Writer’s Digest 92nd Annual Competition Memoir/Personal Essay First Place Winner: “Details and Aftershocks”
Congratulations to Gretchen Ayoub, first place winner in the Memoir/Personal Essay category of the 92nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s the winning essay, “Details and Aftershocks.”
[See the complete winner’s list]
Details and Aftershocks
by Gretchen Ayoub
“The casket you ordered—we had to change it. We needed to special order a new one, since we measured your son—he’s 6’8”. He won’t fit into our regular size.” The funeral director gives me this newest information as gently as he can, speaking softly and slowly. He stops and waits, trained to anticipate any number of reactions. Each time we go over an expense, another item on the list, he does the same thing. Stop, wait, listen. I silently nod agreement. Yes, to the hearse costs. Yes, to the church fees. Yes, to the embalming and body preparation costs. Yes, to the cemetery burial costs. Yes, to the extra-long casket; yes, the color is fine…
The three-part legal-size pre-printed form lists items and services for wakes, funerals, and burials. I approved a similar list fourteen years ago in this same room when I came to bury my husband. He did not need a bigger casket. Right now my vision blurs in and out and I try to focus on what I am about to sign. There are “special” charges that were not on my husband’s bill. Keeping my son’s body at Bay Area Funeral Services. Transport to San Francisco Airport. Flight charges. Transport from Boston’s Logan Airport to the funeral home. These are the costs of flying my boy’s body home. Who are these people who attended to him after the time of death was called, drove his body to the San Francisco airport, loaded him on a plane like cargo freight? Mark, the consummate world traveler, 55 countries and counting, some of which I had to locate on a map, has made his final trip, 3000 miles to Boston.
The funeral director asks if I am ready. I nod again and start to stand up. It is like pushing through cement. He holds the chair with one hand and my elbow with the other, anticipating that I might keel over. He gestures toward the door and leads me to a viewing room, where Mark’s prepared body lies, having arrived two days earlier. “Before you go in, I just want to let you know that we did the best we could. It took a week to bring him home…. that is a long time….”
Eight days earlier, I am driving Mark and his fiancée to the airport after spending a wonderful Fourth of July week together. He has on his favorite T-shirt. It is bright green with a picture of The Grinch across the entire front. He loves Dr. Seuss, and I had given him this shirt years ago. I have countless pictures of him wearing it—on Christmas morning, at his college graduation party, in the various countries he visited. That day at the airport, he embraces me in a final bear hug, this giant of a son with his 5’3” mom. “Love you, call you later!” He and his fiancée walk into the lobby, her taking three steps to his one, as his size 17 1/2 feet swiftly carry him to the door. He holds it open for her. I can still feel that hug.
His fiancée asks that he be buried in his wedding suit, beautifully tailored, charcoal gray in color, that she and her family had custom-made in China, where her parents were born. I agree. When I step into the viewing room, however, I still envision him wearing that Grinch shirt and that mile-wide loving smile. I walk over to the newly delivered extra-long casket. This body with its flesh tone makeup, face frozen in pain, wearing a suit with his hands folded in front of him? This cannot be my thirty-three-year-old son whose infectious enthusiasm, laugh, and kindness permeated every room he entered. Who at any age was still the biggest kid in the room. Whose little nieces and nephews hung on their giant oak tree of an uncle; he was their favorite. Whose photos from all over the world are not stiff and formal, but delightful—a lemur on his head in Madagascar, swaying on the hanging bridges of Costa Rica with his mom, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, exploring ice caves, and hanging out on the edges of waterfalls worldwide. He should be resting peacefully in a Dr. Seuss shirt and a pair of oversized shorts, sporting his big sneakers that he wore when he completed a marathon. To no one, I cry out “What happened? He doesn’t look like Mark at all!” Without turning around, I know that the funeral director is standing a respectful distance back with his hands clasped in front of him, once again prepared. I don’t move but stare. Perhaps if I look long enough, I will once again see my Mark.
