We Try to Say Goodbye

The woman’s voice read out a story that may well have been a parable of the man’s entire life:

“When he was just a little boy, his younger sister went missing. I combed the house, calling for her from room to room. I eventually found her curled up in an upstairs closet. I called to my son and asked him, “Do you know why your sister is in the closet?”

“Yes, mommy,” the boy said. “I put her there. I wanted to make sure she was in a safe place.”

The woman’s voice went on to tell of her son’s work in China with AIDS patients, before that country’s government had even acknowledged the disease, and his work as a doctor, later, with 9/11 workers, his work in India, his work in poor clinics. The list of his humanitarian efforts stretched across third-world countries and the Northeast coast and finally through these two full rooms, which were lined with filled-up rows of wood-backed chairs, and eventually into the next room where another hundred people stood as silently as they could, straining to hear the voice as it found its way through two doorways, one at either end. Occasionally, the creak of somebody shifting their weight on the old wood floors obscured the voice. It was that hard to hear.

*

We had waited on a line that stretched out among the rust-colored New England trees, quiet faces framed in black woolen scarves waiting their turn to enter the old, stately house built by Calvert Vaux at the turn of the last century. On the line were doctors, so many doctors in between the rest of us, all in our 30s, it seemed. Across from the house was a tree that was majestic but squat, just turned gold and orange, like a grand baobab somehow planted in the soil of Connecticut.

I remember the silence. We scanned each other’s faces silently, in an intimate effort to be together somehow even if we didn’t know each other. He had known each of us, and that was like a string binding us along the stone path, waiting in that line, waiting to listen to stories about his life.

Then we entered the house.

A hiccupping cry echoed out from behind closed double doors. It was the wail of a 30-year-old woman who had lost her young husband, and it broke our hearts.

*

In the early cold of that autumn day, after the service had ended, we shuffled into the backyard of the grand house to the sounds of an obscure dub music CD that the man had played repeatedly to anyone who would listen. It was a laid-back sound, one I could remember this 6-foot-3 handsome man hopping around to in his swim trunks as a group of us jumped in and out of a pool the summer before. The cold bit our noses though, as we listened to it on this day.

“My favorite memory of him,” one graying young doctor was saying to two young women, “was when I found him lying in the middle of the street on night in college, howling at the moon. ‘Come lie down and howl with me!’ he begged us. Because that was just so him, having that much fun and wanting everyone to be part of it.”

Everyone agreed as our toes went numb in the biting air that this man enjoyed life more than most of the rest of us. That it was hard to imagine him gone now, if only because he had been so very alive. Repeated was the mantra in groups of three or four that he had lived longer than his very few years. That his years, somehow, had been fuller than most of ours. We were happy for that.

When he died it had been a shock, as you would imagine it must be when someone so young, so fit, so handsome and sweet is found collapsed on the floor of his kitchen in the early morning hours by his young wife and elderly father, who happened to be visiting the couple. When the man’s heart gave out, or an embolism burst, or who knows what went wrong in his still-human body happened, it brought to the ground someone about whom you cannot help but say, if only to yourself and not out loud, “He went too soon.”

He was only 34.

*

During the nine hours of this day, the man is so present in every room that I can see him clearly walking past or standing next to somebody. It is impossible to gather that many people who loved one person that much and not see him as a near-solid apparition.

When I try to grasp that he is gone, I see in my mind’s eye a puff of smoke, nearly like one you might see in a cartoon. Or I see a speck of dust—one mote—maybe just as a way to make solid his absence.

*

After the memorial service and the backyard gathering, those of us who knew the man well went back to the wife’s family’s bluish-gray house, which is tucked perfectly snugly into the trees of New England off a winding road that calls to mind a childhood that promises happiness ahead. The wife cannot return to her new house in Brooklyn, the one she and her husband had bought and moved into only a month ago. She is staying instead in her parents’ home for the indefinite future, again made a child instead of the woman and wife and future mother she was becoming.

Hours into drinking beer and wine and walking in circles around tables with heaps of potato and pasta salads going uneaten, I heard the wife break into sobs again, saying, “We were building such a lovely home together.”

Again, our hearts broke, if that was possible.