Tom Crider is not a churchgoer, not a member of an organized religion, not a follower of any spiritual path. Like many educated, middle-class Americans, he is more comfortable with skepticism and reason than with faith and emotion.
So when his only child, Gretchen, died in an apartment fire at twenty-one, Crider had no immediate answers to the questions that plagued him, no spiritual salve for his wounds. A lifelong reader and writer, he turned to books and journal writing to help him through the pain of loss. In texts both religious and secular — philosophy, poetry, biography, literature — he found solace through what others had written about their own grief, and through the knowledge that he was not alone.
Although he kept a journal, Crider didn’t intend to write a book about his experience until he realized that others could benefit from his story, as he had been comforted by what he had read. Constructing a narrative around his journal entries, Crider chronicled his quest for understanding in the face of extreme sorrow.
— Andrew Snee
A memorial service for Gretchen Erica Crider, who died in an apartment fire Saturday in Easton, Pennsylvania, will be held Wednesday at 2 P.M. at Christ Church here. Burial will be at the convenience of the family and there are no calling hours. . . .
Miss Crider, twenty-one, a student at Lafayette College, died from smoke inhalation and burns when her third-floor apartment at 106 Cattell Street, Easton, caught fire. Easton fire officials believe the fire was started by several candles left burning after Miss Crider fell asleep.
She was pronounced dead at Easton Hospital after firemen removed her body from the small room shortly after 4 A.M. . . .
A new year begins as Earth moves through space, turning around the sun once again. Its orbit is not altered in the slightest by the sudden absence of his daughter.
I wake up and lie there in the dark. Her room is filling with smoke again. She gets up from her bed. The smoke is so thick! She stumbles toward the window and falls over a chair. (This is where the firemen said they found her body.)
When I see her stand up from her bed, I try to reach into the smoke and steer her to the door. “It’s over here, Gretchen! Two steps away!” She can’t hear me. She turns and goes toward the window, falls over the chair, and dies. Again and again.
He doesn’t understand how it is possible. A month ago he was asleep in his house on the hill with everything in its place and his immeasurably precious Gretchen in college. Then came a banging on the door in the night, the dogs barking, and the police saying that Gretchen had just died in a fire.
In the mailbox is an envelope from Medic 9 Paramedic Services, addressed to Gretchen. Inside is a bill for what they did to try to save her: “Advanced life-support aid was given for the following suspected problem(s): cardiac arrest, burns, respiratory arrest.”
The word burns startles him. He knows you don’t treat burns if someone has stopped breathing; you do CPR. Was she alive when the firemen brought her downstairs?
I imagine I’m the paramedic, kneeling, tipping her head back, pinching her nose, putting my lips on her mouth. Two long breaths to fill her lungs; then I check to see whether her heart and breathing have started again.
Was it hard for the paramedic to put his mouth on her burned face? Did he see any life coming back to her? Did her eyelids flutter open?
He reads the bill several times during the day. Was the reference to treating her burns an error? Did they bring her back for a moment? Was she reaching for life and air?
I’ll call them and ask: “Did my daughter come back? Did she?”
Awake again in the night, he stands in the dark in front of Gretchen’s ashes (now removed from their plastic box and lying in a carved wooden one). He feels a strong urge to open the box, fill his hands with her ashes, and eat them.
Visions of things known and unknown torment him. He imagines her autopsy: her body lying naked on a table, her burned face staring up; her body being cut open, lungs peeled back, her vagina examined for evidence of sexual activity. (There was none, according to the coroner.)
He told Peter, the boy she was with, the lucky one who for some reason woke up and stumbled out the door to safety, that he didn’t blame him for not going back in to save her. Peter said he crawled back up the stairs with water in pans and a blanket over his head, but the smoke was too thick. Looking into her room, he saw an orange glow through the smoke. He called to her, he said. He heard her fall down.
He heard her fall down.
A person is a vast thing, much bigger than the physical body. When a person dies, so much more is gone than the form you once could photograph or touch with your hand. In the eyes of those who love us, we billow high and wide, like parade balloons. The emptiness I feel at the loss of my daughter is so much larger than the space once occupied by a young woman five feet three inches tall, weighing 114 pounds.
