EVERY PERSON meets early grief differently.  Sometimes it is catastrophic, apocalyptic. For others it is the Bible’s “thief in the night,” a quiet burglary of life and the spirit.  Most of us meet it somewhere in early childhood—or at least used to, when families lived together or closely, and aged relations left us as regularly as the passenger trains that still ran 50 years ago.

            I knew that grandparents and great-uncles or -aunts died—we received hushed calls or formal cards.  But my family lived, in what seemed a satisfactory self-exile by my father, apart from most of our kin in New York State or Michigan, on the dull plains of Indiana.  So I never felt much reality in the news of distant deaths—ancient people I knew only from big old deckle-edged Kodak snapshots in our albums, black and white or sepia scenes of an undiscovered world.

            My own introduction to grief and mourning was a slow catastrophe—not a great explosion or firestorm, but the seeding of mines and cluster bombs that would detonate for decades to come.  I was going on nine but probably looked and acted younger, certainly felt younger.  Or rather I felt immortal, ageless, timeless and weatherless, as most children do.  What had I to do with time and death?

            In 1946, just as we—all of us, family, city, nation—seemed to be healing from the dismal years of wartime conditions and fully prepared for the modernistic utopia promised us beyond the grey world of For the Duration, my mother died.  It was abrupt, unexpected, the after-effect of a routine operation when she developed an embolism and went instantly, on one night when we—her family—had taken a night off from constant hospital visits and anxiety to attend a performance by Rube Goldberg, the great techno-fantast and humorist.  Part of the initial shock was this mixing of clowns and corpses, comedy and death.  It was. . .blasphemous? . . . to recall that I, my father and my sister sat in the civic auditorium and howled with laughter at a silly man and his silly cartoons while my mother died alone in a little room across town, before nurse or doctor could reach her.

            My family fell apart, imploded, that night.  No one knew what to do, how to act.  We had not gazed on enough memento mori to be prepared, even counting the endless loops of newsreels, war movies, black-and-white photos enlarged in Life magazine for the past years.  That was war, that was different, people were supposed to—required to—die in combat, soldiers and civilians, away across the world in old Europe or on coral islands with names so outlandish even H.V. Kalktenborn could not pronounce them.

            Death was not supposed to walk up shady Indiana streets, from streetlight to streetlight in the soft evening heat of August, and abduct a woman only 48 years old.  It was supposed to be flattened on the screen of the Ritz Theater on Saturday afternoons, where I watched Lash LaRue or Randolph Scott dispense it in measured doses from their six-guns.  It was supposed to be confined to accidents that happened to someone else.  It was supposed to be the result of war, plague, earthquake, landslide, forest fire, happening to faceless mobs of unfortunates.  I saw grainy News of the Day newsreels of shuffling refugees, with voice-over by Lowell Thomas.

            Death didn’t live on my street.  It did not affect my schoolmates.  It did not happen here.  Death was an embarrassing case of bad luck and weakness.  It felt to me like something that should happen to—poor people, colored people, foreigners, exotic and distant people like the “starving Armenians” my father recalled from World War One.  Suddenly, I had joined the ranks of The Others, and I felt disoriented and uncomfortable.  My family was defective, deficient, one less than nature demanded that it be.  How could I explain this to my friends, to anyone who asked?  What was the description of what had happened to me?  I literally did not know the answer, understand the etiquette of death, loss, grief and mourning.  I had been taught to be mannerly, and I now had no guide to the manners of this new found land of After Death.

            I had fallen into the Unspeakable Zone.  My father never again mentioned my mother’s name (I knew her only as Mom or Mother, anyhow), and my brother and sister seemed also self-silenced.  I drew some cues from them, but I felt I could not totally abandon her name and presence.  Society demanded that I respond to questions, especially kindly questions, solicitous enquiries.  But I found it immensely hard simply to say “My mother died.”  The word “died” gagged me, stuck like a literal bone in my throat.  It seemed very wrong to say that, the worst kind of bad luck, a hideous curse—for saying made it so, and one half of my mind, my knowledge and my imagination denied that my mother was dead, was gone forever.

            When I met my friends the day after my mother’s death, I could not think how to say it, so I said, “You have something I don’t have.”  They stared and someone finally asked “What?” and I said “A mother.”  That scene is odd, pitiful and to me (still) inexplicable.  Why was I unable to say something so simple and final as the plain phrase, “my mother died”? 

            Perhaps because of the ringing finality.  To that date, I had never faced finality in any real, everyday form.  Each day had come to me as a pleasantly unreeling surprise.  My life had been provisional, improvised, as free and transparent as air.  To make of my grief a Q & A session, a little show-and-tell quiz, somehow made the terrible event OK, normal, bearable for the moment.  The ploy, however, elicited mild contempt and confusion from my friends, who felt I had tricked or ambushed them.  They knew already about the death, had been coached about my devastation and fragility.  Then I had not played the game—seemed to grieve, to cry, to admit the reality of the death in the family—so they were denied whatever response they had prepared.  What had promised to be a novel and exciting moment fell flat for them, and I was just my old smart-alecky self, no marvelous changeling.

