August 12, 2016
The airplane’s wheels touch down in Seattle. I feel light, almost giddy, like I’m getting away with something. On the approach, I marvel as I always do at Seattle, how snow-capped peaks are in such close proximity to the sea. The endless carpet of greenery, the chains of islands, boats flowing into and out of ports along the shore.
As the plane bumps along the tarmac toward the gate, I reflexively reach for my phone and turn it on, eager to text my friends and let them know I’ve arrived. The screen lights up. It pulses like it’s taking a deep breath, and then it begins buzzing and chiming with texts and voicemails, each more urgent than the last:
Please call me.
Call me.
CALL ME.
Where are you?
It’s very important you call the minute you get this.
THIS IS URGENT
They’re all from my father. I’m unsettled by the sight of his name on the display. We rarely talk, and when we do, it’s me who calls him. As I see his messages stacking up, sent minutes apart, my stomach seizes, and my legs start trembling.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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I don’t have to hear his voice to know what’s wrong.
I’m supposed to be on vacation. I left my husband, Kris, and two kids back home in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s just for a few days, and yet it’s not lost on me that with them, I also left behind the vigilance of motherhood. I said goodbye to my eight-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, who are busy chafing against routines, bedtimes, and each other. The school year has just begun, and the four of us have struggled to regain our footing after a spacious summer with lax rules and schedules. This trip holds the hope that I might fall back into myself for a little while, or at least a version of myself I’ve tucked away but never forgotten. In addition to giving myself a break, I believe I’m doing my family a favor – empowering the kids to rely more on their father, to make their own sandwiches, and to solve arguments without me as a referee. It’s good for all of us.
I’m meeting up with two dear friends, women I’ve known for more than a decade. We met when we were all young magazine editors, before spouses and children, when we traveled around the world for assignments: hiking in New Zealand, skiing in the Alps, kitesurfing in Vietnam. Back home, we’d meet in coffee shops to work on our articles, drink beer in each other’s apartments, and read pages from our works in progress. Through job changes and interstate moves, we held each other accountable to our professional goals and encouraged each other to apply for far-flung assignments or writer’s residencies. More than that, though, we made each other laugh. For hours, we’d talk and laugh.
We’ve rented a farmhouse on Whidbey Island, just north of Seattle in Puget Sound. For the next three days, our only agenda is to relax, maybe drive to the island’s cliff tops to watch a sunset or hike a trail. I’ve been living in the Arizona desert for six years. My body craves trees and billowing veils of wet fog. I imagine ocean breezes, overindulging in seafood and wine, wrapping myself in a blanket, and drinking coffee on the east-facing deck as the sun peeks above the Cascade Mountains.
The plane’s taxi to the gate is an eternity. I hear the clack of wheels turning over on the pavement. I feel each bump in my stomach. My hands are shaking as I clutch my phone. I want to call my father, and I don’t want to call him. I wonder what might happen if I ignore his texts the same way he has ignored mine over the years. I’m angry that he’s intruding, now of all times. There are so many voicemails. I don’t think I can escape talking with him.
“Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Finding Home”
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I stare at the fasten seatbelt sign, willing it to turn off. Once it does, passengers stand up and begin gathering their things. Bodies form a heavy curtain around me. Everyone’s moving too slowly. The balding businessman with the unwieldy garment bag. The mother of two toddlers who’s balancing backpacks, sippy cups, and plastic bags of crackers. A white-haired gentleman stooped over a cane. They’re closing in, and I begin to panic. A dull pain is creeping up my chest, radiating in my throat. It’s all I can do not to shove people out of the way and claw toward the cabin door.
I rest my head against the seat in front of me and do my best to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. I tell myself the texts might mean nothing. I try to imagine other reasons my father needs to reach me so urgently, but I can’t. I clutch my thighs to stop them from trembling. I wait, breathing in and out until people clear the aisle. When they do, I grab my bag and run for the door.
The terminal isn’t better. Swarms of travelers consume every available space with backpacks and roller bags. I look for a pocket of quiet, any open place to sit down and return my dad’s call out of earshot, but there isn’t a vacant seat anywhere.
And so, I stand there in the middle of the concourse, people rushing around me. I focus my gaze on a vertical window on a far wall, where sunlight is coming in, creating stripes on the stone floor. I stare at the light, and I dial my father, and I listen to him tell me what I already know: My brother is dead.
My mind somersaults. For as much as I imagined this happening – since I was five, I’ve imagined my brother dying – I am shocked and unprepared. “How? I don’t understand,” I whisper into the phone.
My Dad tries to explain what happened, but it’s clear he’s not sure. “It was sudden,” he stutters. “I don’t really understand how he got away from them so quickly.” Them, the doctors? Or them, my mother and her husband?
Alan had been living with my mother in Boulder, Colorado, and like me, my father hasn’t communicated with her in years. My estrangement from my mother is long and complicated and fraught. It’s been made tenser by my desire to stay in touch with Alan. Over the years, I’ve found detours around my mother in order to maintain a relationship with my brother. At times I’ve felt like I was participating in a covert operation, or maybe an elaborate deception. Alan loves to check the mailbox several times a day, and so I write him letters, knowing he’ll grab them before my mother sees. I call the house during the hours I think she’ll be away at church or running errands, or I have Kris make the call, then pass me the phone once Alan is on the line. Kris will arrange visits with Alan, or sometimes I’ll try to arrange them through his respite caregivers. I ask them for updates on how Alan is doing instead of asking my mother. In this way, I have felt connected to my brother, though I’ve always longed for more contact.
