Last Friday evening Ben was on the way home from work. As we often do, we were chatting on the phone while he drove. Just talking about the day and what to have for dinner. He got another call and went to take it. A few minutes later he called me back to say that it had been his mother, calling from Brooklyn and that his sister’s husband Will had been in some kind of accident.
We talked anxiously for a few minutes—what kind of accident? Did he break his arm? Was it a car accident? Ben’s mother and sister Kate were walking towards the house and would tell us soon. I said that we shouldn’t worry until we have something to worry about. A few minutes later he got another call. When he called me back he was sobbing. Will died two hours ago, he said.
What? This is the sort implausible news that sucks the air out of your lungs. How could Will die? He was only 44 and the picture of health, always playing tennis and going on sport fishing trips and so on. I started crying too—my first thoughts focusing on those poor girls, our nieces. Only 7 and 10 years old or so, and now without their father. And Priscilla—a widow at 42.
You know, one of my persistent fears is that one day I will open the door to find state troopers there telling me that Ben has been in an accident. He drives so much! And this is exactly what happened to Priscilla. She was home, laid up from recent ACL surgery, and the police came to the door: your husband has been in an accident. He had just gone out to get groceries or something like that, and apparently had a massive heart attack on the street only a few blocks from home.
Poor Priscilla had to go to the hospital to see his body—on crutches! (Somehow the CRUTCHES really bothered me.) I thought that this was probably the saddest thing in all the world until later in the week, when I saw those beautiful pale little girls walking behind their father’s casket.
I have some familiarity with being at or near the center of a stunning tragedy like this. My brother Jonathan died in August of 1995, when he was only 17. He had a heart defect that had been corrected with open heart surgery when he was a toddler, and then they were doing the surgery again now that he was full grown. It had a 97% survival rate, so it didn’t seem really on the horizon that he would end up in the 3%, but so it was. For the first week or so our family was in the center of this whirlwind of support. People converged at the house, coming out of the woodwork, bearing food. (My father says that this is like cells rushing to a wound in the body.)
This is the situation that Priscilla and her girls were in all week. Ben flew out on Saturday, feeling an urgency to simply BE there. Once he assessed the situation and the day for the service was set, he came home on Sunday. Handled some things at work, collected us, and we all flew out on Tuesday, just ahead of that massive blizzard. I mean JUST ahead. We flew out in the morning, and by afternoon no more flights were going. The storm chased us and on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, the day of the funeral, we did everything in a howling, horizontal sleet sort of winter gale.
Of course, as these things always go, both our kids were somewhat sick. The baby had a fever of 101 the night before we had to leave. Isaac was showing signs of pink eye and an upper respiratory infection. But what could we do? We just had to be there and that’s all there was to it.
We got through everything– the service was heart breaking. Priscilla stood up and gave a speech that left me dazzled by her poise and calm and ability to think clearly under such intense pressure. She reminded me of Jackie Kennedy, the beautiful young widow who held it together for everyone else. I really am certain that in her place I would NOT have been able to stand up before — what? a thousand some?– people and calmly summarize my husband’s life, our life together, and give words of wisdom to my children. She was a marvel.
Childcare was of course a problem… I had hoped to hold the baby during the service and just nurse him if he fussed, but at that moment he had a fever and headache and wasn’t so easily consoled. I was so happy that this woman appeared who works for the family out there and offered to take him if need be. Before the service even started I had to off-load him to her. I hoped that he would go to sleep and then she could bring him back, but no. In fact, as Priscilla was speaking I heard his distant screams wafting into the huge echoing nave of this old stone church. I was sitting in the front row. Isaac beside me was also getting restless. So the instant Priscilla was done I took him and walked all the way to the back and out into this little room where the woman and Elias were waiting. I spent the last half of the service in a little ante room reading Stinky Cheese Man to Isaac and nursing Elias.
Managing Isaac during all this was a challenge. He has so much energy, and was struggling himself to make sense of what had happened. One light moment: as we were going through security on the way out, Isaac stopped to talk with a guard there. “Well,” he began, “I have some bad news…”
At times too he showed rising anxiety that HIS father would die like this too. When we were waiting for the enormous church to empty in order to find Ben, Isaac became more and more agitated. “Where’s my daddy?? WHERE’S MY DADDY!??” etc. He actually started melting down as we stood there on these slippery stone stairs watching the crowd file out. (“It was a very ecumenical service,” Ben said. “If it had been just Episcopalians there’s no way we would have had that traffic jam.”)
Later we were in the car and Ben ran in someplace for a second. “Did he die?” Isaac asked.
“Did who die?” I said.
“Did Daddy die?”
“What? No, no. daddy just went in there for five minutes, he’ll be right back.”
But the fact is that Will’s IS one of those sorts of deaths that puts a vein of fear through everyone who hears about it. There is no special reason that it was him and not us, no real logic to it. Which means that it could BE any of us at any time.
I for one am not ready.
On Thursday we came home through travel hell. JFK Airport was really in full-on Soviet mode. The three hour lines to rebook brought Krushchev to mind. The poor souls sleeping on cots lined up along the walls… the bare shelves in all the stores. The storm was over, but the fall-out was still very present. Of course we called ahead! The computer claimed that our flight was on time, but it so very much wasn’t.
My favorite moment? While Ben was waiting in this insane line to check our bags, Elias began screaming and to my amazement shot out double barreled blasts of green snot. Quite forcefully and huge for such a tiny nose. I scrambled in my magic diaper bag and found a Kleenex. He fired again. I cleaned him up again. Isaac began to scream for a snack, and I produced a box of raisins. I got the baby situated, nursing in his sling while I stood up (not a chair for miles.) All seemed well briefly, before Isaac began to shriek, “I have to go potty! I can’t hold it!” This just as I saw Ben handing away our bags with all the clothes in the world (one of our suitcases had a free trip to San Juan, as it turned out). I remembered a friend who said that she flew all the way from Mexico to Cleveland, including a change of flights in Houston, with her little boy. He had had a diarrhea explosion at the beginning of the trip to the extent that she had to throw away all his clothes including his shoes. He wore a towel, she said, around his chest like a prom dress.
But we made it. Our flight was only five hours late (Isaac chattering away all the while—fruit bats versus vampire bats and much more) and our wonderful neighbor shoveled out our house enough so that we could park and carry our stuff in.
It was nearly midnight and Ben and I both were done in with exhaustion. But in this context everything seemed wonderful. We’re alive and well— are children our well, our marriage is generally a happy one– all our concerns in the world are utterly trivial. Life is perfect.