#28 On Grief and Bullwinkle

Uncle Bill was an iconoclast in life and in death. Growing up, he resisted conventional paths – he was perceived as a difficult child. For me, he’s a difficult dead person: hard to pin down, hard to grieve, hard to let go of. His loss ripples out in silence. He is forever a specter of the past.

We grew up with whispers that Uncle Bill might still be alive – undercover, off-grid, maybe tangled in Cold War secrets. The Bermuda Triangle was as deliciously ominous as quicksand, or that urban legend about swallowing gum and it staying in your stomach for SEVEN YEARS. Our only idea of espionage came from Boris and Natasha on Rocky and Bullwinkle or Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 on Get Smart – all lovably inept spies who still seemed more plausible than the truth.

Long before Bill disappeared, my mom wrote a letter to her sister. In it, she wondered – half serious, half guessing, if Bill might be involved in ‘spy stuff’ at Fort Meade.

Years later, his old friend Dick Palmer sent a letter of his own, asking whether the family had ever considered that Bill’s disappearance wasn’t an accident at all? That maybe he was alive somewhere. Gone by choice.

A parent losing a child is universally tragic. But a brother? A sister? There’s a perceived hierarchy of grief. A parent’s loss of a child being the most difficult to bear. Did his siblings mourn him in the same way? Did they believe he was dead? Did they picture him alive somewhere, just not calling? An unspoken grief? Or a non-grief? Do they get casseroles? Sympathy cards? Or just a lifetime of wondering? Did Bill’s siblings pray for him, picture him somewhere far away, or quietly file him under ‘gone’? Was it unspoken grief – or a non-grief?

Did my mom grieve him? Did she remember him on June 28th, the date of his disappearance? On, February 24th, his birthday?

I don’t know what it’s like to lose a sibling. The closest I can get: my mom had four miscarriages. When I once asked if she’d taken DES – an old pregnancy drug with shadowy side effects – the subject came up. If she’d carried those babies to term, we’d have been seven kids instead of three. Four more siblings to estrange themselves from me. Siblings who never were, except in that strange math of grief. Nobody would ever ask, ‘Were you close?’ But they exist in the backdrop, in the what-if. A second psychic I spoke to (I know, I know…) said my mom appeared with those babies. ‘I’m glad they don’t just disappear,’ she said. Which sounds exactly like my mom.

The only way I can begin to understand is to talk to others who’d lost children … others who had lost siblings. Without a trace. I began my search.

My Aunt Jane’s dear friend, Jane Ashe, lost a daughter without a trace. She turned her grief into a book. FIREFLY, Ashley’s Light.

I re-read it, looking for clues to a mother’s grief experience. Jane so immersed herself in work and “cheerful compartmentalization” that, a year after her daughter’s death, a coworker remarked that by the way she behaved, she would have never known anything had happened.

Later, I asked Jane how that comment made her feel? “Proud.” was her answer.

In the book The Loss of a Lifetime:

Lynn L. Shattuck – in the Editor’s note says, “My mom confessed she sometimes thought my brother was in the witness protection program, alive and hiding.” Jane Ashe believed her daughter was still alive – for a time. This still-being-alive-after-death seems to be a common thread among the grieving. (Might this be the way Bill’s siblings were thinking? Like, he’s a spy and living somewhere? That’s what rubbed off on us kids?)

This month has been a month of magical sky watching and pie making. Cosmic dust and flour dust. There’s a hint of wood smoke in the night air. The stars, scattered like sugar from a careless hand.

When I look at the stars and count the satellites (my record is 70 in one night!) I can’t help but wonder at the “now” of it all. They’re the same stars as always, just with satellites doing a stellar chronomarch in front of them, vying for my attention – and getting it. The people who have passed aren’t gone. They’re simply written in a language I’m still learning. Other nights, the haze blocks my universe. Steam rises from the water. I hang over the edge of the hot tub, eyes turned to the night sky. Pinpricks of mist touch my back. These cold portents are the stars tonight? Grief isn’t linear but orbital. Like a planet that keeps swinging back into my nights.

I started to wonder how many people out there were living with that kind of not-knowing. Not dead. Not alive. Just gone.

Angela’s story, and her DNA test back in installment #20, now shimmer with more meaning. Her son vanished – different era, different context, but the same aching silence. Soon, we’ll go deeper into her story. She’s recently met family who never knew she existed – people she’s wondered about all her life. I wonder what it’s like to fill in blanks where your story should have been. I wonder if that’s what we’re all trying to do.

Start at #1.