What is it that makes her absence so big? Everything she said, thought, felt, and was. Everything she would have said, thought, felt, and been. All I imagined she was and would be. The effect she had on me and on everyone she met. The feelings I had for her when she sat beside me, and the ones that stayed with me when she left. The hopes I had for her (and for me with her), the worries, the anticipation I felt when I knew I was about to see her. Even the anxiety and annoyance she caused me from time to time. All this, so much more than her relatively small physical presence, has vanished, leaving a hole in the universe, and wisps of memory.
Had I known she was so large and that her leaving would create this cavernous emptiness, I would have fallen to my knees each morning and worshiped her. I would have strewn flowers at her feet, and I would have cherished every smile, every glance from her eyes, every word from her lips.
At night, when he can’t sleep, he reads books on death and religion. Some of them say she is not really dead. Some say God has other plans for her. He has never believed in a God who controls human lives or decrees their deaths, and he’s always felt the idea of immortality to be wishful thinking. Now, with his mind and emotions in turmoil, he scavenges for ways to keep her from having vanished. He finds himself ready to believe just about anything. He’s like a beggar in winter, clawing through box after box of old coats, looking for one that fits.
Lying half awake in the dark, too tired to get up, he dreams of paramedics trying to save her. A draft from the window ruffles his hair. It seems to be Gretchen, smoothing his hair, saying, “It’s all right, Dad. Don’t worry about me. I’m all right.”
She was my child, my baby girl (or so it still seemed). But I feel like the child now — dazed, hurt, afraid.
He sees death everywhere. He knows other people aren’t as aware of its presence. He didn’t see it before, either. He sailed through life as though death were on a far continent.
Of course, he knew death could strike anyone at any moment. As a volunteer with the town ambulance, he had seen it happen many times. He thinks of the elderly lady on her way to the hairdresser on a sunny Thursday morning, hit by a gravel truck. He remembers the photo on her driver’s license, the lively smile that had once brightened the face of the body he had just pulled from the car.
But her death, and the others he saw, did nothing to prepare him for the death of his daughter.
He reads a book on grief written by a Christian author whose wife died of cancer soon after they were married. As he reads, he feels the author’s pain, but the theology is no help.
The wife’s suffering and the author’s grief seem to make the author question his belief in a God who cares about human beings. He writes, “If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God.” The author concludes, predictably but unconvincingly, that God’s goodness is not inconsistent with His causing human pain.
Am I to believe in the goodness of a God who trapped my daughter in a burning room?
He stares through the window into the night. How small the moments of his life are in this vast dark. The selection of a shirt, the swallowing of soup, even the moments of pleasure or passion: how trifling next to the dark splendor of towering, magnificent death.
He imagines his daughter removing the smoke alarm in her room, thinking, “I don’t need this stupid thing.” She was a know-it-all kid. No doubt she thought she was immortal.
He recalls the only time he ever spanked her: a summer day when she and her cousin Betsey, both about four years old, had run off to play by the pond. He caught them walking back through the field toward the house, naked, muddy, and laughing. Overwhelmed with anger and fear, he spanked their bottoms and screamed, “You could have drowned!” When she was older, Gretchen laughed as she told this story.
Can my daughter, my only child, have been what is called a corpse? Can her precious body have lain so cold and still? I never saw her dead. I didn’t see “it,” her corpse. The coroner said her face and hands were burned. “You wouldn’t want to see her,” he said, and I allowed myself to be persuaded. But now I wish I had seen her lovely-ghastly face. She lived, she breathed, and I loved her. How could she have become a corpse?
In the bereaved-parents group, he meets people with whom he feels an immediate, sad rapport. Their hearts, too, have been broken by their children’s deaths. They know.
After he describes Gretchen’s death to the group, a woman says her daughter was also in college when she died. He asks how her daughter died. The woman takes a deep breath and says, “It’s so hard!” Then she sobs, “Suicide!” and breaks into tears. A minute later she says, “It’s the first time I’ve said it.” Her daughter has been dead for two years.
The meetings are held in a Catholic church, and many of the people in the group talk about God as a benevolent being. He doesn’t want to question their faith, but he can’t understand how they can feel this way about a God who found it necessary to kill their children. Do they, like the author of a book he’s now reading, think of God as a kind of disciplinarian who might take your loved ones away in order to teach you a lesson?
As he splits wood in the snow, fury hisses inside him like a raging cat. It feels good to crack logs open with blow after blow of the maul, but the fury is too deep to be released.
