I have matured to the status of patriarch of my clan, the eldest male Kelly. Eldest male Sturgis. I am patriarch to a matriarchy, if not a simple feminarchy. Most of the women in my family are indeed mothers, but not everybody. My grandkids, all three girls, aren’t moms yet. My one and only daughter is a mother. I have childless nieces. All my aunts have kids, all younger than me. With the feeblest wisp of primogeniture, the first born Kelly grandchild of one Donald J Kelly happens to be male, me, in a world dominated from day one by women. My whole life I’ve lived in feminarchy.
It goes without saying what a pussywhipped husband I am. Wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s been my supreme pleasure to serve Roxanne’s happiness. She is my true love, the love of my life. We’ve been married over fifty consecutive, uninterrupted years. She believes in fairness. She’s an honest, honorable and faithful person of reasoned judgment to whom I’ve deferred for every big decision. She’s the boss of our household. She forgives and she gives permission. I get my say but Roxanne decides what’s best. I know she loves me and respects me. Somehow I fulfill a role of Man of the House without any obvious dominance. I’ve been a good partner for her and her curiosity about the world. She has kept me just under the top in my personal approach. We may disagree, or we may agree for different reasons. Happy wife, happy life goes the old axiom. And one means to being a cool grandpa is being attached to a cool grandma.
My life in a feminarchy got going long before I met Roxanne and maybe prepared me for her. My mother was a charismatic, dominating personality. My father had no true authority or credibility in our family. Looking back a generation beyond them, my Grandma Mary, my dad’s mother, raised him as a single mother from his youth around World War II, his parents splitting up when my grandfather Sturgis went off to war. In my life I only met my grandfather Sturgis twice. His parents were long gone, but Grandma Mary and her sister Aunt Winnie both say Grandma Sturgis was the brains of that outfit as well. Mary and Winnie’s mother, Great-grandma Stoner to me, lived to be 97 and outlived their n’er do well father by several decades and there were no Stoner men to so much as carry on the name.
Grandma Mary went on to marry a younger man in John McCormick after the war and had my two uncles. They lived in Indiana and we saw them about once a year. Grandma Mary would stay with us when our mother was in the hospital, either to have a baby or a nervous breakdown but over the years grew more distant and further apart from us kids, especially after our parents divorced. Grandma Mary had her own family to dominate in Indiana. John McCormick never asserted himself as a grandfatherly patriarch to our clan but left behind two sons, my uncles, who have their own clan legacies to work out separate from us Kellys. Without Grandma Mary — or Aunt Winnie — there is no link of authority to our kinship to the Stoners and the name is extinct. The Sturgis side too is virtually extinct since our mother went to court to have us all declared Kelly. 23 and Me, the ancestry service tells me I have scores of DNA relatives on the Sturgis side, very likely descendants of the predecessors of the clan who settled in southern Minnesota, many of whom still live in the old country or migrated west to Seattle, but all these shares of genetics wherever in the world most probably are dominated by females of their respective clans.
I can only look to my own clan, as stretched out as far as I can see, and women and girls comprise the power and the glory forever, amen. Only Donald Kelly, my mother’s father, the only true grandfather I ever knew, holds any distinction of authority and credence in our family history who was male and could be considered a patriarch of his clan, until he died at 59, when I was eight. And even so, he was succeeded by his widow, my Grandma Kelly, my mom’s mother, a terrifyingly mean woman of vile temper and solicitously sadistic vocabulary who doubtlessly tormented Don Kelly the self-made rich patriarch who worked extra hours to get out of the house, and she has been more than rumored to have driven him to his heart attack and early death — she was what they used to call a shrew. She and my mother clashed like raging tornadoes until grandma banished her and us kids from her house and cabin (an estate really, at a prominent point on a popular lake) after grandpa died, and grandma ceased to have any leverage over mom’s family, us, or to express any interest in our lives and welfare for the rest of her nasty narcissistic life.
Mom had three sisters, and each in their way paid a curse to remain in a semblance of good grace to their mean wacky mother to sustain her through an eventual marriage to a closeted gay gigolo fifteen years her junior and move to his hometown in the San Francisco Bay area where she succumbed to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. My aunts, all younger than my mom, babysat me and my sisters when we were little and looked after us when they were in high school until grandma kicked us out. Losing connection to the youngest two aunts hurt because it felt like a More For Me exclusion. They kept up visitation to grandma’s cabin well after grandma herself deeded it to them before she died.
I felt abandoned by my mom’s youngest sisters. They meant my golden years to me. Grandpa Kelly was Don Kelly, alive and in charge. At Christmas. At the lake. My aunts taught me to swim and water ski. And dance. How to smoke Winstons and read comic books. Best of all they owned copies of every top ten 45 rpm record from 1954 through 1961, and a good portable record player the size of a suitcase and they trusted me to play their records and gave me unlimited access. For this alone, the unlimited access to the earliest hits of rock and roll songs, I am grateful to my aunts because it represents my romantic inclinations about life and love. From those aunts and their friends and cohorts, frolicking, water skiing, drive-in movies, cruising around the lake in boats and partying, dancing, all I wanted was to be a teenager — or as Dion DiMucci put it, a teenager in love. Didn’t happen for me, not at the cabin up at the lake. Years have gone by, decades and generations, and I have never been invited there to visit, not so much as a day trip, not even lunch. The property is still in my aunts’ family, more or less, though nobody named Kelly. My aunts’ descendants swim and water ski and teach their kids. I am of an outside clan.
The eldest child of Colleen Kelly who happens to be a male is the only pillar to make me a patriarch to my clan, but it’s an illusion. I’m the oldest of ten. Seven are sisters. I had four sisters before one brother was born, and then three more before another brother. There was never any way I could get special privileges for being a boy. I did housework chores, washed dishes, vacuumed carpets, scrubbed floors and toilets. They were chores of survival in a chaotic household where our mother the matriarch could not govern coherently and we were saved by the steady guidance of our beloved housekeeper, Eula Pratt.
Today I am a survivor in this world in some ways due to feminarchy. It certainly hasn’t hurt. My gradeschool teachers at St Simon of Cyrene were all female, as were each of the two principals. I always took the nuns more seriously than the priests. High school I remember two significant teachers, both women. At least half my college professors were women. Most of my bosses and supervisors at work were women. None of this seemed revolutionary or unusual at the time.
Eight of the top ten and fifteen of the top twenty in grade points of the high school class I supposedly graduated were girls. It was not surprising. They were all very smart. Three tied at 4.0 and had to play Rock Paper Scissors to get too give the valedictorian speech. They are probably doctors.
This is not to disavow any consciousness of male chauvinism in my lifetime, making my awareness of feminism and acceptance a conscious choice as much as my feminarchical upbringing. It seems as much a shock today as it was some time in my youth to realize women didn’t have the right to vote in the USA until about a hundred years ago. Today the rights of women worldwide don’t match up with their proportion of the population, where they cannot vote, or work, or own property, and whose bodies are held as chattel to this day. I am gifted to live in a society which, however belatedly in human history, offers equity and equality to women of all gender and persuasion. Even the right wing political parties of Europe are led by women. Even wing-nut leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene can project a voice in America. Both US Senators from my state of Minnesota are women, as is half the state’s congressional delegation, more than half the Minneapolis city council and all seven members of the city council of St Paul. Several key state legislators and federal and state judges are women, as is the newest president of the state land grant university. Four justices on the Supreme Court are women. The Vice President of the United States. This is not exceptional or extraordinary. This is what it is.
When Clara was little, around seven, at yet another tour of an art museum, she asked me why there was so much art by men and why so much women as subject matter. I didn’t have a ready answer. The historical record supported her question, both parts. Art history too supplied the answers. Most of history as we know it was written by and for men of patriarchal societies. What apparently pleased men the most was artistically rendered human figures of the female form.
To answer the first part of her question I began to compile a list of names of women artists I have encountered through their works in museums and galleries I have moseyed through the past thirteen or so years in Europe and North America. There are about two hundred names in the Word file Known Women Artists ranging from Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe to Judy Onofrio and Olga Volchkova. The list is not in alphabetical or any genre or chronological order and may include a duplicate name or two. I leave it to Clara and Tess to add to it of their own volition knowing these name make a good start if ever seeking examples to study in their spare time. I am done collecting such names, unless of course I see something stunning.
To the second part of the question I leave unanswered the pose of the human form for Clara and Tess to discover and determine on their own. They have likely sensed that I personally approve of female figures in art — clothed and unclothed — but it is not for me to direct them to appropriately appreciate these figures. I leave it to them to critique and draw their own conclusions.
I am an American white cisgender male. At age 72 I am the oldest living person of my clan, but I am not in charge, except of course of myself and my own conduct and so forth, but nothing of the sort of a chain of command of familial legacy. I have no birthright authority. I am not the dad of The Lords of Discipline or Purple Hibiscus, to offer two extremes. As an oldest brother I’ve tried to avoid Big Brother is Watching You — our mother did enough familial meddling to take an extra generation to untangle, and I don’t need to get entangled in the untanglements; her legal last will was clear, we split the assets ten equal ways and I acted as executor, I didn’t try to tell anybody how to spend the proceeds. Further, I’ve never expressed judgment in my sisters’ choices of boyfriends or husbands to influence their choices because their romantic lives are truly none of my beeswax. That goes for nieces and nephews, brothers and grandchildren.
This does not mean I don’t have my opinions and feelings for other people, I’m just not the family boss. I offer advice if asked, even if in the most subtle or passive aggressive way — one of my career talents as a banker — but I hedge a lot even so, sometimes I can be wrong. As I have matured and aged, even if my above techniques to avoid asserting pretentious authority over my siblings guided me well to mind my own beeswax when we were all younger, the lessons of a longer life have only reinforced what I learned to live and let live. My paternal guidance of my kids and grandkids is founded on my example to them in every interaction, and if my entire life — not just their lifetimes — might not be the best example of judgment and behavior, I am shy (not modest) and would rather impart the lesson than reveal the long story of how I learned it and why.
As it turns out I’ve led a very safe existence. No assassination attempts, not even those of character. A metaphor describing my life would be that I never served in the armed forces. Never enlisted. Never drafted. If I got something out of high school it was the compassion of a vice principal who agreed my antiauthoritarian attitude and military discipline would benefit nobody, not the armed forces, not me, and seriously not the nation, and wrote a letter to my draft board supporting my petition to be classified as a Conscientious Objector, and I am guessing his letter had some sway because I was granted CO classification. My lottery number never came up and I was spared ‘Nam. Spared peacetime service too. Spared military discipline. Spared veterans benefits and the GI Bill too. Spared all that and still lived through reverberations of the Vietnam war, the generation of veterans, anti-war heroes and resettled refugees who shaped some of my culture since I grew up.
I choose not to blame my mistakes on nobody mentoring me to function respectably well in this very real world, and instead admit and own to a self-guided arrogance compounded by my young ignorance that led me to make stupid choices and wasted use of my time. Fortunately I did not go to prison but I did spend a few hours behind bars under the clock at Hennepin County jail for a rash of unpaid parking tickets. I have been fired from a couple of jobs, and looking back have to admit, rightly so, I was a bad fit for the position. Gradually it seems I caught on to ways the world works and learned I wasn’t all that smart, special or clever or anywhere near as gifted as my mother asserted when I was a child.
Fortunately I was younger than middle aged when I discovered my power to squander the insight I could gain by dropping pretending I was the coolest guy on campus, the hippest fan at the concert, the smartest dude at the ranch. I resented Harvey McKay but learned nothing about outswimming sharks. Or Zen: Japanese management or motorcycle maintenance. I was 26 (Roxanne 25) when Michel was born. I wasn’t ready — most people aren’t — and still had trepidations about bringing a new human being into a world fraught with so much crazyass shit, but at the heart of the matter I wanted to be a father to have someone to love and nurture as a good person. I took it as a bonus that my first born was a daughter — a beautiful surprise — today almost every expectant parent learns a baby’s sex in utero, but believe it or not back as late as the early 1980s most parents didn’t know what sex their child was until he or she was born, and Roxanne and I didn’t really care. I saw having a daughter, looking ahead into the next generation, was riding in the shotgun seat of destiny and being privy to the future world. Title IX arrived for her just in time. Having a daughter was poetic justice. Through Michel I learned to back off and observe and let her run ahead of me to see where she would lead or come back to take my hand. Being a father taught me humility. I was 30 when Vincent was born and having a son (again we didn’t know until) added balance, harmony, conflict, abrasion and synchronicity. Fathering them reignited my curiosities and fascinations about life. I hope I have reflected well upon them what they taught me to learn.
When I first held Clara my first grandchild she was a few minutes old and I was 53 and I saw in her eyes the vision of the future I wanted to see. Tess was born almost three years later to save Clara from the fate of an only child. My only grandchildren were girls. My daughter’s kids were girls. Clara and Tess lived in Europe for four years and the benefits of visiting them are beyond esteem in my life and have paid me forward in their lives in ways I will try to forever repay. They have lived in Minneapolis over six years and I chronicle here and elsewhere my grandfatherly participation in their family upbringing. Let’s say I’ve had my chances to mess with their heads.
Neko is my son’s daughter, an only child. She will soon be six, a first grader, born when I was 66, already retired and on Medicare. For several reasons she is a special child. I love Clara my firstborn grandchild with a special bond of mutual originality. I love Tess for her eccentric willpower and loving sincerity. I love Neko as my last chance to impart my legacy of love, peace and happiness to the world. Maybe it’s because I am retired and more available to lend child care now than when Clara and Tess were little, or maybe it’s because Roxanne and I live within ten-minute proximity of Vincent and Amelie, and much of it because of pod arrangements getting through the covid-19 pandemic, I have spent more time with a kid her age than any I recall since Michel and Vincent. It’s been strange getting to book club status with the two teenager grandkids and starting over from la-la-la with the third but it’s been fun and funny starting over from the beginning. Okay, maybe I’m not as limber for playing at the park as I was with earlier kids in my care, but I try.
I began this essay musing about finding myself by default the family geezer. This is not a problem. It’s not a cause for lament. Or panic. It’s a fact. I have three namesakes of sorts — my daughter Michel is named for my middle name, and her two daughters share their mother’s name for their middle names — which hardly counts as birthright legacies from a patriarch. The Kelly name from my mother’s clan will likely pass away with Neko, Vincent’s daughter, my six year old granddaughter, who, regardless of whether a marriage changes her name would not likely pass to her children the Kelly surname, if she has any children. Regardless, after Vincent there are no more male Kellys. My brothers Sean and Kevin’s children are all daughters. My nieces and nephews no matter their sex bear their fathers’ surnames except my dead sister Molly’s daughters, whose kids include two boys both with their fathers’ surnames. Two of my sisters are legally Kelly, Leenie and Heather, but all their kids aren’t. My mother’s sisters have not been Kellys since about 1965 and thus none of their kids, my cousins, are nominally Kellys — in a way no wonder they all resented my mom so much. Even at the top of the chain, within a few years of the death of Grandpa Don, Grandma Grace got married and surrendered her Kelly for the surname Cole. I am not the last Kelly, just the oldest living Kelly male.
Forget my father’s side. The Stoner name went extinct with my great grandmother, who lived to be 97 but didn’t pass the surname. Her two daughters married and assumed new names naturally enough. Far as anyone knows, Thomas Stoner, Grandma Stoner’s inept husband was an only child. The Sturgis surname of my father more or less disappeared from the Earth in divorce court when my mother’s petition to rename all her kids Kelly was granted. My grandfather George Sturgis I met only twice I recall, though he lived in Florida well into his deep 80s. It is said Grandpa George (as we kids referred to him when we prayed our God Bless litany before bed) had some brothers but they remained obscure and invisible. There was a Charles Sturgis who my dad referred to as Cousin Chuckie, who established a communications firm of such success he became known as rich and an influential philanthropist, who died recently survived by a brother and a daughter and son named Kevin I’ve never encountered in person or in the press. One time Roxanne and I took a road trip down south of Rochester to Stewartville, roots of the Sturgis and Stoners. Both family farms have passed from the families. At the cemetery we located several gravestones of Sturgises. My dad has two brothers by his mother, who remarried after Grandpa George, but those uncles go by McCormick, live in Indiana and have little to do with us surviving Kellys, they have their own clan to care for.
Without a namesake or coat of arms to rally them in the future I rely on the court of my lady offspring to carry on. They will be more effective than I am. Beyond laissez faire, I’m just plain lazy. I’m not good at organizing picnics. I let things organically fall into place, what will be will be, knowing if human planning and intervention is warranted, the females in my family will make it so. As Shakespeare’s Juliet says, “What’s in a name?”
Little is said about Thomas Kelly, my great grandfather. Grandpa Don Kelly was the youngest of 13, ten of whom were girls. Thomas died when Don was 3. The family had recently moved to East Saint Paul from a small central Minnesota town called Bird Island. Their existence in Bird Island is murky. No property records show any land in their name. Small town talk recalls a Thomas Kelly of dubious reputation likened to a horse thief who was run out of town around the turn of the 20th century. An Irishman who appeared out of the mist who said he was from Ohio married one Kathleen Kelley of Bird Island, Minnesota, apparently worked the local farms, fathered 13 kids and for some reason — if nothing else perhaps the allure of a job with the railroad in the Big Cities — moved his brood to a big old house in a working class settlement on the eastern fringe of St Paul, where he summarily died, we are told, of natural causes.
The true hero of the family saga is the surviving widow Kathleen, for whom my sister Leenie is named, who raised her 13 kids as a matriarchal mastermind. She put the elder kids to work until the younger ones caught up and until the youngest one actually graduated college and attended law school. It was like the family ponzi scheme for the Kelly siblings to support young Don, and by accounts of a couple of sisters who survived him, my mother’s aunts Kitty and Madge, Don used proceeds from his early success as an attorney to provide for their aging mother and generously recompensated those sisters and brothers who helped him get his education. The mother Kathleen passed away in her eighties, when Don was around thirty — yes, Don was a late child, my mom would tell us, and there was the risk that a child born to a woman of 50 was at risk of being retarded, implying the opposite, the child could be a genius. My mom never knew her grandmother, who passed away before Don met Grace, but spoke about her as an icon of motherhood and discipline. I never heard a first person account of what kind of charisma Kathleen Kelly possessed to manage to almost create a dynasty around a patriarch in the person of Donald J Kelly.
That would have been ironic. As it turns out nobody of either sex inherited his mantle, his law firm or commercial real estate portfolio or seats on boards of tech companies. Yes, his widow and daughters inherited a substantial estate, all held in trust until grandma’s death. By then the bank that administered the trust, faithful to grandpa’s impeccable will, preserved the principal assets but left the heirs, my mom and her sisters, no enterprise or company to carry on. This of course liberated each sister to capitalize her assets and establish a brand of her own, which none of them ever did. No matter.
I of little ambition in the first place recognize my place in the great scheme of things, and at my advanced age find myself content in the material world. Don’t infer this confession to mean I’m satisfied with how this world adds up today. I expect better from humanity, but with some familiarity with history I can see a lot of evidence we are getting to be what we can be. Much of my contentment derives from my fortunate material well being, a comfortable middle class American retiree. The rest of my outlook from this comfortable perspective sees progress and opportunities for good, even in view of atrocities, sadness and tragedies. One trend of light that generates my hope is the normality of the influence of women in the course of human events.
The most powerful marketing force the world has ever known is named after an ancient tribe of women warriors. From Princess Diana to Isabel Allende my generation has been shaped by women of our time. We name-drop Harriet Tubman to cite our historical credentials but whether woke or unwoke, DEI or not, liberal civilization depends on the participation of its women to survive in generations beyond the Baby Boom. You don’t need to empower women. They got it already. To try to take it away at this point, to silence the voice of Margaret Atwood, for example, invites what it takes shy of real world Lysistrata conspiracy in retaliation.
Blame Women’s Lib, I don’t care. Today’s world feminacracy will be tomorrow’s best path towards peace and prosperity across the planet. This is a way bigger effin’ deal than drivers licenses in Arabia. If democracies prevail it will take the leadership of women like Ida B Wells and on in America to shunt aside strong man dictators and patriarchal diktats such as ISIS and Taliban. In western democracy women can try and fail just like men, and try again and perhaps prevail at the ballot. Europe and the UK illustrate thus, left and right.
