Twenty Years

Here is what I remember: I was in the kitchen, scooping white sugar out of the blue plastic container. I was nine. The container was on the stool next to the short counter. We were making pie for Thanksgiving. My mother had just been in the room with me but all of a sudden she was screaming from upstairs. It was the worst scream I had ever heard, the kind you only think happens in movies. I dropped the sugar and it landed all over the floor, white powder spewed everywhere.

I was in the bathroom upstairs, trying to put on my sneakers and tie them with shaking hands. My mother was there.

We couldn't find my brother, he was in his freshman year of college. He was at a local college, but lived away from home. Then he was home with a plastic bag from the movie store where he'd been renting movies.

I was on someone's lap in the back of a police car, my sister, my brother, my mother were all there and we were stopped at a red light. I think of that moment every time I pass under that traffic light, I still do twenty years later. My mother asked if we could just go through the red light. The police officer put on his lights and went through the red signal. He wasn't very compassionate.

I remember being in the hospital. It was too late. He'd died immediately. I didn't go in the room. At nine I knew I wanted to remember him alive. I don't remember who I stayed with then.

We were back at home. Lots of people where there. I was somewhere alone with my mother and I asked her what we were going to do. All she could say was that we'd take it one day at a time.

I didn't want to be around the people.

Later that night I crawled into bed with my sister. It was the only time I ever remember feeling loved, feeling comforted by her. She said something to me, of which I can't remember. It must have been the right thing to say because twenty years later I remember the feeling that it gave me. It made me feel like perhaps we were connected after all. Maybe she told me she loved me.

My aunt and uncle stayed with us for a long time. Several days, I seem to remember it being.

The next day was Thanksgiving. My aunt, uncle and two cousins on the other side of my family came home from out of town to be with us. We had a somber Thanksgiving dinner. I was sitting on the same stool the sugar had been on the day before.

Then I remember being at the wake. I stayed mostly in the back with my cousins, playing cards and doing kid things. I think of green velvet when I remember this experience. Maybe that's what I was wearing.

It was time to say goodbye to my father. I touched his hand. It was cold and hard. I recoiled; had not expected that. I should have left well enough alone.

Back at home I felt suffocated. School was out for Thanksgiving break. I couldn't wait to go back to school, to get away from all the grieving people. I would do the grieving in my own time, several years later, on my own, in college.

On Sunday it will be twenty years and these are the images that play through my mind like it was yesterday. These images make up more than all of my memories of my father when he was alive, combined. I can't hear his voice in my head. He used to visit me in my dreams a lot, but that doesn't happen anymore.