Birthdays came and went for all of us, but one special birthday loomed in our near future, because it was Daddy’s. We always liked to fuss over his birthday. He enjoyed it, pretending he was a little boy again, excited about presents and blowing out candles. This birthday was his thirty-sixth. Momma was determined to make it special by having a surprise party. The neighbors she invited were sworn to secrecy. All of us contributed to dressing up the house, hanging balloons and crepe paper. Cathy made a big “Happy Birthday, Daddy” sign and had the four of us write our names on it. Momma signed it, too, with “Forever your love, Corrine.”
My fingers tremble as I write this. I always believed it was very important for me to have full control of my emotions. A doctor couldn’t think about the patient he was treating too personally, or his feelings might cloud his judgment. I want this diary to be as close to the truth as possible, but it’s not easy to put all your feelings off to one side and just write facts, especially when those facts are about your family.
Here are the facts, however. The police arrived close to seven p.m. They told Momma that Daddy had been in a very bad traffic accident, that it had been fatal. All of us refused to believe it until they brought in some of his possessions and his overnight suitcase.
It was as if a door had slammed on all our sunshine, now and forever. Cathy was the most emotional about it, even more than Momma. As with everything these days, I was asked to help with my brother and sisters, occupy their minds, and be the man of the house now that Daddy was gone. The only ones who saw me cry at all were Momma and occasionally Cathy. Ironically, Cathy criticized me for not crying or acting as devastated as she was. I overheard her tell Carrie and Cory that I went into a corner to cry and that she had seen me crying often.
What I did cry over was the realization that I was just getting to know my father the way I had always wanted to know him. He always thought of me as older than I was, but lately, I could feel him observing how much I actually did in the house, how much I did for Momma and my brother and sisters. I would never say he saw me as an equal, not yet, but he saw me as mature enough for him to be more revealing about himself and his own dreams, faults, and experiences.
Cathy never knew how much time Daddy and I spent alone together. He wanted to be sure to have that important father-son talk about sex and girls. I made it much easier for him, because I knew so much about the human body. It was during one of our last talks that he told me he was a little concerned about Cathy.
“She has a flair for independence,” he said. “That’s a euphemism for defiance. You see how difficult she can be sometimes when she’s told to do something. Lately, she’s always asking why. She’s quickly passing the point where she will just obey. I’m not saying I’m any sort of expert when it comes to females, but I can tell you Cathy’s going to be a handful when she starts dating.”
I agreed with him and
promised I would always look out for her. It was almost as if he had a premonition about his own fateful birthday. There was so much left for me to learn from him and about him. There should be some natural law preventing any child from losing either of his parents until he has had enough time to really get to know them both.
But enough of feeling sorry for myself. It was pretty clear that our lives would never be the same, all our lives.
I set the diary aside because my tears were making it hard to see the words, and I didn’t want to drip any on the pages.
I was crying for the Dollanganger children and Corrine, but I was really crying more for myself. What Christopher was saying about losing his father too soon was just as true for me; I had lost my mother far too soon. How I wished I had had a brother or a sister back then. For Christopher, siblings were a good distraction, but there was something more important. He had a sister who was old enough to fully understand their grief. He could share his grief with her whenever he wanted, even though he was not one to show his emotions.
I shared the loss of my mother with my father, but his grief was different from mine. A man’s love for his wife is different from a child’s love for her mother. Yes, he was lost for a long while. I could remember him going from room to room as though there was no place he could go for any comfort because every place in our house had some reminder of Mom. A grown man needed a grown woman, especially the one with whom he had shared all his dreams and fears. A daughter would never, could never, be enough.
I knew that he went off to cry where I could not see him, just as Christopher wrote he had done as often as he could. And just like Christopher, I mourned all that I could have known about my mother and had lost the chance to discover. I wanted to talk to her when I was older and could understand more and, just like Christopher, be trusted with information reserved for more mature young people. I wanted to hear about her childhood fears and see if they were the same as mine. I wanted to have her guidance when it came to boys and sex and romance. All that had been taken away from me, and so my grief was different from my father’s, just like Christopher’s was different from his mother’s.