The United States staggers on to elect its first woman President, having muffed the chance in 2016. Kamala Harris exemplifies all I’ve been saying this whole essay.
Retreat to chauvinism at great peril. That’s my advice to wannabe patriarchs today. Like the Ice Queen sings it in the movie, Let It Go. Any superstitious pretense of machismo power will be challenged. You will have daughters. And nieces. Sisters and wives. They will probably be better educated.
So as I get older and older by years, day by day I come to clearly realize I don’t care about my forebears very much any more. I’m interested in my descendants. Almost all of them are female — son Vincent the sole genetical holdout, and his sole child is a girl. If seeing them run loose in this world isn’t vicarious heaven on this earth then I would have no faith to guide my love. I look at both my kids, and their kids, and at Roxanne, and I want to say I couldn’t have planned it better. This is a moment to savor like a summer evening in July around sundown.
Our family is permanent, said Tess. We tend to prove it true.
I usually rise in the morning before sunrise. I can’t help it. I’m done sleeping and my mind awakens to the day. StarTribune and coffee. July morning on the front porch.
From this lucky vantage I can gather a humble wisdom. I can look back and reflect all I want and it all adds up to this, and I’m happy. I’m happy it’s not over. I project new memories, future things. My life will be much like it is, but new things will happen. I’ll see something new. The more you see the more you know the more you see, my son in law Sid recited to me a lifetime ago, which he got from a professor at UM Duluth. For me it keeps adding up.
I’m 72 now and there’s no hip cryptic fancy slogan to go with it like my last one, my Summer of 69. Nothing like 63, That’s Easy to Remember; or Hey, I’m 64; and Gettin’ Kicks on Route 66. The pandemic lost years of ZOZO had no slogans either, which was why my Summer of 69 was supposed to be my butterfly coming out party. Which it was, but for all the unintended lessons from events in and out of my control, a year of death and mourning, reckoning, repentance and self-aware conciliation. It’s funny to get over the pandemic distancing and not feel awkward and vulnerable in crowds. I’m tempted to invoke, Screw You I’m 72, but that would be wrong.
Much as I make a gift of being this old, I can celebrate without claiming entitlement. The universe is indifferent. Getting used to that idea goes a long way to contentment. No use getting cranky and giving the world the finger. I owe a lot of respect to you thousands of readers around the planet who attend my lyceum of the soul and somehow empathize with this middle American baby boomer. It shows me we share common perceptions and aspirations wherever we live on Earth, even if we don’t share exactly the same origins or conclusions. I warned you all from the beginning I wasn’t taking any hemlock.
Angela Davis was a philosophy professor at the University of California Los Angeles from the 1960s. She articulated the entangled issues of civil rights and social justice and got under the skin of then California governor Ronald Reagan. She was an espoused Marxist, and though I reject the abolition of capitalism, I admired Angela Davis for her critical exposure of the truths of underlying corruption within socioeconomic systems that suppress human rights. I named my daughter’s middle name Angela after her, though I tell some people it was after Angela Cartwright, an actress and other cultural icon of the boomer generation, but emphasize it was definitely not after Angela Lansbury.
Angela Davis explored a different passage towards serenity when she said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
We slept in. Even I who usually rose before the sun to take in the newspaper in the foreglow of civil twilight instead this July Saturday slept deep until after seven when nature called. Even so the morning was forgettable except for how easily we lost track of time. The prior three days on the road weren’t like our typical travels. Roxanne and I usually pass through other people’s worlds at our own pace in our own time and mostly at our leisure but this expedition we submitted to not just other people’s worlds but to other people’s preferences — by choice, of course, but still a different modus — and returning home where we left off seemed more foreign. Nowhere to go. Nowhere went. Fresh food in the house. We did laundry. Putzed in the yard and garden. Michigan seems like a dream to me now …
Roxanne touched base with her sister and reached out to our kids that we were back. Safely. No symptoms of covid-19. Vincent texted back right away. Michel not so soon. It was mid-afternoon when she called. Until then Roxanne fretted being ghosted, still a little shy from the hangover of our falling out in Colorado, something she didn’t mention the whole car trip but came up after Vincent touched back via Face Time from their back yard where Koki indulged her kiddie pool and Grandma came away assured life was as normal as when she left it. Reassurance came at last when Michel phoned at just the most opportune time, while Roxanne held her phone in hand and was saying for the second or third time that day, at least I reached out.
I was always confident Michel would call, and when she did I knew it was in her own sweet time, when she spared herself some time to recline and relax and have a good chat with her mom. To my great relief they hit it off again, like old times, and from my perspective hearing Roxanne’s side it sounded perfect. Michel apparently asked about our trip and Roxanne summed up saying things kind about “Dad’s relatives” and being loyal and paying respects. Then Michel talked while Roxanne listened and uttered affirming things and laughed and I admired their rapport. Michel was confiding in her mother again, like old times, and they dawdled in conversation like before the rift at the continental divide. Roxanne relaxed, stretched out on the couch, her body language expressing comfort from realizing the estrangement was ended. I’ve said before, I’ve often envied the unending conversational relationship between mother and daughter, as fraught as it can be. They were close and knew each other very well, and for the moment I walked away concluding life was good, all trespasses forgiven and concluded Roxanne would fill me in later with the synopsis of the day to day details.
Just then Roxanne startled. What’s wrong? she said. I could hear Michel say I’ll call you back.
What’s up? I asked, concerned about the concerned look on Roxanne’s face. I don’t know, she said. She got a call or a text she had to attend to. Said she had to go and she’ll call me back. The first thing we assume is it’s our kids. Clara was on a bus somewhere south of where we came from just yesterday, coming home from the Appalachian church mission camp. Tess was on a weekend camping trip to Whitewater state park with a friend from school and the friend’s parents. So Roxanne recounted. Michel and Sid were enjoying an empty nest Saturday. There was something wrong. Radically wrong in Roxanne’s intuitive estimation.
Michel called back. Roxanne cried out wordless. Oh no, she said and looked me in the eye with tears. Okay, okay she said, is there anything we can do? Okay. Call. Go.
“It’s Erin. They think she might be drowned at a lake by Waconia. They’re performing a search and rescue. Michel and Sid are driving to the scene to meet Natasha. Isaac’s there. They’re boating with a neighbor. That’s it. She’ll call.”
Erin. Isaac and Natasha’s daughter, their elder child, Sid’s niece. Tess’s lifelong best friend, both 13. A good swimmer. A smartass not beyond playing hide and seek. All we could do is speculate and almost will a positive outcome. We waited. Must be some mistake. A misunderstanding. A mixup.
Hope gave to despair when Michel phoned from the lake. Isaac and his friend from the neighborhood each had boats and two kids the same ages and they launched on Lake Minnewashta for the afternoon and found a nice spot to cast some lines and the kids could swim. Between the two boats they connected with a Lilypad, a kind of dock platform made of kevlar for the kids to use as a jumping and diving platform. One minute the four kids were jumping and swimming and the next minute Erin was missing. She was not wearing a life vest.
Sid and Michel arrived at the beach parking lot near the scene of the search area ahead of Natasha, Erin’s mom and Sid’s second elder sister. The lake was only about a twenty minute drive away from the city where Sid and Michel live, whereas Natasha was not coming directly from home, which was a suburb not far at all from Lake Minnewashta, but actually in transit coming back from a girlfriend weekend midweek special up north at a resort at Bay Lake and was being driven directly by a girlfriend. When Natasha arrived at the beach Michel had to go. Roxanne’s squinched face translated the anguish in Michel’s hushed tones. Not optimistic.
We couldn’t imagine Natasha’s state of mind. Or Isaac’s. Michel’s or Sid’s. We didn’t want to believe what was happening. Uselessly helpless we sat by the phone staring out the windows and each other trying to hope the next call would say they found Erin floating exhausted in the reeds (like Moses, I quipped for a twist) and she was being whooshed to hospital and she was believed to be able to make it. Roxanne relayed Michel’s descriptors and they left off unhopeful. Michel recognized Erin’s not wearing a life jacket as her stubborn self-confidence. Roxanne and I began anticipating the search for fault and blame — not that we would judge but somebody else might. A coroner’s inquiry could look for criminal negligence — don’t say that! We were actually looking after guilt measured in other ways. We realized that if the worst proved to come true there would be widespread tremors throughout Erin’s family. This included us. And all we could do for the time being was sit tight and wait for information. We could speculate.
You may ask why didn’t I pray? I may reply that’s what I was doing, in my way. Asking a favor from the Master of the Universe to favor one 13 year old child and her loved ones, special consideration to spare us the pain and grief this time around that all mortal souls encounter someday. Come on Lord, I could say, don’t stop with Lazarus.
When Michel called again she reported the county search team was still diving. Sid’s younger sister Tracy arrived to comfort Natasha, who was understandably freaking out. Isaac and his friend the other dad had been frantically diving in the waters around the boats but now were on the beach monitoring the search from land, requested to stay out of the way of the deputy sheriffs. Tracy came alone. Michel said she was making a point of looking after Nate, Erin’s ten year old brother, who seemed to be lost in the commotion standing next to his dad, still wearing his lifejacket, not knowing what to do. Stacy said to Michel she planned to take Nate to her place for the night to give Natasha and Isaac time alone and connect Nate with his cousins, her sons Cisco and Lucas for consolation.
Michel was on the phone with Roxanne on yet another call when they found Erin’s body and brought her to the beach. They said later she was in about thirteen feet of water. She was pronounced dead. Isaac and Natasha identified her. There were no apparent bruises or signs of trauma. Deputies kept the crowd away and she was covered by a sheet on a gurney and rode off in a county ambulance. No siren. I could hear the heartbreak in Michel’s voice. Roxanne and I began to cry. Michel had to go be with Sid and his sisters.
She called back within the half hour. She and Sid were on the road towards Whitewater state park, about a three hour drive, to find Tess at the school friend’s campsite. Michel said they didn’t know how they would tell her about Erin. This was going to about kill her.
Foolishly I volunteered to tell her, which was absurd: no way her parents would delegate such a role. But there was only so much nothing I could do, and if there were anything a good grandfather would do I would face dear Tess and break her heart bearing the news her best friend and cousin drowned. I did not want to be the one to first tell her but I compulsively volunteered because I was willing to accept the pain. No need to explain, Michel didn’t comment. She and Sid were on their way to Whitewater and didn’t think they would make it by sunset. Roxanne suggested they could get assistance from the park service or the state police to locate Tess at the campsite once they reached the campground — there was probably a website with a phone number.
Was there anything we could do? Michel said we might get a call from Clara. Sid reached out to his eldest sister Valerie, who was aboard the missionary bus as an adult chaperone at the camp. One of her sons, Clara’s cousin Carlos was also at the camp and riding the bus. Sid and Michel called Clara directly while her aunt Valeria stood by. It was hard for Clara to deal with it from long distance, being in transit far away from her parents. They knew she needed someone to talk to at home so they suggested she call me and Roxanne from the motel where the group would be staying overnight in Normal, Illinois.
Except Sid en route with Michel to Whitewater, and Valeria in the church camp bus, the Kysylyczyns planned to gather at Norb and Gloria’s. Isaac needed to see his parents and sisters. Everybody needed to absorb the shock. Tracy had Nate, who would be with cousins Cisco and Lucas. How were Norb and Gloria? How can anybody be doing okay right now… Michel needed to make other calls and spend time with Sid. This was not the time to break confidences or talk out of school or lose anybody’s heads but a time of terrible grief, individual and shared and she and Sid needed time to be alone, to talk to Clara and to confront and compose what they would tell Tess.
When we left off with Michel that sunny evening we expected it might be the last we might hear from her that night. Roxanne and I were frozen in place and couldn’t hold still at the same time. It had been about four hours since something was wrong. The conversations with our daughter weren’t lengthy except the sobbing and sorrow. I could imagine stoic Sid at the wheel. We learned the basic facts and the story’s ultimate conclusion, but how Erin happened to drown, and why — everybody’s inevitable question — was unknown. Maybe unknowable. For Roxanne and me the shock and disbelief wasn’t mitigated by being in-laws. We knew Erin since she was a baby. We half expected her to ride with Sid, Michell, Clara and Tess to Colorado. She was Tess’s best best best friend. Forever. The four years they were in Switzerland you could almost say we saw more of Erin through Norb and Gloria than we saw Clara and Tess in person. Almost. Just a week ago Erin called me her third grandpa.
We watched the six o’clock news and only one local station ran a brief breaking story about the search but identified nobody by name, just a thirteen year old girl. In this day and age, Roxanne observed, it’s a wonder Tess hasn’t found out already on her own.
I remember the day my Grandpa Kelly died. I was seven going on eight. It was summer, August, and everybody was Up the Lake. A Friday. All three of my mom’s sisters, including my widowed aunt Margaret and her two sons, and my future Uncle Bill who was going steady with Aunt Donna, and my youngest aunt Renie, around thirteen then and accompanied by her best friend Tuny. Grandma’s cook and maid Rosie was there. My mom and my workaholic dad were there, and sister Kerry was the baby. Everybody was there except Grandma and Grandpa Kelly, who were due by cocktail hour, the cheese and crackers and salami time before dinner. When Grandma and Grandpa didn’t show by mid-afternoon my mom and Margaret started getting anxious, I could tell — early on I learned my mother was a moody soul. Grandpa was supposed to leave work by noon and pick up Grandma and hit the road for the three hour drive to Eaglewood.
Up the Lake at Grandpa’s cabin on Bay Lake came with two distinct conditions: no TV and no telephone. Radio and record players were inevitable, but even though the console in the main living room had a TV it couldn’t get so much as a ghost of a signal on any of the thirteen nominal channels, and an antenna wasn’t considered worth it, not in 1958. The ban my grandfather imposed against the telephone was his conscious renunciation of the imposition of the outside world by means of technology upon his private life and family, so there was no land line, not even with an unlisted and unpublished number connecting the Kelly family to the outside world. How quaint that seems today in the age of obiquity and the cell phone, but when I was a little kid it seemed perfectly fine for Grandpa Kelly not to need a telephone at Bay Lake, even with a household of teenage girls.
The Friday he was overdue my mom talked my dad into taking the boat across the channel to Hansen’s store to use the pay phone to call Grandpa’s house or his office to find out what was going on. I rode along. Hansen’s carried comic books and I had some dimes in case a new Batman was on the rack, or a Superman. I browsed while Dad used the phone. Before I could give the rack a full rotation or ask for a Dreamsicle Dad swept me out of the store and across the road to the dock and back into Grandpa’s speedboat, cast off and gone. All he said on the way was, Son, we gotta go.
Dad said nothing all the way back through the channel and across the bay all the way to the cabin. He was holding something bad back that he had to save to tell Mom first. He left me to tie up the boat and ran to the cabin. By the time I got there the people were in chaos, especially my mom. We were all told to pack for home. Grandpa had a heart attack and may not live through the night.
I remember it was raining on the ride home. Usually a three hour drive to the Twin Cities, it seemed double. Mom was saying the rosary in tears, my sisters Leeny and Bernadette cried and prayed along, little Molly and baby Kerry just cred, and I kept wondering if this was all real. Then the cops pulled us over somewhere after Anoka, red lights and siren. A highway patrol officer escorted my mom and dad to a second car where Aunt Margaret got out and hugged my mom and told her Grandpa was dead.
You knew! She screamed at my dad. You bastard, you knew all along.
That day changed my life. Not the first death in the family I remember but the first profound passing of resounding significance. It affected me in such a way that a few years later when JFK was assassinated I felt prepared for it, I had already gone through widespread and universal mourning for a legendary figure. Before that, when I was about four my Aunt Margaret’s husband who was an Air Force fighter jet test pilot crashed his plane, and I remember it was a closed casket and they gave him a twenty-one gun salute at Fort Snelling.
My dad knew on the phone at Hansen’s store Grandpa Kelly had a fatal cardiac arrest at his law office on the fourth floor of the Midland Bank building and was pronounced dead at the scene. Of all the things my mother held against my father in their life, my mother never forgave him for lying that my grandpa was still clinging to life, that he didn’t have the guts to tell her he was dead. I’m not sure my father was ever sorry or recognized that it would make any difference, the end was the same to him. All these years later I have to side with my mom, Dad was chicken.
Roxanne called Vincent. Since she did not Face Time I did not feel obliged to crowd alongside Roxanne to be in the picture. She called on the phone to speak privately with him and not be overheard by his child. I made my presence felt as a background voice. It was almost as well it wasn’t Face Time because I could hear the heartbreak on his face as he gasped and choked while his mother told him the story of what happened to Erin.
“We’re calling to tell you something bad,” Roxanne said to our son at the outset after hello. ”You probably want to hear this in private.”
Vincent listened to what his sister had told us. One of his first questions must have been what about Tess because Roxanne explained that Michel and Sid hadn’t told her yet and were as they spoke driving down to Whitewater state park to tell her and bring her home. Vincent must have commented how far it was to Whitewater. Roxanne said she had no first person contact (with whomever, likely Sid’s family, Erin’s mom and dad — Vincent, Amalie and little Neko knew Sid’s family, especially Erin) only that she heard from Michel that it was presumed the family would gather at Norb and Gloria’s. Cause of death yet undetermined. She was underwater about three hours. No visible trauma. Yes, an excellent swimmer. No. No lifejacket. (Back to the family) nobody knows yet (when the funeral will be) because they don’t know when the coroner will release the body. (He asked what county) Dad doesn’t know. Could be Dakota, could be Carver, probably too far for Hennepin. I expect (an autopsy). No, no there’s no suspicion of foul play — why would you think that? I know, we’re as blown away as you. You want answers, and hopefully it will all come out. Nobody is talking about it yet but everybody seems to think she had an epileptics seizure.
That was my theory. She was diagnosed with epilepsy with a history of seizures. Everybody knew. She was on medication and her condition didn’t attract much attention any more since she was diagnosed at seven or eight and because the frequency and severity of her episodes diminished to near zero on her meds. She playyed her heart out at soccer, got good grades, swam and dived in her grandparents’ pool, romped at water parks, fished with her dad and lived a perfectly un-handicapped normal life. I could see her resisting wearing the life jacket while playing in the water between the two moored boats because she wasn’t doing cannonballs she wanted to make elegant deep dives and the jacket would be too buoyant to let her go deep. She was an excellent swimmer. Her dad was there. Her brother. The neighbors. With all the cocky confidence in the world she did a pencil dive or maybe a back flip and didn’t come back up. Under water and for what ever reason she had an epileptic seizure. Her automatic, involuntary nervous system kicked in and she inhaled the lake.
My theory.
Roxanne was still commiserating with our son when my phone purred and it was Clara. Hola, I said. Ich liebe dich. Grandpa Kelly, she said, I don’t have any idea what is going on. How is this happening? How am I supposed to be here in this random hotel motel in the middle of nowhere in a town called Normal when nothing is normal anymore. Why Erin? I don’t see how it could happen. Granpa Kelly can you tell me why on earth this happened.
I have no conclusive answers, baby. I’m sorry. I’m sad like you. And shocked. Not fully accepting the truth and the facts. I’m so sorry, Sparkles. I can’t imagine how much this hurts for you.
And poor Tess. She still doesn’t know. I feel so apart. Right now I’m alone, it’s like nobody wants to be in a room with me.
Probably to give you privacy. Where’s Valeria? And Carlos?
They’re together. For a while she was working with some of the church people to get us on an overnight car rental to get us home quicker but they talked her into a night here in Illinois and an early ride home the rest of the way tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Sunday, right? I wish I were home.
Where’s Coretta? (Clara’s eldest cousin, Valeria’s daughter.) She stayed behind at MountainTOP to participate one more week and then she’ll drive home. All by herself? With a couple other counselors from her church. That’s probably changed. I haven’t talked to her yet but she and Val and Carlos are being in touch, along with Grandma Gloria. Have you talked to Grandma Gloria? No, not yet. It’s early yet, and I’m sure she’s got a lot going on. She knows I’m here. I wish you were here too, but you’re not. Know that there is no explanation for what happened that will ever make it easy to say goodbye to Erin like this. Remember the words of your sister Tess, our family is permanent We’ll get each other through this together
We have to, Granpa, because there’s no other way, just take it from me, I feel so alone, and it bothers me the name of this town is Normal. Nothing and nowhere is normal right now.
