the death card

i remember back in high school, while at a speech meet, sitting in bleachers and someone picking tarot cards for people. the card that was picked for dan and me was the death card. in reading, it's important to note that the death card does not project immiment death--it foretells change.

there's been a lot of change in our relationship, a lot of fluctuation. right now, dan's been writing about his brother, and the week before the funeral. i feel the need to fill in a few spots because there are some things i remember, having been glued to his side for the whole week.

i don't have a ton of time but i'll do what i can to also remember.

i remember getting in the car and realizing that i did not have my purse, and dan did not have his wallet. we were racing back to his parents house and a police officer pulled out behind us, but instead of racing hell-bent for leather, we slowed down so we wouldn't be pulled over.

i remember stopping at ball club, this teeny tiny town, to see if they had a phone. they did, but dan's parents' house just rang and rang. that was an hour into our journey.

i remember him turning on the radio--i remember hearing touch of gray, and glancing off to my right, out the passenger window, and seeing the sun break through the party cloudy day outside. it was sunny for the rest of the day. and that is when i knew. it's like feeling your soul sit down, pressing the pause button.

i remember that the next song that started playing was "don't fear the reaper" and we turned the radio off. the next time i heard that song was on the morning of 9/11--woke up and turned on the radio, and then turned it off, and three hours later i feared the reaper.

i remember getting to the house, sobbing with the family. i remember driving home, curling up in the bed, crying myself to sleep.

i don't remember driving back to duluth. i remember stopping at work the night before and crying when i had to tell susan, my supervisor, that i wasn't going to be in for a few days, and telling her why.

i remember sitting at home that night, alternately crying and packing, and hearing dan make phone calls--to big d, other friends. the one person he really wanted to reach was his friend phil, but he was overseas on a school trip. when he tried calling he was told that the only way they could get him through was if phil was involved in corey's death somehow, ie, part of an investigation, etc. we found another friend who was also over there, and her husband (at the time) broke the news, and then she told phil.

i remember the mounds of food--piles of it in the kitchen, the fridge packed, the counter crowded. i remember picking at most of it, not hungry. i remember going to the store to buy Immodium-AD, and that being the one thing i saw everyone in the family eating.

i remember not wanting to stay in corey's room because it felt too strange. i remember dan's mom saying that she felt the best there. i felt the best sitting at the top of their backyard, behind the immense garden they had. i watched corey's dog, gabe, wander around. i think of everyone in the family, i felt that gabe had the most knowledge of what had happened, the first acceptance. i watched the fur he shed be tossed around on the grass, watched a sparrow swoop down and scoop some up for its nest. that is when i knew i would make it through that week. before, i wasn't sure. it felt interminable. i think that was on tuesday.

i remember corey's friends--this great armada of people--coming over to watch the video of corey in class. i remember the improbability of everyone laughing uproariously over corey's personality--the improbability being that we were laughing so hard, and he was gone. the living room was full of people who cared, people who were trying to inject some happiness and good memory into the miasma that was hanging in the living room.

i remember those cinnamon rolls that appeared from someone that were the only thing i wanted to eat that week. when they were gone, i half-heartedly ate some lasagna, cold. but i don't remember eating much else until the reception, after the funeral, when someone made me eat a piece of cake.

i remember dan's dad sitting us down and telling his children that even though they were not technically his, he wanted them to understand that he loved them as much as he loved his own natural son, and he didn't want them to forget that. i remember being included in that circle. i remember him telling us that he was on the way home from the church, from talking to the pastor, when it occurred to him that he had never just told his kids how he felt about them, and felt he had to do so, right then and there.

i remember the visitation. i remember knowing that when i looked in the coffin, it wasn't going to be corey laying there. and it wasn't. it was leftovers--the shell of the boy i knew, the man he was growing into. the real corey, the one who joked and pulled pranks and took pleasure in using a super-soaker squirt gun on the cats instead of a small spray bottle--that corey was elsewhere.

