January 16, 2003

Not sure how to intro this one, so we'll get right to it. I wrote this about two years ago for a memoir class (disclaimer - haven't edited any of it since so be kind). Since I've not been able to post much this week, and since I'm heading to Chicago today for AFSP's Overnight Walk, I thought now might be a good time to share it with a wider audience. Oof - this one's a little tough, brace yourselves...

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The phone was ringing for the third time that morning. It wasn’t yet six-thirty and I’ve never been an early riser. Twice already Amy had called to ask questions about my car, which she was borrowing for a bit. With the third crack-of-dawn call, I assumed she couldn’t pop the trunk or some damn thing.

“Now what?”
“Miss Wheat?” an unfamiliar voice asked, “Cari Wheat?”
“This is she.” This wasn’t about how to use the windshield wipers.
“This is officer Droban with the Sahaurita Police department. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, but that’s all right – is everything okay?”
“Are you sitting down Miss Wheat?”

Now I was completely awake; jolted by the dawning that something awful had happened at home. It was, in fact, as if I’d never been so awake. My family lived in an armpit corner of Arizona known as Sahuarita and a police officer from there wanted to make sure I was sitting down before talking to me in the wee hours of the morning. Prep yourself kiddo.

“I’m sitting, what’s going on?”
“I’m afraid that both of your parents are dead. It appears that your father shot your mother in the head as she slept and then turned the gun on himself.”

*****

The time between the phone call to end all phone calls and getting home to Arizona was exactly the whirlwind one might expect. Thank God a dear friend lived just one flight down from me in San Francisco and was a light sleeper. What Nicole must have thought when she woke to find me pounding on her door, drenched in tears and handing her a credit card. “I need you to buy me a ticket to Tucson, for today.”

Within an hour, we were on our way to the airport; me leaving bizarrely calm messages with work and family and she trying to figure out exactly how to ask if they were both really gone. In my blubbering I hadn’t been clear about how serious the situation was. She was hell-bent on going with me, of course, but I was too petrified of what I was walking into, what we might find, to subject anyone else to the nightmare. These were the same instructions I gave to Lisa, in Phoenix, when I called to convey what had happened and that I was on my way home. “Don’t come down Lis, it’s too crazy and I don’t know what’s going on yet. I promise, if I need you, I’ll call.”

My 23 year old brother Josh found them. Two o’clock in the morning and a bit tipsy from a night out, he hit the hall switch only to bathe our father’s broken body with just enough light to forever sear that image into his brain. When the police arrived on our block of Placita de Laton, Josh had to be restrained and held in the back of a squad car; such was his terror and panic. How he lived through trying and failing to wake our mother, I don’t know. He will never, ever be the same.

I’d been in and out of the Tucson airport at least two dozen times in my life, but the desert had never seemed so abandoned. In a place that enjoys 350 some odd days of sunshine each year, there was not one leaf on one tree and not enough sun to turn even the saguaros green. It was as if everything surrounding them had died too. Once together, Josh and I spent what seemed a wounded eternity sobbing and propping each other up on a friend’s couch. We had no idea where to start or what to do first.

Fortunately, Lisa has never really listened to a word I’ve said and she was already in Tucson, in case I changed my mind about needing help. Josh, rightly so, couldn’t face going back into the house and yet there were things we had to gather, papers to track down, valuables to sock away, answers for which to scrounge. There was no way she was going to let me tackle that alone. Before I knew it, I had a house full of girlfriends sorting through the 31 years of my parents’ life together and managing to find laughter amid the heart wrenching new reality along the way.

*****

As far as we could tell, my folks never threw one single thing away. It seemed to my small army of girlfriends that trinkets from each vacation and photos from every happening were neatly packed away in one corner or another of the house. The Christmas decorations alone took up half the garage, not to mention Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and a perennial favorite, Halloween. Each was well represented in paper and ink, plaster and ceramic. Kirsten unearthed a lifetime supply of gift wrap under their California King-sized bed. Every imaginable occasion was accounted for in wrapping paper, ribbon, gift cards and those insane little purple wristband tape dispensers. Mom could’ve been a Boy Scout; she was so prepared.

