Death and the Suburbs
When visiting home becomes a meditation on mortality
My mother’s friend died last night. Mrs. C. had a brain tumor, and her descent was brutally rapid. She got her diagnosis in the spring, right around the same time my parents’ next-door neighbor, Mrs. A., also found out she had a brain tumor. Mrs. A. is reportedly doing well, or as well as it could be hoped. She may continue to do well, or she may not, but either way, my parents cannot disguise their sadness when they talk about her.
This morning, after getting the news about her friend, my mom baked a cinnamon-swirl coffee cake and took it to Mr. C., who lives several blocks away, in a house that previously had been occupied by the family of a boy I went to elementary and junior high school with. The boy was very smart and also somewhat arrogant, and one day, after being rejected from Harvard and wait-listed by Yale, he walked to a neighborhood park and shot himself. At the memorial service, they played R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts,” and even those of us who privately had not liked the boy very much were moved to tears because, well, obviously.
This boy’s suicide also reminded everyone in the neighborhood of another brilliant boy who had shot himself a few years earlier. His body was discovered in his darkened bedroom by his younger sister and her friend. A year or so after that, the sister’s friend was in a car full of teenagers who were following another car filled with their friends. For some reason, the driver of the first car thought that she was being followed by the cops, panicked, and swerved off the road, into a pond next to my middle school. Only one person escaped; the rest drowned.
Our parents used the accident as a cautionary tale to warn us, even as they hugged us a bit harder than usual, about the dangers of reckless driving. But all I could think about was that friend of the girl whose brother had killed himself. First that, now this; she must have thought she was cursed.
In the end, though, it was the family of the boy who died in his bedroom that might have been cursed: a couple of years after his son shot himself, his father killed himself the same way, in the family’s backyard. Later, workers found a stash of TNT buried there. Not long after that, the sister and mother moved away.
I thought about that family the other day when I was walking my dog past their old house, a tidy Cape Cod with a NO SOLICITATIONS sign posted by the front door. I’ve been in my hometown for a couple of weeks visiting my parents and have been spending a lot of the time walking my dog along the suburban streets where I grew up. Almost every house I pass conjures some memory: that one belonged to the family who kept their Christmas tree up until June; this one belonged to the guy who smoked a cigar while he watered his driveway; here’s the one that belonged to the Christian missionaries. And so on.
When I passed the Cape Cod, I remembered the son’s suicide as if it had happened a week ago: My mother sobbing as she told my sister and me what happened, the macabre sight of a carpet-cleaning company’s van parked outside of the house a couple days later. I remember thinking it didn’t make sense: People my age didn’t die. People I knew didn’t die — that happened only to people in cities and war-torn countries, or to celebrities. This couldn’t possibly have happened, even if it had.
I was saddened by Mrs. C.’s death. But because I didn’t know Mrs. C., who was in her sixties, my initial reaction to her death was a shamefully complacent, “Well, these things happen to people her age.” That immediately led to my second reaction: Shit, my parents are people her age.
My friends and I have reached that time in life when our parents aren’t old old, but they are beginning to betray little signs of encroaching fragility. Deaths that once made no sense now make too much sense, and every good-bye seems a few ounces heavier that the last. When I imagine my parents, they’re always suspended in memory’s amber as vaguely thirty-something, but each time they stand in the driveway, waving to me as I leave town, I see them as they actually are: a bit more vulnerable, a bit grayer around the edges. And I feel every messy and frightening and desperate thing the arrogance and cluelessness of extreme youth protected me from feeling about the deaths that happened in my childhood.
Mrs. C.’s death aside, I don’t know why this particular visit home has made me so fixated on mortality. Perhaps it’s because I suddenly find myself free of the distractions of my city life, or because being in the suburbs, with its empty sidewalks; perplexing lack of public trash-cans; and quiet, wide-open spaces, encourages too much free-range contemplation.
Or maybe it’s simply because it’s autumn in Michigan, when the sky is the color of an oyster and the foliage is in the last throes of radiant decay. We’ve had a nice spell of sunny weather and occasionally you’ll see someone braving shorts, but generally this is turning-in time, a signal to go inside and bake something or to put on some music and wonder if this is the year you’ll finally make mulled wine. My parents listen to a lot of Garrison Keillor, and although his brand of homespun whimsy makes me want to crawl out of my skin, that ponderous, breathy baritone voice of his seems appropriate to the season. Mrs. C.’s death has made me realize that my parents and their friends are themselves autumnal, and how cold it’s starting to feel outside.