History lesson. (Really Granpa?) The town is named for its founding feature, that being the location of an ambitiously big state teachers college: back in the olden days teachers colleges were all called normals. Thus they named a town after the campus of the state’s biggest. Just think of all the kids in Illinois who were schooled by teachers who studied there. Do you want to spend four years of college there? No. Where then? Vermont. They have a physical therapy program. My dad and I plan to check it out.
Sobbing silences functioned to comfort us between the unsayable sadness and powerless passion. I let the silences go unfilled. I learned that saying nothing was better than saying stupid things that made no sense.
Ultimately the topic came around to coming home, being home with everybody and anybody connected to Erin. What’s Grandma doing? She’s here. Talking to Vincent on the phone. How are they doing? Just like us. Bad but talking it out. Consolation will take time. You really aren’t alone, Clarabella. A lot of us loved Erin. It will be everybody together to get through this. And we will. You expect to be home by tomorrow night? Hopefully. They’re saying dinnertime. America is a lot bigger than it looks. So true. I’ll let you go now, I love you Granpa. My love to Granma. I’m going out to check in with Val and Carlo. I think there’s going to be a prayer circle. I love you too and you can call me back if you want to talk some more. Or not talk. See you when I see you.
Back to just me and Roxanne. Being on call. Waiting for cues. Who should we tell? We should wait until we knew more. There would be no rush for a quick funeral, and how could anybody plan until the county authorities release the body. Here she was, Erin, the body. In custody. Her sacred remains subject of public inquiry into the cause of death. A young teenage girl innocently pursuing happiness dies for no good reason. We think. The medical examiner, coroner, whoever makes these judgments will decide the cause and Erin’s corpse will go to the funeral home of the family’s choice to be dressed for the funeral as much as maybe a week away — who at this juncture was thinking ahead that far? Who would step up to organize the plan? Sid maybe.
It was hard for us to sit around and stand by. It would have been wrong to crash the gathering at the Kysylyczyn’s uninvited. Our liaison to Sid’s family was Michel and whatever Michel delegated to us was whatever our role, until or unless otherwise appropriate. We realized we would probably be left out of the inner circle and might have to improvise our role in the milieu. No matter, we were far from outcasts and foresaw ourselves preoccupied with Erin in our familial tremblors for the foreseeable future. This was a horrible, terrible big deal.
It made the ten o’clock news on at least two of the local channels. No names were released and the facts matched Michel’s account. On one newscast they also reported about the Aquatennial fireworks display over Nicollet Island and Roxanne and sighed at having missed it and hissed at how TV couldn’t do the pyrotechnics justice even in this age of HD. It was funny how a thirty second story about Erin on TV equaled almost eight hours (what used to amount to a work day) of real time almost exclusively seizing our attention. What else happened that day?
It would be difficult to sleep but we went to bed anyway, talking in the dark. All we could say was you never know. We were exhausted from our road trip and now the blindside emotion over Erin and in a familiar summer embrace of caresses of good night made of fresh meaning we dozed asleep. Roxanne’s phone went off well after midnight. It was Michel saying they were home safe. They found Tess’s campsite with help from a state trooper and a park ranger.
Roxanne listened silently in the dark as Michel spoke in a virtual whisper. They were only connected a minute or so when Roxanne expressed her sorrow and said good night and they would talk tomorrow.
How’s Tess? I asked.
She said, “I’ll never be happy again.”
Chapter 19
I kept thinking about Neil Young’s song about Keep On Rocking in the Free World, the lines about a kid who never got to go to school, never got to fall in love, never got to be cool, and it seemed so inappropriate to equate the passing of young teenage Erin Peterson with the poor baby dumped in the song, but the chorus refrain rang true, we keep on rocking in the free world. In the real world.
The Carver County authorities wasted no time certifying Erin’s death as accidental drowning. There was no evidence of trauma or foul play, or negligence for that matter. The question of her epilepsy playing a role could not be addressed by any autopsy, and so can never be answered but remains my private theory as well as the subject of speculation among anybody searching for a cause for the accident. Fault was another matter which the authorities offered no opinion but some of those who searched for a cause looked closer to blame, and among the family the civil guilt accrued like usury and secret debts.
I couldn’t figure whether to take Tess’s summation that she would never be happy again as an expression of existential despair or as an oath.
That first night it was hard to sleep with this on my mind and I’ve pondered it ever since. Those first days it was permissible to spend hours in a room alone weeping because that was how some people grieved. A common phrase that year was everybody grieves in their own way, and so a variety of entitled precedents were set for protocols dealing with loved ones among the Kysylyczyn family, some quite understandable. Natasha, Erin’s mom, withdrew into total isolation at her home the first two days and then only received company a few minutes at a time. Isaac watched over her in solemn rectitude, guarding his wife’s remaining sanity until she could get enough grip to reach out past the crushing walls of her pain to allow others to enjoin her to share the pain all around. Natasha had a hard time with that, Michel reported, because she blamed herself as the cause of Erin’s death and thus the pain shared by all. In a while Isaac, who carried a load of guilt of his own, persuaded Natasha to come to the living room to visit with Tracy, then Val and Sid and eventually her parents, but that week she didn’t leave the house except to dealing with the funeral and did not go to Norb and Gloria’s even though that was where the rest of her family convened to form the plans for Erin’s funeral. Plans were finalized at Nat and Isaac’s house.
The neighborhood Washburn McReavy would make the arrangements. The visitation — what we used to call the wake — would be held that Thursday evening at the mortuary’s chapel at Dawn Valley, a cemetery in wooded west Bloomington not far from Bush Lake and near where Erin lived and went to school. The funeral would be held Friday at 11 am after an hour visitation at the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, a grand old gothic classic turn of the 20th Century mansion of holiness located at the fringe of downtown Minneapolis. A procession would form at the church after the service to convey Erin to interment at a plot back at Dawn Valley Cemetery in west Bloomington. An obituary would be published in the StarTribune but it was too late to make the Sunday paper, obviously.
I called my sister Murray in case she saw it on the news, which she had but didn’t connect it to our Erin. She knew Erin, or mostly of Erin through family mingling through the years. She was horrified and deeply sad. I didn’t feel like calling anybody else so she said she would pass the word. Kerry would want to know. Macushla. Maybe Heather. Hannah. Jeff (her ex husband) of course. Norton (her son) didn’t know her, or brother Kevin, but she would pass it on just the same because they would feel sympathy. She asked about the Kysylyczyns and I said I didn’t have much to tell, I hadn’t seen them yet but as she could imagine the reports were grim. There was no candy coating any of this.
We had just returned from John McCormick’s funeral in Indiana and death was too top of mind. Murray mentioned our mother’s axiom that deaths come in threes and I said, stop! I mean it, she said, already once a widow herself (before Jeff, her ex), it could be me, or you. Hug your kids.
Roxanne after a restrained interval called Gloria on Sunday and they talked a few minutes. Norb was having a hard time, she said. She herself felt wretched and numb hearted like she was stabbed but couldn’t die because she had to be there strong for her kids and grandkids. Natasha was a mess, to be expected, and poor Nate was practically orphaned, staying with Tracy and the boys. She couldn’t imagine what Ike was going through, And the Aragons (Valeria’s family). Valeria was due back at the Woodbury church on the mission bus later that afternoon and the family was gathering at her and Norb’s house to plan. At the time Gloria expected the county to release Erin to the mortuary later that afternoon. It was all too terrible to fathom. Her sister Janet and husband Larry arrived that morning from Winona. She had to go. Somebody else called on the land line. Roxanne described Gloria’s voice as calm emotional chaos. As expected we were not invited to participate in the planning sessions to come.
Which left us with spare time to commiserate on our own. We put it out there through Michel and to Gloria we were on call and available to help out in any way to support everybody to get through this, but other than Michel who relied on phone relief with her mother nobody took us up. So we fell in line, monitored the grapevine and anticipated the wake and the funeral. Keep on rockin’ in the free world.
The extent of the effect of this calamity blew my mind in ways never tested before and I decided it was good that I was not in charge of anything to do with managing any of the proceedings like funeral arrangements or the official obituary or testimonials, much less to convene all the tides of grieving personalities around any common theme that was free of guilt and recrimination. Those who knew Erin best needed to be in charge. I felt a need to stand back and stand by, stay out of the way, lay in the weeds and see how things unfold and be available in case there was anything at any given minute I could do or say to help. I learned from talking to Clara on the phone how powerless I was to save the day, much less to offer the right words of assurance to make everything okay. If I felt short of my expectation of myself to rise up heroically and explain away everybody’s pain I could only imagine the failure others felt for falling short of coping with their own feelings being exposed so raw.
No one who knew Erin would ever concede she was gone to a better place. Even those who believed she went to heaven would admit in earthly terms Erin lived a bountiful life. Smart. Cute. Athletic. Popular. By every measure Erin enjoyed success at life. If maybe she could be accused of being spoiled it wasn’t by guile or deceit, though I always suspected her of being a subtle, clever con sometimes she seemed to have transparently innocent motives, and it wasn’t her fault she belonged to a privileged class and benefitted accordingly. From the get-go Erin’s fate diverges from the baby in the dumpster in Neil Young’s song, and I feel like apologizing for thinking of them congruently. Neil Young’s forgotten child who never got to grow up lost out on love and respect from their first breath and Erin was a cherished person from the day she was born, though both died before fulfilling potential except maybe Erin fulfilled as much as a lot of thirteen year olds — whatever means potential. Erin’s tragedy is its irony. We all looked at it as a murder. As bad as an abduction or random bullet or victim of a drunk driver. The truth was just as hard to accept. Accidental drowning. A beautiful life cut short for no good reason. She wasn’t sick or suffering. She wasn’t a victim. She was a superstar. In some ways she was in heaven already, there was no reason to be in any better place. The most people of faith could agree was that God took her too soon. But why?
God’s Plan was sure to come up in the coming days. God’s own inscrutable Plan which plain souls like you and me are not privy to because God doesn’t need to confide in you and me. And if you can’t figure it out you aren’t alone because great theoretical theologists throughout time have spent centuries of thought trying to figure out God and in the end defer to the faith that it’s far too complicated for mere humans to understand. To say she was taken too soon presumes our selfish human timeline, by the way. Why did God let it happen? What is the lesson here?
I don’t speak for God. I don’t think anybody does or can. I think it’s the wrong way to look at the world, second guessing a god. Second guessing basic human morals. Following doctrines and creeds leading to absurd conclusions based on inscrutable myths. I can’t endorse the conventional explanation of what happens now to Erin’s soul, so it’s best for me to be quiet about my dissociative relationship with religion and my fascinating admiration for its symbols and respect for its place in human culture and history.
It seemed imperative Erin rest in peace in the most peaceful and peaceable ways possible, and it was gratifying to get reports from Michel through Roxanne nobody in the family was going shitfaced loony at Gloria’s camp and by and large the committee of siblings and Gloria’s sister composed a neat obituary for the newspaper once the mortuary and church were scheduled, which of course needed to be agreed by Natasha and Isaac. The take-away food flowed between Apple Valley and west Bloomington — Olive Garden in aluminum pans and so on. Gloria never skimped on catered meals.
Natasha was eating but not much. Michel saw her at her house and confirmed she looked a mess, but what would you expect? She was calling herself a bad mom. She didn’t take the epilepsy serious enough. She didn’t relate a recent recurrence of seizures that might be related to puberty. Erin had an appointment with the doctor but not for another half a month, before school starts. Natasha says she should have paid closer attention, should have pushed harder to see the doctor sooner, been with her at the boat on the platform on the lake and watching her dive. The spiral always leads to spasms of sobs. She doesn’t want to hear she’s a good mom. It doesn’t get through. She’s convinced she’s a fraud. It’s sad. She needs help but so far she isn’t seeing anybody, as if one day she expects to get up and all this will fall into place and make some kind of sense and she can go back to work and live some kind of life with Ike and Nate. But right now she feels like she doesn’t deserve to get over this.
The kids and the cousins were collecting icons and photos for a tribute collage at the mortuary visitation. Clara and Tess were charged to pick out the dress for Erin in the casket. It would be the purple one. It was her favorite color. It was a dress she borrowed frequently from Clara to wear to church. The kids weren’t holding back they weren’t taking it well but at least since Sunday night they were together, since Clara came home.
The choice of a suburban mortuary and cemetery was based on neighboring proximity to the family home but the choice of a church in downtown Minneapolis to hold the funeral was entirely based on Erin’s joining up with that congregation about the same time as Michel and Sid and their kids after repatriating back from Europe. They church shopped Minneapolis and nearby suburbs for a congregation where they felt they might fit, preferably Methodist because that was the faith Sid was raised from Gloria’s parents. They found the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church to their liking for its purposeful mission doing good in the city and attraction to the pastors who led the congregation. Sid, Michel, Clara and Tess became members. Erin spent enough Saturday night sleepovers at their house to attend church services with them on Sundays to join too. She went to Sunday school with Clara and Tess. They sang in the young voices choir. Along with Tess she played the hand bells. It seemed a common ploy to get me to attend church by luring me to see the kids sing, read liturgy and play hand bells. Sid was already baptized Methodist as a child but Roxanne and I attended the service the day Michel, Clara, Tess and Erin got baptized into the faith, full members.
The pandemic radically changed the dynamics of church congregations. The grand hiatus of live in-person congregated worship services relieved me of having to attend such things in person since the kids didn’t perform — nobody did. Services were still conducted via the livestream channel the church operated on the internet only without a choir or congregation or hand bell ringers, so I would not bother to tune in just to hear some readings and a sermon no matter how eloquent or pertinent the theme. I had to hand it to the pastors at this church for their sincere enthusiasm for their mission to inspire people to do good in the world.
There is a large stone plaque in the common entry to the church framing a quote attributed to John Wesley, founder of the Methodist religion in the 1730s:
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
Before Angela joined the Hennepin Avenue church I knew little more than John Wesley’s name. I didn’t know John Wesley from John Wesley Harding. This quote piqued my interest. As long as I hung around I couldn’t help but analyze the institution in light of those words, and in short I came to conclude that this particular congregation functioned as best humanly possible to genuinely minister to its community. Of course it preached the gospels to the believers and the faithful but didn’t oversell salvation and didn’t condescend to fears or insecurities to engage people in the stories from the sanctuary. The services featured lovely music from the choir of dedicated singers and young voices like Clara, Tess and Erin, sometimes a brass ensemble, sometimes strings and piano, hand bells, a pipe organ of regional fame, and for the music alone it was worthwhile to sit through the inevitable worship words I didn’t believe (and in an earlier phase of life would have ridiculed) except now I accept and respect religions as choices people make to seek ultimate answers. This church emphasized seeking.
I was accustomed to seeing churches try to seize control over peoples’ lives, not setting them free. This congregation propagated hopes and dreams, not fear and loathings.
Michel was impressed from her first Sunday visit, when the theme was the parable of the Good Samaritan. She later told me the way the pastor told the story evoked in her such empathy for the victim she almost wept when the Samaritan stepped up. Samaritans, she reminded me, were considered low class in their society, almost lepers. The story got to her. This impressed me. I had about eighteen years of serious Roman Catholic education and someone had to take a deep dive into the Bible or the church canon to cite stories I was unaware of, and this is a commonly known parable of Jesus. That it came upp prominently in my daughter’s search for faith opened me up to paying closer attention to her character and inner life. She never received religious training growing up. Her secular life resulted in a healthy moral personality, and now as an adult she wanted some faith as a force of rescue, doing good. She had it pretty well in this life, and it impressed me that she wanted to better herself through channeling energy into doing goodness.
I deliberately avoided churches and religions when my kids were growing up. Michel’s mother-in-law Gloria was shocked and almost outraged when I admitted at one of her pool parties that Michel and Vincent were never baptized, not even Catholic. I said it was important not to commit them to any creed and to give them the freedom to discover and to choose for themselves as free agents. In that same conversation Gloria got me to admit I’m a nonbeliever, and we’re still friends. Obviously I behave myself in other peoples’ churches.
The Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church is located in the heart of Minneapolis, near Loring Park at the foot of the downtown. The 19th Century was rather kind to Minneapolis, founded in 1855, before Minnesota was a state, and by the turn of the 1900s the flour and timber milling along the Mississippi drove immense prosperity drawing immigrant populations from Europe, and congregations of the wealthy families who lived in beautiful mansions in the hills overlooking the emergent city established lavish European knockoff gothic and romanesque cathedrals of every popular denomination. The Methodist church is a beauty with its spire and vaulted walls and stained glass windows and when the music takes hold it’s nice to peruse the icons in the colorful windows where Jesus is in heaven and the arches reach high above the nave and the sanctuary is lined with fine woodwork. The pews are cushioned. The balconies are suspended effortlessly. It’s obvious the building has been cared for without hesitation. Its clean limestone understates the building’s size. Additions were constructed seamlessly to connect its campus. It’s obvious there are people of deep pockets watching over this church the past hundred or so years, but the average people in the Sunday crowds are mostly just that — average.
The city itself changed in the 20th Century. In my lifetime the rich old moneyed families moved away from the city and gradually new money bought the mansions on the hill and around the Lake of the Isles. Jesus told us the poor was always with us, and that may have been true about the community in the multi-housing apartment tracts around the edges of downtown all along. My Grandpa Kelly was a landlord in that neighborhood. A few luxury condo high rises have gone up to replace tenements around Loring Park, but the residents of most blocks surrounding these mini-cathedrals are low income. When they come to church they want to be accepted as average.
What I learned quickly was how earnestly Michel’s church engaged the neighborhood without preaching about it. They sponsored immigrants. Referred the homeless to shelters. Fed the hungry. Counseled the lost. Hosted seminars, workshops and social groups at meeting places within the campus. Supported BIPOC minorities and the LGBTQA. All were welcome. They were woke and diverse, inclusive and equitable in a humble and conservative way, with a focus on optimism and hope against the acknowledged perceptions of nihilism and despair in this world.
Lead Pastor Judy Zabel embodied the soul of the congregation. She had a contemporary preaching style and brought to her sermons something deeper than Christian talking points and greater than rote theology by posing questions to the meaning of the teachings. In her sermons she seemed to be still pondering what she composed for that week, exemplifying the unfinished dynamics of soul searching and relying on faith in the Holy Spirit to guide the way.
One particular Sunday Roxanne and I were there with Michel when the theme was Matthew’s gospel accounts of what Jesus said about hypocrites. ”Like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean… So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others… When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret. Your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Pastor Judy’s sermon resounded with Michel, Clara and Sid (Tess and Erin were busy in the east balcony getting ready for an interlude of hand bells) and Roxanne and me so profoundly we talked about it through Sunday breakfast at Curran’s and the topic kept coming up as recently as our vacation in Colorado, the acts of doing good for performative reasons to get credit and glory, even if in a passive aggressive way. The Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church existed as the nexus of good, giving, visibility and hypocrisy. Donor names on plates defined spaces on the campus, hinting at the sources of the impeccable upkeep the organization has to finance and sustain. It is no small endeavor and the church spire stands up to proclaim its existence proudly in the skyline next to the park. They otherwise do not advertise what wonderful people they are.
At Halloween they sponsored (until pandemic) an event called Trunk or Treat. On a Sunday afternoon in late October volunteers parked their cars in the church parking lot, opened their boots and decorated the trunks with scary stuff and gave out candy to neighborhood kids. I helped Michel, who favored puffy spiders, give out candy every year along with her girls, Erin and Roxanne. I would take warm breaks in the building and sip hot apple cider and visit the church’s gallery of European religious paintings from the 1300s through the late 1800s. All are exquisite and priceless pieces by unknown and obscure painters. My usual favorite for gazing is a tall canvas by a French artist named Albert Matignon titled Bread of Love. It reminds me of the style of Jules Breton. It tells the legend of St Elizabeth, Princess of Hungary ca. 1227, famed for defying the aristocracy by smuggling bread to the poor.
