The Hero's Body (22 page)

I don't know what my father had elected to do with his organs, and I'm ashamed now that I was too stomped by sorrow to ask, or even to think of asking. My grandparents are not the breed of people to whom you can speak about such things. And certainly not when they'd just beheld their son lying dead on a steel table. A flesh-obsessed Catholic in her every cell, Parma no doubt believed that my father required his organs on those auspicious avenues of the afterlife, that his kidneys and liver would be welcome when a tarrying Christ finally came back to call up the dead. I've no notion how she squared this belief with what happens on an embalming table, the formaldehyde, the glutaraldehyde, the ethanol and humectants, the sewn-shut eyelids and lips.

In the
kitchen, Pop was trying to land my brother on the phone in Colorado. Mike has never been easy to call or hear from. In 1996
he went out west to snowboard for a weekend and never came back. For weeks at a clip he's ungettable by phone or by email, hiking some hill, canoeing some ravine, camping in some off-the-map Edenic wild, backpacking through boonies, rock climbing, mountain biking, communing with bearded and tattooed others who puff enough weed to tranquilize a pachyderm. Our home state had never been a proper fit for him. He's long-haired with a hieroglyphic fresco inked onto his entire left arm, and he tends to favor women who are named after seasons. Jersey is short on those.

I haven't shaken loose this characteristically terse message Pop left on his voicemail that day, the last of the evening's light about to die: “Mike, it's Pop. We've got a problem here. Call us back.”
We've got a problem here
. Fourteen years earlier, I'd spoken identical words to my father when I called him from the gas station, after I fed diesel fuel to a gasoline engine: “I've got a problem here.” The problem upon me at the gas station was, by contrast, welcoming in its possibility of remedy, while the problem we all had on May 7, 2000, stood solid in its unfixability. A problem suggests the possibility of a solution, the chance of correction. What was the antidote to my father's fatal crash? How to fix
that
large thing? Death is not our problem, is not an algebraic equation to be overcome. It won't be solved. We make an adversary of a fate and then feel swindled when the adversary wins. Larkin:
Most things may never happen: this one will
.

My brother called back much sooner than we'd expected, and before Pop could speak, I jerked up from the kitchen table and told him to hand me the phone. “Here,” he said to Mike, “your brother wants to talk to you.” I hadn't planned on that, was not sure from what place that impulse had arisen, or what it meant that I wanted to be the one who delivered him this news. I was not aware of feeling a newfound parental obligation; he was an able adult who lived seven states away, and we'd never been very brotherly to begin with.

I said his name, I heard the opening notes of his panic, the quavering
in his words: he knew. In his very marrow, he already knew. That's when my sobs began gradually to gyrate and then to spiral up from the well of me. For the last several hours I'd been somehow inoculated against tears, not prepped, unready for the fearsome work of real sobbing. As I stalled there on the phone with my brother, gauging the tremors as they moved along my fault lines, he wailed at me to tell him, to get on with this filthy chore. I spoke this wedding of words that would repeatedly spear me for the next several months, a linguistic pairing forty years premature, the most terrible sentence I've ever spoken: “Daddy's dead.”

I suppose I'd had other options—“Dad has crashed” or “Dad's been killed”—but it was “Daddy's dead” that came unthinkingly from my throat. The child's plea in
Daddy
, the decisive thud of
dead
. Even then, I see, in that stricken state, euphemizing was not possible, the placid dishonesty of
passed away
, the insulting gibberish of
a better place
. A loved one's place is with his loved ones; there is no better place than that. To miss a loved one without interruption is a special kind of torture, and talk of that supposedly better place does nothing to mitigate it.

In the coming days, many would mumble to me about that better place, about how sorry they were for the
passing
. It would be impossible to scorn them for such knee-jerk condolence, for relying on those euphemisms. Death makes people babble, makes them blunder. They don't know what to do with the thing, how to think and speak of it. Nor did I—I least of all—as I groped after answers that stood stalwart in their silence. And yet people do mean what they say at a funeral, are never surer in their intentions with language. It bothered them, I saw, when I refused to say
passed away
, when I insisted upon
killed
and
dead
, when I did not shrink from the unadorned truth of it.
Your father's gone
. Yes he was. Yes he is.

In the hours and days, weeks and months following his death, I developed a distracting fixation on word choice, as if the precision
of language could summon understanding or deliver an atom of acceptance. It was a detour of obsessiveness over which I had no control. Whatever else it is, grief is a succession of byways. If words are instruments of revelation, my confusion and grief must have glommed onto them in an effort to be enlightened and ameliorated. Gather the right words, use them to fill in the many new frets of the spirit and heart, and maybe you'll give yourself a chance at healing. Our grief-eaten obsessions are never pointless trivia or pathologies; they are enactments of understanding, deep forms of meaning.

There on the phone with my brother, after I uttered “Daddy's dead,” the emotional contractions of this labor that began several hours earlier at last ended in birth, a prolonged burst. Solar-plexus sobs that harnessed the body whole, vacuumed all the air from the room. It left me there panting on my knees. Then I was pacing between the living room and dining room with the cordless at my mouth; the telephone delivery of such news demands pacing, as if you can walk off the cramp of it. I tried to breathe through this eruption, this hefty tension in the head. I couldn't hear what my brother was asking or exclaiming, but I could tell that he was taking in the magnitude of
the problem
, this unmendable mistake.