Important things, naturally, like wills and insurance papers were nowhere near as well organized. Additional proof, I decided, of how unexpected this was. Titles for cars were in a nightstand but proof of insurance in dad’s desk. There was one file cabinet overflowing with things that seemed important but could have just as easily been recipes or old grade school papers. I took back what I said about mom’s preparedness. Things like jewelry were just as random. Stored in ice cube trays we found earrings that ranged from what could’ve passed for fishing lures to impressive, dripping gold nuggets, all sharing the same scattered space. What the hell?

*****

Neighbors stopped by, presumably to express their sympathy and to offer assistance. Not so in Sahaurita. In a community that bantam, the neighbors were standard-issue busy-bodies and were only nosing around to find out what had happened. They asked questions designed to soothe their own distress, not to offer relief to any of us. One claimed to be terribly close with my folks yet was surprised to learn they had a daughter… doubtless he’d ever spoken with them or been in their home.

No exaggeration, every last inch of the walls was covered in family photos. My friends took great delight when assigned the task of taking them out of the hundreds of rickety old, mismatched frames for easier storage. This gave way to howls of laughter as progressively older photos, each with bigger hair and more awkward ‘phases’, were unearthed behind the more recent shots under the glass. One series of precariously naked photos of my brother as a toddler broke the tension in the most well timed and needed of ways.

One miracle of a neighbor did stop by on day two. She and her young daughter were weighed down with potato salad, cold cuts and the most amazing chocolate cake any one of us had ever tasted. There was also sweet tea, and all the paper plates, napkins, cups, knives, and forks they could carry. She didn’t ask even one single, awkward question. Rather she said only this:

“If I were you, I would be freaked out, scared and unspeakably sad. But I would also be hungry and I certainly wouldn’t want to do any dishes.”
“I made you this card,” added the girl as she handed over her glitter-encrusted masterpiece, which I immediately soaked with grateful tears.

These two made all the other nosy-neighbors melt from memory. I couldn’t find the words to tell them how wonderful a gift they were sharing. Sometimes angels appear in the midst of chaos; they’re the people who just know the right thing to do.

*****

Josh stayed with good friends while Lisa and I bunked at a nearby hotel, courtesy of her younger sister, a Marriott employee, who sent her love the best way she knew how. “Tell Cari I’m so sorry for every time I was ever a troll to her.” Lisa couldn’t help but grin when she passed along the message. I would find, in the coming weeks and months, that everyone showed concern and affection each in their own unique ways.

*****

The house carried a mortgage that I was now responsible for on top of my astronomical San Francisco rent, so I was on a steady course of readying it for sale as soon as possible. This was not our childhood home; I’d spent but a handful of nights there and Josh crashed there only because he was too ‘laid back’ to get a job. There was no heartbreak at the thought of someone else sleeping within those walls. Once we’d tracked down anything deemed important for settling estates and the upkeep of family history, it was time to set aside items with purely nostalgic value. The rest would be sold at auction; the awful kind where they leave everything exactly where it was when the person died and strangers wander through, absentmindedly looking for bargains in the remnants of a life left behind. We filled my brother’s room with the keepers: bronzed baby shoes, a cedar trunk stuffed with wedding and prom dresses, countless photo albums and slide trays, the Little Women dolls from mom’s childhood, the roll top desk from dad’s, and tchotchkes from both their world travels.

“The monkey mold!” I announced to the girls - still dutifully sorting through books, records and, as a special treat for one of them, an entire bureau of craft supplies - that we had to find the monkey mold. Understandably, they had no idea what I was rambling on about.
“The monkey what?”
“The monkey mold,” I mustered my last scraps of patience as panic rose in my throat, “We’ve gotta find it. It’s silver and yay big.” Could we find one small, specific thing in this pack-rat haven?