Most of the rest of the paintings in the gallery depict events in the life of Jesus, including sweet nativity renderings from medieval Flanders and northern Italy. Besides this discreet gallery, the church hangs and displays religious themed contemporary paintings, prints and figurine sculpture throughout the public spaces outside the sanctuary. Inside the sanctuary the stained glass. However all this is curated, I like the collection and realize there is an elite trusteeship behind the scenes who symbolize the power and responsibilities required in an ongoing basis to sustain the organization, do good and be true to a commitment to not be hypocrites.
The church’s stated mission is clear and simple, to make disciples of Jesus to transform the world. Their stated vision is to grow love of God and neighbor, welcome new people and heal a broken world. That’s pretty straight up to me, no hidden agenda. Then they post the church’s statement of practices: Radical Hospitality, Passionate Worship, Intentional Faith Development, Risk-Taking Mission & Service and Extravagant Generosity. It’s that last one that convinced me this outfit just might be for real. All the other practices seemed boilerplate enough, even the oddball Risk-Taking Mission & Service (ampersand included) but Extravagant Generosity, that is something of a practice that is abnormally virtuous and hard to conceal.
By the time covid-19 and conditions of emergency shutdown stopped all congregated church services indoors and there was no more reason for me to attend I all but forgot about them. Michel sent text reminders about their streaming Sunday stripped-down services but without the kids as performers and readers all the good in the world didn’t draw my attention and I didn’t really miss it. Michel’s belonging to that church seemed like a good choice — for her. Her search for faith I could take seriously without patronizing her or cynically criticizing spirituality, if she would just trust me to accept she can form her own spiritual thing with God without me having to approve or join the club too. There may be member perks but with perks come responsibilities and loyalties I don’t care for. I expected eventually Trunk or Treat would come back and I would help give out Tootsie-Rolls and Skittles to all the low income kids in superhero costumes once again.
Pastor Judy used to dress in a long black robe for Halloween, her gray hair tied back in a bun, a white lace collar around the throat of her robe, playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I expected to hear one day the confirmation classes would resume for Tess and Erin, and only a matter of time until the emergency would be lifted and gradually Pastor Judy would reconvene the crowds again, masks encouraged, and music would return, the kids participating, Sid serving as usher, Michel inviting us to attend the fifth anniversary of the hearing of the Good Samaritan and afterwards downstairs in the cafeteria there will be brunch, and either that, Confirmation Day or Christmas Eve would suck me back to church, even a good church like this one.
Never anticipated being rushed back for a funeral, and never Erin’s. And yet this was Erin’s church. Perfect sense. Sunday school and young voices choir with Clara and Tess. Hand bells. The Walker Art Center across Hennepin Avenue collaborated with the church to sponsor a mini-golf tournament on an artist designed course in a section of the sculpture garden. Erin won the inaugural tournament that prior year, awarded a faux bronze plastic life-sized portrait bust of John Wesley as a traveling trophy (every thirteen year old girl’s dream, right?). Everybody knew Erin. Erin came to Trunk or Treat. Pastor Judy knew Erin.
Michel related to Roxanne how she and Sid spoke to Pastor Judy on behalf of Natasha and Isaac to ask if Hennepin Avenue Methodist would please conduct the funeral for Erin and without hesitation Pastor Judy said yes, even if she wasn’t sure exactly how to put together the logistics and comply with the existing covid-19 emergency, she would make it happen. Thus the funeral was scheduled for Friday, the mourning visitation for Thursday, and the obituary published in the daily newspaper and social media. The mortuary would handle the logistics and coordinate the transportation from Bloomington to downtown and back to the cemetery. Natasha agreed to leave her house with Isaac to meet with Pastor Judy and her staff at the church Tuesday morning to plan the liturgy and music for the funeral. Michel, Sid and Valeria would attend the meeting, and Michel reported later what an ordeal it was to penetrate the fog of grief to get Natasha to pay attention and make decisions without breaking down and freaking out. Michel worried she would never find closure.
The obituary was composed by Gloria’s sister Janet with input from Valeria, Sid, Tracy, Michel, Clara, Norb and Gloria and met with approval from Isaac and Natasha. Before I even read a copy I felt myself wishing to get the funeral overwith. The limbo of inertia for me only postponed what I hoped would occur, a crescendo of consensus for what positive insight this event could possibly give and let us all get on with the catharsis.
Chapter 20
Death and its vocabulary get a lot of synonyms and euphemisms in our language. People meet their demise and pass away. Croak. Kick the bucket. Succumb. Leave us too soon. Get called back to God and meet their maker. Expire. You can go on.
Meaning no disrespect to Erin or her entire family — until I read her obituary I didn’t realize she had 16 cousins, until then not taking account that Isaac had four sisters — I wanted to rush through all the grief stages in one day and go straight to acceptance. Serenity. Erin was dead. There was no bringing her back. The waiting period before the wake between Saturday and Thursday seemed too long to say good bye. It was longer than our whole road trip to Indiana and Michigan.
I thought I’d had enough of death ruminations saying hail and farewell to John McCormick. I had it all figured out from my Summer of 69 perspective, even if I barely had thirteen hours at home to reflect upon my reflections on my ruminations when a whole new death happened. It was enough to behave appropriately when a grandfather figure passed away, salute him and entomb him with honors and lifetime achievement eulogies. This was death from the grandfather’s perspective of a child.
There was ironically no comparison. John lived to be 97. Beloved by all. Decorated by the military. Accomplished his dreams, far as he made known. Nobody expressed regrets at having known him. Nobody said he left too soon or seemed overly sad to see him go. Because he had lived such a full and rich life there was no reason to feel sorry for his loss because he had everything and everybody has to die eventually.
Erin was a child, her whole proverbial life ahead. A whole lot of life to be had to get to be 100, which was how old her own great-grandmother, Gloria’s mother lived. Erin was barely getting started. 13. That’s all. That’s the end of her story. Never got past middle school, no high school, no college. None of any of that stuff. Experiences. Accomplishments. Accolades. Some say she was on track towards such things in academics and athletics. She was popular at school and played on a top level soccer team in the Bloomington Athletic Association. She got good grades. She had a nice family, supportive and nurturing. Her parents were educated professionals, whose parents in turn were educated professionals, so Erin’s exposure to education was a no brainer. The kid had unlimited potential to do well in a long life that offers nobody guarantees. Sorry but all that potential is a guessing game of speculation that cannot be measured anymore, all slanted and tainted by everybody’s subjective perspective. Our projected hopes and dreams. We all wished the best. We’ll never really know. She’ll never grow up, get old. Outlive me.
She did not die of a drug overdose. Not a car crash or a bullet. She did not succumb to a terrible disease, not even covid-19. She was not abused, abducted or abandoned. Her house was not burned down. She was not hit by a firebomb or guided missile. Erin did not commit suicide.
She had epilepsy. It’s a brain condition of neurological activity like brain spasms or electrical eruptions that cause seizures to a person over a range of severity. About 2.4 million people in America have it, about 1.2% of the population, about 200,000 new patients diagnosed every year. About 65 million are epileptic worldwide. Erin was diagnosed by age 8. She did not have any shaking type symptoms like twitching. Hers were absence seizures marked by brief loss of awareness lasting several to several dozen seconds — spacing out. Petit mal. She told Clara and Tess sometimes she would get a feeling coming on, called an aura, and then it was over. She was open about discussing her condition, though she preferred not to be the object of medical curiosity. She was being treated by a neurologist and taking medication. The seizures were tapering off and did not disrupt her normal life. For some people the condidtion intensifies with aging. For others it may even go away by itself. Michel noted that for Erin the seizures took on some frequency with the onset of puberty, coinciding with the timing of her period. That development prompted Natasha and Isaac to schedule a check-up with the neurologist in the month before school started, but nobody thought it was a development of any urgency, least of all Erin.
The idea that they all guessed wrong spread panic throughout the family, even though these was no direct evidence that epilepsy played any role in the drowning. Without any prompting from me it was everybody’s best guess, however, and Natasha suffered the worst for guilt for not doing enough to pay closer attention to the potential harm — Erin was at least two years from worrying whether she could qualify for a drivers license. Erin was otherwise living la dolce vita. Maybe it was too much sugar. A full autopsy was not required and there is no known way to detect brain activity post mortem. No signs of trauma to her head, face or anywhere on her body. She drowned.
That she was not wearing a life jacket will always be a bone of contention. According to the law she was not required. The boats were anchored, not in transit. They were close to shore. Erin was an accomplished athlete and considered an excellent swimmer — I’ve watched her play soccer and learn to swim in Norb and Gloria’s pool — and all it took was one moment of inattention and she was lost like a three year old in the woods hauled off by a jackal.
The death of a child is an unimaginable loss and the cause of deep and abiding grief no one else can imagine or comprehend. By any means and by every possible misfortune, whether a prolonged suffering illness or famine or sudden as an electric shock or a bomb, when children precede their parents they leave an indescribable hole where an emerging person is supposed to be, and that carries over in waves to everyone who knows. It’s not the same as an elder passing with revered accolades and memories and maybe some scandalous asides and confabulated histories. A child is frozen in time, unfinished people in progress, a living dream of what can be, a missing companionship that was supposed to be a lifelong certain presence evolving through life who isn’t there any more to give nurture and unconditional love. Or to love back.
So I have been told, and so I have observed.
It hits hard. They keep saying each person grieves in their own way. So true. Grieving and appreciating death aren’t the same thing. Erin’s drowning evoked in me a deep sadness she was dead but provoked a need to accept the finality and get to the part about sharing the communal grief ceremonies and putting out a common perspective that Erin was gone and we all would somehow have to carry on. I concede it was easier for me to play the tough guy, a third-string grandpa in law at best in Erin’s pantheon, but as a whole in my life I have come uncomfortably close to death to accept it as one of those things. Nobody escapes. Someday Erin would eventually die. We don’t like that she died at age 13.
My dad Dick Sturgis used to say, none of us gets out of here alive. Whether he nicked that line off Jim Morrison of the Doors or some minds think alike, it’s a basic truth. My dad died when he was just barely 61 as if to prove his point in a similar fashion as Morrison. My mom died of a heart attack some fifteen years later in an emergency room in Colorado Springs. Speaking of heart attacks, there was Grandpa Kelly when I was eight, which upended my future but I survived. My earliest memory of someone who died and had a funeral where everybody cried was my uncle Bill, my mom’s sister Margaret’s husband the Air Force fighter jet test pilot who crashed when I was about four.
My youngest death of a peer was in sixth grade when Michael Gageby died of a ruptured appendix. I was just getting to know the guy. He was a new kid who joined our class that year with Mrs Dobmeyer at St Simon of Cyrene. Kind of a well dressed dandy, he wore Beatle boots and his blond wavy hair in a pompadour, Buddy Holly glasses, and braces on his teeth. He took a razzing from the school hoods and gave back pretty well. Turned out he took guitar lessons and had an electric Fender guitar — picked Guitar Boogie for me the one time I visited his house just a little while before he died. We hung out at the record shop sometimes. The Saturday before the Sunday he got sick we met up at the Southdale mall to hang out, check out the merchandise and follow groups of girls. On Monday our class was informed that Gageby was in the hospital for a ruptured appendix and we prayed for him. Seemed he complained of stomach pain on the bus ride to the St Simon of Cyrene part of town where we departed after Southdale, but who would have guessed appendicitis? Somebody had to explain it. Everybody in class wrote him cards at the hospital on Monday. Tuesday Sister Aquinas the principal came to our class to tell us Gageby had died of sepsis. The funeral was at the St Simon of Cyrene parish church. I and some of the guys we hung out with at Southdale were asked to be pallbearers. I remember how stricken his parents were, Mr and Mrs Gageby, clung to each other as if under an umbrella in a storm, their eyes anguished with grief. They were a relatively older couple, pushing 50. They thanked me for being Mike’s friend. He was adopted as a little boy. They had just relocated to the Twin Cities that year from suburban Chicago. We would have been approaching 13.
My sister Molly died at home hospice in Lead, South Dakota in a bone chilling January just over ten years prior to Erin. She had esophageal cancer made worse by alcoholism and I was able to visit her at hospice before she died. Among her last words to me were, You ought to come around here more often. She died while Roxanne and I were in Mexico.
A little over a year after our mom died my sister Murray’s husband Don died of melanoma in a hospital just a week after being diagnosed. It had spread to his liver before anyone knew. Being widowed so suddenly hit Morgan hard but the family rallied for her and over time she met a new guy and remarried.
Roxanne’s sister Cindy’s husband John went to bed New Year’s Eve and died in his sleep seven years ago, 2014 at age 64, convincing me to retire at 62 and not waste the rest of my life working if I didn’t really need to.
Somewhere before and after Cindy’s husband John, her and Roxanne’s parents both died, first their father in hospice care, then their mother in hospital for sudden acute kidney failure.
All these people except Molly I attended their funerals. I should add in Aunt Winnie’s and just the week before John McCormick. Other than these I guess I’ve been pretty lucky avoiding funerals. The longer I live, the more opportunities will emerge. One day the bell will toll for me.
Until Erin I managed to procrastinate serious anticipation of my own mortality, even if I told myself I accepted it long ago. As one accustomed to depression I certainly contemplated death at one time or other throughout my conscious life. I thought about suicide because it happens. I never wanted to do it because I never wanted to be dead. However bad or sad I felt I never wanted to be dead. Dead was dead. No more. No mas. There was no reconsideration and another chance. At about adolescence in my life, about the age when I recollect my depressions first made me self-conscious about feeling them, I entertained my first doubts about my religion — not just questions but serious doubt. In the years to follow, my adulthood, middle age, as an elder my early doubts evolved into cynicism, agnosticism, atheism and pantheism, paganism and borderline blasphemist infidel when it comes to my conflicts and coexistence with spirituality. Early on I rejected living with the prospect of Judgment Day and I posited that even if God exists it would be counterproductive to require every soul to have to believe the whole myth of Jesus just to get to heaven if God really loved everybody equal. If there were such thing as eternal life, then why wouldn’t God in infinite grace and mercy grant perpetual life to us all and let the secular world judge our civic conduct in this world.
None of my philosophical leanings or variations of theme searches ever answered what happens to us after we die. I am inclined to assume the worst, that is we completely cease to exist, there is no afterlife. Sorry. That’s the main reason I don’t want to be dead. I would rather it doesn’t end. Would I like to believe there is more? Of course. I would love to believe in an immortal soul made of consciousness and eternal energy that resonates throughout the universe, one with nature and physics. That would to me be a bonus, going to heaven. That’s the best I hope for, and how I have described my idea of the afterlife when discussing it with people I would prefer not to bum out and alienate by suggesting death was dead and that’s all she wrote.
After all, I could be wrong. With all the tides of afterlife rushing around Erin it seemed most prudent to go with the flow and be prepared to console everybody on their own terms of perpetual light and eternal life, and yet I could not escape into others’ grief enough to deny my own time was running out and I still wasn’t done. No, I could be done any day now. As my sister Murray’s current ex-husband Jeff said, it’s the fourth quarter. I had all the qualities of an elder’s life summarized in a five minute eulogy, and for all my life, all my years of experience, nobody will miss my consciousness and memories more than I will. Death is not a better place.
It’s sad to think of a eulogy for a thirteen year old kid. Winner of the Walker Art Center Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church first annual miniature golf tournament. Honor student at STEM courses in middle school (science, technology, engineering and math). Soccer star — aggressive midfielder. Loyal friend and companion to my grandchildren, Clara and Tess. Best friend in the world to Tess. Doting grandchild. Beloved daughter. Favorite among cousins. Adorable niece. Fixture among family. At 13 she was already a kind of institution.
The year Clara and Tess returned from Switzerland they created an online exclusive family magazine they called the Tessclara Monthly. They published photos from their iPhones and articles cribbed from social media such as a tiger attending prom in Florida or a man-made forest in Singapore, fun facts such as the average human brain when awake generates enough electricity to power a light bulb, and weird recipes under Tess’s Tasty Treats for concoctions like Spaghetter made of spaghetti, ice cream, cinnamon, sugar and whipped cream. The feature story each issue was Cousin of the Month. In June 2018 they profiled Erin.
“Every family has the cool kid,” either Clara or Tess wrote, their collaborative written style hard to distinguish. ”In the Kysylyczyn family that’s Erin Peterson. This multi talented ten year old goes to school, plays soccer, sings and does gymnastics. We have this interview with (let’s face it, EVERYONE’S favorite) Erin Peterson.”
Remember I described her as a little wiseass? Here is the text from June 2018:
Q:Erin, what do you think makes make people like you so much?
A: I’m talkative and I’m a good conversationalist.
How do you pull off your hairstyle so well?
I take good care of my hair, my mom helps and I get my haircut every few months.
What are your hobbies?
Soccer, drawing, reading, playing outside, and being awesome.
What makes you so cool?
I was born like this.
Do you think that you are the favorite?
Yes.
Who is your favorite cousin?
Tess.
How is your brother?
Bad.
What is your style?
Erin style.
Why do you think that you deserve to be the cousin of the month?
Because it’s me and I’m awesome.
What is something that no-one knows about you?
I talk to myself when I go to sleep.
So, even if Grandma [Gloria] won’t admit it, Erin is (and always will be) the favorite in all of our hearts. ”Erin is such a great person.” – Tess “Erin is really spunky and has a great style.“
Verbatim.
After a few more editions the Tessclara Monthly ceased production. Maybe they ran out of cousins who would cooperate with an interview — some of the younger boy cousins like Erin’s bad brother Nate were more inclined to be the anti-cousin of the month. School started. Maybe they moved on to other media such as TikTok. I downloaded and printed every issue.
June 2018 Erin was ten. Tess too. Clara pushing 13. What a happy trinity. Blessed. Last seen all together the 4th of July at Norb and Gloria’s pool party, diving after dive stick treasures with Coretta and the boy cousins on the deep end. Last saw Erin with Tess at the splash pool waterslide aquatic center in St Louis Park where they gave Neko lessons how to swim and dive under water, the day she called me her third grandpa. Reading back in Clara and Tess’s journal I can seem to always see Erin being there almost automatically, yet I hardly really knew her that well, even though for a while it seemed she spent more time at Michel and Sid’s than at home. I simply ignored her half the time, took her for granted and sometimes looked after her suspiciously but didn’t truly bond with her until that day at the water park with Neko, and I can’t say I knew Erin that well on an eye to eye basis. Rereading her profile in the Tessclara Monthly I can’t say I was ever that enthralled and awestruck but I realized how taken with her my grand daughters were, especially Tess. My skepticism of Erin as a little con artist arose from her milking my generosity for bomb pops and Dairy Queen, after soccer games and a dose of Dippin Dots at Mall of America, but sometimes I would fret for Tess that Tess was putting more into their relationship than she got back from Erin. Now I was really worried.
When Michel and Sid moved with the kids to Switzerland Tess and Erin each got necklaces with half amulets that fit together as a whole when pieced together, so much Tess missed Erin while she was away. After four years they were reunited. Five years after that, separated forever.
I had one more thing to live for, to somehow comfort Tess in her irreconcilable, inconsolable grief. I didn’t know if I could ever do that, an old geezer grandfather, I was learning, has very little influence over the feelings of teenagers. I had to hope I could try, or at least be ready with a clean handkerchief, a genuine embrace, a look of heartfelt compassion, and the presence of mind to say something wise and true to help her mind find a pathway to heal her broken heart, if ever I got the chance.
Michel was having a tough enough time. Besides supporting her own children Tess and Clara and mediating among the Kysylyczyns in their commiserations as they coordinated with the funeral home, the church and each other to plan the details of the Celebration of Life and Resurrection. The stress on the individuals coming to grips in their own minds and trying to extend support to one another not secure in their own grief was spreading paranoid vibes. Michel was hearing that Natasha resented Michel for stealing her daughter away and alienating her from enjoying mother-daughter time together. Michel said to Roxanne she knew that was a crock of bullshit and at first blew it off as more of Natasha’s emotional implosion, but now it was starting to get to her as a sign Natasha wasn’t trying to get better, just looking for more ways to escape self-blame. Michel said she felt Natasha was shunning her and her girls to shut out resentment by disassociating from people who meant the most to Erin besides her. In some ways nobody would blame Natasha for wanting to keep Erin’s memory private to herself for a while but Michel criticized the practice of sequestering Erin’s relationships and it was starting to be a trend, not talking about Erin any more because it made other people walk away and cry. Michel said Gloria was getting to be the same way, isolating from and exiting conversations about Erin because it hurt so bad.