i remember going to the church. i didn't have a role to play other than girlfriend. i ended up being the kleenex holder, and throughout the day made sure that everyone had enough tissue. it seems so insignificant.

i remember seeing a girl i used to babysit, at the funeral. she'd been in corey's grade. i remember looking at her and saying, "ashley, you're huge!" because in my mind, she was gigantic, compared to the ashley i'd last seen.

my parents were in branson at the time, on vacation. my sister had gotten through to them and i spoke with them one night, but they weren't going to be able to make it up for the funeral. i really, really wanted someone there from my family. i remember standing in the back of the church, waiting for the funeral to start, and turning, as if someone had tapped my shoulder, and looking outside, and seeing my siblings walking towards the church. i remember walking out the door and not wanting to go back, not wanting to have to remember why i was there. i walked into their arms and for the first time that week i felt like i could let out the grief i was feeling, and i cried. i remember seeing their faces and the smell of my sister's perfume, and being a little cold, but not caring about anything but seeing them and being held.

i remember dan being so angry about them asking him to speak. i remember that the girl playing the organ was a school friend of mine, and i remember trying to make conversation with her, and her saying that when she found out who had died, she knew she had to be the organist at that service. i remember the short prayer that was said, before the service started, just the family and me, and jen's boyfriend (now husband, matt), which was a whole nother soap opera waiting to be started.

i remember dan speaking, and doing so very movingly, very eloquently. he brought corey back while he was speaking. i remember sitting with dan's family, not mine, and holding up his sister, sarah. i was trying so hard to be strong for them, to be whatever they needed me to be, that whole week. the only times that i let it down were outside, staring at gabe's fur blowing around in the wind, and when i first saw my siblings. i cried with dan, i wept and we held each other at night, but i felt like i needed to pull back and share my grief, but not flood him with what i was feeling.

i remember sleeping that week on the floor in the living room, with dan's cousin, mitch, who was i think around 13 or so. i remember waking up and hearing everyone asleep, and laying there listening to the breathing, glad that they were. i remember feeling horrible that i was so glad to be alive, but i think that's natural.

i remember after the funeral, everyone came back to dan's parents' house, and stood around talking and such. it was the first time dan's mom had seen most of her relatives in ages--their family dynamic is sometimes skewed a tad--and i remember corey's dog, gabe, barking and barking at my brother. i remember meeting dan's cousins, whose names escape me, and his little cousin telling me about how he baked bread with his other grandma, easter challah, like i'd just attempted a few weeks before. he explained how to braid the bread, a technique that my loaf did not showcase.

i remember going out on dan's birthday with a bunch of friends from high school. a few years removes you from their supportive close-knit net. it doesn't feel the same, going out with them later, as it did when you saw them every day. dan tried to make the best of it, but i remember him being furious when we got in the car that he had been forced out. which he was, don't get me wrong. but i think the intentions behind everyone's actions that week were good--no one wanted to push anyone, no one wanted to coerce. they just wanted to help.

the problem with helping is that there's a lot of assuming that goes on during that helping. the group assumption was that it would be good to get out of the house--and part of it was. i can't deny that. but it had to be one of the worst experiences i'd had, because no one knew what to say, and the only thing on our minds was corey.

i remember dan sitting up writing the eulogy, and spending time reading that bill walton book corey'd given him. i remember standing in corey's room at some point that week, recalling when we'd sponge painted his ceiling with dark purple paint. i could almost smell it, fresh, even though it'd been years since we'd done that.

i remember so many little things, all tied up in each other. i remember going back to bemidji, drained and empty, and i remember dan's family sending food and the remainder of the reception cake home with us. at some point the next week, our friends came over and aaron polished off the last of the cake.

i remember not wanting to go anywhere, or do anything, for quite some time. i know dan was in the same boat--up all night, catch a few hours of sleep at some point. for weeks and months on end, his morning shower was his time to grieve for the day--the water so hot i thought his skin was being punished for corey's absence, he'd lay there, crying. it was something he needed to do, to let it out.

