White Hot Grief Parade Read online

  I returned to Interlochen for my Senior year in the fall of 2000, with big hopes and plans for the future, not to mention a boyfriend acquired the previous school year. I also had a revelation: that my pierced, leather-jacket-wearing, punk-music-listening, left-handed, red-headed, pseudo-intellectual boyfriend was my small way of rebelling.

  As mentioned before, junior-year-boyfriend Jeremey was my “motorcycle guy.” He was an assertion of my independence now that I was away from home full time, free to explore with my own judgments and moral compass. After an initial flurry of phone calls between my parents and Interlochen begging any adult to step in and end the relationship, my parents resigned themselves to the fact that the universe was not going to implode if I loved a rebellious redhead with one too many Es in his name.

  It turned out that my parents needn’t have worried, as it couldn’t last with the bad boy forever. Jeremey graduated and got out into the big bad world and in truth, I don’t think he fully understood what was happening to my father and my family, nor did I have any ability to fully share it. Eventually, in a spectacularly ordinary teenage manner, we just parted ways.

  I suppose that was where Kent entered in.

  He was a friend first, and a true one. When I arrived for my senior year at Interlochen, I was a returning student but Kent was at the Academy for his very first time, to attend the final year of high school. It was a common practice. Opening weekend, his WASP-y, dry, New Englander mother and father (both doctors—of nuclear physics and astrophysics, respectively) escorted him, wandering the campus with horror-struck curiosity. This arts school perfectly defined exactly the kind of free-spirited, tree-swinging, paint-covered human they did not want their son to be. This is not the yacht club, their American Gothic facial expressions said, and this black sheep in our family is going to an Ivy League School if it kills us all.

  But Kent fit in perfectly. Interlochen had its own hierarchies both theater-department- and campus-wide, and Kent managed to carve himself a comfortable little throne in both. He deftly won over the theater department because he was talented, incredibly, bright and, crucially, tall. He got fantastic roles right off the bat and was a “good catch” as far as scene partners were concerned. On campus he was charismatic, confident, wickedly funny, and handsome (he wore his hair in a long, gorgeous ponytail he cut during winter break) and I observed his blossoming popularity from afar, with the cool distance of “having a boyfriend.”

  But as the year thundered along, changes came—at home, at school, with Jeremey, with my father’s health. And somehow, as the year progressed, my friendship with Kent became the kind of friendship people write novels about.

  He called me to catch up over Christmas break. I remember Dad taking the first call and, looking at the caller ID (before caller ID automatically listed the location), saying “631? What is 631?” (Dad had Rain Man-like knowledge of little things like this.) “631 is Long Island! Long Island? That must be the ponytailed guy! I like him!” I was surprised that my stomach flipped at the prospect of talking with my friend (and nothing more) over the phone. But it did. I filed it away under “Teenager,” subcategory “Shared Experiences,” sub-subcategory “Boarding School,” and left that file there to gather dust.

  But after we returned from the holidays, my heart sank when I learned Kent had started dating someone else. I cared for them both, was genuinely happy for them, and didn’t want to interfere. Plus, despite feeling further and further away from my boyfriend in college, I was still devoted to him.

  Furthermore, Dad was not well. His health was failing. There were no overt signs, but something was in the air. I was a busy, driven, ambitious high school senior who had no time for distractions.

  Yet, by spring break, Kent and I had not only been paired in our Shakespeare scenes as Antony and Cleopatra, but also cast opposite one another in As You Like It. It would be a springtime full of Shakespeare, poetry, and honest conversations, all with Kent. Love crept up on us.

  Kent and I had the spring. A fleeting, perfect spring of youthful flushes, stolen kisses, and dreams. Spring turned to summer, summer to fall: a perfect six months of young love.

  There was so much shared before Dad collapsed at graduation. Before his new treatment that rendered him unable to walk, or breathe, or stay awake. Before we both had to grow up very, very quickly.

