“You suck.” She cursed herself with real anger, with an insular, personal seriousness that had become more frequent in the last months.
I knew that she would be provoked by anything that sounded like consolation, but I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll set a better time tomorrow. I screwed your concentration up, coming along, is all.”
“My concentration was fine, Dad. It had nothing to do with you.” She let the screen door slam behind her and stomped up the stairs.
I forced myself not to follow and try to make her feel better or explain why she shouldn’t take her training so seriously. There was a childishness in my impulse to dissuade her from placing such value on and devoting such effort to getting a better time on her run, or to excelling at her schoolwork, because I had not cared about such things in my own adolescence but had suffered the same degree of frustration with myself and the world, had found myself angry or sad for no reason. The beer had gone warm, so I tapped a couple of railroad ties in the retaining wall along the driveway, like I was checking them for rot, then poured the last couple of swigs behind the yew bush and went back inside.
5
MY GRANDPARENTS AND MY MOTHER DIED WHEN I WAS MORE or less fully grown. That’s the way I imagined things should be. I never knew my father; nor did my mother. (He and she spent a night together at a college homecoming weekend she’d gone to with friends. He didn’t tell her his name and they both left the next day and that was that.) I had no siblings. So behind me were the ghosts I always expected to have there, looking over my shoulder. But after the accident, ghosts surrounded me. My whole family made a circumference of ghosts, with me the sole living member in the middle. Or perhaps I was at the end; perhaps my family was not a circle but a procession in which we all had our supposedly proper places but then my daughter ran ahead of me into death. My great-great-grandfather was the farthest spirit back that I could imagine in any detail, because he was my grandfather’s grandfather and my grandfather had known him and remembered a few facts about him. He was a Methodist minister who’d had some kind of breakdown and been taken away and that’s about all my grandfather could recall. Beyond him trailed a parade of phantoms. He would have told me that Kate hurrying ahead into death was a blessing, a mark of grace and mercy that I, myself a grandson of dear old fallen Adam, was not competent to see as such. I found myself having imaginary conversations with him, in which he tried to console me with that point of view. I imagined myself wholeheartedly agreeing with him, not because I actually felt that way but because it seemed that he would be so convinced of what he said, so certain it was providence, and his certainty would be a comfort, however slight. I never once felt that there was any deeper goodness or benediction in Kate’s death, as easy as it was for me to imagine that idea, even accept its integrity. Because I understood that there are vastly greater meanings in creation to which I have no access did not mean that I could shed my sorrow.
Understanding that my woes were minuscule compared with the sum of the universe did not prevent them from devastating me. I knew that the anguish I experienced was presumptuous, that I pretended to absolute tragedy. If I claimed I was too weak to bear my daughter’s death, didn’t that mean I really had the strength? My persistence in feeling that Kate’s death was the end of the world was an embarrassment, because I knew of people who had suffered the deaths of children from suicide and gunshots and falling from windows, the deaths of siblings to drowning and avalanche, the deaths of friends and lovers and spouses to fever, to falling, to ice, and to fire. I could have bought a plane ticket or rented a car or hopped on a bicycle or in some cases walked to those people’s houses, knocked on their doors, sat in their living rooms, drank coffee, and talked with them about the override proposition or their vacation to Portugal and they would have done what people have always miraculously managed to do, which is carry on when there are so very many reasons why doing so should be impossible. I had a deep and abiding love for the idea that this life is not something that we are forced to endure but rather something in which we are blessed to be allowed to participate. But I felt no gratitude whatsoever for, and no relief from, the pain I experienced every waking moment, and this life felt like nothing more than a distillation of sorrow and anger. Even after Kate’s death, when my prior, occasional despair became general, I still believed that giving in to it was a failure of character.
And yet. Wouldn’t my sorrows have been the greater if Kate had never been at all? Wouldn’t they? Wasn’t it the case that her short and happy life was the greatest joy in my own? Wasn’t the joy of those thirteen years its own realm, encased now in sorrow but not breached by it? That is what I told myself. The joy of those years had its own integrity, and Kate existed within that. She could not be touched by the misery caused by her own death. Sometimes I had the sense of her watching me and smiling because she saw me in my sorrow and anger and understood that it was a natural part of the comic tragedy of this life. I hoped that the reason she no longer felt sorrow or anger was not because she was inhuman but because she was now wholly human, even if I, yoked to this life, still had to suffer the joy of my life with Kate, unbreachable as it might be, in stark and ruinous contradiction to my life without her. That joy was the measure and source of my grief.
I REMEMBER SITTING AT our dining room table late one spring afternoon, with rain and wind blustering around in the side yard and through the maple trees. Susan was in the kitchen, finishing some schoolwork, while Kate and I played a board game called Sorry! at the end of the table nearest the windows. The rest of the table was piled with clean laundry that needed folding. Kate drew from the deck of cards placed on the middle of the board.
“Eight,” she said. She tapped one of her playing pieces along, counting, “One, two, three …”
I drew a card.
“Move backward four,” I said.
Kate said, “Sorry, Dad.”
“That’s half the fun, kiddo.”
“Dad, who’s my grandmother?” she asked.
“She was Grandma Crosby,” I said.
“So who’s my great-grandmother?”
“Nanny Crosby.”
“I never met her.”
“Yes, you did, but you were a real little kid, almost just a baby.”
“Who’s my great-great-grandmother?”
“Grammy Black, whose name, in fact, was Kathleen, which is kind of like Katherine, but we didn’t name you after her.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because she was what your Grampy Crosby used to call a pisser. She was a grump who lived in her bathrobe and bossed everyone around and complained all the time.”
“Who’s my great-great-great-grandmother?”
“I don’t know that far back.”
“Who’s my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother?”
“Take your turn, wise guy.”
“Okay, wise guy.” Kate took another card and tapped out the spaces.
“Hey, you and I need to go to the garden store and get some red geraniums and go to the cemetery where Nanny and Grampy Crosby and Grandma Crosby and even Grammy Black are all buried and plant them in front of their stones, to make them look nice for Memorial Day. You know geraniums; you’ve seen them the times we’ve gone to the Memorial Day parade and stood near where everyone’s buried while they talk and when they shoot the guns.”
“And all the Cub Scouts run for the bullet shells.”