There was a time when the girls were
five or six years old and we lived in the house on Lamar Street. They did a little chorus line song and dance
shtick, something copied from TV. It was
the cutest thing I had ever seen, then or since. I quickly projected that they were beautiful
and talented. That they would go on to
become big name entertainers, play to huge throngs of people and have their
name in lights. They would grow to
adulthood together and be close like that all their lives. They would support each other into old age
long after their parents were gone.
It didn’t work
that way at all. They are both gone from
me now. I have, in essence, lost both of
them. One is living out of state and
estranged from me. The other took her
own life twenty eight years ago today, April 22, 1985. I would never be able to give her away as a
bride should she choose to marry. Never
knowing the man she married and maybe even liking him. Never holding her children---my
grandchildren.
I remember long
ago making funeral arrangements for a woman of great age. Her children asked that I list by name among
the survivors, a child who had died forty years before. The newspaper didn’t want to print it until I
insisted. They took the attitude that
the family should “Get over it”. I understand
much more now than when I was a younger man.
For years I lived with a constant, burning, all consuming rage. Gone now except for searing nanoseconds of vignettes. Images that come suddenly in the day or in the nights. I don’t talk about it except in therapy but it never goes away. Children should bury their parents. Parents should not have to bury their children.