I wonder if my father had his own ways of keeping up with Alan without having to interact with his ex-wife. I wonder if he was thrown by her name on his phone’s caller ID in the same way I was thrown by his call. I wonder if my father hadn’t called me how long it would have taken for me to hear that Alan is dead.
Dad tells me that my mother delivered the news but offered few details. “Something about an asthma attack and possibly a seizure. His heart stopped beating in the ER,” he tells me. That’s all he knows. It happened last night. My mother had waited until the next day to tell him. I ask him what I should do. “What’s happening? Do I need to get back on a plane? When’s the funeral?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what the plan is.”
“Are they doing an autopsy?”
“No. His heart stopped. He died, Sweetheart.”
I bristle. “Sweetheart” isn’t something I’ve heard from my father since I was a little girl.
I turn off my phone, tuck it in my pocket, and begin to wander the airport. I spend long minutes staring at the signs directing passengers to various terminals and ground transportation, but they don’t make sense to me. It’s as if the words are written in another language. I have no idea where to go, so I just keep walking.
By the time my girlfriends find me, I’m sitting in a dusty corner of baggage claim that’s under renovation, on a chair that’s ripped, my feet resting on the plywood subfloor. It’s the only place I could find a seat without people pressing in. My friends sit with me. They ask me what I want to do next. All I can think to say at the moment, my hands shaking violently, my stomach churning and head throbbing: “It’s too soon,” I whisper.
It is too soon?
“I wanted to see him one more time.”
This thought, that I want to see Alan once more, is one of several that will haunt me in the coming weeks, months. “Thought” isn’t even the right word. Each one is a siren. Intrusive and urgent. A knot that demands untangling. A puzzle that only I can solve.
The first thought hints not so much at regret as it does a missed opportunity, a door slamming closed. I had believed, as sure as I believe the sun sets in the west, that I would see my brother again, alive, at least once. I imagined I would have the chance to sit with him face-to-face, and that as much as he was capable of doing so, we would talk about our complicated relationship and what we meant to each other. Even as I thought this, I knew it was unrealistic, given Alan’s intellectual disabilities. Alan spoke in short, fragmented sentences. The list of topics he liked to talk about was short (dogs, food, cars). His attention span was limited. A deep, introspective conversation was not something he was capable of. But I nonetheless fantasized it would happen.
The second thought comes in the form of a question: Did Alan know I love him? I told him frequently that I loved him, but on what level did he know? This may seem like an existential problem. Can love be defined? Do the people we love really know that we love them? How do they know? But the thought for me is more than philosophical. Cognitively, Alan was five years old. He hadn’t developed the capacity for abstract reasoning. I had little knowledge of his interior world. Was he capable of understanding love? Did he feel loved? Had he developed a sense of object permanence and healthy attachment, the foundations of loving family relationships? Did he know that people who were far away, out of sight, could still love him? Did he grasp the complexity of relationships, that people could simultaneously be angry with him, fear him, and yet also love him? Did he experience the warmth, the bond, the nurturing of familial love, even if he couldn’t articulate it?
The third thought. The third thought is one I’m reluctant to name. It’s the most urgent, the one that sideswipes me the moment my father says he can’t be sure how Alan died. The one that makes my knees buckle. I’ll let it gnaw at me, creating anxiety and making me question reality to such a degree that I’ll begin to wonder if I’m losing my mind. The thought is: She did this. My mother. It’s all her fault.
I don’t yet understand where this third thought comes from or what it means, whether it’s born from grief or some deeper truth. I’ve just received the worst news of my life. I’m in shock. I’m reeling. I’m trying to figure out where to go and what to do next. I search my mind for answers, for clarity, but instead, my mind delivers more bad news. It serves up thoughts and questions perhaps more painful than the phone call. This thought my mind has given me feels like a betrayal. But it also feels familiar. It is so horrifying and so familiar that instead of considering it, I want to exile it, pretend it never entered my consciousness.
I sit in the broken chair at baggage claim, watching luggage slide down conveyor belts and circle the metal carousels. Black and brown roller bags. Pastel-colored plastic suitcases. A few orange and yellow duffels. Around and around they go with no beginning or end.
As far as I can tell, no one else shares my thoughts. No one will ask the questions I will ask, turn over stones. In the landscape of my family of origin, I am the one who pauses, who wonders, who senses, who investigates. This curiosity makes me unpopular. I want more information, to know the inner workings of things. I’ll pursue truth at the expense of relationships. A therapist once told me I’m the one who stands up in the boat. Everyone else either screams at me to sit down or shoves me overboard.
I know that thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are just thoughts. I tell myself this. And yet, they loom. In the coming months, these thoughts and questions will surface time and again. The unknowns will torture me. They’ll change shape and meaning. As I navigate the dark halls of grief, they will echo from behind doorways. They will loosen their grip on my psyche. I’ll feel something akin to relief, and then they’ll strangle me again.
For now, I decide to swallow my questions, the unknowns. They sit in my belly quietly, like a precancerous mass.
Gina DeMillo Wagner is the author of “Forces of Nature.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Memoir Magazine, Modern Loss, and other publications. She has a master’s degree in journalism and is cofounder of Watershed creative writing and art workshops. She lives and works near Boulder, Colorado. You can visit her online at ginadwagner.com.
