Twelve years ago I was a senior in high school looking to finish my last five months of school. It had been a stressful past year. My dad had had a triple bypass surgery in June before my senior year began, and that same week my grandmother, his mother, passed away after years of illness and suffering. The Friday before Martin Luther King Day in January 2000, my father began experiencing the tell-tell chest pains and signs of further heart problems. He was admitted to the hospital and stints were placed in the arteries that had been bypassed the previous summer. It felt like another near miss in a year of many scares.
I was numb. I had reached my capacity for worry, pain, anxiety and distress. I hoped that this hospital visit was the last, and that my father's homecoming the following day on Saturday would be the last time I would see him feebly return from the hospital after having a "heart scare" as we'd come to know them.
I was completely incapable of emotionally enduring the shock that the following Monday brought. It was a holiday from school, and I had looked forward, like any teenager, to sleeping in. So when the phone rang just after 7 am and my mother showed up at my door telling me it was my friend Allison, I groggily took the phone from her. "Hey", I said.
"April died last night." I felt like I was being sucked into a dark well. I felt myself falling, and put my hand against the wall to steady myself even though I was still sitting in bed.
"What??" I asked breathlessly. I couldn't quite grasp what I'd heard. April was our classmate. She was our class president. A top athlete in the state and the strongest young woman I knew.
I'd known April was sick for the past week or so, but that didn't register right away. I'd later learn that April died of complications of pneumonia, something that still didn't make sense to me. How could someone so vibrant, so full of life, be gone?
I was shocked, and I was saddened, especially to see the grief of those who loved her best. Yet I was numb beyond basic emotions. No one close to me had ever died, especially not a child. I couldn't grasp what it all really meant. I'd been so afraid of losing my father - the center of my world - that I couldn't wrap my mind around this sudden unexpected blow.
I got through that week and her funeral by employing a coping mechanism that I've reverted to often in my short life - autopilot. I listened to her friends, her teachers, and people from across the state as they grieved the loss of her, but none of it really sank in. I stood in the cemetery on the day of her funeral and contemplated what it meant to see that shiny casket in the sun. Morbid thoughts of her "sleeping" in the cold, dark ground haunted me, so I tried to forget where she was.
I wasn't particularly close to April, but when you are in a K-12 rural school in a class of 9 (nine!), you have a closeness to your peers that is unique. And when you are a senior in high school, on the edge of that precipice that is the rest of your life - opportunity, goals, potential, college, marriage, kids .... well, it's all very hard to understand how it is that your classmate was robbed of that. It's hard to grasp why her family has to go through such pain. Why teachers and other parents who loved her have to wonder what might have been. And for me, it was sort of easier to just forget where she really was.
Only I didn't forget. For years April has been in my dreams quite regularly. In every dream she is surprised, incredulous, really, that we all think she is dead. She's living a normal life and can't understand why we all think she is gone. This dream has happened in lots of variations, but the bottom line is always that she is not really gone. Some of these dreams were so real and persistent that I, at times, blurred the line between really acknowledging truth and fantasy. It was easier to pretend that she was somewhere else laughing at us for being so silly as to grieve for her.
As the anniversary of her death approached this year, I reflected on recent dreams and the event as it happened twelve years ago. I wondered at the meaning behind the dreams and I also wondered why this year felt different as the date approached. I finally decided that April's death was continuing to haunt me because I'd never accepted it, never dealt with it, and at the time was incapable of processing it. And as much as I dreaded the idea, I realized that part of my journey to peace this year meant starting with one of the most unsettled parts of my past.
Today, I asked Kyle to take me out to the small community where I lived and attended 7-12 grade. I had only been through this community once in the last ten years, and I was more than a little apprehensive about revisiting some feelings that might come up once I was there.
Surprisingly, it was all less terrifying than I imagined. Most of the old school building has been demolished, and it was a bit sad to see it gone. I remember days of reading by the old heaters, racing for a place against them before classmates got there first. I remember pep rallies - events which I detested and more often than not, hid in the bathroom during. I remember dreading gym, laughing at the sound of Mrs. Boehlke in the math room yelling in frustration at one or possibly both Beightol boys in the same day. I thought about the three shiny quarters our principal would put in our hands on movie day - the last day of school before Christmas break - so we could each get an ice cold soda out of the machine. I thought about my dear friend, Japanese student Mayumi, and how much fun we had in English when I tutored her. I remembered Independent Reading Book tests, the fun of pep band, and the joy in beating our rivals Southeast or Pine Bluffs in volleyball or basketball. This building held a jumble of memories for me - some good, some bad. It was a relief to allow myself to think about them and just let them be what they were. I didn't try to categorize them or think them through. I just let them be what they were.
After visiting the school I asked Kyle to drive by the house that I lived in for three and a half years. A different color, some changes here and there, but still standing. It felt weird to see someone else's life in place of my own. But it also felt right. I was so far from where I'd been the last time I set foot in that place.
And finally, before heading back to Cheyenne, I requested we visit the cemetery. I had been to April's grave site only once since the funeral. My classmates and I had gathered there on our beautiful graduation day to release balloons in memory of her before we went our separate ways to parties, celebrations and then on our own life paths. I felt it was necessary to visit April's grave in order to find some peace in her death. I needed to acknowledge that she was there - and she wasn't there. Her resting place was final, and it could simply be what it was. I didn't have to label it in any way other than to simply acknowledge that she was gone in body but obviously remembered in spirit.
I wasn't sure exactly where her stone was, but it's a small cemetery and others had been to her grave in the preceding months, marking it with flowers, angels and a wreath. I spotted it right away. I grasped Kyle's hand and led him to it, wordlessly. We stood reading the little mementos left by others. Kyle said, "She must have loved Coca-Cola." A smile spread across my face. "Oh, yes, indeed. She did love Coca-Cola!" My husband, who never knew her in person, had innocently reminded me of one of the simplest pleasures April had loved in her short life. The wind had blown the Christmas wreath over, and so I kneeled to right it and tried to drive the stake into the hard ground. I stood back up, nodded to Kyle, and said, "Ok, then. Okay." I'd been terrified to go, but in the end, the lightness that I felt leaving the cemetery stunned me.
I will be able to remember her great smile, her love of Coca-Cola, and her stylin' Doc Martins. The bright personality she was will remain, and the pain will fade, with time. I'm just grateful to have found some peace in celebrating who she was and not the tragic end. I'll never forget April, and I wouldn't want to. But I won't have to be so sad when I remember her.
No comments:
Post a Comment