  It was everything that you hope and dream of, and should ever be so lucky to have when you are seventeen and truly in love for the first time and it is spring.

  The Morning

  I ’d been trying to go to college in Minneapolis. I was trying to trust the faculty and my by then ex-boyfriend Jeremey, who was (awkwardly) in the class ahead of me, that this could set me up for a meaningful life that wouldn’t disappoint anyone. I was trying to find my footing. I was trying not to miss Kent too much. I was trying to not worry too much about what was going on at home.

  I tried. I did. But I wasn’t doing any of it very well.

  As mentioned before, my parents shielded me from the bulk of the cancer difficulties. But as time wore on I felt more than merely protected from it; I felt shut out. What was appropriate to shield from a nine-year-old didn’t feel appropriate to keep from a teenager, and I don’t think any of us understood how to transition in this area of our family. Before we all knew it, I was “old enough.” But I didn’t know what to ask or how to help and, at least I think, they simultaneously didn’t want to burden me and didn’t want me to bear witness to its indignities. I felt as though I were outside a locked door—ear pressed against the heavy wood, able to hear only the murmurs from within. Somehow, all three of us had lost the key.

  Operating in this vacuum, it is an understatement to say that I was not doing well at college. I loved my small class of thirteen actors, the faculty, the classes. I loved the university environment and was still managing to pull good grades, much to my astonishment. But I longed for Kent and all of my Interlochen friends. Most of all, I was coming apart with doubts about home and the elephant that no one was talking about: my father was dying.

  I worked at Interlochen the summer following graduation—Kent and Lilly were there too, along with many of our friends, and it felt like a meaningful transition to a permanent goodbye. Furthermore, Mom and Dad had decided it was time to try an experimental treatment at MD Anderson—a hospital specializing in oncology treatments in Houston, Texas. Dad was going to participate in a trial for a very new but very intense chemotherapy, the kind used on Lance Armstrong to great success. This didn’t faze me—Dad had been knocking back chemo like Jell-O shots for years. I offered to stay home and help, but my father was both sentimental as well as prideful and didn’t want to “rob me” of the summer before college; nor, do I think, did he want me to bear witness to his struggles.

  At the end of that summer, I had returned home to a disintegrated father. I had just days leading up to my departure for college. We went to eat at a deli on Thirteen Mile. It was tense. Dad was in bad shape. He was weak and frail. I was so underinformed about what was going on— and thus so angry, confused, and frustrated with cancer—that I ended up taking it out on the vessel holding the disease. Dad mentioned that he was afraid to sleep. I snapped, “Why are you afraid to fall asleep?” and he yelled back, “Because I’m afraid I am going to die!” The deli went quiet. People turned. I stood up and walked out and circled the building three times. No tears. Just primal, absolute fear.

  Then Dad’s birthday on the first of September.

  Meanwhile, I was writing longhand letters to Kent, who was taking a year off to work on a dairy farm, his hours so different from mine that we never truly got a chance to speak on the rotary phone Kent shared with two Portuguese farm workers, Clibbs and Roderigo.7

  Then September 11.

  Meanwhile, my ex-boyfriend Jeremey was after me for explanations and retribution and forgiveness. He was insistent and merciless. It was always all about him. He was everywhere I was in Minneapolis and it was quickly wearing me out.<
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  Then my parents’ anniversary.

  At school, I was studying sociology and Shakespeare and philosophy as well as writing papers and participating in lectures. I was living alone in a single coffin-like room in the corner of the thirteenth floor in a massive dormitory. I ran up and down the flights of stairs to combat my anxiety. I called home, but no one was there to answer and when they were, Mom was a ghost of herself. I could hear it in her voice; the tense act of hope her positive words and tight voice were performing, and I wished she would just tell me—and admit to herself—the truth.

  I lasted about eight weeks in Minneapolis. It wasn’t meant to be. On Monday, October 8th, 2001, I was walking to class and I stopped dead: I knew that I had to go home that day.

  So I did.