i remember not long after that he started running a game, to keep himself occupied. that ravenloft campaign ran for over a year, every wednesday, a few odd days tossed in. at the end of it, he gave all the participants a little gargoyle, as thanks for playing, as thanks for watching over him.

i think back to that week and it feels like i'm watching someone else's life played out. i remember myself as a player on that stage. i remember myself as technical support. i remember my role, and i remember that feeling i had every morning, on waking: why am i sleeping on the floor? why is the dog snoring? oh, that's right...corey's gone.

i did a lot of rationalizing. like dan said, columbine happened that tuesday. i had this deep peace within that said that there was a reason for him having to leave. did he reach nirvana, and just head off into the blue? corey was an old soul; i wouldn't have put it past him. perhaps his soul was needed elsewhere. i don't know. things in nature happen for reasons out of my control; corey was a force of nature: the quiet of winter, the deep silence of the first snow.

that was in april. in august, my mother called on the night of a thunderstorm that produced fist-sized hail, which i had run out to collect. dan called down from the apartment window that my mom was on the phone, and i ran back in and put the hail in my freezer. my aunt was dying after suffering what they thought was a massive stroke and heart attack. she was on life support but they were going to turn it off.

she died three days later. i wasn't terribly close to my aunt, but it felt like perhaps i needed a reminder of what it was to see that grief, all over again. i made a card for my cousins, her children. i remember stopping at their house on the way out of town, and my cousin shelly looking up at me and saying, "thank you for the card." there was a light in her eyes that told me she was not just saying that because she had to; she was saying that because she was thankful.

there are many things in life for which i am thankful, and often i do not know who to thank. i am simply the beneficiary.

that week of corey's funeral, someone brought a book over and left it at the house. it was a new book, called "the next place." it is a beautiful book, almost a children's book, and it vaguely and poetically covers death. i read that book and carried its message with me for years, until cari's mom died. then i felt like i was on a mission to find that book. after a rampage at barnes and noble, i sent it to her while she was in texas, helping her dad recover from the accident, with a rock.

i think that's when i started carrying rocks all the time, in my pockets.

who do i thank for finding that book? who is the person who put it on that coffee table? who brought those cinnamon rolls to the house? who put a rock in my pocket? i don't know--but in that same way that shelly thanked me, i thank the world at large for holding me up in so many small ways.

obviously, my memories are not the same ones that dan carries. they're tinged in their own way by their own images, by their own emotions. i hold onto different things than he does. my grief, in my mind, was lesser; i think a good deal of the time, i repressed it, let it out when i was walking in the state park, because i felt that was the only way to do so and not have a detrimental effect on my relationship with dan.

corey's death altered the way that dan and i operated, as a couple. i was afraid to show him my feelings, not wanting to be a "burden." i meted it out on my own. dan's stuffing of his own was difficult to watch--i didn't have a name for it, i couldn't tell you what he was doing. but i'd seen my father do it for years, push all those feelings down, ignore them, realizing that they're too great to handle in one fell swoop. you have to take them out little by little--or as they say in my uncle jed's recovery process, little by slow--and consider them, and put them back. and do that same thing, over and over, until looking at them hurts, but does not cripple you.

my friend cari explained that the wound left by her mother is too huge to heal. you don't heal some things; you learn how to manage to live your life fully, with that handicap included.

no one back in that humid gymnasium had any idea how prophetic that card was, the card of change. it's foretold many events in my life, most all of which are tied closely to dan and the relationship that we have. or perhaps it foretold nothing--perhaps it's just coincidence, because even without that card, things change; people change. corey has been an agent of change in my life--his life and his death, and that week of forging myself, after he died--those things changed me. i know they changed dan.

i'm glad to look back on that week--it's taking it out, it's reminiscing, it's reliving, and in the telling, releasing. props to dan for the prompt.