A ponderous hippopotamus sits pondering a preponderance of ponds.

Birds fly overhead.

Moments - Sketches in Humanity ◈ 2. remembering ...

Moments - Sketches in Humanity ◈ 2.  remembering ...


Sunday, October 8th, 2017. This bright autumn day we strolled down to the creek at the fording place where the road runs through a small stream. A few of us waded into it and I walked through the water on the wet stones, enjoying the sound of the lapping and rushing water, the glistening ripples and smooth sheets, the wind and the turning leaves. In the midst of the flowing water stood a small thicket of shrubs, trees and grasses.

After a moment of hesitation I chose to walk out toward it, trying to keep my balance on the slippery riverbed.

I stood. I tried to decide where to put my hands; first I let them down by my sides and then I softly held them together in front of me by overlapping my fingertips. I looked for a while toward the edge of the thicket and the water surrounding it and wondered if anyone was watching. I could feel the sunshine. I thought and I felt and I prayed. I closed my eyes. I prayed for a family and I prayed for myself. I pictured a day nearly a decade ago when I was twelve years old. It was a day full of sadness like all days, but this sadness touched me in a collision between lives I did not know and my own.

 

September seven years ago I begged my dad to take a walk with me to this part of the creek after he took care of his bee hives. It was one of my favorite places to be and explore and to search for rocks. The water was lower then, and we could make our way across the fording place to the thicket of shrubs and sandy dirt in the middle without much difficulty. It felt like an adventure, as small a river as it was, climbing across branches and stones and tall grasses in search of what we could not see, to find little treasures. We found an old soccer ball floating in a recess in the grasses. My dad lifted it out of the water and we turned to go back to our side of the stream. I had gotten glasses in the last year or two but my eyes were not weak enough yet that I needed to wear them constantly. I was not wearing them now.

 

It took a long time for me to realize how deeply that day affected me, that it had truly been traumatic, that whatever strange disturbance I felt about it was a legitimate upset and pain and that I was hurt, that I was not merely imagining that something was wrong. I had told myself it should not be a big deal, that I felt disturbed (if I even did) only because other people might think I should be. How was I supposed to respond? Was I supposed to be sad, to be in pain? Was I selfish? silly? Did I just want attention? Did I feel, or only imagine that I felt? Was I numb, or simply unaffected? What kind of person was I depending on which of those things being true?

 

It was a Friday. September 17th, 2010. His name was Ryan Pattrick*. I thought he was a log resting in the water with my myopic and distracted child’s eyes. I never got close enough again to the dark shape in the stream to see this man whose son had just turned a year old, whose wife expected him to soon be home, whose tackle box was sitting further up toward the main bank as the only sign of life I saw other than the black car parked where the dirt road meets the stream, the only sign I saw of a 29-year life that had ended less than an hour before.

 

I had faced death before, but not in quite the same way as that day at the stream. I had been to so many funerals, memorial services and burials as a child, for people my parents or friends or community knew, and at most of them I had been tired, disinterested, and fidgety, not feeling much but trying not to hurt anyone. Some of the people whose services I attended I knew nothing or almost nothing of. When the person was close to a friend I felt so awkward, not knowing how to act appropriately, whether to act normally in a childlike way or somehow try to offer comfort. I certainly did not want to just ignore. When I was much younger I had some preoccupation with death and the people I knew who had died. Death has been a common subject on my melancholic mind. The death of my dad’s mother at the end of 2010 led to lasting tears, heartbreak and frustration, and the services I went to after my grandmother’s death almost invariably led to unstoppable tears - even if I did not know the individual I knew the pain. A few years after that, funerals started feeling more the way they used to again, more disconnected.

I am not responsible for who lives or dies. It was not my father’s fault or mine that we were not there three quarters of an hour earlier when a man taking an afternoon fishing trip alone had a seizure and drowned. What if … what if. Life is so fragile, so awfully tenuous.

 

I felt guilty.

 

It is not my fault.

 

There is nothing he could have done.