Sudden. Cardiac. Arrest. The week before, vacationing with the family, planning the final details of his upcoming wedding in three months. A typical flight back to San Francisco. Waking up the next day with his fiancée. It’s her birthday. They plan a special birthday dinner for that night. “I don’t feel too well.” Head to the hospital. Dead. Hysterical phone call from his fiancée. More phone calls. Frozen in a charcoal gray suit lying in an extra-long casket.
I review these hard facts as I stand over him. None of this aligns with any of Mark’s being. Perhaps the spirit of this Madagascar roamer has gone off to another remote place and left this XL body here, so that we may bury him according to his beloved Syrian Orthodox tradition. I thank the kind funeral director, take the yellow copy of the bill, and go home.
Over the next weeks, I often hear “You’re so strong.” I greet the mourners at the wake, comforting young men and women who are so grief-stricken they are unable to speak. They try to tell me what a great friend he was while breaking down in tears. We hug. I thank them for being here. I turn to the next person in line, a middle school teacher, a former employer from his high school job, work colleagues who have flown in from California, an old friend of mine who I have not seen in fifteen years, his friends from many states and countries. I stand stick straight at the front of the church on the day of the funeral and read his eulogy, written on the plane from Boston to San Francisco that first night when my sister Judy and I flew out to be with his fiancée.
Greeting people, eulogizing, and standing motionless at the gravesite as the muffled tears of those in attendance float around me in the hot July afternoon—that is my body in the sleeveless black dress. But my being is somewhere above, in the high ceilings of the church, in the blue sky above the casket at the cemetery service, outside of the funeral home walls. The shock space. I box up the anguish and put it on some invisible shelf with “do not open until___” scrawled in black marker on the outside.
As the wake begins, I tenderly tuck his gold christening cross and chain into his stiff hands. The funeral director asks me if I want it back when the services are done. “No.” “Are you sure…” as if to clarify that once the casket is closed and in the ground, there is no more asking. Maybe that gold cross will make him seem more like Mark and less like the man in the suit.
The rest of the world keeps moving. I try to organize boxes of his memories in the attic but end up sitting on the creaky, splintered wood floor, realizing that I have been crying for a while, but not making any noise. This is not the mom in the black dress, but the mom who loses track of time next to childhood letters from camp, handmade Mother’s Day and birthday cards with giant hearts, stick figures, and xxx’s and ooo’s and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings. There are Tupperware bins of holiday decorations including his personalized Christmas stocking knit by my godmother when he was born. It will stay folded in the plastic box.
I open my eyes in the middle of the night, not sure if I was ever really asleep. On my daily walks, sunglasses are essential even when it is dark. Daylight hurts. I sit with my strong morning coffee on the back porch in all weather, staring and thinking. I get up because I must; the constant weight pressing on my chest and legs will otherwise immobilize me. Very few ask anymore, “How are you doing?” and I don’t volunteer. Because if I do, everything may shatter all at once, splintering into thousands of tiny shards. I read articles where experts discuss complicated or prolonged grief disorder, as if grief is a pathology that needs to be cured. All grief is complicated and lasting. It is circular and messy, defying parameters. There is no order.
Four years later, there are still times where I cannot attend a party, a holiday event, or a family gathering. It is too suffocating. Some wonder what happened to that early strong woman; she is no longer easy to find. They are curious as to why I cannot muster the will to be present and to find joy, why it is so hard to be with those fully living. And I do not expect that they would understand why. The old adages resurface: time to move on, time to heal, time to do “what he’d want you to do.” Sometimes, I watch others who have suffered unexpected loss and their eyes have that look; the one caught between trying to be present, but realizing that they are in a moment that will never be for the one who has died.
Sudden death produces shock, which provides a temporary coating, allowing for compartmentalization and dissociation to take over. That coating can peel off, then regenerate. There is a frozen river that I see when I am walking in the woods in the winter months. The top seems impenetrable, yet the water still flows fast underneath, churning below the surface, as if ready to break through at any moment. How long that ice will stay firm is unpredictable. It could be all winter or it could crack due to a couple of unexpectedly warm days. Freeze, thaw, refreeze. That is the longer, quieter sequence of sudden loss.
It has not even begun.