He’d like to have someone to kill for Gretchen’s death. He understands how revenge inflames those involved in wars, riots, revolutions. If he were a Palestinian, with Gretchen shot by Israelis, he would be a terrorist. If he were an Israeli, with his daughter blown to pieces by a terrorist’s car bomb, he’d be a vengeful soldier.
As he works in his office, he hears his father-in-law, Arthur, bang in through the back door and stomp through the living room. He turns around to see Arthur standing in the doorway. The old man’s face is red from the cold, his white hair stands straight up, and his hands are black with grease.
“It’s no damn good,” Arthur growls, staring hard at him.
“You mean the car, or . . . ?”
“You know!” Arthur says, still staring into his eyes.
“Yeah, I know,” he says.
Then Arthur tells a joke having to do with the problems encountered by a man with an enormous sexual organ, and laughs so loud that the dog stands up and wags her tail uneasily. Bravado and humor are Arthur’s ways of thumbing his nose at life’s anguish.
His friend Alan suggests he try something called a “body harmony” treatment. It is supposed to relieve stress and provide other psychological, and even spiritual, benefits. While he lies on a table, the therapist lifts and holds his arm. Moving the arm slowly in a circle, the therapist asks, “Do you feel Gretchen’s presence?”
He says, “No.”
The therapist says, “I do. She’s here.”
A stranger feels her presence, when her father does not!
After an hour or so of this, the therapist follows him to the door, whispering, “It’s OK to be happy. It’s OK to be happy.”
Hospital bills, which conjure cruel images of nurses and doctors trying to revive her, are still being sent to him by mistake. “Tube 1 4F 48, blood-gas kit, diaphor electrode, pacemaker tray, cardiac manual vent, intensive treatment, code cart. $408.75.”
He knows that special efforts are made to save the lives of young people. He did it once himself: A young man, just Gretchen’s age, had been holding a crane cable when it brushed against a high-voltage power line. He remembers placing his own hands just above the holes the electric current had blasted in the young man’s chest. Everyone on the ambulance crew knew it was hopeless, but they refused to give up on one so young, and so he had kept pushing rhythmically down, down, down on the young man’s chest all the way to the hospital.
It may be that I need these hospital bills, this repeated evidence of her death. Otherwise, I might think even more often than I do that perhaps she’s alive after all.
In the health-club sauna, Leo is sitting on the upper bench as he comes in. When Leo asks how he’s doing, he says, “It’s hard, Leo, if you want the truth.”
They talk about Leo’s new career: training people how to love. After a while, Leo gets up to leave and says, “Gretchen had done what she came here to do, Tom.”
“I wish I believed that,” he says, “but I don’t.”
“Know this, Tom,” Leo says, shaking a finger at him, “it was her time. Her time had come.”
He doesn’t understand how people believe such things.
His father, a deacon in the Presbyterian Church, had faith in the goodness of God, though he rarely spoke of it directly. One day, a few years before he died, he called to say that a young woman he knew had been raped and murdered by three men while her children were locked in the next room. In a quavering voice he said, “This makes me question my faith.”
After his father died, he found a book on his father’s shelf that posed this question: “If God is good and He cares about us, why does He let terrible things happen?” The author’s answer was that God is not responsible for such things because He hasn’t finished the job of creating order out of chaos. We are living in the sixth day of creation and God is still laboring to make His work perfect. So when a stray bullet kills a little girl who happens to be walking down the street at the wrong moment, it’s not God’s fault. These things, the author says, “are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.”
This theory manages to avoid the problem of God’s responsibility for the “bad things,” but assumes a God who cares about individual human beings. He finds this difficult to believe.
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but, unlike the Psalmist, I fear evil everywhere.
It’s deeper than fear, really; it’s dread. He feels like a dog who’s lived through being run over once and now jumps at the slightest sound. When the phone rings, his heart sinks. He thinks someone else has died: his wife, his mother, his brother, a friend. In a store or on a street he hears a child scream in delight, but instead he hears horror, and turns to see if the child needs help. Several times a day, waves of fright splash up from a sea of dread.
In addition to the expected definition of dread (“to anticipate with anxiety, alarm, or apprehension; fear intensely”), he finds this also: “fear mixed with awe or reverence.”
Yes, there is awe in what I feel. It’s what I imagine a mole might feel when the top of its burrow is scraped away by a grizzly. It comes from being one who is tiny in the presence of a greater, malevolent power. This power snatched my daughter away from me. What will it do next?
Driving Gretchen to school one winter morning when she was thirteen, he hit a patch of ice on the road. Another car was coming toward them as they went into a spin. His turning of the steering wheel had no effect. They spun slowly, making a complete circle while skidding into the left lane. Just missing a head-on collision, they slid down the road sideways, looped back across the pavement, and bounced into a field, where they came to a stop.
“Boy, that was close!” he said.
Gretchen was staring ahead through the windshield. She turned to him and said, “Dad, we’re going to be late!”
At the health club a guy asks him, “Do you have any children?” He hesitates, then says, “No.” Would someone waiting to play racquetball want to hear what happened to Gretchen?
He feels the role of father, a silk robe he once wore, slipping from his shoulders. Everything it meant to be a father is gone, suddenly and forever. When Gretchen was born, her life gave his own a bright new purpose. She depended upon him for shelter, food, guidance, and love. Her development into genius or ignoramus, aggressor or peacemaker, might not have been entirely up to him, but it felt that way. And he believed he’d have some influence, through his child, her children, and her children’s children, on the future of the human race.
Now, along with his only child, his fatherhood and all that it meant has vanished. He has no daughter or son to care for and no lineage extending from himself into the future. He still has a lingering fatherly pride and love, but the object of it is gone. He stands on a severed branch of the family tree.
“She died in her sleep,” the coroner said that awful morning in a deep voice, attempting to soothe, and he held tightly to the thought that death had carried her off unaware. But later he talked on the phone to Peter and learned the truth. The coroner had softened the facts. Peter said he heard her stumble across the room and fall. The truth twisted its way into his heart: she tried to get out!
The coroner might have been right to lie. Now he’ll imagine her stumbling, falling, dying forever.
The truth raised agonizing questions: Why did she wake up? Was there a smoke alarm? Did she hear Peter yelling to her from the staircase? Why did she go toward the window across the room instead of taking two steps from the bed to the door?
He had to find out as much about what had happened to her as he could. The day after she died, he called the official in charge of the investigation and said he needed to know the facts. The policeman said, “I don’t know why you want to know this, but I suppose you have a right.”
Two days later, he sat in an office with Mieke (his second wife, not Gretchen’s mother) and his brother-in-law, listening to the fire marshal’s view of how the fire had started. The fire marshal placed several blackened candlesticks one by one on the desk and asked if they recognized them. The instruments of her death! He didn’t want to look at them. The fire marshal said one of the candles must have fallen over and smoldered, perhaps on the upholstered chair, filling the room with deadly smoke.
The fire officials told them about questioning Peter after the fire. He and Gretchen had been at a party drinking beer. They went for a pizza with friends, then up to her room, where they fell asleep on her bed, both of them fully clothed. The fire marshal told them what Peter had said about trying to get back into her room. Peter’s nose and mouth were black with soot, he said.
The firemen took them to the house where Gretchen had lived in the attic room. Plywood was nailed across a gable window. Other than this, there was no visible evidence that a tragedy had occurred there. He would have felt better if the house had burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a pile of charred beams.
The firemen led them past police barriers and up the stairs to her room.
Everything was black in that tiny space. This was where Gretchen’s life ended. Her body lay on this floor.
The fire marshal said they should take anything they wanted, but he thought, “What’s the use? Do I want her clothes, her blackened books, her shoes?” Photographs of family and friends tacked to the wall by her bed had been curled and turned gray by the heat. The faces were gone; only shapes remained. He wanted to leave, but he couldn’t turn his back on everything that was hers.
The smoke alarm was missing. If there had been one, he would not have been in that room filling boxes with Gretchen’s sad things, and she, instead of lying cold in the basement of the funeral home, would have been sitting at her desk studying, or out somewhere on campus talking and laughing with friends. He would have been home doing whatever inconsequential things he might have had to do — working on his newsletter, buying Christmas presents, splitting wood — and knowing, without thinking about it, that his daughter was alive.
But there was no smoke alarm to wake Gretchen up in time to save her life. So the next day, after receiving her ashes from the funeral director, they drove home with her belongings in boxes and the clothes from her body stuffed in a garbage bag.