I rose from my bed and went out into the hallway, standing by the top of the stairs for a few moments and listening. Daddy was watching television now. I suspected he might have fallen asleep watching it, which was something he did when he watched alone and even occasionally when I was watching something with him that really didn’t amuse or entertain him. He’d watch it for me, but the day’s work would catch up in his muscles and bones, and he’d drift off. Rarely did I wake him before it was time for me to go to sleep.
Christopher’s brief factual description of his father’s death had brought me back to the afternoon at the hospital when Dad came out of Mom’s room before I could enter. I had been brought from kindergarten. I didn’t realize it then, but later I understood that Dad had remained with Mom for hours after she had passed away. He had sat at her bedside, holding her hand. The nurses and the doctor urged him to leave, but he wouldn’t listen, and no one bothered him. I think he wanted to be sure I had arrived first.
“Your mother has gone, Kristin,” he said with a broken smile on his trembling lips.
“Gone?” In my childish imagination, I assumed he meant she had gotten up from the hospital bed and left. Maybe she was already home.
“She’s gone to be with God,” he continued. “When you look at her, you will see she is peaceful. She has no pain. I want you to go in and just look at her. She’ll know you are there, okay?”
“Will she look at me, too?”
“Not the way you think. You’ll understand someday. I promise,” he said.
In his grief, my father looked strangely younger. They say people seem to age overnight with the death of a loved one, but he looked more like a little boy who wanted to believe in fantasies. That’s how I remembered him at that moment.
I did what he asked. Mom did look peaceful, but there was something about her that told me she really was gone. I didn’t cry loudly. I felt the tears streaming down my cheeks, but I barely made a sound. I thought if I did, I might somehow ruin her trip to see God or something. I was afraid to kiss her, and Dad didn’t encourage it. I think he was afraid of what I would say after my lips felt her cold skin.
He took my hand again and led me out.
It had been a while since I had thought about all this. Christopher’s diary seemed to have the power to open old wounds or revive closely held memories and secrets that lay dormant for both me and him. More important, I wanted them revived. I wanted to relive my childhood feelings and vividly recall some of my wonderful moments with my mother. It was like passing through a portal to go back in time, a fantasy I could make real. As quietly as I could, I went up the short stairway to our attic and opened the door. The light switch was on the right side.
Our attic was about the width of the whole house, with two panel windows that faced the front. The previous owners, who were the original owners, had left some old furniture up here. Dad called them pack rats and claimed there were many people like them, who couldn’t get themselves to throw away or give away anything.
Some, he said, believed the possession would become valuable with age, and others clung to the idea that eventually, they would find some relative or close friend to give the item to, even though they rarely did. Because of the refurbishing and remodeling work he often did, Dad often came across what he called “prime examples of dying memories.”
In our attic, the previous owners had left a hardwood wardrobe with a walnut veneer and embossed cherubs on the doors, another antique that now contained most of Mom’s clothes; a cherry wood chest, which had many pairs of her shoes; a large dark maple full-length oval mirror; a dark brown leather settee with ugly thick armrests and legs; and some dark maple chairs from an old dining-room set. There was also a scattering of some of our own possessions in cartons lined up along the far right wall. Dad said the attic floor was well constructed, and except for one spot where there had been a leak many years ago, there was a decent-looking insulated ceiling. I suspected that he came up here from time to time to do just what I was about to do, open the wardrobe and look at Mom’s clothes.
Most people give away the clothes that belonged to the ones they loved. I knew that my father had trouble doing that, and that even though he was probably past the reluctance, he would rather not think about it. He would rather feel that there was something more of my mother with us besides old photographs and videos, something she had touched and that had touched her. Too many years had gone by for the scent of her perfume to be on her clothes, I thought, but when I brought some of the dresses and blouses to my face, I was sure the scent had lingered. With it came flashes of her face, her smile, and the sound of her voice when she sang or read to me or just asked me to do something.
I was thankful that being in the presence of her clothes didn’t make me cry. It brought me some comfort. I wondered if Christopher would talk about something similar later in his diary. Sharing the loss of a parent drew me closer to him. I sat on the old settee and looked at the opened wardrobe, imagining Christopher seated beside me, talking to me in a very adult manner, explaining everything about memories and sorrow and moving on with your life.