Living in the Wake

Chapter 1

I remember everything everything about those days.
I remember the phone rang in the early hours of the morning. Still, today, I can't hear a phone ring and not have this horrible feeling of dread wash over me, sinking deep into my stomach. Its a discomfort that is so much more than physical, but the physical symptoms of this kind of sheer panic are overwhelming.
And you forget it, which is the worst part, because it always comes back. One day you're perfectly happy and then out of the blue you think of something, you see something that reminds you of that feeling, or you just think of it from nowhere and your body seizes up, and you remember.
You remember the hurt.
You remember the shock.
You remember not being able to do anything except sit there and let it sink in until it reaches the very core of your self, and then watch as your entire world crumbles in around you.
nothing can console you.
nothing can help.
It is a hurt so powerful that the only possible relief is to get so roaring drunk that you pass out and sleep so deeply that even dreams can surface.
It's the knowledge that you'll never see that person again.
You'll never hear their voice, or touch their face, or laugh with them, or hug them... oh god you'll never hug them. It is truly amazing how powerful the longing to hold that person in your arms can be.
you miss their laughter, you miss their tears, their anger and their joy. You miss every single part of that person, because you loved them. But the part you miss the most, is them loving you.
That morning, my mother died.
Mothers die everyday, but not yours.
You never anticipate it. It is always a shock. It always hurts.
And you will never be the same again, because a part of you is gone.
I couldn't imagine a world without her undying love. I couldn't imagine not picking up the phone and her being on the other end. Even if she called too much I didn't care, I would have had her call every minute of everyday of the rest of my life if it would have meant I could talk to her.
All of her neuroses, and little personality quirks; I would have taken it all.
When it really sunk in, I cried. I wept so powerfully my body shook, my head ached, and my mouth went dry.
When there were no more tears left in me, I stood up and I walked to a mirror and I forced my hand through with one swift stroke. I went through every room of my apartment and punched out every single window.
I threw my television across the room and watched it shatter into a million pieces on my kitchen floor. Then, out of pure frustration, I fell to my knees and wept some more.
At the airport, only hours later, I couldn't even keep myself from crying in public. I had to go the bathroom fourteen times and hide in a stall with my hand covering my mouth.
Why did I do that?
Why did I hide my grief?
I lost my mother, my friend, my teacher and my confidant. Why the hell should I have been so embarrassed about that?
I should have walked up to every person I saw and cried on their shoulder.
Because I deserved that, I deserved consolation.
I am not entirely sure what I expected of people, but it was more than what I got. It was less than she deserved.
The world should have taken notice.
The world should have stopped and looked.
We should always stop and look.
I took enough sedatives to kill a small horse for the plane ride. I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise, I hate flying. If I have to go anywhere, I drive, and it has nothing to do with safety.
It's the complete lack of control
And now, not only was I not in control of the plane, but I had lost control of my life. It was like I was slipping on a patch of ice; I saw that I was falling, I could feel the complete lack of balance, but no matter how hard I tried to correct myself I just kept doing the scooby-doo scramble, running in place like an idiot.
"Are you gonna be alright?" the flight attendant asked in such a sickeningly sweet voice I had to tell her to fuck off. She actually gasped, I hadn't heard anyone gasp in such a long time I actually started to laugh.
That was the first time, granted only hours after this all began, that I knew the world would go on. I knew that I would adjust, and that I would live, because I could still laugh. My mom always said that if you can't laugh, there is absolutely no point in living at all.
She was right. But I would need to remind myself of this on several occasions.
I sat on that plane, with that poor flight-attendant, just laughing my ass off. Laughing at nothing, laughing at a gasp. Laughing at irony. There is irony in this world. I'm not entirely sure how this all was ironic, but it was.

When I stepped out of the terminal my father stood like a statue looking at me. He was so proud of me, but I still can't understand why. He didn't move, though, I just dropped my bags, ran to him and hugged him.
I really hugged him. Me and my father were never really on a hugging basis, it just wasn't the way things were, but this hug was like we had hugged a million times. It was a full embrace, and it was exactly what I needed.
