Letters from Grenada

(This will be an seven-part series.  One post a day.)

Prelude to Grenada: Part I

In June of 2004 I was 27 years old and recently returned to New York City. I was six months in to what I thought was an awesome new job, and I had just rekindled a relationship that I was certain was for keeps. I felt alive in Manhattan. I thrived surrounded by bustle, and I was lucky enough to be living near lots of close friends from my college days. Life was good and getting better. What I didn’t know was that it was all about to fall apart.

At that moment, I was still nearly untouched by death. I knew that was rare and I felt lucky. I was, after all, pushing thirty with four living grandparents. There had not been a family funeral since 1983, when my mother’s father’s mother had died. I was six years old. My sole memory is of sneaking sugar cubes from the coffee tray, wrapping my arms around a think metal pole than ran from floor to ceiling, then spinning until I staggered away like a drunk.

More than ten years later, a boy I liked but didn’t know very well was killed in a car accident. David died the winter I was in 11th grade. Every winter for the next five years, a young man I knew died under tragic and often bizarre circumstances. Mike froze to death in the Italian Alps. John accidentally suffocated himself. Chad fell from the cliffs at Hook Mountain. Each of these boys I knew and liked but they were friends of friends, people I’d gone to school with but hadn’t seen in years. It was very sad, yes, but it was someone else’s tragedy.

During the sixth winter, someone I knew well was hurt. I would come home from work and sit in the bathtub, wrap my arms around my knees, and cry. Only Will didn’t die. He had been working at a construction site, standing on the beams that would later support the floor of the attic. He lost his balance and fell two stories, passing through the unfinished house and landing on this head in the basement. A miracle occurred when after more than two weeks in a coma, he opened his eyes and spoke. I happened to be there at that moment, though he didn’t remember that later. Today he’s a new father. The bizarre and macabre pattern had been broken.

A couple of years before Will’s accident, we had lost Arnie, the father of my friend Stacy. She’d been one of my closest friends in middle and high school. I’d spent many weekends at her house and I knew her parents very well. Certainly Arnie spoke to me more and knew me better than my own father did. When we graduated from high school, he sent four of us to lunch at the Friar’s Club. My freshman year at Cornell, he sent me a care package full of ice cream flavored lollipops. Then in January of our junior year, two days after I got back to Ithaca, Arnie collapsed one morning while walking from his front door to his car. Stacy’s bedroom window was over the driveway, so it was she who saw him fall. That day, when I heard her breaking voice on my answering machine, something small in me came unhinged.

Arnie hung on for nine months and several more strokes. He endured endless and increasingly futile, then dangerous, medical procedures. When he was home, he’d sleep in his chair. He looked small and we were not to disturb him. Often during those months I’d make deals with God. If you let Arnie be OK I will never smoke another cigarette. I will be nicer. I will be good forever.

When he finally died, the most direct cause was the staph infection in his blood that he’d caught while in the hospital. Nearly every organ in his body was failing. He woke up one last time, told his wife and daughter that he loved them, and then he was gone. Arnie was a union official, and I’ll never forget all the crying tough guys at his wake.

That was in 1997, and that was the closest I’d ever come to losing a family member. Indeed that’s how I felt at the time, that I’d lost a surrogate father. Much later I’d realize that I’d had no idea.

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Posted on September 10th, 2008 under Grenada • Tags: backstory, memoir. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback