March 25: The day “go on with your life” began

Burial day, March 25, is in many ways harder than March 22, the day he died.

March 25 was the day I was supposed to “go on” with my life.

And I did, but not in the way the conventional wisdom of the 1980s thought it should.

For 41 years I’ve met March 25 with varying degrees of “This day sucks.” Some years I put my fingers in my ears and try to tune it all out. Some years I sprinkle “blood” on my doorstop and hope it passes over me. And one year…ONE YEAR…I actually didn’t notice it was March 25, but the suck caught up the next day.

This year, the suck is in trying to remember the things that happened that only Bruce and I experienced together. The feeling has been amplified since I turned 60, and I’m sad to realize that I have no one to talk to about it, that my questions can never be answered. Why I didn’t realize this sooner, I don’t know, other than maybe grief layers itself in a way to hand out surprises once in a while.

I wish Bruce and I could compare notes about our trip to the zoo. The blowout with his father. The day I discovered a newborn calf in the field.

Carlene’s birth.

I wish we could talk about what happened when we got home from the hospital. I wish he could tell me how I slept that first night, if I’d had anything to eat, if he was as exhausted as I was.

I’m crying writing this, which happens when you feel love and grief at their apex; when your heart has splattered all over your universe and grief has attached itself to your heart’s every atom.

I still love him and miss him and wish he was here because “grief ends” is as big a fairy tale as “happily ever after.”

The following is an excerpt from my book, An Obesity of Grief, about the original March 25, 1983.

If you’re grieving, my friends, know your tears aren’t your enemy. Let yourself feel it, no matter how many years have passed. Does it suck? Yes. But know there are many of us who understand and you’re truly not alone.

Chapter 4

At our church, chairs and a closed-circuit television are set up in the hallway for the overflow crowd. With hundreds of sad eyes watching, I walk down the aisle with my parents behind the pallbearers.

Almost a year ago, many of those same eyes watched me walk down that same aisle, holding on to Dad’s arm as Bruce—tall, handsome, and full of life—waited for me at the altar. Now, he lies dead in a casket covered in a spray of lilies, carnations, and roses with a small red ribbon attached, scrolled with the word “Daddy.”  

Except for a few muffled cries, the mourning congregation is stoic, and so am I. While they sing “Children of the Heavenly Father,” I stare at the casket and remember when Bruce sang it at his former church a few months ago. It’s not his performance I think about, though. It’s how, on our way to Edgerton that dull, gray Sunday morning, Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend” came on the radio and we sang it all the way to the church.

Years before he knew I existed, when I was in eighth grade and he was a senior, Bruce played Curly in the Jasper High School production of Oklahoma! I was starstruck, mesmerized by his voice, and for the rest of the year, I was his unknown groupie. I attended all of his choir concerts, even though it pained me to see another girl sit on his knee during a performance of “Ticket to Ride,” and contributed to the fundraiser the school hosted to help him go to Europe with America’s Youth in Concert. When we formally met at the Styx concert a few weeks after I graduated, I couldn’t believe it when he said he hoped he’d see me again, the awkward girl from the third row of the high school auditorium who couldn’t carry a tune if it was strapped around her waist. But whenever we listened to music, I sang along with him like I was Barbra Streisand.

The hymn ends and the church is quiet except for the sound of one person crying. It is my father, fully engaged in shoulder-shaking, head-in-hands, inconsolable sobbing. My mother thrusts a tissue at him and scolds him with a sharp, “Shhhh!”

Dad was six years old when his father died, and now his only grandchild is fatherless. He has earned the right to cry.

I imagine liberating my own pain that way or by throwing myself on Bruce’s casket and wailing, but what would people think? What would my mother say? My only emotional emancipation is after the funeral when I kiss my hand and touch his casket when I think no one is looking, like I’m saying goodbye to a clandestine lover.  

I pull my coat from the hanger and slip it on as I walk out of the church to the black Chrysler parked behind the hearse. The clouds are heavy. More snow will fall soon.

The driver opens the passenger door.

“Thank you,” I say, and slide to the center of the seat to make room for my grandmother Katinka while Signe and my parents file into the back seat. Hot air blasts on my bare legs and I reach out to turn down the fan as the driver eases into the driver’s seat.

I look away as the pallbearers wheel the casket to the back of the hearse. When I shift in the seat to pull a tissue out of my coat pocket, I feel the pull of the stitches between my legs. It was a difficult birth, but she came out perfect. All nine pounds of her. Ten fingers, ten toes, and her father’s Charlie Brown head.

I dab my eyes and look up as they close the hearse door. For three days I’ve been an actor reciting lines: “Yes, I agree, this is a very tragic loss.” “I’ll let you know. Thank you for your concern.” “We’ll be fine. How are you?” But right now, all I’m thinking is, This is it. I’ll never be this close to his body ever again. And he’s all alone. He’s all alone! I want to sneak into the back of the hearse, open his casket, climb in, and close the lid, but if I say this out loud, they’ll call me crazy. They’ll say he’s dead, he doesn’t know he’s alone.

Torn up and screaming inside, I stare straight ahead as the procession of cars starts its way down the main street of town. When the hearse is halfway across the railroad tracks, the crossing lights begin to flash. The rest of the procession will have to wait. The irony is as heavy as the silence as we continue the journey to the cemetery.

It begins to snow and another train passes as David prays over the casket. I look up and see a childhood friend watching me from across the crowd of bowed heads. His helpless look mirrors my own, and we stare at each other for the remainder of the prayer, sustaining me like a weight-bearing wall.

Back in the Chrysler, the others chat while I wonder if I have enough emotional energy to get through the luncheon.

“Would you take me home?” I don’t ask the driver.  

#

Standing up from the table at the front of the church social hall, I leave a ham sandwich and a scoop of macaroni salad untouched on my plate. A line of mourners has formed around the perimeter of the long, brightly lit room that smells of waxed floors and Folgers. Low-voiced conversations hum in the background as members of the Ladies Aid wash dishes in the kitchen. I’ve worked these luncheons before alongside my grandmothers, my aunt Mavis, and former teachers whom I never called by their first names.

Church wasn’t a place as much as it was something I did, and growing up, I did a lot of church: Sunday School, catechism, choir, youth group. I had to have a really good excuse not to do church. When I married Bruce, I didn’t consider that I had a choice about church, and since Bruce grew up doing church, too, we did church together. He sang in the choir and taught Sunday School and I did Ladies Aid.

The line of mourners starts to advance. While the first in line shake hands with Walt and Eileen and my parents, I straighten my shirt, pull the hem of my skirt below my knees, and cross my jacket across my chest. While the pads have held up, I really need to see Carlene soon.

After a few hundred quickly shared memories, offers of sympathy, and sometimes painful hugs, it is time to go home. My sister Debbie says she wants to buy some wine while we are in town and that she needs cash for her trip home. I tell Dad to stop at the municipal bar downtown since they sell bottles from behind the counter and allow customers to write a check twenty dollars above the purchase amount.

Debbie and I walk into the dimly lit bar. Several patrons, some of whom were at the funeral, watch us and say nothing.

“Hey, Lynn,” says the bartender.

“Hey. Can we get a bottle of rosé?” I ask. “And will you take my sister’s out-of-town check?”

“Not a problem,” he says, reaching for the wine. He makes a funny comment about cheap wine and both Debbie and I laugh; a normal, ordinary moment that isn’t missed by the ears at the bar.

At home, Carlene is asleep, so I go into the bathroom to pump my engorged left breast and what I can from the right one, which is still painful in the area of the blocked duct. I tuck a warm compress under my right arm and secure it with my bra, throw on Bruce’s South Dakota State University shirt and join my family and David in the living room. David has kept a close eye on me the last few days.

There is a stack of cards in a basket on the coffee table. I put a pillow on the floor and sit down and begin to open them. Cash and checks fall out of many of them.

“Why are people giving me money?” I ask.

“It’s for a memorial,” someone explains.

There are hymnals in our church with a sticker inside dedicated in loving memory of someone. Is that what I am supposed to do? Buy hymnals?

I read the sympathy cards like they’re Tarot cards.

“Time heals all wounds,” I say to David, waving a few in the air.

David shakes his head. He knows my pain is white hot. He also knows I am impatient. When Bruce and I went to see him after the miscarriage, he reminded me several times to let Bruce process his thoughts whenever I pressed him for answers. I hate surprises, I’d told them. Especially the emotional ones.

“Time doesn’t heal,” he says. “It only gives us perspective.”

I put the cards down.

“Time doesn’t have the power to heal,” he continues. “Healing implies it goes away. But years from now, you’ll be able to recall this time and feel everything you feel at this moment. In time, you will get stronger, you will feel joy again, you will build yourself up, but this comes from inside you, not because a certain amount of time passes. It’s a lot of work and you won’t be the same person you were before he died. You can’t be.”

Years from now? Is he kidding me? I never want to feel this way again: exposed, raw, and so naive. And I won’t, I decide. I’ll show David just how wrong he is.

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