I needed to know there was still someone there who would love me unconditionally.
It wasn't the same as my mom, it couldn't replace her, but it comforted me.
Mothers are different from fathers. Fathers are like co-conspirators, and mothers... well, mothers are just mothers. They do the little things, the things you never truly appreciate until you absolutely need them.
Or until you can't have them anymore.
Little things like sending you mittens in the fall because she knows that by now you've lost the pair she sent the fall before.
Little things like sending you cards on halloween.
Things like always being your number one fan and your biggest critic at the same time.
Calling precisely when you need them to and always thinking about you.
Always thinking about you.
That was it. I knew that my mother was always thinking about me, that I wasn't forgotten, not for one minute. Because I knew that where ever my mom was, whatever she was doing, in the foreground of her mind she was thinking, "I wonder how Shay's doing." And now I didn't have that.
I could be forgotten.
Lost in the whirlwind of stimuli that is the human condition.
I don't want to be forgotten.
I don't want her to be forgotten.
I felt guilty for my laughing fit.
I felt guilty because I felt like me accepting it, me moving on in anyway, was dishonoring her.
"She's really gone." this was completely random. My father was just sitting down in the car, looking straight ahead, and said it.
And then it happened. He started to cry.
It was staggering.
Never before in my twenty-two years of life had I seen my father cry.
Part of me was glad to know that he could, but the other part me was frightened by it.
And of course I started to cry. So we sat in the parking lot of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, in a car, as two grown men balling our eyes out like little children.
When we finally composed ourselves I looked at him and he smiled, and once again, I laughed.
He laughed.
He roared.
He roared my fathers monstrous, bellowing laugh that eventually dissolved into violent, sharp intakes of breath that sounded more like a hiss than a guffaw.
"We're gonna be OK, right?" I asked.
"I have no idea," he replied, "but I certainly hope so."
That was enough. I could live with hope.
I thought that the drive home would be laden with silence, but it wasn't. My dad couldn't stop talking. It was like suddenly he couldn't stop thinking of things to say. He talked about everything; he talked about the store and the website. He talked about the governor and the school board, about my aunts, about my uncles, about nazi germany, about his time in the war.
He wouldn't shut up, and thats when I realized, there was something I didn't know yet.
"Dad," I interrupted.
"what is it, shay?"
"How did mom die?"
He didn't say anything. He just kept looking forward, trying to make it look like he hadn't heard me.
"Dad?" I called out in frustration.
"I wanted to wait until we were home," he said with a sigh.
"I need to know, dad."
He nodded in agreement, and with the flick of the blinker, he pulled over to the side of the road.
"You're gonna hate me," he said with a half-smile, as if anticipating how I would react.
"I don't care, dad, just tell me."
"Your mother...your mother is a very--very stubborn woman, and she just didn't want you kids to worry about her..."
"dad... what are you saying?"
"Your mother had been sick for... some time now."
Somewhere along the way, according to my father, my mother had formed blood clots all over her body. The doctors had known about them for almost nine months, but they had been around for a lot longer than that.
The medication my mom was on was supposed to thin her blood so that blood could continue to flow around and significantly reduce the clots. Eventually, however, a clot formed in her brain that the doctors didn't find and then, one night, the clot blocked the flow of blood to her brain and she suffered a massive stroke and died.
Apparently this happens a lot, but knowing that didn't comfort me.
After hearing all of this I pretty much flipped out.
I was just angry that my mom wouldn't tell me. Why wouldn't she tell me? Did she think I couldn't handle? Did she think I would kill myself or some shit?
"She didn't want you to worry, we didn't think it was anything huge." my dad was desperately trying to calm me and failing miserably.
"not a big deal!" i screamed "NOT A BIG DEAL? IT WAS FUCKING BLOOD-CLOTS DAD BLOOD-CLOTS ARE KIND OF BIG FUCKING DEALS! YOU KNOW, CONSIDERING SHE DIED FROM THEM AND ALL!"
"We didn't know there was one in her brain, Shay!" he paused.
I paused.
"We just thought... we thought it was just in her legs. The doctors said it could be easily treated, but they couldn't find the other clot. I know, we should have told you, but she just didn't want you to be spending sleepless nights up worrying about her."

There was silence after that. Dad didn't talk, I didn't talk. We just drove on into the night, blind, deaf and dumb, but managing to operate an automobile. Perhaps just by sheer luck.
The driveway was just like it had always been.
It was funny really, nothing seemed different. Nothing seemed to have changed and that made me angry. Why was everything the same? Because in reality, everything had changed. Everything was different now that she was gone, but if you didn't know, you would never have been able to tell.
I stood on front porch and it just hurt.
It hurt to look at all the places where she had been. Every little trace of her was in that house and seeing it, seeing the swing, and the door, seeing the windows and living room and all the things that she had done in every part of that house tore my hear out.
I couldn't breathe.
I couldn't even cry.
It was such a tremendous hurt that the only thing I could do was to stand there and try my hardest to keep my heart beating.
I closed my eyes and stepped forward, one foot at a time. With each step the pain hurt more.
I could smell her in the house. I could feel her. I could feel everything she was concentrated in that small piece of property.
I felt like Jesus, carrying a cross. Every step was like being torn apart by a whip.
I was walking to my crucifixion when I was walking through those rooms, and the weight was mine to bear.
"What do we do now?" I asked my dad from the doorway.
"Nothing," he said numbly, "We go to sleep, and in the morning we'll go make the funeral arrangements."
It was all wrong. Everything.
We should have been doing something. We should have been holding her dead body in our arms and crying our eyes out. We should have been raising a monument to her.
But we weren't.
We were sleeping.
And the terrible part, was that sleep was all I wanted.

Chapter 2

I dreamt that night.
I dreamt about her.
I dreamt we were at the kitchen table, some morning some day gone by.
I dreamt the steam from the coffee was rising from the cup, and the sun was peaking its head above the clouds onto the cold morning dew.
I dreamt that my mom was laughing and that I was laughing.
I dreamt that this was a dream. It was all a bad dream.
For a moment, when I woke up, I believed it. I opened my eyes and stretched, smiling all the while. I stuck my feet out from the edge of the bed and stood up and walked out of my room, down the stairs expecting to see her at the kitchen table with her coffee and her paper, but she wasn't there.
I had forgotten. And remembering is the hardest part.
Once again, I was faced with my breaking heart.
My dad was gone already, though to where I have no idea.
He probably didn't want me going to the funeral home, it would be too hard. It was harder being alone, though. I couldn't handle the silence. It was deafeningly loud. I couldn't be alone with my thoughts, so I went to the first place I could think of.
I didn't even know if she still lived there, but I went to Rachel's house, just hoping that someone who knew my mom could sit and mourn with me. And I mean really mourn.
I knocked on the door and Rachel's mom answered.
I don't know why... well maybe I do, but I was jealous. I was so jealous that I was angry, I couldn't even look her in the eye. She answered the door and feigned surprise at seeing me. There was this immediate string of condolences and regrets and she reached out to hug me, but I recoiled. At first she acted surprised by this, but I think she understood eventually.
"I suppose you're looking for Rachel, aren't you?" she was sympathetic and yet condescending at the same time. I had a really bad feeling this was how most people who knew me in any intimate sense would act.
It was.
"yeah, I took a long shot that she might still be living here, or at least in the area." I was trying not to sound like I was completely shattered by all this, but Rachel's mom already knew.
"Well, she's not living here, but she has an apartment downtown." she started fishing around the entry way table as she said this. "I have her address and phone number somewhere here, if you want it?"
"I'd love that, thank you." My anger was subsiding as I remembered what a wonderful woman Rachel's mother had been to me all my life.
After digging through piles of junk mail she fished out a small, crumpled piece of paper with sloppy handwriting slapped over it.
"Here it is," she said as she handed me the note, "She's on vacation for the next 2 weeks, so she should be around."
I said my goodbyes, offered my thanks and walked away.

I had forgotten how long it takes to get anywhere in this town. I had to spend 2 hours looking for the keys to my moms car. My mom had recently bought a new car, so it didn't bother me that much to drive it. There were no real memories attached to it.
The building Rachel was living in was really quite beautiful. It was in a sort of neo-victorian style and was surrounded by lawns and gardens. As I walked through the entry way I saw children and their parents in the attatched park. They were so innocent, they were so happy.
I wanted to crush them.
I wanted to say, "don't get too comfty, kiddo, she's gonna die when you least expect, and then where are you gonna be?"
I didn't, of course, but only after practicing some very intense self-discipline.
I walked up to the buzzer and hit the button that said "Wright, Rachel". At first there was no response, which worried me, but then she answered.
"hello?" she sounded confused over the comm. speaker.
I didn't really know what to say, "Hi" was all that came out.
"Who is this?" she still sounded very confused.
"It's Shay." I replied quietly.
Then there was nothing.
I waited and then, without warning, I heard the door behind me fly open and I felt a pair of arms wrap around my shoulders. I could hear that she was crying already, repeating the words "I'm sorry" over and over again.
I loved this woman.
Correction: I love this woman.
She had been my longest and closest friends since the first day of pre-school. We were drawn to each other like magnets, barely catching each others gaze on the playground. After that first day we were inseparable.
In the fourth grade we went steady for a whole week until I told her friend Amy that she was fat. She was fat, it was really just an observation.
After that we were just friends, but it was enough.
It was enough until high school.
Once sophomore year began, things changed completely. She started hanging out with the upper-classman, one of which being my older brother Murphey. Sometime during the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high-school the two ended up dating, which was incredibly awkward for me.
By that point in time we had really ceased to have any kind of formal friendship. We talked now and then in school, but other than that, there was no real interpersonal contact between us. Then one day, almost as quickly as we had become friends in the first place, she showed up crying at my doorstep.
Murphey had dumped her for another girl. Something that I knew was going to happen, but ,for some reason or another, never felt like warning her about.
They had been dating off and on for almost a year and half and in that time I had seen Murphey with multiple other girls, almost brazenly showing them off to me despite my knowledge of his relationship with what used to be my best friend.
Our senior year it was as though all that time had never happened. We were once again a dynamic duo, invincible to pressures of high school, but what we hadn't prepared ourselves for was college.
Rachel was never a star pupil, she scraped by mainly with C's, a B thrown in here and there, but she was never a scholar, and she knew that. When we graduated I was headed off to Northwestern while she had decided to stay and take classes at a community college. I felt terrible leaving her, I knew that we would grow distant, and we did.
for my first couple of semesters we stayed in close contact, she even came to visit me on several occasions, but when I stopped coming home in the summer, it all began to deteriorate. I called less, she called less. We stopped writing letters altogether. Even when I came home, it was for such short periods of time that my itinerary barely afforded me enough time to spend with my family.
But now here we were. Three years of distance and non-communication and we were holding each other and opening our wounds for one another to see as if we were 12 again.
"So where's Murphey and Nate?" She asked me from across her apartment and she made us two very strong irish coffees.
"I have no idea." The words tasted cruel in my mouth.
I didn't know where they were. Sometime last year there was some kind of falling out that occurred between my parents and my oldest brother Nate that I wasn't a party to, but for some reason he didn't talk to me either.
And Murphey. Murphey was a completely different story.
I had always guessed that my second oldest brother was having problems with substance abuse. Even in high school he had alcoholic tendencies. He would go out for four day weekends and get plastered the entire time. I had to bail in him out of jail on several occasions so my parents wouldn't find out.
I would take whatever money I had managed to save up from my pathetic after-school job at an RV sales lot and take the bus (I wasn't lucky enough to get a car) to the police station where he'd be there, waiting, looking miserable behind the bars.
My mom always knew, and she always reimbursed me, which was nice, considering that the bails were usually in the five-hundred dollar range.
But alcohol turned into drugs and then dealing, and when my mom found a fairly large bag of cocaine in my brothers sock drawer, she kicked him out of the house. Murphey and I were never as close as we should have been. We were brothers, but purely by definition.
I hadn't talked to either of my siblings in almost 2 years now, and suddenly that thought weighed heavily on my chest.
"Have you heard anything from Murphey?" I yelled into the kitchen.
"No!" she said with a hint of disgust. "Why would he contact me?"
"I don't know," I said, almost ashamed, "just thought it was a possibility."
As I sat pondering my brothers whereabouts, she slinked playfully into the living room, put the coffee cups on the table and kneeled in front of me. She sat there staring at me with a huge smile across her face.
"What?" I asked.
"I never thought I'd see you again."
"Why would you think that, of course you'd see me again, my family is still here."
"yeah, but they've been here for the past... what? Three years and we haven't seen each other?" she stood up and sat next to me, taking my hands and holding them in hers. "I always think about what good times we had, how much we laughed together when we were younger, and I see you now..." she paused as her eyes drifted off into the realm of the indescribable, "... and I just feel like we were together that whole time. Like we never skipped a beat."
"My mom died." Don't ask me why I said that in response.
"I know, Shay." she said, squeezing my hand tighter. "I know."
And, once again, I broke down.
I felt like an idiot. Here she was telling me how glad she was to see me, how much she missed me, and I felt the same, but the only thing I could do was to cry. I had come there with a purpose, and that was it. I needed a shoulder.
The amazing part was, she didn't mind one bit. She sat there and held me and cradled me and told me things that gave me so much comfort, it made me cry more. Because I wasn't ready to feel comforted yet. I wasn't ready to move on, I was still angry.
I cried until I fell sleep in her lap, the next morning I woke up on her couch, completely disoriented and aching from the unsettled sleep you get on a couch. It was five o'clock in the morning and she was still fast asleep in her bed. I didn't want to wake her, but I had to go, my dad needed me there, I think, and I needed to get over my own selfish needs.
I wrote her a note, telling her how much I had missed her as well, and the entire time I wrote I wondered why it was so easy to put it on paper, but so difficult to say out loud when I think she really needed it. I told her to come to my house when she woke up, if she wanted, and that if she couldn't make it over to call me, and I'd come there. I just wanted to be around her.

Chapter 3

My father was passed out in his recliner when I walked in. There was food strewn around him like he had just devoured the entire contents of a Seven-Eleven. Half-eaten Twinkies lay mutilated on the coffee table along side a myriad of potato chips and various microwaveable soups and stews.
My dad had gotten fat. For the majority of my youth my father was a pretty physically fit guy, but as he approached his fifties the beer gut he had gained from his years as a bar-hopper had slowly turned into something similar to that of a pregnant woman. Swollen and firm.
I started picking up the trash around him. I'm not a cleanly guy, but I felt like he needed that. My mom was always picking up after people, especially my dad. It's not like it was some huge chore for her, I think she kind of liked it actually, but she wasn't around to do it, so someone had to and it might as well be me.
He woke up as I was trying to scrape the charred remnants of a bean burrito off the glass top of the coffee table.
"Where the hell were you last night? I got home and you were gone." he said, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
"I went to Rachel's." I was getting breathless trying to fight that burrito.
"Rachel?" If I wasn't mistaken, he was genuinely surprised. "I didn't think you two were still friends."
"Yeah," I said smiling, "neither did I, but apparently we are."
"Good, I'm glad you have someone here." he stood up and started helping me clean the place up.
"I have you here dad, you know. It's not like I need anyone else."
"Oh, I know," he was having some difficult with a soup cup that had become plastered onto the side table, "but I also know its nice to have someone that isn't your father to talk to. I mean, I spent 4 hours at Mally's with George who owns the hardware shop across from mine so don't feel bad."
My dad was an oddly comforting man. It took a lot to offend him because was very open to the other side of the argument, which is what made growing up in our household almost tolerable.
"Hey, dad," I said as he poked his head out of the kitchen in response, "where's Murphey and Nate?"
"Nate's on his way, he couldn't get a flight out last night so he got one this morning, but I don't know about Murphey, you've probably talked to him more recently than I." His face got suddenly sullen. I think the idea of an estranged son was hard on him, even if he didn't like to show it.
"When's Nate flying in then?"
"Actually, I'm glad you asked," he said coming into the living room with a large garbage bag, "he's going to have to fly into Milwaukee and we're going to have to pick him up."