  There I was, back in Michigan, temporarily relieved, but now a visitor in the strange house of a dying person—pills, machines, the smell of hospital, and dread. Unfamiliar people were there offering opinions and advice no one wanted as they wiped their brows, relieved it wasn’t their time to go. My mother, having arranged for Kent to fly in, was preoccupied running up and down the stairs being hostess, hospice nurse, and everything in between. And the most unbelievable feeling came over me. I was furious.

  There were so many things I thought I would have felt—distress, fear, despair. But I was engulfed by rage. How could I have no idea things had gotten so bad? And so quickly? Was I so much of a child still that I was not granted the dignity of this information? Was I a member of this family? Or was I simply the child of a couple fighting cancer?

  I felt lanced straight through the gut with total isolation; there was no one to call. My parents were the people who were both horrifically afflicted and who had all the information. I felt patronized. I felt terrified.

  I felt angry. When you do not have the information, you cannot be granted a choice. My father might have wanted to face the harsh realities in solitude with my mother, to keep the terror from me, to allow me to remain on my path. I see the logic now, but then I raged that I hadn’t been given time to prepare. I might have made more memories, said more loving things, come home more. But I had been robbed of the chance.

  I seethed.

  No wonder Kent is coming, I thought. He is here to look after me because Mom is looking after Dad, and this is all suddenly very clear. I am a terrible person in the middle of a situation I do not understand and, now that I do, I cannot tolerate it.

  When Kent arrived, I went numbly upstairs with him. Dad was laying down in bed, grasping for every breath he could as the cancer was winning inside his ravaged body. He smiled weakly as Kent and I entered.

  “Hi, Kent. How’s the farm?”

  Kent sat down in a bedside chair and Dad took his hand.

  “Good,” Kent smiled, chuckling a little. This chuckle was Kent’s signature, rolling and tentative and sad.

  “Good,” Dad said and closed his eyes, spent.

  Then it was my turn.

  There was nothing to say. I don’t believe we said a word. But he gripped my hand with Herculean strength, as if the only part of his entire being still able to communicate the power of his desires were his strong, gigantic hands—clutching at those he loved, at the words he was desperate to say and possibly anchoring him to life itself. He reached across his body and gripped tighter with his other hand, until both sets of our hands were knotted together and pulsing. I think he was embarrassed. I think he was sorry. I think he wanted me to know how much he loved me, and I think he wanted me to go.

  I dropped my head, placing my forehead on the mountain of our hands and lingered there for a moment before standing up and walking away.

  I suppose that was my goodbye—insufficient, wordless, collapsed— but, if that was what it would continue to be, I didn’t want to build up a collection of memories of Michael Silber in that state. I would prefer to preserve the memories I already had and not tarnish them with how it was at the end.

  Kent and I headed downstairs. There were strangers waiting in our living room, all of them saying unthinkable things: This is the end of course. Oh isn’t it awful being in a house where you can feel death looming? It reminds me of being in a hospital only you don’t feel nearly as clean. Oh, shh shh the daughter is coming! Don’t say anything, just be pleasant.

  I stared at them at the base of the stairs and left through the front door without a word. Kent and I headed to a deli, ate, and returned home in silence to a silent house. Mom was spent, and suggested I stay downstairs beside Kent. In hindsight, I suppose it was partly for my comfort, for me to be held at night, but also partly to keep me from the horrors inside the bedroom.

  I woke in the middle of the night with stabbing pains in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air. I needed help. My chest constricting, I left the bed and made my way upstairs to my parents’ room and found the door closed.

  It was then that I remembered. I remembered about The Dying. I needed to pull myself together on my own. I entered my childhood bathroom next door, and folded over, I counted my breaths—in 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4—but the pain kept stabbing, crushing my breast, turning my heart to pulp. What is happening? I thought.

  I attempted to stand and failed. I crawled to the door of my parents’ room, struggled to my feet and placed my hand upon the door, preparing to knock.