            But I had no idea.  Was grief public?  Private?  Individual?  Corporate?  In my family it was, evidently, intensely private, a secret, an obscenity, an unmentionable fact.  It was part of death, so it could not be aired, viewed, in public.  It was over 50 years before I knew my brother’s and sister’s reactions at that time.  When it happened, I was sheltered, cosseted, scrubbed clean of any taint, of grief and mourning.  Innocence may be defined as the lack of knowledge of death—that is what Genesis says, anyhow.  Adam and Eve were not just punished with drudgery, sexuality and mortality, they were also punished with the everlasting knowledge of mortality. 

            This sense of personal mortality is not, as they say now, “hard wired.”  It is acquired, adduced, learned from experience, tentatively.  After my mother’s death and my awkward acceptance of its reality, the general idea of death began to bloom in me like one of those exotic jungle flowers that erupts every few decades with a glory of giant blossoms and overwhelming stench—beauty and corruption fused inextricably.  I began to think of my death, my own personal, inevitable, unavoidable death.  Like Hamlet I became haunted by knowing if it were not now ‘twere later, but it will be.  It was an unfair and profoundly disturbing fact, something as physical as an obstacle, a roadblock in my path that the length of my life would inexorably bring nearer.  If I lived a very, very long time, there would still be death waiting patiently like punctuation at the end of a sentence.  If I were carried away young or by accident or by disease or by war or by mischance, still that bulky stumbling block of death awaited me.  I envisioned death literally as a barrier, a low, solid wall, an impediment.

            I felt trapped in myself and intensely selfish when these images and apprehensions of death came.  I felt guilty, because my father was much older than I and would surely die soon, or soon on the scale of my life, and I was not anxious or worried about that.  It seemed right, decorous, measured.  Old people moved nearer to death and died.  But young people, why did they—?  Why did they have to think about death, know it as a dirty little secret, feel it like a disease burrowing under the skin, like those tropical worms that invaded you, grew long and feasted on you, lived like filthy house pets with you, inside you?

            For some years I developed and cherished a chronic insomnia.  I went to bed, listened to my little portable radio as late as possible, switched it off and lay in my bunk staring up at the felt-like grey darkness.  I heard distant sounds—cars, trucks, trains—and followed lights that flashed against the window blinds.  Time ticked greenish numbers past on the radium dial of my Westclox Baby Ben alarm, as slow as the drip of centuries that made stalactites and stalagmites in deep caves.  We plodded past 1, past 2, past 3 . . .  I sweated, I twisted, I willed sleep to come, I locked my eyelids, my muscles.  In this thick grey silence, I knew death waited, I knew I was as mortal and fragile as my mother (who had never seemed old to me, just beyond the reach of time), I knew my journey to the end of the night would bring me to that simple cinderblock barrier of my own, my special mortality, my ready-engraved death.  I could almost see a headstone, read my name etched into it in letters already blurred by years and weather.

            Every morning I woke tired, worn smooth as if after a long wrestling match, a struggle to will myself to stay alive till dawn.  Still, at the back of my eye I saw myself lying comfortable and deep in a satin-padded coffin, looked down at myself from a God’s-eye view, was alive looking at myself dead.  I felt cheated, exasperated—this much-vaunted death was a cheap trick,  a carnival midway illusion, a con game.

I KNOW THE SMELL of death.  It is not so melodramatic as the stench of corpses—I do not know what that is, having lived a safe and sheltered life.  (Unlike most citizens of Planet Earth in the 21^st century, I have never been bombed from the air, herded to a concentration camp or seen a neighbor step on a land mine.)  Death is another, far more intimate smell.

            The smell of death is the deep stench of massed roses. 

            My home town cherished several industrial nicknames and loci of fame:  we built most of the world’s lawnmowers and knitted a sizeable percentage of its underwear.  We might have been “Lawnmower City” or “Underwearoplis.”  But the cultivated name preferred by our Chamber of Commerce was “The Rose City,” after the acres of glimmering glass houses and the metric tons of hothouse flowers grown and shipped all over the U.S.  We wallowed in roses, reveled in them, dreamed of them.  Householders put out trellises and cultivated rose gardens to support and advance the cause.  Even in wartime, under the E for Effort flags, we grew gaudy puddles of roses.

            At my mother’s funeral, the viewing parlor was filled with flowers, mostly roses, red, white, yellow.  The August evening air was heavy, cloying, choking with their odor.  It gagged me as effectively as the word “died.”

            My mother lay in a long, dark box that glittered with bright gold fittings—like a case for rare jewelry.  I had to stand on tiptoe to see down across the tiers and banks and cascades of flowers around her.  She was very still, very beautiful, a display as carefully wrought as a museum piece.

            But she was smooth, shining, inert, waxen.  Her eyes were stubbornly closed as if in a delicate frown, her auburn hair looked stiff, frizzy.  She was not there, had somehow exited the varnished case, like a puppet dropping off the stage through a cunningly hidden trap door.

            I remembered that when the Stewarts moved in across the street from our house, they found many brown carboys of embalming fluid stacked in the garage, abandoned by the previous owner, an undertaker.  They were marked POISON, and the mystical word formaldehyde was flourished on the labels.  I imagined the contents of these big amphorae had smelled overpoweringly of fresh roses.  My mother had gone away forever, replaced by a waxen manikin filled with pure essence of roses.

            Today I cannot easily enter a room laden with flowers, even for a wedding, an anniversary, a joyful celebration.  The blossoms tell me of death.  The spectre of the rose is my memory of that first death, after which there is no other. ###