 

Two men in a commercial truck happened by a while after my dad made the discovery, not realizing that the road turned into a stream. My dad did not have a phone. He told them there was a body in the water and asked if they could call for help. They were afraid, afraid of this sudden confrontation with the unknown and death. After the call they quickly drove away but we stayed. My dad tried to decide if he should try to pull the body out. Was it too late? Would it only cause trouble? In the end he decided to wait. The state police came with a very nice woman investigator. I sat in my dad’s car, parked on one side of the road, across from the black car. My dad disappeared around the corner toward the stream with the police and I did not see him for a while. I think someone asked if I was okay or needed anything. I think someone might have said poor girl, but I do not clearly remember. The window was cracked open and I heard a man say that there was a bottle of pills in the black car and he wondered if it could be a suicide. It was a long time in that car. I felt a strange flustered, excited sensation, some twinges in my stomach, questioning what was going on, why were they not coming back yet? When they did come back the investigator said it was too late to do anything when we found him. She told us we could call her if we needed to talk.

 

I felt so guilty. So often there had been empty cars parked there in the past with no one around. When we went to explore that day I saw a pretty tackle box and no owner. I had inherited in the past belongings left behind and the mind of this child jumped excitedly to whether I could take it home. I think we decided to leave it there for a while and see. That was before the thicket, before the soccer ball, before the moment when I heard something wrong in my father’s voice and I was ushered to the riverbank and the car, before the curiosity, before the confusion, and before the last seven years. That tackle box I wanted - it belonged to a dead man. I wanted to own something and that thing had been owned by someone else, and if he were not dead he would still own it. How could I be so selfish? I felt stabbed through my heart. I felt as if I had killed.

 

Somehow that soccer ball made it home with us. There were so many feelings, foggy sensations, struggles with processing the pain, that I said nothing about it until years later. Whenever I saw that soccer ball in the yard I felt dreadful inside. I did not want to touch it at all. I pictured it floating in the same water as that dark, lifeless form. I felt the guilt and horror at myself. One day I managed finally to explain that it bothered me, and we did not keep it anymore. For a while I kept newspaper clippings about that day in my desk, one saying a body had been found and another saying it had been identified. I never told anyone and I felt embarrassed about it. The drowning was ruled an accidental death, two words that spark confusion and tears whenever I think about what they mean and they remind me that there is so much sorrow in the world. It seems like such a cruel phrase.

 

A few years after that day when we found the dead man I was swimming at a different place in the same creek, at the park, and I found some animal bones in the water. I had seen bones like this many times before, mostly in the woods, from deer hunting. I could not leave them there. I did not want to touch them and I did not want to climb up the shore without them, so I carried them up, cringing at their touch all the way. Some of my friends laughed or made faces and asked what on earth I was doing with those gross bones. I could not answer. How could I say? They were deer bones and I could not help but think of human bones, even though the body had not been left in the water forever. They were dead bones and they were in water. I was upset. I was there with my mother and when my dad stopped by he confirmed their origin. I did not even explain what I was feeling then. I told myself I was silly, that I must be making up whatever I was feeling, that I should not really be caring about some animal bones. I could not even explain it to myself.

 

Today when I turned back towards the group on the bank I did not feel like I needed to cry, but as I waded closer the tears began. I cried softly. I was not ashamed.

 

My second grandmother died last year. Since her death many of my feelings have surfaced again in a new perspective or with new intensity. I feel things that I do not expect to feel at times I do not expect to feel them. Memories came back, seven-year-old confusions, unaddressed wounds. I recognized that my struggles are legitimate even if the feelings and the situations do not make sense and they never do. I do not need to know what I am feeling or how in order to be feeling it.

 

I used to walk to the fording place often. I still walked there after that, but tended to avoid it, memories like shadows lurking in the corner of my eye. Sometimes now when I reached the water and I saw an unattended car I felt darkness inside, I felt fear. Walking there with friends brought the memories and the tension.

 

There was a murmur of peace today as I stood and remembered in silence. This place was not only the place where death crossed my life, but the beautiful scene of the present and from my childhood. It is not wrong to have sadness and joy at the same time. Remembering and moving on are partners, and the way forward is often wet with tears.

* * *

 

Pain is significant and powerful and real but is not the origin of significance and power and reality. I have come to see that, though the pain of grief is great, grieving can be strikingly beautiful when in it comes recognition of the weight of human connection.

________________________________________________________

*Names have been altered for the sake of privacy.

Writing completed December 31, 2017. SHL.

This sketch belongs to a collection in progress called Moments - Sketches in Humanity. Sketch 1 has not yet been released. ◈