Someone took the phone from me then, Pop or an uncle or cousin, and I reeled down the hallway into a vacant bedroom where I lay on the mattress and shook there, gnarled inward, convulsing with these sobs. My godfather hurried in after me, held me there on the bed, in the day's new dark. He'd always been the male member of my family least infected with machismo, and I've never forgotten his tenderness that night, his selfless lack of regard for the masculine protocol, so prevalent in our parts, that calls for a man never to spoon another man on a bed, no matter the sorrow.

After those sobs I felt unaccountably animated—I remember standing in the kitchen, trying to rally my family with motivating inquiries: “Okay, everyone, what are we gonna do about this now?
What's the next step here? What's the plan?”—but in a few hours I'd be back on a bed, in my dorm room at school, my quaking frame in Anna's hold, our faces pressed together. Sleep that night was the negation of rest, a wakeful, dreamless sleep in which I stayed conscious of my father's crash, and when we sat up at dawn, half the pillow was damp.

Because no
one saw my father crash into that guardrail, no one knew what happened. But everyone knew this: the pack was a minute in front of him, pushing hard down that snaked Pennsylvania back road. They'd planned to wait for him at an intersection. And because he was unfamiliar with the road, another rider would then point him in the direction of the highway so he could return home. The place he hit was a ninety-degree right turn, 120 feet over a crest.

The morning after the crash, Anna and I drove to my uncle Tony's house, and we found him bent over the kitchen sink, his back to us, tears dripping into a cereal bowl. He couldn't turn around. My father's helmet sat looking at me from the counter, a crack in the lower left side—not a surface or hairline crack but a saw-toothed fissure, cracked clear through—and a dent just above it. Tony had taken it from the hospital and rinsed half a gallon of blood out of it. Soon he told me this, from his own experience on rides like that:

“Your father was on a road he didn't know, and he was trying to take it easy while the other guys were hauling ass ahead of him. He was afraid he'd get lost, wouldn't be able to find his way back to whatever highway he needed. It happens all the time. You get lost on those back roads, you're screwed. So he sped up to try to catch them. There was that crown in the road, and the sharp right turn just beyond it. He had what's called a high-side. As soon as he saw the turn, he locked up the back brake, which you never do unless you're
going a hundred miles per hour and need to stop fast. Most of your brake work is done with the front brake.

“As the back brake locks, the bike doesn't want to stay up, it wants to go over, in whatever direction you're turning. When your dad felt the bike slipping under him to the right, he tried to save it. He didn't want to low-side—he was thinking about the bike. And when he straightened up to the left, the back tire stepped out, it caught on the road and flung him like a slingshot over the bike, into the guardrail. This all happened in two, two and a half seconds. If he had let the bike slide from under him, without trying to straighten up and save it, he would have gone feet-first into the side of the road and got up and walked away, I think, no problem. Maybe a broken foot or leg, but otherwise, no problem.”

Let the bike go and walk away, no problem. But he couldn't. He'd let
us
go, let all of life go, but not the bike.

III

If someone had asked
me to help with my father's funeral, I would have said to bury him in his carpenter's clothes: the brown Carhartt hoodie, a torn T-shirt that still held his sweat, those beige and beaten work boots, the Lee dungarees scabbed with caulk and stained with paint. I would have said to place him in a plain pine box Pop and my uncles had built with their own hands, with my father's own tools, not the high-end mahogany casket, a capsule designed to keep out the moisture and the air, as if either now could do him any harm or good. I would have vetoed the mortician's art, the embalming, the sewing of his eyelids and lips, and that tiny smile, that vestige of a grin, they fashioned to his face for us.

They want to honor the dead, I know. They want to clean the tremendous mess. They do the noble work of giving the family what it needs most now: a last look that isn't violated by the vicious fact of the body's breakability, its fragile pumps and vessels. My family needed to see my father done up like a life-size doll, in just-bought clothes he did not buy, a hasty three-piece he'd have loathed. They needed, as so many need, not to confront the scowling fate of our flesh.

At the casket before the mourners arrived, my family formed a crescent wall of moans, a team's half huddle of grief, trying to prop each other up, literally hold ourselves together, gaping at my father
and that clownish grin now stitched upon his face. This was the first most of us were seeing of him since he'd crashed into that Pennsylvania guardrail. My grandparents, my father's fiancée, and my uncle Tony had gone to the hospital three days earlier to identify his body. Sometime that week, I'd ask my father's fiancée how he'd looked when she saw him on the steel table. It was important to me to know how he'd looked. She'd seen the blood dried brown in his nostrils and ears, she said, and from her position slightly beneath him—she'd crashed to her knees beside the table—she'd seen his slitted eyes clouded and specked with blood, his pupils in permanent expanse, as if wanting to let in the light they no longer needed.

Now the rouge on his face looked perverse even though the mortician, in her overwrought voice—the voice she'd been taught to use, a sympathetic grating I felt along the notches of my spine—had told us before entering that “he looks great.” For a corpse, she must have meant. Auden:
We are not prepared / For silence so sudden and so soon
. I leaned over the casket to touch his face and found that the texture of his skin was about what I'd expected: plastic or latex, an alabaster Halloween mask, not cold but cool. His fingers, too, had been sewn together. So much sewing, yet nothing mended. So much shutting, yet nothing closed. The foul breath of lilies, roses, mums kept pushing through the room's dormant air.