My parents called me “Monkey” as a kid; a symptom of perpetually climbing on anything bigger than me. As a result, each spring the Easter Bunny produced, not a hollow, drugstore chocolate bunny, but a solid, deliciously heavy chocolate monkey. I thought the little rabbit an eavesdropping genius, how else could he have known? Having cottoned on in later years, I would wonder where my mom bought them, with our many moves, even as far flung as Alaska and Australia.

On my twenty-fourth Easter the annual basket didn’t arrive and therefore, tragically, neither did a chocolate monkey. At the time, I pressed my mom about it and she said she thought she’d given me the mold but found it too late, still at her place. Mold? She’d been making them?! Every year, without fail, she’d hand made this clever inside joke of a personalized gift. It epitomized how she lived and how she loved and if I couldn’t find the monkey mold now, I knew I’d never stop feeling this loss.

With mounting hysteria, I tore through the kitchen in search of this piece of my past, this weird and suddenly life or death connection to my mother. Luckily, as with the holiday decorations, everything had a home in her home. I found the damn thing amid an impressive array of cake decorating supplies in the pantry. This served to remind me that she had also faithfully made each of us birthday cakes depicting our latest obsessions: jukeboxes, basketballs, Raggedy Ann, race cars.

I haven’t cast it in chocolate yet, but I have the monkey mold now and it will ever remind me to do tiny, personal and consistent things for the ones I love.

*****

The months to follow were a blur: scatter their ashes, say something appropriate, sign a tornado of papers, hire lawyers and real estate agents, clear out the house, let everyone they’ve ever loved know the news in a gentle way, answer letters, pay all those bills, remember to eat, face mom’s kindergarteners because they’d all seen the six o’clock news and this was a huge headline in a small town, collect insurance, get some sleep, store everything with meaning or value and sell the rest, try to make sure everyone else is keeping sane, stay afloat at work, don’t lose your mind.

*****

As a result of them hoarding every single thing they had ever owned, I found a secret gift in the house that helped put in perspective the chaos. In the bottom of a closet, in an overstuffed plain brown envelope, were letters. Not a trite note of explanation from my dad, but love letters from their first months together. My folks met in their twenties while each traveling around Australia. I would later be born there and my brother and I would spend our childhoods straddling two continents. They knew each other two months and then married and celebrated their 31st anniversary fifteen days before they left this world. We would have happily celebrated another every January until their natural deaths, should living any longer been an option our dad could have considered. The found letters were from those first few months when they were both still traveling but missing each other sorely. They couldn’t stand to be apart and so married and created an amazing, if all too short, life together. I plain never met another couple that was more in love.

It’s that same love and devotion that I take as explanation for why dad took mom with him. Three decades later, he still couldn’t face time without her. The only bright spot of no one knowing what really happened, is that whatever explanation I choose to believe becomes my reality. For better or worse, there is no one left to correct my theories.

*****

Aside from the inexplicable monkey mold panic, I’ve never gotten around to fully losing it, never completely broken down. I haven’t let myself feel what transpired and I still don’t understand or believe that they are both gone, forever. Maybe it’s too enormous to actually wrap my mind around; I don’t think anyone can feel that weight and that loss without collapsing in on themselves.

Instead, I know that I was strong and resilient only by the grace of inspired friends who know precisely how to love. As always before, and particularly following January 16, 2003, each shone brilliantly in his or her own way. Nicole made the painful phone calls and did her best to be brave. Amy filled my fridge with mac n’ cheese and my vases with fresh flowers. Lisa rallied the troops and got shit done. Jenny got me to answer the tough questions and to make decisions. Dan crossed the country to sit with me and to hold on for dear life.

For these gifts and for every day since, I thank each loving friend. They are my chosen family and, as is so often the case, they are much better at it than the family into which I was born. I will never be able to repay those moments of clarity, those unselfish acts of kindness. Truly, I hope they never need me to, that their lives are each blissfully tragedy-free. Since I know that’s likely not to be the case though… I stand at the ready with food and phone calls, patience and laughter for when I know, first hand, that they’ll need it most.