Speaking of Death

A close friend of mine just lost a family member. Which causes me to think about my own experience with death.

When I was in high school, a close childhood friend was killed in a car accident. Her name was Jenny. She had lots of billowy, curly, long, blonde hair. She was famous for it. And she was cute. Mild mannered. Chronically likeable. Popular enough to be liked by everyone but not popular enough to draw any jealous enemies. She was the first friend I had in a new town. We were 5.

I remember her coming to my house and us playing in the yard, on the tire swing. I remember her telling me about the people in the Caldecott Tunnel accident, how it was so hot that they melted in there. I was new to the bay area, and didn't really know about the Caldecott Tunnel. I remember driving through it later, looking at the scorched and blackened walls and ceiling, thinking of what Jenny had said, imagining people melting. It was always eerie to me after that. Even by high school, when we would all compete to see who could hold their breath all the way through, I would anticipate the trip, wondering whether we would drive through the burned tunnel with the ghosts of the melted people, or one of the other two tunnels.

By junior high we would talk on the phone for hours, sometimes until we fell asleep and the phone would sit next to me on the pillow, a soft white-noise traveling from her bedroom to mine, until one of us woke up and called across the line to wake the other and hang up the phone. We'd gossip about our mutual friends, as pre-pubescent girls are wont to do. I remember when she got in a fight with her best friend, telling me all about it. I was friends with both, and tried to be neutral.

We'd grown apart in the years of high school. I started running around with a different crowd, and felt myself to be too busy for my previous, wholesome circle. The last time we talked was in the hallway between classes, "Wait. Stop and talk to me. You never talk to me." She had said, in a friendly, chiding manner. "I know, my next class is all the way in D hall" I responded, more as an excuse for my neglect than anything. "We never hang out anymore. We should hang out sometime." She said. I made some indication of intention to call and hang out. I remember thinking at the time that we probably wouldn't. We'd just see each other at random stuff we both ended up at. But I also remember being flattered that she still cared enough about my friendship to try and sustain it.

Soon after that I got a call from a mutual friend one night --a mutual friend who I thought was exaggerating and catastrophizing everything -- so when I learned Jenny had been in an accident, was in the hospital, and "might die," I pretty much wrote off the last part as unnecessary drama. But another mutual friend called a few minutes later, one who was decidedly more level-headed, and confirmed that it was really serious.

I wasn't sure what to do. We couldn't go to the hospital or anything, we just had to wait. I went in my room, on a sort of autopilot, and prayed for my friend, Jenny, that she would be ok. I remember getting the distinct impression that she would not be ok. Then the distinct impression that it was better this way, that for her to live would have meant incredible suffering and loss of capacity, a crippled life in many ways more painful than an early-aborted one. I felt a strange sense of peace.

Sure enough, about 10 minutes later I got another call. Jenny had died in surgery. They couldn't save her.

I didn't go to school for a couple of days. I remember walking to the swamp (now called "wetlands") near my house, finding groves of trees to hide in and cry. I looked in the water and counted crawdads. I passed time. I disappeared to the house of an older boy I was seeing in the next town, sat on his porch swing, stared into the distance, let him kiss me, laughed while he did. He asked why I was laughing and I couldn't explain.

I went to the school for an hour one day because there was a grief counselor coming for all of Jenny's friends. We met in a mysterious classroom I'd never seen before, in the administration building. A bunch of kids I'd never met before were there, along with people I knew to be her friends. Surely she had friends I didn't know, but it felt like some of them just wanted to get out of class, were just curious about what was going on. rubbernecking, essentially.

Various people talked about their feelings in the session. I remember the counselor kept urging us to set up a scholarship fund in her name. It started to annoy me. It almost seemed like she was more interested in the scholarship fund than helping us work through our grief. I remember thinking, "none of us have any money, lady. We're not trying to change the world. We're just trying to get our own lives back together." I can see why she suggested it now. Trying to get us involved in a productive way to express our grief. But I was already the president of the drama club, the junior publicity officer, the chairman of the Junior Prom, the lead in the school play, the volunteer coordinator for the battered women's shelter children's program, in the school chamber choir, and in a bunch of other clubs and organizations. I wasn't interested in taking on a new project, just managing the ones I already had on my plate.