Some mornings he feels as though he’s been trampled by a heavy beast during the night. He can’t work, think, or even make himself go for a walk. He limps through the day, dizzy and bruised, and fears the beast who did this to him still lurks nearby. Whatever it is that killed Gretchen and wrecked his life has earned his profound respect.
Joseph Campbell says survivors of World War II saturation bombings in cities like Berlin and Dresden later described the experience as “sublime.” This, Campbell says, is what one feels in the presence of awesome power — not necessarily a “good” power, but a force capable of annihilating you and everything else, if it feels like it.
People who live close to nature, unprotected by houses and health insurance, must be touched by such “sublime” experiences quite often. This may explain why many of their gods are fearsome ones. Unlike religions that postulate the ultimate goodness of God, many “primitive” religions worship monstrous gods who spring directly from thunderstorms, floods, volcanoes — the daunting power and energy of the universe.
Yes, I’ve felt this, too. With Gretchen’s death, I’ve been struck by a force so impressive it feels “sublime.” I could fall to my knees and worship it, purely for its power. I’ve felt its awesome presence, and this is enough for me. No religious concepts are necessary, or even relevant.
In Gretchen’s room is a box of stones she collected on a beach when she was little. He holds a smooth white one in his hand, trying to feel his way back to the day her eager fingers picked it from the sand.
The question rises again: How can it be? How can she be dead?
It’s been three months since his daughter fell in that little room, and he is surprised by the persistence of this question. Even now he thinks she might be alive somewhere, that she might have faked her death. After all, he never saw her body, never kissed her cold, burned face goodbye. His only proof of her death is the word of firemen, policemen, the coroner — all strangers.
He tells his incredulous self that many, many people die every day and that some of these deaths are as senseless as Gretchen’s. Her death came when she was young and healthy, so it should not be. But it certainly can be. Is it that he can’t accept what so clearly should not have happened?
He doesn’t remember ever believing the universe to be fair, or that people get what they deserve. He took pride in facing the harsh truth: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” So it’s not that he considers Gretchen’s dying a violation of cosmic justice. His conviction that it should not have happened is more visceral than that.
She should not have died, a part of me insists, because she was my daughter!
This voice within him crying, “How can it be?” has the whiny, outraged tone of a child who believes that he, and all the objects of his love, are exempt from decay and destruction. His rational, adult self would not, of course, say this, but Gretchen’s death has shocked and angered another self — an infantile self, perhaps, an imperious character so blind to reality it thinks it has been orchestrating the good fortune he’s had so far in his life. Like the baby convinced of his omnipotence by the arrival of a nipple whenever he screams, this infantile self is enraged when its wishes are thwarted.
Pain and grief have awakened a childish tyrant whose temper tantrums echo loudly within me. I’m shocked at how unaware I’ve been of this character who seems to live in my psyche, beyond the reach of reason or will.
Life in all its forms fascinates him as never before. Watching a chickadee cracking a seed on a branch, he hunches his shoulders in his jacket and wonders how it keeps its tiny body warm in the icy wind. He tries to imagine its life, seeking food from dawn to dark, sleeping in a bush at night, fluttering awake again in the morning. It does this for five or six years, he supposes, and one day it falls into the leaves and dies.
Reading the Book of Job, he finds many poetic expressions of his own agony. Though he may not believe in the God of the Old Testament, he feels abused by a superior power and would like to protest to his tormentor, as Job does:
Thou art become cruel to me: with thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me.
Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance.
For I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living.
He imagines poor Job at the end of the story, standing naked, his skin bursting with boils, the wind rising around him in a dark funnel. In a long lecture delivered out of this wind, God responds disdainfully to Job’s objections. All the wonders of the universe are of His making, He points out, and He mocks Job’s feeble humanity:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Though he doesn’t understand much of the Old Testament, this speaks to him. This God makes it clear that His powers are beyond human imagining, and He isn’t about to give us reasons for being what He is, or for doing what He does. His, Her, or Its ways are not to be questioned by the likes of us.
He loves the Book of Job for its long-suffering hero, its soaring poetry, and because it throws all theology out the window. The God in this story is not the Father who cares for human beings. Injustice, cruelty, and death are nothing to Him. The God who murdered Job’s family and thundered at him from the whirlwind is pure power, without a hint of an anthropomorphic heart.
