DESPAIR

While my father had no fear of death, I did—though I’ve come to realize that it could be more accurately described as a death “despair.” And I know the exact day in my life that it began—Valentine’s Day of my fateful sixth-grade year.

By then I knew two children who’d died, Peter Wright, my crush in first grade, who’d drowned in a lake, and my cousin Michael in California, who’d been buried alive. He’d been playing in a trench where new sewer pipes had been laid down when a dump truck came and dropped a load of dirt on him.

For my Valentine’s Day slumber party, I’d decorated the dining room, where my friends and I would sleep. I’d strung red crepe paper streamers from an old light fixture in the middle of the room—like spokes—taping them to the walls, then I’d hung large red paper hearts from them with thread. Sometime in the night, under this festive canopy, I woke up and looked around at my sleeping friends and thought, “One day we’ll all be buried and decaying in coffins in the ground.” Immediately I was overwhelmed by a feeling terrible beyond words to describe it—an agony so deep that my mind immediately closed over it like water over a dropped stone, and I was left with my heart pounding wildly in my chest. (This was only a few months before Mr. Main would call me “an arrogant little snot.”)

Since then I’ve experienced other feelings painful beyond words to describe them—anger and grief so intense, it has felt as though my mind must crack irrevocably. This emotional trove of pain was the legacy of my childhood, I understood at the time, which didn’t come unlocked until I was betrayed by a boyfriend who impregnated a younger woman—I was in my forties by then and too old to have children. I remember a night when I woke up repeatedly, feeling such anguish that I scrawled messages on sheets of paper and hung them from drawers so that I would see them the next time I woke up: messages like “They are only feelings, they can’t destroy you”—because it felt as if they must—and “They are only feelings, they will pass.”

My death despair was in the same category of seemingly unendurable emotions and was to revisit me often throughout my adolescence. In the moments it did—usually at night—I was liable to throw myself against a wall before my mind could close over it again and blot it out.

When my brother, as a child, asked my father what happened to you when you died, he said, “They put you in the ground and you rot.” I don’t remember the moment I asked my father the same question, but, of course, that’s the answer he would have given me too.