Being respectful and minding a reasonable tradition not to speak ill of the dead I kept mute about my perception of the emerging blame game among various family to assume or assign fault for what happened to Erin. It seemed clear to me what happened to Erin was Erin’s fault. I didn’t want to invite arguments or incite anybody to call me out for blaming the victim. It was sad, bloody damn sad, a terrible, tragic accident. Whether acting all daredevil fancy shmantzy or just a simple pencil dive off the lilypad feet first, Erin chose to go into the lake. No mistake, jumping in the lake was intentional. All the kids were doing it, albeit the other three wore lifejackets, but we all know Erin was an expert swimmer and diver. She had arrogant self-confidence and decided she would dive without a jacket. To Erin’s own best judgment there was no risk in what she was doing. She knew what she was doing. Everybody trusted her. She wanted to dive in the lake. She dived into the lake. For whatever reason, by some unknown means, Erin inhaled the lake water and died. The last part was certainly unintentional — an unintended consequence of an act of choice, and that’s why it was an accident. But it was Erin’s fault.
That they could not find her soon enough down underwater only started the tsunami waves of tectonic faults and seismic tremblors caused by Erin’s drowning. I wasn’t sure somewhere out there Erin wasn’t reveling in the attention.
My son Vincent was concerned for his niece Tess. His best friend Trevor was killed two years before in a high speed head-on car crash with a wrong way driver on an interstate freeway west of Phoenix, Arizona. Vincent and Trevor were friends since grade school. Went through South High together. Remained tight into adulthood while Vincent went to university and Trevor served as a band roadie, sound technician and sideman guitarist before producing two excellent albums for Southside Desire, his singer-songwriter wife Marvel Devitt’s band in which he also played bass. People remembered him as a dedicated guy who, when he wasn’t playing a gig would be stage managing or working the sound at a local club or else home taking care of his and Marvel’s kids. He was cutting back his sound gigs at First Ave, the Turf Club and the Nomad to spend more time with Southside Desire. This was supposed to be his last roadie trip, driving an indie duo from the UK called Her’s on their first US tour. They had just left their penultimate gig in Phoenix, so it was past midnight and one can imagine their euphoria if the gig went well. A day or two before, to celebrate Trevor’s birthday they took a day trip to see Grand Canyon, all for the first time. Leaving Phoenix they got a jump on their final leg of the tour to LA, their last performance before flying home. The whole Twin Cities music scene openly broke down and cried. My son was overcome.
He had a hard time attending the memorials. His grief was too personal to share with a scene beyond his wife Amalie and some other close personal friends, Roxanne and me, so he kept it private and for quite a while trusted us not to bring up Trevor he missed him so much. At Vincent and Amalie’s wedding Trevor was the best man. Eventually Vincent brought up Trevor. The Southside Desire drummer Damian was another friend from school and he kept coming around. Vincent and Amalie had Neko and when he and I got together over the kid Vincent began remembering Trevor out loud, sometimes criticizing his faults mismanaging money, usually praising his talents as a good dad and caretaker of other musicians’ kids and as a musician and sound man. They texted daily. He confessed he was having the hardest time facing Marvel, Trevor’s widow, for some reason, but he was working it out
What he most missed from Trevor was that in all the world Trevor was his Go To Guy. His brother. There was no closer human being except Amalie. He expected they would grow old together. Between his gaping absence and the horror of how he died, Vincent sometimes talked himself into tears about Trevor, and I listened. I didn’t know what to say and usually said nothing, just listened. I saw it as a good sign when he commented how ironic it was, a band from the UK was killed by a driver coming the other way on the left side of the road in America.
When we got together during Erin we talked around her when Neko was around because he and Amalie hadn’t told the three year old Erin was dead, so we talked figuratively about Trevor. I didn’t know Trevor that well, maybe as well as I knew Erin, by reputation mostly. I liked him and I respected the close relationship he had with my son. Like I knew Erin the best through what she meant to Tess. Vincent knew his niece Tess well. He favored her since babyhood because like him she was a second sibling, almost three years junior to her elder sibling. Vincent expressed worry for Tess’s state of mind more than anything because if Erin reminded him this much of Trevor then Tess must be going through a hell of unprepared rupture of the universe. We wouldn’t see her until Thursday at the wake — the visitation, the obituary called it.
Memorials preferred to Epilepsy Foundation or Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.
Somebody inevitably would start a scholarship fund. Valeria was already in charge. No GoFundMe page however. And of course there was no way to sue the lake for wrongful death.
When my father in law Roxanne’s dad realized in his relatively demented mind that he was dying he said to me, There ought to be a law. I knew he meant a law against dying and I was all in favor. He didn’t want to die. I didn’t blame him. I also didn’t bother to counsel him that there already was a law, Natural law, which says we all die.
When my ancient Aunt Winnie used to bitch and moan about still being alive I was offended that she seemed to regard life as cheap and was wasting it by wishing it away. Her life, of course. She was lonely, eyesight gone and shunted by her son, my cousin Ronnie, who likely bilked her of every asset she owned just to keep her in a cheap nursing home, so she had some kind of right to have a pissy attitude, but it seemed if she was considered by my family to be one of the wisest of our elders then I expected more creative hope from her endeavors to survive at her advanced age. For somebody who would rather die she lived a long time.
Old people who die get a kind word in emeritus told to a past generation. Memoriums to young people are expected to keep their memories going through the lifetime of their own generation of survivors but somehow into the future too. Either way only the living can remember. Even if Erin’s dying remains senseless and meaningless it will always be remembered. How she will be remembered was taking shape behind all the scenes and would blend together the obvious themes. Why she will be remembered is the real reason we all grieved her loss that last week of July 2021.
Chapter 21
The news that week reported Simone Biles withdrew from further Team USA competition in gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics, citing mental health reasons. The House select committee to investigate the riot and insurrection at the nation’s Capitol January 6th held its first public hearing with testimony from four police officers injured on duty by rioters who stampeded Congress to stop the certification of the election of Joe Biden and sought to lynch Vice president Mike Pence on behalf of President Donald Trump. Our governor and state health commissioner reminded Minnesotans that the state of emergency still existed over the covid-19 pandemic, and though severe restrictions of behavior had been loosened, the spread of the new delta variant was being detected in wastewater testing and hospitalizations were again on the rise, so citizens were urged too keep observing precautions. Meantime fentanyl overdoses killed more people at local homeless camps. All the while north western wildfires vented haze over our sky.
Under such a copper tinted sky we drove to Bloomington for Erin’s wake. Thanks to a navigation app we easily found the mortuary at the focal center of a tidy cemetery in the woods not far from Bush Lake and Hyland Hills. The building a one story modern tan brick and demi chalet like a 1980s church without denomination, as institutionally neutral as a conservative government agency and moreso than a medical clinic. The tiny two or three blocks of land around the building all had flat gravestones, easy to mow. Some of the lawn was open grass. The cemetery wasn’t very ancient at all. The parking was scarce. A line of people extended down the sidewalk to the parking lot from the entrance to the building where small groups gathered outdoors in the evening light. We joined the line at the end. It moved along quickly.
It rather blew me away seeing so many people, lots of kids and their parents, a big turnout for Erin. We encountered Sid’s sister Tracy’s sons Cisco and Lucas with Erin’s brother Nate dressed up in button up shirts and pressed pants more or less chasing each other around the lawn outside the building, looking grim and still needing to burn that preteen energy. We asked them how they were doing and they shrugged and looked grimmer. We asked Nate about his parents. “They’re sad,” he said. “My mom cries all the time.”
At about forty yards from the door we were spotted by our own niece Macushla, daughter of my late sister Molly, who ducked into the building and emerged in a few seconds coming toward us and motioning us to cut the line, Michel’s orders, we were family. So we exchanged the hugs with Macushla and followed her inside to an open lobby where my sister Murray and her ex-husband Jeff were talking with Molly’s other daughter Hannah, and there was Michel, the first we’d seen her since before John McCormick’s funeral in Fort Wayne.
If there are certain times when you take deep pride in your child this was one for me. Never have I seen her more elegant and sincere. Always known for her beauty, there was an appropriate glow about her this evening, even with eyes of sorrow. Again here was my future hope, my daughter, my girl in a subtle purple and gray green dress and greeting her family with tragic truth, never prettier and never denying the reason for all this occasion truly sucked.
We embraced and patted each others backs and shoulders and shared tears and straightened up. Sid was nearby and hugged us. Clara came from the viewing chapel and hugged us. She offered to escort us to Erin, and she walked us into the intimate little room where the coffin displayed Erin in a purply flowery dress. Tess was in the room, off to the side so as not to obstruct the procession coming through from outside. In a way Roxanne and I and Clara were against the flow, but nobody minded. I approached Tess and called her by my nickname for her, Kitty. She hugged me tightly and said nothing.
Erin was dead. Looked dead. Kind of purple. Her favorite color. Seeing her bloodless corpse did exactly what an open casket review is supposed to do, confirm to every witness that the deceased is really dead. It’s important to human nature to be sure someone is truly dead, there is no mistake. Even when we most want there to be a mistake, our seeing is believing. Her face was peaceful. A soft purple sleep. Nothing contrived by the mortician made me feel less sad to look at her this last time. It was worth one last look though. I needed to be sure it was really Erin. Not that I doubted what I’d been told or gone into denial — you all know me by now — but seeing her corpse at the very end of her life was my means to teach myself that hers was not a trivial loss. The line out along the sidewalk forming the procession to view her body and say good bye said to the world Erin left a grievous hole.
Her BAA soccer team wore their uniforms, pink and purple. The rest of the kids in civvies probably schoolmates, neighbors, the church choir. I recognized faces from Michel’s church, not surprised. Away from the viewing room and into the deep lobby the adult crowd mingled towards the cafeteria tables and chairs set sparsely to a quiet room where a comfort dog named Gideon with baggy flesh accepted being stroked and petted by sad kids of all ages. Gideon’s sponsors gave away stuffed toy Gideons the size of beany babies to anyone who wanted to take one home. At the outer lobby the procession past the flowers to Erin’s casket entered back into the open lobby to a gallery of photo collages of Erin pictured in Kodacolor and black and white at every age with scads of cousins and other kids and grandparents and her dad’s family, sports teams and choirs and Sid’s family, past birthdays and pastimes on excursions with Clara and Tess.
When Clara escorted us back to the lobby when we were ready after viewing the body she said it was a dress of hers Erin wore in the casket, her favorite dress to borrow for church if she stayed overnight on Saturday.
So what did Clara think of Simone Biles withdrawing from competition at the Olympics? She was justified, she answered. Well being takes precedence over career. Suni Lee stepped up, another gymnast on the team, who came from St Paul by the way, and Team USA won gold. If Simone Biles says she needs time away from gymnastics to devote to her mental health, she should be taken at her word.
She left us in the crowd nearest the photo collages to go back in the reviewing room to look after her sister. Pale and ghostly, dark circles under her eyes emoting moats of sleepless sadness, Tess looked like a goth waif without makeup or jewelry. In a simple gray green dress with pale purple short sleeves she stood vigil over her best friend cousin and wept silently among the sprays of flowers. I wanted to go back in there with Clara to comfort her in her vigil but refrained because Tess needed these moments to herself, something Clara respected and kept her vigil over her sister and cousin friend at a distance, and Tess didn’t need over-attention from a well-meaning consoler and grandfather calling her Kitty, even me, not at this time. She knew she was not alone in her grief but for this time she needed to be alone.
Out there in the lobby where people signed the guest book it was astonishing to me to see so so many of my Kelly family mingling around with Michel and Sid and Sid’s family. I didn’t know why I was surprised by my family’s turnout except most of them barely knew the Kysylyczyns, or Erin, so I thought. So I was proud to see my clan supporting Roxanne’s and my extended family. Not far behind us, Vincent and Amelie showed up, got queued to the top of the line via Macushla who was lingering among talkers outdoors on the lawn, and soon mixed among the mourners, Kelly and Kysylyczyn alike.
First I found Isaac, Erin’s dad, straight and tall in an elegant gray suit, almost steely military, engaging guests. We embraced and I asked how he was. “I’m in robot mode,” he answered. I said something about not losing his humanity, and he said, “Never.”
The line to meet Isaac was never ending so I moved on. Natasha, Erin’s mom, was nowhere in sight, which didn’t surprise me from the reports I’d heard about her seclusiveness. Norbert and Gloria, Erin’s Kysylyczyn grandparents were not hard to find halfway deep towards the Gideon area, also steeped in sympathizers and mourners. We embraced on sight and consoled each other amid fresh tears. Nobody knew what to say. Words could not express the dumbfounded feelings about what happened and why it happened and what it meant to lose Erin.
No answers.
Erin’s other grandparents, Isaac’s parents Ernie and Bernie took up the rest of the lobby and vestibule by crowd density and virtue of Isaac’s five sisters, their spouses and children, Erin’s Peterson cousins, several of whom hung around in the quiet back room petting Gideon. We knew the parents, Ernie and Bernie from Norb and Gloria’s annual 4th of July pool parties. Ernie was typically stoic, a model man of emotionless ceremonial duty to act with impeccable dignity, and Bernie (Bert her friends called her) held herself bravely showing example to her daughters and grandkids and standing by her men, Ernie and Isaac, her frail eyes behind her granny glasses squinched with perpetual pain. All us elders looked twenty years older since July 4th but no one more than Isaac’s parents. None of his sisters or their kids participated in any of Norb and Gloria’s pool parties and we only met them once at Isaac and Natasha’s wedding, so it seemed extreme to acknowledge the breadth of Isaac’s family beyond himself and maybe once a year Ernie and Bert.
Isaac was a software engineer of considerable skill. The only boy of six kids he grew up Catholic in the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. He liked fishing and camping and boating. Erin liked to fish with him. He liked to travel into Canada to fish lakes in Manitoba. Sometimes he brought along Tracy’s husband Joe Jones, who also liked fishing and camping. It was impressive to see Isaac’s Peterson family — Isaac nominally the only Peterson among his siblings, the others married and living under married names — there supporting him for Erin. Everyone looked grim. Ernie and Bert set the tone. This was not a night to celebrate a damn thing.
It wasn’t a night to get chummy. We found Tracy and Natasha with Valeria and Ted Aragon and their kids in the cafeteria tables area within sight of Gideon. I pocketed a stuffed Gideon for Neko. The kids we exchanged nods but among Sid’s sisters each embrace was embraced, and with Natasha it was like a handshake and a half. Tracy is an affectionate hugger. Valeria less so. Valeria’s husband Ted will hug Norb, but not Sid or me or Joe or Isaac, we’re all fist bumpers and handshakers. Gloria’s sister Janet was there and her husband Larry — of course. Norb’s two sisters and their husbands were there from Chicago. John and Sara Aragon, Ted’s dad and step-mom were there, glum and speechless along with his step-father Jim and mother Sandy. My sisters Heather and Kerry along with Morgan and her ex-husband Jeff and Kerry’s current husband Patrick, my nieces Macushla and Hannah, daughters of my dead sister Molly, both my kids and two granddaughters plus Amelie were there, but not Neko. Nobody had told the three year old Erin was dead.
So Roxanne and I circulated among the mourners exchanging hugs, fist bumps and handshakes as appropriate, but no high fives. As usual I tried to elicit comments by just listening but the silences drowned out any voices summoned by the shock. Erin’s older cousins walked among the elders mum and stern. A few people wore masks — not many considering the size of the crowd indoors in the air conditioning so soon after the lifting of covid restrictions — which concealed their face expressions except for their eyes, which ranged from glazed to furious with squinty gazes in between. Anybody who smiled required a reason related to hope.
Outdoors on the lawn the crowd thinned out and there was no more line to go inside. Tracy and Joe’s boys Cisco and Lucas cavorted lamely trying to entice cousin Nate to lighten up but Nate moped under the watchful eye of Joe. Several years ago I wrote about toy guns and in the story I described a girl with glee shooting her younger brother in Gloria’s pool with a Super Soaker water rifle and the brother crying, “Not in the face! Not in the face!” That little brother was Nate. The glee inspired shooter sister was Erin.
The kids on the lawn needed a ball to kick around. People hung out as they exited, giving the long Irish good bye even though they would meet again tomorrow for the funeral. The sun hung low between the trees in the copper sky.
I went back in to see Erin one more time before we’d go. Tess was still in there, nearer to the casket but still not alone, deferring space to those like me who visited for one last stare, yet never alone, a cousin or her sister at her back. In this instance me at her side. She tilted her head to my shoulder and I slanted my head to rest on her head. She wore french braids. There was nothing to say. She was getting tall. Way bigger than the little girl I perched on my shoulders at the Louvre to see Mona Lisa. Older now than the little girl who wrote in a Christmas card to her mother Michel, “Our family is permanent.” So much older and wiser than the young lady who declared just five days ago, “I’ll never be happy again.”
She straightened herself and made eye contact and deliberately tried to smile at me but the tears gushed hard and I gave her my spare clean white hanky. I put my arm around her shoulders and we gazed at Erin, blond and trying to look serene in Clara’s purple flowered dress, too obviously not content or even resigned to be dead. This whole elegant scene was wrong. It should not be happening, and everyone and especially Tess knew it. The look on Erin’s embalmed face said Erin knew it. Tess had placed in Erin’s folded hands the gold chain necklace Tess wore the whole time she lived in Switzerland, which was half a medallion, the other half on a necklace around Erin’s neck in the casket. Tess’s unfathomable pain from this unthinkable separation drenched her in a bottomless lake of sorrow she could not surface, chained as she was to a wrecked relationship as out of control as Erin’s drowning.
Michel approached to whisper that the morticians would be closing the casket soon. Tess asked for a few more minutes in private. Michel lingered at the doorway while Clara walked me out to the lobby by the collages, suddenly chatty, telling about the troves of photos she and the Kysylyczyns sorted through, printing several through Walgreens same-day service. She talked about choosing the music for tomorrow’s church service, assuring me I would like their choices. The cousins composed something as a statement of remembrance, which Coretta Aragon the eldest cousin would read. Clara was nervous how the funeral would go but trusted everyone involved would do their part, for Erin.
Isaac and Natasha were given notice of a final chance to view her alone before they closed up for the night and everyone in the lobby and the vestibule parted a way for them to proceed into the viewing chapel as Tess and Michel exited. Outdoors again as night began to fall into golden twilight I observed the clearing of the crowd and said good night to my sisters and nieces. Murray quipped again how we had to stop meeting like this at funerals. There was no reason for Roxanne and me to hang around late. The Kysylyczyns and the Petersons lingered for obvious reasons but Roxanne and I weren’t technically close family, and even Gloria didn’t invite us to join their commiseration, which didn’t bother us per se although we felt cut off from Michel, Sid, Clara and Tess. Otherwise we felt relieved to get away with no other responsibility than to show up again at the church the next day and again back at this cemetery to lay Erin in her grave. We were extras in the crowd scene. Friends of family. Nobody wanted to hear me complain how she always suckered me for a frozen treat on a stick after every park board soccer game those summers when she and Tess were in gradeschool because she was with Tess and knew I would pay — of course I would pay. Who would begrudge a kid a bomb pop after a soccer match?
In the collage Erin and Tess posed in team uniforms, at least three different years, 4th, 5th, 6th grade. Tess fresh back from Switzerland to southwest Minneapolis. Erin spending almost half her life it seemed bunking at Tess and Clara’s, joining their church and playing park board soccer at that massive set of pitches arrayed across that park near Diamond Lake. A guy always parked his ice cream truck along Portland Ave and that’s where Erin got her bomb pops and Tess and Grandma and I got dreamsicles. Erin kept playing soccer past the Minneapolis park board program and joined the Bloomington Athletic Association and from all accounts got pretty good at a competitive level — not surprising, though I hadn’t watched her play in at least two years. Tess stopped soccer after park board and also stopped competitive swimming and concentrated on gymnastics, where we attended meets watching her and Clara compete among gymnastic clubs across the state, my and Roxanne’s extent following our grandkids sports. Only lately they took up diving, which they could practice with Erin at Norb and Gloria’s pool, which had a deep end and a one meter diving board. Just that summer Tess attended a diving camp while Erin had soccer camp. The harmony and convergence of their lives deserved a better braid.
