
didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my
grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail
lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's
brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and
added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the
touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and
I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown
and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a
game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under
the door. Louise
curled up on the
dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I
brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by,
late for class. And my grandmother croaked out
"Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the
swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree
is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my
memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment,
knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And
the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood,
Writing
Salon mistress and photographer
extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us
in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various
versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high
school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had
forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes),
just to check on some of the facts. There was David
Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at
the front of the book was a dedication to three other
people from our class who had died, two of them in
car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and
Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I
was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in
the first paragraph of this post, though I could have
some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died
in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally
monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even
after death. The fact that there was no trace of
these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they
had never existed.