  But then, I heard it: the cries of the final hours.

  Cathy, my father gasped in desperation, I love you . . . I love you . . .

  There were rustles and machines and steps and broken voices.

  . . . I love you . . .

  With that, the pains in my chest ceased instantly. I slid slowly down the wall beside the door, my hand still placed upon it and, as I sat there, listening to the final moments, I wept to be missing it, knowing it was a door, an inch, a knock, a breath away, but not for me to witness. I found myself in real time, in those final moments, inside the middle of a long-felt metaphor:

  I was listening to my parents’ love story reach its conclusion, just as I was meant to, outside a door.

  Drenched in a pool of sweat, my face almost imperceptibly contorting with the knowledge of the night, I realized the pain was no accident. No pain is.

  . . . I love you . . .

  Later that morning, I awoke again, back in my bed. There was rustling in the house—feet shuffling and hushed voices. I felt over to my right for Kent, but he was not there, though his space was still warm and imprint fresh. The door to the bedroom was shut.

  I shot out of bed and moved to the closed door—wanting to burst through, to smash it open and run but I stopped. Hesitating, I put my hand upon the knob, knowing that on the other side of the door lay the rest of my life. As long as I remained in the bedroom downstairs, I could keep reality at bay, even if only for a moment or two. But I held my breath and turned the knob, placing my ear to a crack I had made in the doorway. Kent was on the phone upstairs in the kitchen.

  “He’s dead,” I heard him say.

  I was seared—forever scored by these words that went into me like a branding iron, unforgettable and irreversible. There was the separation of life before and life after those words. What would I preserve of those last 6,673 days? Eighteen years, three months, six days, give or take a few hours. Would I remember every second of what is now my personal BCE—everything that was “before he died?” 953 weeks and two days . . . What was I meant to keep?

  And then I was overcome with a relief I would continue to feel guilty about for years. The suffering and struggle and indignities of The Dying had finally ended. For him. For all of us. I was relieved, and for that I am sorry.

  I don’t remember what I did next. I don’t remember the next moment I looked into Kent’s face. Or my mother’s.

  There are some things that happened that morning before I woke that I will never know, and I frankly do not want to. Things Kent and my mother shared in those final moments that I am certain they will take to their own graves. Things that are dark and hard and eternal.


  I walked calmly upstairs to my bedroom. In the next room, my father lay dead behind his still-closed bedroom door. I opened my closet, took off my checkered pajamas and teal wool sweater and folded them in a neat pile, and then I pulled on a long dress of pure white silk.

  I wanted to be ready to act. I wanted to always remember what I wore that day. And I wanted it to be beautiful. Hopeful.

  I remember wanting to be armed in white.

  7 No, but seriously.

  Planning

  Irecall, probably more vividly than any other, the moment Lilly heard that Dad was gone. Kent and I were seated on my bed, both stoic. I wanted to be there when he told her, but I did not want to do it myself.

  I don’t remember what he said, but I do remember the depth of the wail I could hear through the telephone, and how much I envied it.

  She loved him. Everyone did.

  They can only be described as the Funeral People, and they were retrieving Dad’s corpse and carrying it down the stairs with what I considered to be an overstated sense of stoicism.

  “Hey!” I wanted to shout “Hey you! All of you tall serious men in black suits and frowning faces. Hey! Are you listening to me? You are very odd men, all of you, which I suppose you have to be. After all, I’ve never quite understood how or why anyone really gets into, you know, the Business. Now while I am certain you are extremely capable and you run The Dying like a real tight ship, please! This is not that serious! Laugh, smile, be of good cheer!”

  But the men obviously weren’t listening to my inner monologue; they were too busy carting my father’s body downstairs.

  The Funeral People moved down the stairs and through the front door. The doors to the hearse opened, then closed. The Main Funeral Guy shook our hands, handed us a card, closed the door behind him, and told us to show up somewhere later that day. It was like a Dentist Appointment of Death, just without the free oral hygiene swag.