My heart broke for Tess. My Kitty. There was nobody in this world whose love I found harder to earn than her. Seemed she disliked me the night she was born and I held her at the hospital and she squirmed at me as if I arrived late for the occasion. She used to cry when I was put in charge of watching her. One year when she was about two Roxanne and I visited them when they used to live in Woodbury, before Switzerland, and we had just come home from our vacation to Mexico and brought Clara and Tess little trinket toys from there. Clara got a butterfly and Tess a ladybug. Tess didn’t like it and told me to “Get out of my house!” She kept saying it, crying, “Get out of my house!” Michel and Sid were embarrassed, Roxanne bewildered and Tess adamant. I was completely blown away. We left.
As she got older Tess and I gradually made friends. It seemed Clara and I hit it off at first sight the day she was born, and that may have been something Tess sensed from birth, being second. If I sensed this I compensated as best I could without conceding favor to Clara.
A breakthrough with Tess occurred on a family trip to Venice, Italy. Roxanne and I timed our spring visit to Switzerland to coincide with Clara’s school choir making a trip to Venice to sing at the Basilica San Marco. Clara traveled with the choir and the rest of us rented a condo for the weekend with a canal view. It was Roxanne’s and my first visit to the venerable city. It was also our first visit with Sid and Michel’s family to anywhere without Clara. Tess stepped up for her absent older sister to escort us through the city and entertain us as our official grandchild guide. Tess had already been to Venice once before and wanted us to feel secure navigating such a strange place of no streets but corridors and bridges tying together an island city of canals, which at the age of six or seven she assured us we had nothing to be afraid of, we would never get lost no matter how intimidating the passageways and open campos might seem there was a logic to it and she sometimes held our hands accompanying us to places like the Rialto bridge and the grand Piazza and the Bridge of Sighs to be sure she made us feel included and welcome to this interesting place of boats but no cars.
She had me convinced she really knew the place when she led me to a green space grassy park where she practiced cartwheels and round-offs, her early gymnastics exercises. She wore a blue dress and an opera mask that day. For the first time in her life I felt she was going out of her way to be nice to me, and I have felt with her a sense of privilege ever since. She sang for us the Skye Boat Song — twice, once for me and Roxanne when we first settled into the condo, and once more when Vincent and Amelie joined the vacation the second day — Tess and her gusto voce rendition of the Scottish ballad about Bonnie Prince Charlie’s escape, which she learned at school. That weekend Tess took over from Clara so Clara could travel with the school choir and not think twice about me and Grandma Roxanne. Tess proved she could entertain and enlighten us as least as well as her sister could at her age and I was impressed that she showed she cared that much about me.
A few years ago she and I were talking about how we didn’t hit it off so well when she was a toddler and I said I worried that she resented me because she thought I loved Clara more than her, which was never true. She paused to consider that theory and did not deny it might be somewhat true. In my mind it’s settled that I love Tess as much as Clara and Tess knows it. And I know Tess loves me and doesn’t have to prove it. We got pretty lucky as a family separated by geography to be together and experience things together during the girls’ elementary school years so there was no period of estrangement to overcome. No awkward adjustments. No sense of making up for lost opportunities. No guilt we didn’t do enough. I don’t know what transformed a cranky, grumpy little girl into an affectionate and charming young lady but it scared me to death she might regress beyond zero.
And now we set the example of how to grieve.
I feel Tess’s loss as if Erin were one of my own and I cannot reconcile for Tess or myself whether it was fair, or if we should have seen it coming, or if it means anything cosmic about the destiny of civilization. I cannot say whether Erin’s soul is here, there or out there, or what became of her memory and her personality, but her body is no longer alive. Those who profess to believe in the Resurrection will have to wait until Judgement Day for a reunion. Tess’s loss can never be repaid.
All I can measure are her words as we parted the night of Erin’s wake: “I love you.”
That told me all was not lost.
“I love you too, Kitty,” I responded. “See you tomorrow.”
Chapter 22
The morning of Erin’s funeral the sun rose without bold drama, the sky still stained with wildfire soot, so it took longer for daylight to assert firm control over the night. Once it did, though, it looked like another hazy summer day.
I knew it was Friday because it was the day of Erin’s funeral. Since I retired seven or so years before, many days I didn’t care what nominal day it was. Unless I had plans or an appointment I didn’t keep track. I trusted myself with free time. This was my Summer of 69, some kind of culmination year symbolizing freedom and survival. Since I stopped working at a job I took up the pastime of unhurried contemplation and meditative daydreaming. I read more. Learned kitchen skills. We toured Europe and spent more weeks in Mexico. Went to day baseball games. Stayed home. I wrote this blog. The pandemic and the lost year of ZOZO, the days of George Floyd and the menace of a government regime determined not to cede power seemed to happen out of nowhere to affect and alter my reality perceptions of where and how I lived but nothing actually stopped me from living well and being happy at my advanced age. Retired. No longer part of the Rat Race. No longer slave to the clock. No more dependence on the paycheck. All that retirement savings and matching so many years for this — freedom. A house paid for. No liens or mortgages. Taxes paid on time. Retired. Enough saved to get by in our senior years. Enough to travel again. Enough to afford to be with the people we love with no excuses like Sorry, I gotta Work.
There is no perfect perspective. This was meant to be a year of revelations but not so much for me as for everybody else, and once more it turned out the other way around again. A sad and depressed patriarch slow to learn from his mistakes expected to make even his legacy all in one summer like a merchant making up for pandemic losses all in one day. If I expected by Labor Day to win some kind of grandpa lifetime achievement award it disappeared in weed smoke in Colorado in June. John McCormick’s passing humbled me to recognize what a truly life well lived really meant in this indifferent world. And then Erin drowned. My life didn’t mean much anymore in the grand scheme.
Somewhere between old John McCormick and his time on earth encompassing almost a whole century of experiences and sequences of events, some more memorable and mostly mundane, and young Erin and her existence barely past a decade making sense of a world unmade as much as not of her own making, my life could not compare to either of them. I am a lost generational bridge. The runaway boomchild.
What have I done to advance the human race? I am a vain speck of dust in the macro cosmos. A sleeper cell who never quite woke up enough to challenge society to go after its best ideals. Whom have I befriended for life? In my own family I barely get by as a husband, dad, brother, uncle, and now grandfather, nothing to distinguish my tenure, my presence in the family tree. Sixty nine years old and still a self-pitying pirate, hitch-hiker, parasite mooching existence off a world of everybody else’s time.
Even this convenient flash of self awareness came too late to authenticate what came to this: sixty nine years is a millstone not a milestone. All that time telling myself I was seeking wisdom — for what? Self gratification. Near criminal justification. Vain confidence to gravitate to a corner to read any room if I could dare enter any room. Self edification — did I really learn anything useful? Self medication — to what cure?
My Summer of 69 would never come again, like the lost year ZOZO it would never end. Until the end. “We know not the day or the hour,” my mom used to say, fishing for a passage from Matthew’s gospel to summarize sudden death. My future summers were numbered, and this could end up my last one. I retired from the Rat Race to spend my end days of my end years deliberately at leisure doing or not doing whatever I wanted. Travel. Read and write. Spend time with Roxanne. The kids. Grandkids. Meditate, contemplate and think. Make new memories. Find personal peace. Serenity. Somehow this summer was supposed to mark a year when I might proclaim I reached my goals.
It would have been an easy reach to blame John McCormick and Erin for spoiling my summer when I blew it early in the Colorado Rockies. Didn’t blame either of them actually. John was after all a model civics lesson. Erin exposed my hubris. Looking around my house at all the stuff accumulated over about forty years of occupation only reminded me of one retirement goal grossly unrealized: divestment.
I have gone on binges cleaning closets and purging bookshelves, sorting photos and recycling appliances and so forth, but now the sheer volume of trivial mementos everywhere in my home overwhelmed me as I tried to devote attention to sorting, organizing and purging my stuff during the week of Erin’s funeral. Yes, some of this stuff should go. Why do I need these stones, they are barely pretty much less precious. A Rocky Colavito baseball card. A holy card of St Michael. Where to begin… the foreign coins, the statuettes. How many images of Eiffel Tower does one man need? A few grocery sacks of books I concede I will not read again and the library is still overstocked. Up in my loft I seek open wall space to put up another print alongside all the life works of Clara, Tess and now Neko.
Contemplating the array of watercolors and pen and inks and pastels made by the grandkids on the walls around my desk made me realize I really didn’t want to divest anything. Not so long as I’m alive. Not my Rod Carew baseball card. Not Rocky Colavito, even if he was a Detroit Tiger. Not the two stones from my mountain hikes, one for my right hand and one for my left. If any of this stuff had to go, where was the argument to keep any of it, why not get rid of it all? Because all this stuff would have to go somewhere else. CDs and vinyl records into the chain of used records, posters recycled, trinkets dispersed. I’m a living future landfill hill.
Even so, as long as I’m here this stuff gives me comfort. And joy. It reminds me of my life. It reminds me I am alive and I have lived. And each new thing I add to these collections keeps reminding me how rich my life is, like the post cards of Frida Kahlo and the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Transit maps of Paris. Erin suddenly taught me I can’t let go.
Remembering Erin is the only way to honor her life. She would want to be remembered like the collage pictures at the wake. Remembered how she was alive. Laughing, running, swimming, mugging and hanging out at the birthday cake. I had few pictures of her in my digital library, all with the Kysylyczyns and none in print. Nonetheless she was a vivid image in my memory who would live on as an eternal con girl and wiseass to be reckoned with in any crowd, who was especially kind to three year old Neko. And who was Tess’s best friend. I didn’t really know Erin that well but probably would have known her better as years went by, and that would not happen. When I thought of her in the context of the Neil Young song, how she was one who would never go to high school, college, vote, grow up and be a neurologist, fall in love and all that, the less the song appealed to my sympathy towards Erin. The more it begged my sympathy for the free world that keeps on rockin’ without her.
When I die I will no longer get to reflect on the meaning of anything. There will be no new experiences, no future memories. My life on this earth will freeze frame and go dark, for me. No more collecting souvenirs. No more sunsets. For me. Everybody who survives me will get stuck with their own messes to divest as they rock away their experiences and memories, presuming anybody really cares enough to reflect upon their remaining days and hours. My time gets shorter and here I keep accumulating stuff and divesting less than I vow to myself I will get rid of, and I started to figure out why. I needed this stuff to keep me reminded I’m alive. It’s my own proof of life. What’s that decluttering question — does this thing give me joy? Well yes. Looking at it, listening to it, touching it, reading it evokes the joy of the experience the thing represents. My overwhelming surroundings purposely served to reinforce my life. I needed this stuff to keep reminding me life is good. Every trinket and memento means something meaningful everywhere I might look — the Mona Lisa canister on the coffee table at my ZOZO pandemic couch giving me the hairy eyeball — you may fairly ask how many Mona Lisas does one man need?
Like an old style drunk on new year’s eve I resolved to keep culling and recycling and parting with stuff I could live without, but in my heart I knew somehow I would keep as much of it as I could get away with until the very end, as soon or later as that may be. That was because I wanted to keep my memories alive as long as I could, and I wanted to deliberately leave a bunch of stuff for those who survive me to have to sort out and deal with so they would have to know me and remember me. I wanted my legacy to be more than a meager liquid estate. I wanted Roxanne, Michel, Vincent, Clara, Tess and Neko to inherit the task of dispersing my remains, which are my memories and personal memorabilia. There’s got to be a Shakira album in there for somebody who loves to sing along.
This is where the week of mourning took me, to the fringes and to the core of my existence. A well loved kid dies out of the blue only to prove these things happen and the rest of us get to move on and get over it until it’s our turn. Seeing all the mourners at Erin’s wake jolted me aware how alone I felt in the shadows of her life and everybody else darkened in their souls for her loss. There was a magnitude I felt I was missing, on the verge of not taking it seriously, or just jaded. Nobody talked except to say how bad it felt, just hugged and made eye contact and bowed their nods, shook hands furtively and keeping an awkward distance spread apart by covid customs. I feel I’ve grown more introverted and shy at my advancing age and the pandemic isolation only reinforced and accelerated my inclinations towards hermit habits.
The morning of the funeral the wake was still on my mind. How wide Erin’s reach. Extended family. School. Athletics. Neighborhood. Church. Who knew. Her extended family alone outnumbered all the McCormicks and friends of John. What if Erin would have lived to be a 90-something old lady? She’d have outlived me. Grandchildren of her own? Never know. We are left with the next best thing, an opportunity to extend her life with our own extended memories, and by the looks of people’s faces and the reflections in their eyes no one would ever forget her. No one could seem to talk about her. No one could say her name. Everybody was there for something too painful to talk about. The thing most in common was shock. Who was I to be so cool as to feel askance to the suffering and seek some kind of vocabulary to put this event and Erin’s life into the pantheon of common memory, commemorating and celebration. I wanted to come out of my shell and offer a resounding toast. Only this was obviously not the time or place.
For the funeral we dressed in our Sunday best. Roxanne chose a simple navy blue dress. She wore her thin gold chain with the birthstones of our children and grandchildren. I put on a charcoal suit, pale blue shirt and maroon necktie. I buffed my shiny black shoes with the hairy brush. Do I look all right? she asks, and of course she looks elegantly understated. With not much else on our minds we drove to the church early so we could be around to help out in case we were needed. Roxanne drove. The route was simple, just aim downtown on Hiawatha 55, exit to 94, skip I35W, skirt the downtown ramps to Hennepin and Lyndale exit, before the tunnel, and just prior to reaching the bottom of that exit a quick right turn entered the church parking lot. It was mostly a high speed journey of freeways which could be hairy sometimes, but this Friday morning traffic seemed to usher us along with unforeseen ease, requiring no extra navigational guidance from me. We were there in seven minutes.
There were several cars in the parking lot. We found an open space a few spaces away from Sid and Michel’s GMC Acadia. Sid was huddling with the pallbearers under the shade of the old oak hovering over the pre-school playground next to the original parsonage. Michel was inside with Clara and Tess in the community reception room greeting mourners who like us had arrived early. They received us with hugs meant to last a thousand years.
When asked how they all were no one expected to hear they were good. The faces of my dearest people expressed it all, a determined sustenance against exhaustion from unrequited grief. Not a week gone by since the bad news and the loss still burned eternal and everything still seemed like yesterday, like it still was happening. Nobody looked well slept, not even little kids, but everyone appeared well kempt, a good sign. The toll this was taking on Michel supporting an emotional array of other people connected and affected besides herself, something we never prepared for as a family — somebody dying yes, but not this one or this way. Her composure made me reach for her to assure her I was there — the there that people mean when they say they’re there, if ever there is a there there, I was there.
Michel was there for Tess, and Clara, Sid, Sid’s mom and dad and siblings, and there for cousins and nieces and nephews and inlaws and me and Roxanne and everybody else who identified her as a personified link to our future together without Erin. For everyone even thinking about freaking out about all this there was Michel. She was not stoic, or alone. Sid was there for her, and Clara. Roxanne on the phone every day, day or night. And Tess too, whatever she could reciprocate. I only wish my own consolation was enough, as a father and a friend, to ease the pain in her heart and make her smile again.
She was a good nurse. Worked throughout the pandemic. Here she was, working through something worse, a personal epidemic of emotional despair all around, and as compassionate as can be Michel consoled everyone she faced and touched with confidence and hope for enduring peace with this abrupt, unfair new reality.
Pastor Judy entered the commons by way of the sanctuary. In her classic pepper pony tail like a gray rainbow of hope, and in long black robe with white lace collar, she wore the authority of the chief leader of this premises. Unmasked — a brave thing so soon, as maybe a third of the mourners showed up masked, while at the wake the night before maybe a tenth — she crossed the room at a confident social distance from everyone she greeted, some by name, and to everyone she smiled.
A smile of attrition. Not a smile of plastic joy. Not a smile of pride in knowing more or better than the sorrowful crowd making their way towards the sanctuary. Not a smile of silly delirium. Her smile directed uplifting respect to acknowledge each person’s presence, sincere eye contact and so forth, her sincere and authentic way to communicate with people who instinctively looked up to her.
She approached Michel and within earshot of Kysylyczyns and Petersons she said she wanted to meet briefly with the family in the small chapel in a few minutes privately. Roxanne and I went with the flow to the chapel and took a seat in the back. Being family of family seemed close enough to crash the meeting and I was immensely interested what Pastor Judy would say to this intimate group of over a hundred.
She entered as the last of us found our seats and closed the chapel doors behind her. She strode straight to the podium up front of the altar and spoke without a microphone to the silent family.
“We all know why we are here. We all want Erin back. In all our confused ways we want to bargain with God to give her back to us, but that’s not happening. He did not take her from us to teach us an awful lesson. God didn’t take Erin from us because he needed her, because God doesn’t need what he already has. We are given this grave loss and we all grieve our own way, and so I encourage you all to look around among you and know we are not alone. This is a time to all pull together for Erin. She was special. We want this to celebrate a special life. God wants us to celebrate her life and remember Erin.”
Without a cue or signal Pastor Judy exited the center aisle and out to the vestibule and gradually the chapel emptied and people flowed through the commons to the entry to the sanctuary where the front pews up the middle were reserved for immediate family. Roxanne and I sat in the middle pew in the vicinity of someplace we usually sat with Michel on a typical Sunday, someplace inconspicuous where I felt safe not to sing or chant the prayers. It had been more than a year since the last time I attended a service in this church, since the pandemic restrictions stopped congregations from congregating. This church carried on with services streamed over its internet channel, which kept Sid and Michel tuned in but offered little appeal to me on a Sunday if my grandkids (plus Erin) were not singing in the youth choir, wringing the hand bells or reading a lesson. I hope someday Michel will realize how much I respect her choice of religion even as I only choose to participate out of respect to her and Sid and the girls and she will respect my pagan ambivalence about the Holy Ghost.
Roxanne had learned that this was the first large scale normal funeral since covid restrictions were partially lifted that past month. We were encouraged to wear our N95 masks but not required. Most of the church volunteers did. We were encouraged to keep social distance and try to populate every other pew. Some drifted up into the balcony, and I was jealous — we routinely went up to the central balcony at Christmas Eve when the view of all the candles with the lights out dazzled when they all sang Silent Night in probable civil disobedience to the fire code for a minute — the balcony was the vantage I knew I really wanted but I was committed to Michel and Sid’s row in the floor pews, and they were reserved up front now, with immediate family, so Roxanne and I sat together apart from anyone we knew. From this vantage I had to look upwards to appreciate the stained glass glories of Jesus, Mary, the evangelists and the angelic luminaries brilliantly and thrillingly etched in colors shimmering in the sunlight of the morning hour. The invisible pipe organist trawled an ethereal prelude melody.
We all stood for the procession of the family, who took their places in the front pews, followed by the pallbearers accompanying the closed casket to its place at the foot of the altar. The organ prelude ended and Pastor Judy descended from her pulpit vantage to the center of the upper nave behind the altar and greeted everybody with as much humble sincerity as anyone might ask from a leader and host to a gathering so spontaneously ambushed by God’s Will. She asked us to sit. She did not apologize for no choir or assistant pastors or any fancy funeral pageantry, this being the church’s first open public funeral beyond close family since covid. She thanked everyone for attending and got right to business, reading from Psalm 139:1-12, as displayed on the video screens hung discreetly on each side on the walls above the exit doors to the sanctuary, screens showing the live stream of the service for those unable to attend in person, the psalm words like subtitles over lovely landscapes.
“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me,” it begins, and goes on to say there is no escape from God, not even in darkness because “darkness is as light to you.”
Next, too good to be true, my favorite hymn. A soloist from somewhere unseen in the building, high in a balcony perhaps, her figure and face on the video screen briefly as the scenic landscape montages of mountains and valleys, gardens and forests dissolved to the music of “You Raise Me Up”.
