David Erlewine
Quiet Deaths
Even dead and buried, Carl still understands. He’s not angry or even disappointed
that I’m probably not going to say anything about him at today’s memorial service.
Carl worked with me in the PCE Department. At the moment, I can’t recall what the
acronym stands for, but it involves accounting matters. I work for a federal agency.
Does it really matter which one?
My first day, Carl came by my cubicle and slapped my shoulder. "Welcome, welcome, welcome!" He was the loudest accountant I had ever met.
Now I’m sitting in the back row of his memorial service, something thrown together haphazardly for today, Friday. Monday is a federal holiday and our boss has a lot of meetings next week and isn’t sure about holding a service then. According to her e-mail, she is worried that it might not be viable.
All 130 chairs are filled. They would have needed the auditorium if this weren’t Friday and the dawn of a three-day weekend.
I do my best to ignore my usual thoughts. I engage in positive self-talk and imagery to relax. No one is going to suddenly point and demand that I stand and say my name. I will not be forced to say how I knew Carl and tell a joke about him.
In fact, according to the service "minutes", there is only one part where I would even have the chance to speak. "Memories of Carl -- Volunteers Welcome" is blocked off from 1:45-1:55. From 1:55 to 2:00 is the final prayer and benediction.
My stomach is tight and light. It’s 1:51. Four people have gone to the podium. They have talked about Carl’s bellowing laugh, his love of the Redskins no matter how badly they played, his purple ties. One crying woman I didn’t recognize said she and Carl’s wife would be sisters forever, both losing husbands to drunk drivers.
It’s 1:52. I have no idea what the current speaker just said. My stomach is killing me. If someone jabbed a rifle in my ear and ordered me up to the podium, I might pull the trigger.
No one else is approaching the podium: five speakers out of 130. I sway gently, believing I am about to force myself out of the chair. I glare at the other 125 cowards in the room. Look at Jerry Gray, staring ahead. He can’t tell one story about all the trash talking he and Carl did about the Redskins and Cowboys?
Our boss returns to the podium. "Does anyone else have anything to share?"
Carl never once finished my sentence for me, never gave me a weird look when
I blocked on a word, never walked away from me while my brain and vocal cords tried to form words that I wanted to say. He was the only non-therapist that I ever talked to about how covert stutterers like me were living on borrowed time, that we were the exceptions to Caesar’s exhortation that cowards die a thousand deaths. I was tens of thousands past that if I added up every time I’d changed a word to avoid blocking, let my wife answer the phone, stayed inside while neighbors congregated in the street.
Everyone’s heads are pitched down but mine. Their eyes are closed. I bow my head to whatever the priest is saying, aware that by the time I get on the train for the long slog home, this death will barely register above the others today. Before I have picked up my daughter from daycare I will have convinced myself that my stories about Carl weren’t particularly resonant, that no one wanted to hear how Carl and I were always saying our families needed to get together, that once again I was reminded how inconsequential my speech problem was, or that from now on I would just hit fast forward every time I dwelled on my elementary school nicknames.
"Introduce yourself to someone," the priest says. "Make a new friend. That's
what Carl would have done."
The service is over. The woman on my left shakes the hand of the woman to her left.
"Hi, Andrea Cutler." As the other woman replies without a thought, I remember how
much work I have to do before the three-day weekend. I nod at the heavy woman
smiling back at me and exit quietly through the back door a few feet away.
©2007 by David Erlewine
