My mother wails. Jay L. Lamb clutches her tightly.
“He appears to have suffered a massive heart attack. The lab work will tell us for sure. I am so sorry.”
“He’s dead?” The voice is mine, and yet it seems to be coming from outside me.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
My mother wails again, sobbing, “No, no, no, no.”
The young doctor reaches out and clasps her hand.
My mother sniffles and gurgles and turns her head from Jay L. Lamb’s chest to face the doctor. “I want to see him.”
My father’s body is in an empty room in the emergency department. Although I recognize him, it’s not really him. Gone is the brightness and color in his face and the way his expressiveness added to it. He is pale. His chest, stripped free of his ever-present golf shirt, shows the trauma of the attempts to save him—the compression from CPR, the use of the defibrillator paddles. His ordinarily well-kept graying hair is mussed and tangled and wet. In life, my father could be found where there was chatter and aroma and motion. Here, it smells of cleaning fluid, we’re standing still, and no one is saying a word.
He is gone.
My mother, sturdier now than she was just minutes ago, steps to the edge of the gurney and strokes my father’s face, then bends down and kisses his cheek.
“Jay,” she says softly, “will you take care of everything?”
“I will. Shall I give you a ride home?”
“No,” I say. “I will take her home.”
My mother is mostly silent on the climb up the Rimrocks along Twenty-Seventh Street. As we hit the straightaway atop the rock, heading toward my parents’—my mother’s—house, she says, “I can’t believe it.”
“I can’t, either.”
“Edward, your father is gone.”
“I know.”
She looks out the window at the farmland speeding by. Up here, yesterday’s snow still lies sprinkled on the ground.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says.
The house, which always seemed to me to be ridiculously large for just two people, seems cavernous without my father in it. I had my troubles with him—never more so than the last time I saw him, an occasion that now fills me with regret—but I loved his outsized personality and the way he could fill a room with his laugh and his voice.
There are many empty spaces in this house now, and I do not know who can fill them. Not my mother. Certainly not me.
“Would you like some breakfast?” my mother asks.
“Mother, you don’t have to cook.”
“I would like to.”
I nod. “Breakfast would be good.”
My mother cooks and tells me what happened this morning. My father, figuring he could get in a few buckets of practice balls before the rain picked up again today, had left the house around 6:00 a.m. and headed down the hill to the Yegen Golf Club in the West End.
He didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. He collapsed right beside his car. Someone called 911, the ambulance showed up, the golf pro called my mother, and she called Jay L. Lamb, who came to pick her up and take her to St. V’s. From there, she called me. In a two-hour window, my father went from eager golfer to dead.
I am numb at the thought of this.
My mother places a plate of over-easy eggs, bacon, and toast on the kitchen’s breakfast nook and waves me over. Her cooking is marvelous, as it has always been. I pick at the food. In fits and starts, my mother talks.
“He loved us.”
I nod.
“He loved you especially.”
This is not true, but now doesn’t seem like the time to say so. When my Grandpa Sid, who had been sick for many years, died in 2003 and my Grandma Mabel followed just three weeks later, I remember that my father was given to extolling virtues that his parents never possessed. Dr. Buckley told me that it was part of his grieving process, a sort of “deification,” she said, to help him think of them in the best possible way. Dr. Buckley assured me that, as my father went through the process of grappling with the loss of his parents, he would come to acknowledge their attributes and their faults. “We all have both,” she said.
She turned out to be right, too. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman.
I will not interfere with my mother’s deification of my father. Her grieving has begun.
I wonder when mine will.
By 10:00 a.m., my mother has begun to wane and says she wants to go to sleep. She asks me to stay, and I say I will. Whatever plans I had—I can’t remember what they were—have gone by the wayside.
At 11:11, when she is fast asleep, the phone rings. I pick it up.
“Yes?”
“Hello. Could I please speak to Maureen Stanton?”
“She is asleep right now.”
“This is Matt Hagengruber with the Herald-Gleaner. May I ask who I’m speaking with?”
“Edward.”
“Edward Stanton?”
“Yes.”
“You are Ted Stanton’s son?”
“Yes.”
“Edward, I’m sorry to hear about your father’s death. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Yes.”
“I can ask a few questions?”
“No.”
“Would it be all right if I called later to talk with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for your time.”
I hang up the phone.
The calls come all afternoon like that, some from friends of my parents (I know none of those people), some from the radio and TV stations. Those are all variations on the call from Matt Hagengruber, and I tell each of them the same thing: they are welcome to call back later and see if my mother wishes to talk.
The only exception is the stupid woman from the TV station who asks for “Mrs. STAINton.” I tell her never to call back again. I would like to say the same thing to Jay L. Lamb, who calls at 2:58 p.m., but I think my mother would like to talk to him. I write down the message.
All the while, my grieving mother sleeps.
I spend my off-the-phone time in my father’s office, where I find a shelf full of photo albums that span the days when my parents met, long before I came along, to present day. I notice something else: Along about the time that I graduated from Billings West High School in 1987, I started disappearing from the rows of photographs. By the late 1990s, around the time of the “Garth Brooks incident,” I was gone entirely.
In the past decade of family life as captured by a camera’s lens, the Stanton family is my father and my mother and their trips together (I recognize France and Egypt and London among the photos). Edward Stanton Jr. is nowhere to be seen.
And yet today, Edward Stanton Sr. is dead, and I am in his office.
I never really understood the concept of irony, but this situation may be it.
At 4:40, my mother emerges from sleep. She comes downstairs in her robe. She looks tired, which is to be expected. She looks older than she did when she left me several hours ago, which is shocking.
I tell her about the calls from the media and that they will be back, hoping to speak with her. She sighs. “I’ll have Jay make some sort of statement.”
I tell her about Jay’s call and request for a callback.
I tell her that her friends are worried.
I tell her that I am OK.
And I tell her good-bye, that I have things to do at home.
“You’re a good boy, Edward,” she says to me, her thirty-nine-year-old son. “I will give you a call tonight and let you know about the arrangements for your father.”
I thought that I might be able to breathe if I could just get out of that house. But here I am now, waiting to make a right turn at Twenty-Seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and I can’t find any air.