Apparently my brother, who, at some point in the last two years of us all not speaking had managed to land an incredibly well paying job with a hotel chain and part of that job was staying the hotel for a night and rating the service and quality of the hotel. So he was flying into Milwaukee tonight and I was supposed to pick him up from the hotel in the morning.
After my father and I had made the living room less like a pigs trough, we took showers and made breakfast. Sometime after ten I heard the doorbell ring and ran to answer it.
It was Rachel. There was something about her standing there that made me infinitely happy.
It made my dad happy as well. He rolled to the front door calling out "Rachel! it is so good to see you two kids talking again, we missed you around here."
"Thanks Mr. Beal," she said, blushing.
We didn't talk once about my mom the whole time she was there. It wasn't that the thought didn't cross our minds, but I think because of the two days of crying prior to this, it was easier to begin the coping process.
When it was just me and Rachel left in the house we just sat for a moment twiddling our thumbs.
"So what do you wanna do?" Rachel finally broke the silence.
"well, tomorrow I have to drive to Milwaukee to pick up Nate, wanna come?" I smiled as broadly as I could to add some enticement.
She sat in her chair and pondered for a moment and then, without hesitation said, "yes, I'd love to. But until tomorrow, what would you like to do?"
I was almost stumped. It had been so long since I had been in this town with any free-time to do what I pleased, that I had no idea what there was to do. And then I thought of something.
"Do you remember what we used to do in high school?" I asked mischievously. "I mean, before you started dating my brother and ruined our friendship."
"That's just cruel, but I think I know exactly what you're talking about."

Rachel surrounded the joint with her lips and breathed in heavily and swiftly. When she had taken in all the smoke her body could handle, she pulled the joint away and her eyes bulged in her head as she fought to keep the smoke in as long as possible.
I watched her intently as she struggled with her own lung capacity until all the smoke came out in one large, body shaking cough. Which was subsequently followed by a series of equally harsh, but less intense coughs.
I took the joint and did the same. The smoke was harsh and tasted foul. I could feel it burning in my throat and lungs as I fought to hold it in. I could feel the effects already, my eyes were watering and my thoughts began vocalizing in my head at million words per second.
And exhale.
We just giggled like little kids as we sat on top of announcers box at the high school football field and looked out over our town. We were gods among men.
And Inhale
She started rambling on about the expansive nature of the universe or some high-logic nonsense, but I drifted away into a completely different train of thought.
And exhale.
I thought about why it is we feel the need to find love, to be loved. Why do we covet our parents and families so much. Is it because we really don't want to be forgotten?
And Inhale.
Do we seek our mothers in our lovers, because our mothers make us feel important, needed, loved.
And exhale.
I looked over at Rachel, who was still talking to herself about how god is everything and we all come from the same place. When I looked at her though... no, maybe not.
And inhale.
I'm pretty sure it was right about there that I noticed the cop car pulling up road and shining a spot light on us.
I grabbed Rachel's hand, ditched the joint and started running as fast as I could down the bleachers and over the railing. I jumped over first and then I turned to help Rachel down, who was still discussing the existential nature of God as we ran.
I turned back to see two very portly police officers running after us, so I turned into a small patch of woods and led the incoherently babbling Rachel through a maze of trees until we came out in someone's back yard.
I stopped for a moment and silenced Rachel, who, somehow, was still managing to analyze religion as a whole, and listened to hear if we had been followed.
"why are we running?" Rachel whispered in my ear.
"cops" I mouthed to her.
It didn't even phase her, she just shrugged and then got lost in thought.
I sat for a few more seconds and then started to make my way around the house. Then those tricky bastards almost got me. One, somehow with his superior cop intellect, had decided to head around the wood and cut me off in the street with the car so we were trapped like rats in these peoples back yard.
Luckily for us it was getting dark, and if there's one thing I'm good at, its eluding cops in the dark. I have my shady streak too.
I then lead us back into the woods, past the football field, down the street and into my car, where I sat in the drivers seat panting and sweating. I turned to Rachel, who looked and me and said, "Can we grab some Taco-Bell?"