A friend tells him Gretchen had a wonderful childhood and a happy life, even though it was cut short. He agrees, but inwardly complains that she’s just trying to cheer him up with some so-called positive thinking. On the other hand, he knows she has a point. As a child, Gretchen was a happy little butterfly. In her teens, she was like most adolescents — moody, self-centered, trying to be popular. She made friends, had some fun, caused a bit of trouble, but she made it through what can be life’s most hazardous time and was beginning to flower into womanhood. This is worth remembering.
But when someone tells him how wonderful she was — cheerful, smart, helpful, “a light” — he realizes that he, too, is beginning to idealize her, and that this will make her even more dead than she has to be. If this continues, he’s afraid, he’ll lose touch with the real person she was and remember only an angel.
He reads accounts of near-death experiences with interest and hope. Could it be that she was not as frightened in that burning room as he imagined? Is it possible that she became detached from her body and observed its dying with a calm acceptance, as these reports suggest?
He longs to go back in time, to be with her for that moment, as he was with her in her childhood when she faced new and frightening experiences: her first day at school, or being in the hospital for an operation, or the first time she pedaled her pink bicycle down the street, around the corner, and out of sight.
He’d give anything to know that in that smoke-filled room her spirit passed willingly into the light.
He keeps seeing things around the house and loving them because they were there when Gretchen was still alive. The elaborately stacked woodpile he built last fall is in the same nearly complete condition as when she might have looked down on it from her bedroom window. In his closet hangs a shirt that he last wore when Gretchen was home: “She might have touched it; there could be traces of oil from her fingers in its fabric,” he thinks as he strokes the cloth.
After her husband died, Queen Victoria made the servants wait to clean up the bedroom where his body lay until after the scene had been photographed. She wanted to preserve every detail of the death scene on film: the prince’s body in bed, the ornate night stands nearby, the portraits of royal ancestors on the walls. For months Queen Victoria slept with Albert’s nightshirt in her arms. She placed a plaster cast of his hand on the night stand, and on the wall over the empty side of their bed she hung his portrait, framed with an evergreen wreath. Each night before dinner, the queen asked servants to lay out clean clothes for the prince, along with a basin of hot water and a towel.
In the Victorian era, grievers sought comfort in ways that would now be considered ghoulish. People had photographs taken of their dead loved ones in the casket, or even posed with the living. He recalls one image of a dead child lying on a couch with his head on his mama’s lap. He wonders if this woman knew the photograph would help prove to her unbelieving heart that her son had really died.
His nephew Travis reacted to Gretchen’s death by trying to assure his own place in heaven. Travis begged his mother to ask their minister to baptize him immediately, even though he hadn’t reached the required age. The following Sunday, it was done.
He’s read that children younger than Travis — those between the ages of three and five — do not see death as final. They believe it’s a going away of one who may return; that the one who has died is sleeping and can hear what is being said; and that, when buried, a dead person can feel if someone comes near the grave.
The child in me, the one who can’t or won’t understand the finality of it, sees death this way, too.
Studies show that six- and seven-year-olds tend to personify death as an angel, a skeleton, or “Death Man.” At this age, children might say they have seen the face or form of Death, or even that it has come into their room at night and tried to pull the covers off the bed. One child told psychologists that Death is white and has keys that can open any door.
At Travis’s age, however, kids tend to accept scientific explanations: death is the cessation of the heartbeat and other bodily functions, the end of life. When Gretchen died, it must have struck Travis that death really happens, even to young people, even to someone he knows.
What a sorry sight: a man and a woman, divorced, throwing their dead daughter’s ashes into the river.
Standing beside the streaming water, he reads a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet that ends with these lines: “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” They scoop their daughter’s ashes from the boxes and throw them out over the rapids, where they vanish in dark water. When the ashes are gone, they toss flowers: yellow, white, orange. The blossoms ride downstream, pass under the bridge and around the bend. Nancy cries through all of this, but he is too angry. He thinks how small they are, how feeble this gesture. He thinks again of the passage he has just read:
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek its source unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
Is she singing now? “Yes,” says his heart, but as he recites these words and imagines his daughter dead on the floor of her burning room, he thinks they do not describe reality.
“Losing Gretchen” is excerpted from Give Sorrow Words: A Father’s Passage through Grief, by Tom Crider. © 1996 by Tom Crider. It appears here by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing.
