Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

When our sweet young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath in the now-bomb-shattered Haddam Doctors, in time-dimmed ’81 (Reagan was President, the Dodgers won the Pennant), Ann and I, in one of our last free-wheeling marital strategizings — we were deranged — sought to plot an “adventurous but appropriate” surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time’s embrace. A journey to Nepal, a visit to the Lake District, a bush-pilot adventure to the Talkeetnas — destinations he’d never seen but would’ve relished (not without irony) as his last residence. But I was squeamish and still am about cremation. Something’s more terrifying than death itself about the awful, greedy flames, the sheer canceling. Whereas death seems a regular thing, a familiar, in no need of fiery dramatizing, orderly to the point of stateliness, just as Mike says. I couldn’t cremate my son! Only to have him come back in powdered form, in a handy box, with a terrifying new name I’d never forget in four hundred years: Cremains! I’ve scattered the ashes of two Red Man Clubmen, and these residues turn out not to be powdered nearly enough, but are ridden through with bits of bone — odorless gray grit — like the cinders we Sigma Chi pledges used to shovel onto the front walk of the chapter house in Ann Arbor.

Ann felt exactly the same. We had two other children to think about; Paul was seven, Clarissa five. Plus, there was no way to transport a whole embalmed body on an around-the-world victory lap. It would’ve cost a fortune.

For a few brief hours, we actually thought about, and twice talked of donating Ralph’s physical leavings to science, or of possibly going the organ donor route. Though we pretty quickly realized we could never bear the particulars or face the documents or stand to have strangers thank us for our “gift,” and would never forgive ourselves once the deeds were done.

So finally, with Lloyd Mangum’s help, we simply and solemnly buried Ralph in a secular ceremony in the “new part” of the cemetery directly behind our house on Hoving Road, where he rests now near the founder of Tulane University, east of the world’s greatest expert on Dutch elm disease, a stone’s throw away from the inventor of the two-level driving range and, as of yesterday, in sight of Watcha McAuliffe. Interment at sea — a shrouded bundle sluiced off the aft end of a sportfishing craft with a fighting seat and a flying deck, performed under cover of darkness and far enough out so the Coast Guard wouldn’t come snooping — wasn’t an option we knew about. But it’s on my list for when my own time arrives and final thoughts are in the ballpark.

But. Acceptance, again. What have I now accepted that visits me in my stale bedroom, where I’m warm and dank beneath the covers, my stack of unread books beside me, and at an unknown but indecent hour? What is it that rocked me like an ague, turned me loose like a flimsy ribbon on a zephyr? All these years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it — my post-divorce dreaminess, the long period of existence in the early middle passage, the states of acceptable longing, of being a variablist, even the Permanent Period itself — these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that, like the luckless snowmobiler Chick Frantal, my son, too, would never be again in this life we all come to know too well.

It’s this late-arriving acknowledgment that’s unearthed me like a boulder tumbled down a mountain. That was my lie, my big fear, the great pain I couldn’t fathom even the thought of surviving, and so didn’t fathom it; fathomed instead life as a series of lives, variations on a theme that sheltered me. The lie being: It’s not Ralph’s death that’s woven into everything like a secret key, it’s his not death, the not permanence — the extra beat awaited, the mutability of every fact, the grinning, eyebrows-raised chance that something’s waiting even if it’s not. These were my sly ruses and slick tricks, my surface intrigues and wire-pulls, all played against permanence, not to it.

Hard to think, though, that the Frantals alone could’ve sprung me this far loose with their sad acceptance qua sales pitch. Chances are, with the year I’ve had, I was headed there anyway, preparing to meet my Maker. When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it’s just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it — to have that chance before it’s too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they’re “feeling it,” when the ball’s as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that’s all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level.

A cooling tear exits my eye crease where I’m turned on the pillow to face the inky sea. The single-lighted ship is nearly past the window’s frame. Possibly they do more than one cremains box per night if no mourners are along. This could be what the funeral business means when it says “We’re trustworthy.” No tricks. No shameless practices. No doubling up. No tossing Grandma Beulah in the dumpster behind Eckerd’s. We do what we say we’ll do whether you’re along or not. A rarity.

Somewhere below the ocean’s hiss I hear Bimbo’s doggy voice, musical within the Feensters’ walls, yap-yap-yap, yap-yap-yap. Then a muffled man’s voice — Nick — not decipherable, then silence. I detect the murmur of the Sumitomo banker’s limo as it motors down Poincinet Road past my house for his early morning pickup, hear two car doors close, then the murmured passage back. No Thanksgiving for the Nikkei.

My last tear, after this many, and many more not shed, is a tear of relief. Acceptable life frees you to embrace the next thing. Though who’s to say it all wouldn’t have worked fine anyway — those familiar old rejections and denials performing their venerable tasks. Years ago, I knew that mourning could be long. But this long? Easy to argue some things might be better left alone, since permanence, real permanence, not the soft blandishments of the period I invented, can be scary as shit, since it rids you of your old, safe context. With whom, for instance, am I supposed to “share” that I’ve accepted Ralph’s death? What’s it supposed to mean ? How will it register and signify? Will it be hard to survive? Can I still sell a house? Will I want to? And how would it have been different if I’d accepted everything right from the first, like the CEO of GE or General Schwarzkopf would’ve? Would I be living in Tokyo now? Would I have died of acceptance? Or be in Haddam still? God only knows. Maybe all would’ve been about the same; maybe acceptance is over-rated — though the shrinks all tell you different, which just means they don’t know. After all, we each carry around with us plenty of “things” that’re unsatisfactory, “things” we’re wanting to undo or ignore so other “things” can be happier, so the heart can open wider. Ask Marguerite Purcell. As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning — to me. I will if I can.

Out in the dark, I hear a motorcycle, nazzing, gunning, high-pitched, somewhere out on Ocean Avenue, though it fades. Then I think I hear another car, a smaller foreign one with narrow-gauge tires and a cheap muffler, slowing at my driveway. For a moment, I think it’s Clarissa, home now, with Thom in the Healey, or alone in a rented Daewoo — safe. I’ll hear the front door softly open and softly click closed. But that’s not it. It’s only the Asbury Press. I hear music from the carrier’s AM as his window lowers and the folded paper whaps the gravel. Then the window closes and the song fades—“Gotta take that sentimental journey, sen-ti-men-tal jour-ur-ney home.” I hear it down the street and down into my sleep. And then I hear nothing more.