By the time the funeral rolled around, I had cried enough tears that I was ready to stop. It was an open-casket funeral, and my first time seeing a body. Her famous, long, curly blonde locks had been shaven from her head, apparently in a last-ditch effort to drain the fluid from her brain. Her head was covered with a blue and white polka-dot scarf that didn't match her dress. Her lips were sewn together funny, so that she didn't look like herself. Her face was swollen, there were bruises here and there that the mortician had attempted to cover up, her chin sagged in a way that only the dead could have. I remember looking at her body thinking, "that is not my friend. Jenny is not in there." It was the single best moment of the grieving process for me, and I understood then why people do open caskets.

My friends were nervous to go look at her. I took a couple of them in, one by one, to look at the body. They cried, as I hadn't.

I noticed on the program that one of the pall-bearers was Jenny's cousin, a boy named Michael who was our age, and had been my first reciprocated love-interest as a pre-teen. We had met at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk on a youth trip while he was visiting Jenny one summer. We wrote letters back and forth for a while. She told me he liked me, which was virtually inconceivable to me, and endlessly exciting. He lived far away, though, and I never saw him again. I tried to recognize him among the boys and men carrying the casket, but couldn't tell which one he was. He probably wouldn't have recognized me either. I thought about asking around to find him later, but it somehow seemed inappropriate, under the circumstances. What was I going to say to him? "Remember me? Do you still want to hook it up? I can drive now." Now I sort of wish I had found him, expressed my condolences or something. But at the time I couldn't think very far beyond the fact that we'd once had a frivolous flame.

I cried again at Jenny's funeral, and it was the last time I cried for her. I was amazingly efficient at dealing with my grief all in a few days' time. Disturbingly efficient, I felt. I was over being sad, but not over being guilty. I felt guilty for not calling her. I thought I was somehow responsible. She'd just asked me to call and hang out. If I had called her, we probably would have hung out that night, and it never would have happened. It was all my fault.

I've since gotten over this illusion -- I think most people close to her experienced feeling like they were supposed to have intervened that night somehow. But remnants of guilt lingered for a long long time. I felt guilty for not being a better friend over the years. Guilty for drifting away in recent times. Guilty for not stopping to talk to her in the hallway that last time, or any other day before that. I felt guilty for underappreciating her friendship. For taking her for granted. For not thanking her for being my friend when I was the new kid, desperately needing acceptance. I felt guilty for still being here, not nearly as good a person as she, while she was gone. I'm not sure I don't still feel remnants of some of these things.

I remember seeing Jenny's sister sometimes after the accident. I never knew what to say. About a year later she said something about how it's still really hard, but the family knows Jenny is in a better place. I remember thinking that I simply couldn't fathom living the horror they lived through -- so much so that I preferred not to think about it.

Since Jenny's death I've lost a few grandparents, none of whom I was extremely close to. I cried then for my parents, more than anything. My paternal grandfather's funeral was almost a celebratory family reunion for me, greeting cousins I hadn't seen in many years but had loved as a child. My boyfriend once lost his brother. A casual friend died of cancer in my early 20s. Another killed in a car accident in my late 20s. But at 33, Jenny remains my closest brush with death. It was so long ago now that I feel like I don't remember what it's like. I'm left only with impressions and vague memories. When I see someone lose someone close, I am devastated for them, realizing that I cannot imagine what it's like.

Memory is kind, like that. It edits out the parts you can't live with forever, and leaves you with a general idea of what went on. Memory is a lot like a PG movie, actually. It suggests the horrible and evil things that happen so that you get the point, but it doesn't leave you with the shocking anguish and detail that you experience at the time. This is my sole comfort when I think about the fact that someday I will lose someone really close to me. I can't imagine going through it. I can only imagine the other side, and suppose that as life moves on, the shock will remain behind me, with only the flavor of that time lingering throughout my future. Enough to give me the experience to build on, not enough to drag me down.