The chorus goes:
You raise me up so I can stand on mountains
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas
I am strong when I am on your shoulders
You raise me up to more than I can be
The first time ever I heard that song was in the chapel of a parish elementary school in a little town on the Italian mainland from Venice where Clara’s school choir sang a concert recital to the school kids and their nuns the time we traveled to Venice to see them sing at Cathedral San Marco. At almost the last minute Clara’s choir was scratched from San Marco — the repertoire not quite sacred enough or something — and the venue at the little town Catholic school on the Mediterranean mainland got substituted and we had to go by ferry to get the car, but it proved more adventure than hassle. We saw Clara’s school choir sing. The school was cute and the host kids very nice, the nuns and priest hospitable and kind. Fifth grade Clara so short in the front riser. Looked so happy singing, so into the moment. When they sang, “You raise me up to more than I can be” I wept, I remember well, being rather into the moment myself. And now at Erin’s funeral I wept again.
When the soloist finished, Judy stood at her pulpit to recite what the program described as the Litany. She read, “We come before you today God, in abject pain and anguish. There are no words to describe the distress of losing someone we love very deeply.”
To which the crowd responded, reading from the video screens:
Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
A litany is by definition a list. In church it’s a list of devotional prayers, and after each prayer the congregation responds aloud with an affirmation. Pastor Judy’s litany that day comprised seven distinct observances of Erin, each invoking the collective grief of the mourners, each invocation focused more acutely attuned to specific expressions of loss, of Erin in their individual lives, and with each successive invocation the congregation responded louder and with greater vocal conviction: Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”
“Amen,” said Judy.
Next from a high corner of the balcony on the left side of the altar a pair of kids from Erin’s Sunday school performed an anthem of hand bells calling like a phone nobody could answer until the caller hung up.
Next eldest cousin Coretta Aragon and aunt Valentine O’Keeffe of Isaac’s side of the family each stood up and read statements of remembrance. Neither could go through the whole thing without sobbing but they walked us through Erin’s life and times and the reasons they so much admired her. They raved about her math skills and how she dreamed to work for NASA. Praised her inclusiveness and social conscience. Loved how devoted she was to her family and she loved to go fishing with her dad and brother. There were infinite ways everyone loved Erin. They pledged that we would all always love Erin forever in our memories and hearts.
After these two intimate eulogies there was a pause in the service for people to collect themselves a moment. The floor level of the church was not tiered like an amphitheater, not like the balcony, so I could not see forward enough to look at how Michel and the Kysylyczyns seemed to be doing. I would have liked to look around behind me to observe who the people were in those pews but it would be rude to turn around just to stare unless it was that segment of the service to get up and greet the people around for the kiss of peace, as it were, and it didn’t seem like this was the time and place to get chummy in that way. Another reason I wished I was in the balcony, above it all, this event perhaps the most attended gathering indoors since the lifting of covid pandemic restrictions it seemed weird to me how willingly (and wittingly) we would all risk a super spreader to make this happen.
Then we stood as Pastor Judy read from John 20:1-2, a couple paragraphs of the story where Mary Magdalen, before first light, visits the tomb of Jesus and finds it empty, so she reports back to the disciples that “they” have taken his body away.
With that the pastor paced away from the pulpit to center stage and asked us to all take a seat. When we were all settled she began by reminding us that Erin loved to read. Her current favorite, she said, was a fantasy series of tales about Percy Jackson, whom I never heard of until that day — could be the next Harry Potter? My bad — not relevant. Pastor Judy was not selling trends in young literature or posing as a literateur to appeal hip to the kids but put it out there Percy Jackson was interesting to Erin because he was named after Perseus, one of the few Greek heroes who lived a happy ending and died a peaceful death. She herself had not read Percy Jackson herself yet but expressed interest in them as interesting stories because, who wasn’t interested in a good story with a happy ending?
Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, said Pastor Judy. She said every good story has some conflict that seems like it can’t be resolved. “Each one of us has a life story that is unfolding every day. And like any good story, our life stories aren’t predictable. They have twists and turns that we just can’t foresee. There are moments of inspiration that take us by surprise when we discover something new about ourselves or the world, there are quiet moments of contented bliss when all things seem right in the world when we are out fishing on a lazy summer afternoon. There are moments when we are fired up to face challenges and opportunities, ready to take on the world. And there are other moments when life’s unexpected twists and turns almost do us in. You may feel Erin’s death is one of those moments. It seems like a conflict that can’t be resolved. It seems like a story that just doesn’t have a good ending. Today, we grieve, and we are not alone.”
Pastor Judy stepped forward one step down from the stage or altar area towards the crowd. She wore glasses with wide wire frames, not oval, round or aviator, just big, and she wore them as transparently as she could, as if they were a nuisance to wear but she needed them to see everybody. She looked at everybody, making eye contact throughout the church. She talked with her hands, making fists, spreading her palms, extending an elbow, nothing showy, and her body language leaned and swayed with her eyes in rhythm to what she said. She had a plain face with a kind of neutral expression veering towards kindness and good will and she spoke as if confiding to two or three people in a voice informal and persuasively assuring and friendly, her voice and what she said compensating for her plain face. She wore a headset mic — the audio visual team at this church comprised some of the best technicians of faith in the city — and she spoke without notes or any teleprompter.
Mary Magdalen arrived at the tomb to anoint the dead body of her good friend Jesus, Pastor Judy said. It was a custom to anoint bodies with oils and spices as part of the grieving process. Pastor Judy imagined she wept thinking of some of the funny things Jesus said. “Things that never made it into the bible.” She wept because she lost the one person who knew her best, who she could share her whole heart. The gospels, Pastor Judy reminded everyone, tell us that Jesus had loved Mary when other people mocked her because she had done some crazy things. People thought she had demons but Jesus saw somebody to love. And now he was gone. Dead. Silent. She was heartbroken. Traumatized. Sobs shook her body, Pastor Judy pumped both fists and her robe rippled. Mary made her way in the dark before dawn to the tomb.
“Did you hear the angels ask her? ‘Woman why are you weeping?’ Did you hear that question? That question … well, it kind of bugs me. Don’t you just want to answer, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you weep when your best friend has just died?’ What kind of question is that anyway?
“But you and I know , there are plenty of well-meaning people who will say, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be alright. This is part of God’s plan.’ Well. Everything isn’t alright. Not now. And some well-meaning and lovely people, who really do want to comfort us, will say, ‘God must have needed Erin more than we do.’ And I say hogwash. No! God, the creator of all things DOES NOT NEED ERIN PETERSON MORE THAN WE DO.”
It took some of us several seconds to exhale and sob and compose our feelings. Roxanne and I clasped hands.
Pastor Judy clasped her own hands and stepped a half step more forward. “Friends,” she continued, “don’t be afraid to weep. Grief and tears are not a sign that we don’t have enough faith in God. Grief and tears are a sign that we loved Erin. I agree with Nadia Boltz-Weber when she says, ‘Our grief is actually holy to God.”
Pastor Judy surmised that Jesus himself wept at the tombs of dead friends. She said she had faith in light of eternity that death is not the last word. “Death will ultimately have no sting because in the end there is no where we can go where God isn’t already there with us and holding us for all eternity. I have faith in God’s promise that God will bring us through this valley of death to the other side where we will come out into the light. I don’t fully understand God’s promise of resurrection life, but I trust it because I trust God. That’s what faith is. It is trust. But let’s just be honest. Today, deat stings. Death stings now.
“Maybe that question, ‘Why are you weeping?’ isn’t a silly question as much as an invitation to remember and celebrate Erin’s life and love — to remember her part in our sacred stories.
“I weep today because Erin’s story wasn’t supposed to end this way. Her death was tragic in a way that is different from an 80-year old, who dies after living a full, long life. We all know that our story on this earth will have an end, but it’s not supposed to end after only thirteen years. We feel cheated. We will forever wonder what Erin would have done and what she would have accomplished with her beautiful mind. She was SO smart, so wise, so kind, so capable, so ready to take on the world and change it so it would be a better place. She was ready and willing to live John Wesley’s call to ‘Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the people you can, forever as you can.’ She was already living that out and there’s no telling where that kind of heart and desire would lead her as she grew older. We weep at the loss of what could’ve and should have been.”
Pastor Judy went on about Erin’s open love, how when she said I love you she meant it. She lived it. She loved the uniqueness of everyone, remembered birthdays and details of her friends and relatives’ lives. She said we weep because she loved being part of our story and we loved being part of hers.
“We weep today because nobody is promised another day. And when someone dies so suddenly, we are jolted back to that scary reality. Somebody has said that grief is the price we pay for having loved. And so, this grief we feel today — it’s holy and sacred.”
She then modestly credited her thinking to the influence of theologian Nadia Boltz-Weber, whom she quoted from her book Your Grief is Holy to God: “‘While there are some who would reduce the Christian Faith to moralism and delusional positivity — we know that the God we worship is not a shiny-toothed motivational speaker churning out cheerful memes in times of suffering. Because the God we worship is a crucified and risen God. Which is to say, we worship a God that is not unfamiliar with darkness. A God who comes close to those who mourn. A God who comes close to those who stand outside of tombs. A God who is not far off, but who is as close as the choppy breath that falters in your weeping.'”
Then she went back to Mary Magdalene, last seen weeping at the vacant tomb. “The unconditional love of Jesus had made her whole and changed the whole direction of her story. She weeps at the grave. They’ve taken him away. I don’t know where he is. Do you feel like that today? That is the mystery of death. Notice, the pastor confided, that Mary goes to the tomb while it is still dark. She goes there thinking that the tomb is the end of the story. But it is not the end of the story. Mary doesn’t find Jesus’ body in that tomb. The angels tell her to go tell the disciples that Jesus is not there. He is alive. Death could not hold him. Death would not have the last word. God had transformed death to life while it was still dark.
“Friends, God doesn’t wait to see if we can figure out this life and get our act together before God will show up and love us. God shows up in the darkest times of our lives to walk with us and raise us up and love us through the darkness and despair. God shows up when we are filled with so much grief that our hearts simply can’t hold any more pain and they break open , laid bare and vulnerable. God shows up to pour love into our broken hearts so they can be mended and made whole again. Death is not God’s plan. Life — abundant life is God’s plan. That has always been God’s plan — to love us to wholeness in this life and for all eternity.”
And that, Pastor Judy concluded, is why the story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told — even greater than Percy Jackson! she exclaimed with a face of surprise. Why? Because God shows up to defeat hate, defeat despair, defeat hopelessness, with the mighty power of God’s love.”
And so Pastor Judy knit the congregation closer and more intimately to Erin. It was our grief, sorrow and love. She gave us permission to own it. She invoked Erin’s love and our love of Erin. Erin will always be with us because we will always love her and remember her. Pastor Judy wove Erin’s life through the narrative effortlessly because she truly knew Erin and who Erin was and doubtless felt charmed by Erin in person. To the pastor’s great credit, she made an honest effort to know the people who hung out at the church and Erin would have been hard to not notice, even for the busy chief exec of one of the richest and most prestigious churches in the state. Having witnessed Pastor Judy’s style and rhetoric almost five years accompanying Michel, Sid and the girls to church I had a feel for her sincere pastorship. For as much as I was not a believer I respected Judy as an honest professional Christian clerical pastor and admired how she administrated her church and bore the responsibilities of providing religion to a more mixed than diverse urban congregation. The more she spoke of Erin the more credible her intimacy, which equated herself with the rest of us and lent more credence to her voice and gave voice to our own grief to validate and soothe our own confused sorrow.
Maybe we were shocked. Maybe we were taken unaware. But now we know it’s real. I understand it’s Pastor Judy’s vocation to favor an evangelical point of view but it impressed me how much she eulogized Erin and praised God without making it all about moral issues and redemption and holy behavior.
(Sid would later confide he could see Erin in his mind smirking when Pastor Judy compared her to Jesus.)
She ended the eulogy this way: “God meets us now, in the darkness of our grief and sorrow. Erin had hoped to work for NASA someday. She knew she would never be an astronaut because of her epilepsy but she was fascinated with space. As her brother Nate noted the other day, ‘Now Erin is in the stars.’ Her story continues — on for eternity, enfolded in God’s story of love that includes all of us. And while it is still dark, the light is breaking in and the darkness will not, shall not overcome it. God, who loves us all, promises that for every ending there will be a new beginning. There’s no greater story than that.”
She then led a prayer of Commendation and Thanksgiving, with the words on the twin video screens. In prayer they gave Erin to God, presented by her coffin.
“Receive Erin into the arms of your mercy,” began the last verse of the commendation prayer before Pastor Judy led them in the recitation of the perennial known as Lord’s Prayer, which began, “Our God, who is in heaven …”
A soloist somewhere deep in the balcony who had sung You Raise Me Up sang a closing anthem on the video screens called This is the Sound of One Voice.
The pallbearers assembled at the casket and Pastor Judy gave the Benediction:
“As we leave this place, let’s not forget: there is no where we can go where God is not. Everywhere we go, God goes before us. From the farthest ocean to the highest mountain, from the heights of joy to the depths of despair — wherever we find ourselves, God is already there. So go in peace, for we do not go alone.”
That was the last word until the cemetery. The seven male pallbearers, who included Erin’s uncles Sid, Ted Aragon and Joe Jones, escorted Erin’s coffin up the center aisle as everyone stood, the organist played a familiar postlude recessional, and out the old front door into the blue white sunlight her uncles and cousins carried her down the old front steps to the hearse at the curb, which would wait there for the rest of us to get into our cars to form the procession. Most of us filed towards the exit behind Pastor Judy, who followed the pallbearers, the coffin and the mortician outside to stand on the granite steps and watch them glide the coffin into the back gate of the black Cadillac for Erin’s last ride. There was a limo standing by for Isaac and Natasha, and a ride on the side for the pony-tailed pastor — probably her husband, an ex pastor himself I’m told. She carried a thick black book.
Given some attendees who exited the church the usual way through the modern entrance right at the parking lot, the procession line on Oak Grove towards Hennepin formed almost right away, while Roxanne and I moseyed around the periphery of the church campus to reach our car. We lagged behind Sid, and Norb and Gloria, and way back behind Sid’s other sisters, and Ernie and Bert and all the Petersons, and who knows who, a parade blocks long led by a motorcycle policeman — surprised such a duty still existed on a police force self-consciously understaffed since George Floyd. Still, most attendees knew the destination and had no problem following some other familiar car on a known route to Bloomington, 394 to Hwy 100 south to Normandale and 494 to Bush Lake Rd. We didn’t need a police escort and lagged back, took our time, we already knew the way and no one was following us that we knew.
In the car we talked. Roxanne was the first to say it was the best funeral sermon she ever heard. It was the most personal. Spoken by someone who really knew her. Wasn’t all contrived around Jesus and God’s will, at least I thought. Not preachy. I liked the story approach. I offered that for once the deceased wasn’t honored for serving God but God was honored for serving the deceased, and I added that I long admired Pastor Judy’s leadership in the scheme of things and the sermon that day for Erin convinced me — as if I was still a skeptic — Pastor Judy epitomized the ideal modern Christian church mentor. If ever I had a true crisis of the soul, I would trust to confide in Pastor Judy.
We kept in mind, this funeral was not only a spontaneous event, the components of the service came together spontaneously. There was no fresh funeral template. This was the first such full funeral since covid-19. The quality of Pastor Judy’s sermon and eulogy impressed me so much I requested a transcript,and she obliged.
We arrived at the cemetery almost late. We found a place to park the car down the lawn where future graves would go, and we didn’t advance much closer to the gravesite where the Kysylyczyns and Petersons gathered around the casket suspended at the crypt, waiting for Isaac and Natasha to emerge from their limousine. They wore dark glasses. From a distance we could barely make out the funerary prayers recited by Pastor Judy from her book, but it didn’t matter. Soon enough they lowered the casket, the circle tossed flowers and soil into the grave, the crowd gradually dispersed except that extended scrum of immediate family who were invited to a lunch at the home of one of Isaac’s sisters — probably the one who recited one of the statements of remembrance at church.
Roxanne and I told ourselves we were not hurt we were not invited. I for one needed a quiet catharsis. It seemed the whole month of July came with one epiphany after another. Our family is permanent, of that I was sure, but it wasn’t clear what form of a fixture we would mark ourselves among humanity. Two people, neither technically blood relatives but family just the same, departed this life like legends, each bequeathing legacies of hope and actualization it would be unwise and foolish to ignore and forget. My Summer of 69 got upstaged by a geezer and a thirteen year old in the aftermath of my own Colorado sabotage amid the new liberation from covid-19, and there was too much to think about to miss out at the lunch party after Erin’s burial.
Epilogue
Moving on is an earthly way of reckoning the way we imagine souls in the persona of ghosts go crossing over into paradise, heaven, nirvana or where ever. To the other side. Everyone agrees everybody grieves in their own way, in their own time. Maybe my fix was quick but the catharsis has taken a long time to catch up. I still encounter social situations where deference to Erin’s memory evokes discomfort and sadness, and it’s been three years. That itself attests to the endurance of the memories of Erin.
Sid recommended a book to help us come to grips with our sustained grief, The Beauty of What Remains by Steve Leder, a rabbi who counsels countless people for their loss of loved ones who found himself at a loss to parse the meaning of the cognitive decline and death of his own father. Confused, I borrowed The Remains of the Day, a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which served the purpose of making me think deeply of my own life in the context of whether I fulfilled my duty to serve those who were put in my life by destiny. The rabbi’s book evoked the same introspective inquiry in terms of the legacy of memories we create along the way that is carried on by our souls on the shoulders of our descendants and those we have served. Everybody dies. What beauty there is in death is that it magnifies our love of life.
It should anyway. For Erin’s mom Natasha the sadness lingers like a curse. She excuses herself from family parties and celebrations because she sees all the cousins having fun without Erin and the vacancy torments her. And that’s the way it is. She’s a functional professional. She’s a mom and a spouse. She just can’t deal with reminders of Erin, the irreconcilable pain of her loss. To some smaller degree there are others who avoid mention of Erin or they begin to cry or get stiff and change the subject.
A scholarship fund in Erin’s name was started by her aunt Val and uncle Ted disbursing modest amounts to Bloomington high school students pursuing higher education.
Since Erin won the first annual miniature golf tournament sponsored by the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church at the Skyline Mini Golf course at the terrace at the Walker Art Center in 2019 — a course designed by artists — the church decided to name the tournament after Erin. The tournament skipped 2020 and was scheduled to resume in August. There was no word of the whereabouts of the traveling trophy last seen in Erin’s possession, the plastic faux bronze bust of John Wesley.
Pastor Judy retired from Hennepin Ave in 2023. She got the church back into its regular routine after the pandemic, though Roxanne and I didn’t attend very frequently, Christmas Eve and Tess’s eventual confirmation ceremony, and Pastor Judy’s final Sunday, just to hear her final sermon. She spoke of letting go of Jesus — it was Pentecost and past the Ascension and the disciples needed to get their acts together without Jesus being there. She reportedly went on a long road trip across eastern Canada to Nova Scotia with her husband.
Erin’s loss fell hard on Tess. Perhaps herder than on Erin’s mother because Natasha was a a grown woman, expected to cope with adult issues, life and death, whereas Tess was a young teenager, unschooled in the often unfair and randomly cruel ways of the world. Tess had so much invested in her friendship with her cousin it bankrupt her emotionally and she ached with despair. Gone was the syncopated personality who would make up songs over breakfast: Hey-ey, what cha going to do today, things have passed so long, life is like a song for both of us to share. Spontaneous interludes of thought like a poem she published in the Compas anthology when she was seventh grade. Now her moodiness bordered toxic attitudes Michel, Sid and Clara had to confront and to some degree tolerate because, you know, we all grieve our own way and in our own time.
Roxanne the eternal grandma learned the locally oldest and biggest cemetery in the city liked to open its gates to the public and conduct memorial workshops and celebration festivities. The place known as Lakewood situates parallel to one side of Bde Maka Ska (once known as Lake Calhoun) and within its many acres of monuments and woods is a small lake of its own. Roxanne enrolled us in a late afternoon of crafts, making lantern sailboats adorned with messages to our beloved dead ones. There was a big turnout. Sid, Michel, Clara, Tess, Roxanne and I took up one of the dozens of picnic tables of construction paper and markers. Some of us made more than one — I made one for my mom: Dear Mom, How are things going up there with Jesus? Please take care of Erin until the rest of us get there. At sundown we lit our lanterns and launched them int the lake. The breeze favored patterns of tiny ships drifting far from shore.
Later that summer Roxanne learned that Lakewood was holding a seminar on making mandala memorials for our beloved departed and enrolled herself and Tess for a Sunday afternoon class. Neko and I had nothing to do that day so we tagged along. While Roxanne and Tess took the class the three year old and I went for a hike through the headstones and monuments, checking out the mausoleums and vaults. Do you know what it means when people die? I asked her casually, and she replied, Only old people die. When I said sometimes kids die too she didn’t comment, in a short while made the conversation go away. Far as I knew nobody had explained about Erin and I wanted to tell her. I didn’t.
Eventually our hike found us back at the mandala seminar, where the participants were scrounging the grounds for natural materials to make their own mandalas for their loved ones. Neko caught on to the game and joined with Tess and Grandma gathering with glee. She had overheard the teacher say that before taking a sprig, or flower or pine cone, one had to ask permission to take it. Neko asked permission from the gardens and bushes and trees. She observed the others making their symbolic wheels of life on the lawn and kiped their ideas. I began to think we didn’t need to talk about Erin, that Neko somehow knew what was completely unspoken.
Tess, of course, made a spectacular mandala. Still, her mood didn’t brighten. She kept to herself as much as she could get away with. She was said to talk taciturn and nasty, reminding me of the little Tess I used to know who at Neko’s age ordered me to get out of her house. This was different though. I worried. Michel assured me she was slowly coming through, hadn’t severed all her worldly connections. Still practiced gymnastics. When school started she was attending a new school according to redrawn middle school boundaries. It was actually her second year at the new school but because of covid she spent almost all of the prior year remote learning from home. This particular year she didn’t particularly care that she hardly knew any kids or teachers. Yet as apathetic as she was towards her school she got A’s and B’s. It wasn’t until Michel noticed she was losing weight that Tess was diagnosed with an eating disorder. She wasn’t eating.
Argumentative and surly, Tess resisted therapy. As she continued to lose weight Michel took her out of gymnastics. Outpatient therapy didn’t work so Michel and Sid placed her in an inpatient setting. Most of this period she was incommunicado to us. Michel kept us apprised. We sent her a packet of note cards, envelopes and stamps and she wrote us a couple times. Notes of gratitude and abstract love. I wrote to raise her self-confidence. whenever we would see her if she was home on furlough she was meek but sullen. Michel and Sid measured her meals to deliver minimum calories. She resisted and questioned the measurements. Even so she stuck with the program and evolved back to outpatient therapy after about six weeks.
The nature of Tess’s therapy and the details of her disorder were never confided to Roxanne and me. We respect their privacy. We recognized the stress and strain Tess brought to her family and the efforts Michel and Sid put in to somehow find treatment for their daughter. I admired how seriously they took their daughter’s condition and dedicated they were in spending time to participate in Tess’s therapy. To our observation Tess was too skinny but not emaciated. She didn’t look undernourished, just creepy thin. Except for gray shadows around her eyes she had healthy skin and hair. Her hair she kept brushed down beyond her shoulders or wrapped back in a bun. She wasn’t letting herself go all to hell, but rather took care of her appearance, hygiene and style. Rox and I never saw the belligerent Tess described by Michel and Sid and occasionally Clara, but we did witness stifled tantrums and tears sometimes. When she gained enough weight and settled on a routine of prescribed meals she returned to gymnastics. Roxanne and I resumed our oft roles picking up or dropping off the kids at their gymnastics club, dental appointments, and in Tess’s case school and therapy. We never asked probing questions about the therapy. It seemed the kid was entitled to privacy. She spoke and acted as if her life was no secret. It seemed Tess knew we respected her privacy just as much as she respected ours, and she understood she could count on us and could confide in us if she ever needed us in any way. She took advantage of us because we loved her. It was okay because she loved us. She may have been a little hell at home for a while but Tess was always nice to us, grandpa and grandma, and for that we didn’t pressure her with a get well mentality.
She kept getting A’s and B’s. The teachers gave her a remote learning curriculum model to accommodate her absence while an inpatient. I wondered why she didn’t seem to understand that it requires a certain measures of food to stay alive. To exist. I wondered if Tess was on a hunger strike. To make it matter more she was already vegan and chose a plant based diet. When we dined out with her we often went to sushi places. When Michel allowed her to order for herself it was a sign Tess was retaking a say in what she eats. We took her to the St Patricks Day parade in St Paul because it was a nice day and she gave us all her candy from the paraders. She skipped school that day.
I wondered why the therapists treated Tess only for her eating disorder and ignored a connection to grief for Erin. I suppose there is no proven connection, cause or concurrence, but the coincidence looked obvious to me. No doubt the combined health insurance of Sid and Michel required specific diagnostic treatment codes to take the most care of their daughter, which by and large worked.
When I worried Tess was on a hunger strike I meant she was on strike for Erin, bargaining to bring her back. I asked Roxanne, does Tess know you don’t have to die to be loved?
A telltale meme all this time with Tess is how all along she never greeted us without a hug or said good bye without including I love you. Not the rabid babe who told me to get out of her house. Not the gracious hand-held child guide to the canal bridges of Venice either. She wanted us to listen to Phoebe Bridgers. If I am a proud grandfather who sees precocious things in my progeny, I could see Tess wasn’t falling apart. Maybe it was a coming of age. The older she got the more astute she got with her therapies. She was learning to play the game. Going to high school helped. All the while she hugged us and said I love you. It was un-faked. I could feel it. She was essentially okay. As long as she kept expressing her love language to me and Grandma it proved to me that Tess was true, she would endure and proceed to get better.
We always hugged her hugs and said we love her too.
We had no say in her treatment and therapy. That’s proper. Sid and Michel are her parents and it’s wrong to second guess their decisions — they’re the ones she lives with and who bear the responsibility of raising her. If Grandma and I acted neutral to to inevitable reports of how Tess was doing, we freely reinforced any and all affections and her own narratives of what she was doing. I ventured so far as to say I admired her for taking therapy seriously and hoped she recognized the knowledge and experience could lead to advantages early in her young life.
Her first year of high school she took art and produced an abundance of paintings and drawings. She got good grades in science and math. She hung more or less with a clique of nerds and athletes. Wrote for and edited the literary magazine. She tried out for track and field and did some JV diving. Her sister Clara was a senior so she had connections with kids in various grades. It was a blessing of good planning they lived a block and a half from their high school, an easy walk. She never missed school, even if she didn’t like her art teacher because he didn’t teach and told the students never to expect A’s, and yet she produced an array of canvasses and pages of sketches and drawings of stunning virtuosity that year. She decorated her room upstairs in colored fairy lights. She created a warm psychedelic space where she drew and painted. She showed me. It wasn’t the first time Tess amazed me with everyday arts. She used to have a keyboard which she could pluck melodies both familiar and original. She is an award winning state student poet. She sang the Skye Boat Song a cappella at a grade school talent show at the first school she attended in Minneapolis after moving back to Minnesota from Switzerland. I told you I look for precocious traits in my kids and grandchildren, and I’ve always seen them in Tess.
Maybe not so much as an athlete but she gave her best effort. Roxanne and I continued to follow her at traveling gymnastic meets when her club competed, and Tess kept at it and achieved personal bests at beam and bars, sometimes going to a podium in fifth or eighth place. That she competed one last season at her gymnastics club showed the world she was healing because it meant she was eating and maintaining her weight. She went on to compete at her high school.
In truth she looked well. Skin glowed. Circles gone around her bright green eyes. She joined the school choir. It didn’t hurt her morale to score tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras concert along with her sister. Tess needed no supervision but was worth noticing. She’s feeding herself and could be well trusted to eat. She could be heard saying she was hungry.
She took driver training and got her license shortly after she turned sixteen, though it required two tries. She no longer requires getting lifts from Grandma and me, or her parents, or sister — not usually. We see her at dinners at Michel and Sid’s, our place or Vincent’s. We see her at Gloria and Norb’s pool. We’ve met her friends. We hear she has a boyfriend who goes to De La Salle.
At Erin’s anniversary in July we offered to drive Tess to Erin’s gravestone and made a date of it. With her mandala skills she composed a mandala upon Erin’s gravestone. Roxanne and I helped gather components, always asking permission from the source of the flora. When Tess completed her composition she asked for a moment of privacy, so we took a hike and left her alone at Erin’s grave. In the distance I thought I heard faintly a song by Taylor Swift. I could not help but watch Tess sitting crosslegs reading a paper, probably a letter out loud. That’s as much as I spied. It didn’t take much, she hardly hid her actions, and I owed her as much space as could be paced off at this nascent little suburban cemetery. It felt right to be a witness, however. People need to know we need to know each other are okay.
Tess owes much to her elder sister Clara. Clara was close to Erin too, if not the same age, she as a cousin qualifies as a kind of big sister, along with her elder cousin Coretta. As her family quaked with the shocks and aftershocks of Erin’s death, Clara kept her head and spent most of her own grief consoling her dad and mom, and devoted a lot of attention to her stricken sister Tess. This is not to say Clara was slighted for sympathy or deprived her own grief. This is how she grieved, consoling others such as her Kysylyczyn cousins and aunts and her other grandparents, Gloria and Norb.
The last time I attended church at Hennepin Ave I noticed Clara lit three votive candles in the sanctuary. I asked her who she was praying for and she told me: Erin, Buggy, aka Aria, a classmate at middle school who died of suicide, and her great-grandmother and namesake Clara, who had only recently passed away at 100 years old. It was evident Clara my grandchild had a balanced perspective of death and the soul flame of memory, enough to accelerate her own maturity to meet the challenge of coping with Erin’s loss and consoling others apparently stricken worse and coping harder. Her enduring remembrance of her classmate Aria spoke to me about her capacity for charity, compassion and loyalty.
Sid and Michel took the girls on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest, Puget Sound and points west to the ocean. At the Olympic National Park at a flowing river that emptied into diving pools they witnessed a drowning, a middle aged man who could barely swim climbed a waterfall and got swamped over his head. They watched him wash by in the current and could do nothing to save him. This freaked them out. Helpless terror. The poor man. His terrified face. Flashbacks of Erin.
These fragments of reminders of their worst days scare them but don’t seem to veer them off their paths. I say I don’t second guess Sid and Michel’s parenting because they have raised their daughters beyond my sight with virtuous success. I would love to take credit for the girls perspicacity but their parents spent their years day to day raising them, whereas I am just the grandfather who hangs out every few days for a few hours. Still, in the deepest part of my grandchildren’s good fortune so far in their young years the credit should go to the kids themselves because they are ultimately, like you and me, responsible for their behaviors in this world and no matter how well parented a kid can be and no matter how kind and wise a grandparent can act, a child will make their own choices and choose their own story no matter how well programmed they may be by family or society.
Clara my first grandchild made me aware of so much about life from the day she was born that looking back I couldn’t believe what I was missing, what a stiff I was and what perceptions I could take in from the perspective of a new baby I forgot to perceive since my own babies grew up. Clara and I were best friends when she was little. Even after Tess was born we had a hand-holding bond. When they moved to Switzerland it broke my heart, they were just starting to sing in school pageants and play at gymnastics and make things at school and learn to spell words about ideas. To compensate Roxanne and I took plane trips to Europe every so many months to visit them, tour their schools, tour Paris and Lake Como. When Clara went off with her Swiss international school choir to Venice as a separate group from her family it was our first Europe excursion without her, and Tess stepped up and took our hands and led us around the bridges and canals because she had been there before, and not to worry without Clara she would keep us entertained.
Even so we followed Clara’s choir by accident running across them in their sky blue baseball caps filing through the same canal routes, bridges and campos of greater Venice, not to mention the great Piazza San Marco, and we would wave at her across the way as we walked around touring the great old city. We followed her on purpose to the mainland to the little town Catholic school like groupies to see her sing and hear the choir where Clara sang You Raise Me Up and a dozen other songs to a small auditorium of Italian school kids the same age as the choir, grades 5-8, and seeming to get off with the entertainment with little prompting necessary from the nuns and priest who ran the school. We got to hang out with Clara after the performance at the school courtyard for about twenty minutes, then she was back on the school choir bus. This was the day I realized my friend grandchild Clara was truly growing up, having her own adventures without me.
Made me appreciate Tess all the more. Now Tess makes me appreciate Clara all the more. For her birthday one year Roxanne and I took Clara to London to see Wicked, the musical play. We didn’t bring Tess though we wanted to, but Michel wouldn’t allow both kids to fly to the UK in case of something tragic — Michel despised aeroflight. Otherwise we strove to keep things equal between them and not favor one or the other, except for such loopholes as age — Michel tried to tell Tess she was too young to fly across borders with grandparents, and too young to go to Wicked. Eventually things even out.
I have learned to simply let go as much as I can of the very idea of influencing their heads. I guess I had my chance when they were infants and toddlers, but even then you can see what results I accomplished, getting ordered out of the house by a toddler-aged Tess and subsequently abandoned by Clara in Italy on a vacation taken simply to follow her participation on a choir adventure apart from the family. And now I’m known as the grandfather who smokes pot. Any credibility I have as a senior persona to their generation transmits from how I will treat them the rest of my life and not so much what I have tried unwittingly to teach them thus far about life while they were teaching me.
The past few years Clara has gifted me for Christmas copies of books she annotated in very tiny but legible handwriting comments in the margins and underlined passages. The first she gave me was Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. First her insights blew my mind, and secondly her voice in her annotations sounded so clear and personal it was like we were reading the novel together. I thought, wait a minute girl — if this physical therapist gig doesn’t work out then maybe you could fall back on being a writer. That sense of reading together kept up with a gift of collected works by Arthur Conan Doyle, which included The Hound of the Baskervilles. The latest was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I read each one and texted her notes. She sent me a copy of a paper she got an A on for a her English class on Frankenstein and how human nature doesn’t really exist. She expressed dislike for Holmes and understood the need for there to be a Dr Watson. But what of the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse?
Clara graduated high school and enrolled at the College of St Benedict at St John’s University. She was recruited to the MIAC NCAA Division III diving team and came in eighth in her conference her freshman year. There are no athletic scholarships at St Ben’s. She did get some academic scholarship help, and a scholarship to sing in the choir. Her college is located only about an hour from the Twin Cities so we attend her diving meets and choir concerts. There’s less sense of separation than those years in Switzerland.
A few years ago, while Amelie was pregnant with Neko, we all took a family vacation down to southern Utah, rented a house in a town called Hurricane and visited Bryce Canyon. Sid and I and Clara and Tess hiked to the floor of the canyon on the Queen’s Garden Trail. On the switchback climb up the Navajo Loop wall I lost my stamina and felt compelled to rest at every layer. When I resumed the climb I took it slow as just about everybody passed me by. Sid went ahead at a brisk pace. Clara and Tess had the energy to keep up with their dad but were reluctant to leave me alone. Looking up I counted down the remaining switchbacks. Only four left I shooed them forward, assured them I would be along at my own pace. I trudged. I wasn’t really short of breath. My legs and hips and back ached. I wasn’t worried about my heart and I continued to rest at the crest of each switchback. When I counted only two left, from around the corner came Clara and Tess. They took me by the hands, Tess left and Clara right, and walked with me up the next incline, and the next, and let go of me and led me out of the canyon to relatively level ground where sweating Sid and the ones who didn’t descend the whole Queen’s Garden, Michel, Amelie, Vincent and Roxanne waited with picnic lunch in the park. The girls came back for me and however briefly held my hands like old times crossing the street, and those last two switchbacks were worth more than every previous step I ever walked in my life.
So much has come and gone since that vacation to the Utah desert. Neko is nearly six. Erin is gone almost three years. Clara and Tess have not suddenly emerged as talented kids compensating for Erin’s loss, yet the loss has not made a barrier to their activities. According to me, the attentive, doting grandfather looking for precocious traits, my grandkids are discovering how to use their basic talents at the things they love and matter to them to discover new aspects to pursue the future with confidence they can always bounce back if they fall on their ass because at the very bottom they can fall back on an elastic resilient family. Which includes me.
I remember when Clara might have been seven and I explained the concept of degree of difficulty — the harder it is the more credit you get for doing it. The context was probably gymnastics but I turned it into a life lesson. All these years later Tess got mad at her art teacher who didn’t offer extra credit for all the drawings and painted canvasses she produced her freshman year. They each miss Erin in their lives and will always hold a kind of grudge against the cosmos, Erin’s death will always be unfair. It cannot be undone. Not by deliberate overachievement. Not by hunger strike. Clara goes on making friendship bracelets out of colored threaded strings. Tess paints and draws but was through with art class her sophomore year — she joined choir instead. It presented a higher degree of difficulty. She sells vintage and retro clothes on the internet to make a little money.
The night of what would have been Erin’s 14th birthday the I35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis was underlit with purple light. This is the replacement bridge for the one that suddenly collapsed at rush hour August 1, 2007. The new bridge was outfitted with colored lights so it can be lit for special occasions and commemorations. Sid’s eldest sister Valeria works for the state department of transportation as a senior highway engineer. She persuaded somebody to allow purple light on the bridge the night of January 16, 2022 in honor of Erin’s birthday because purple was Erin’s favorite color, and it was granted because there were no other color requests for that day. It was a cold night but not the worst, Clara wrote — Roxanne and I were not there, we were in tropical Mexico. Clara, her mom and dad and sister Tess drove back and forth across the bridge that night and eventually got off the freeway downtown to park and walk over the Mississippi on the Stone Arch Bridge to view the purple bridge in the distance down river.
As Clara framed a photo of the tribute of the bridge she saw a pattern in the icy river. Below their bridge a pool of open water formed a heart within the frozen winter stretch of water downstream. She sent me the photo of the heart in the river and the purple bridge.
That was a thoughtful gesture. She can afford to presume, she and her sister, that I truly care and understand who they are and what they mean. I realize I’ve striven a lifetime to establish this much simple comprehensive clarity. To be like this is worth the struggle. Relatively easy. I am blessed and spoiled and lucky. And probably very naive. What I blithely and cavalierly called my Summer of 69 didn’t really end. It wasn’t bad as ZOZO, the lost year of the covid pandemic, but it seemed to last longer, like long covid. Not with brain fog but mental lucidity. I thought my summer of 69 would grant me exceptionalism at my advanced age and what happened was a purgatory tour of what the world would be like if I died. I got rid of a few tee shirts and used-up pants but made no headway divesting of the stuff I’ve accumulated all around me to constantly remind me I am alive and have accumulated memories and am still searching for somewhere to get more souvenirs.
Much of what I speak will be left to my family to sort and dispose. Sorry if most of it is junk. Maybe Tess can sell some of it as Boomer Retro. I truly resolve in my heart I will sort through all my earthly possessions eventually and purge my belongings, but that day hasn’t come yet. At the risk I will suddenly drop dead and leave all of it to my heirs, I’m deliberately procrastinating my project. Maybe here and there I’ll deliver bunches of books to Little Free Libraries around town. Maybe I’ll part with more sweaters I’ll never wear again. I’ll pick away, I suppose. But I am not driven and all-consumed to get rid of mementos of my life. To me it all adds up. Every map to a new and strange national park or UNESCO site of world heritage.
And is it so bad to bequeath to my grandkids (and kids) the archives of my life? Would it hurt them to sort through zillions of photographs, decades of notebook journals, hours of recorded music and volumes of tourist keepsakes?
When I look at my kids and their lives and the lives of my grandkids I see in them elements of the best of what I want to see in myself. I have seen goodness. It signifies my vision of what is good is true. These years since covid and since Erin have validated my faith in striving for goodness in everyday life and seeing goodness for its own sake, quality of life. Paying it forward and not giving up at the resistance of worry and depression. Keeping oneself moving against impulse to lay still and let stasis entomb you before it’s time for you to actually die.
Buffalo Kelly 