DAFFODILS by Alyce Miller
I thought I knew danger from the travels I’d done solo, Bangkok to Baja, Indonesia to Italy, Paris to the Philippines, and all throughout the U.S. But ironically, the most dangerous travel of all transpires in the geography of the body – the lungs and heart – testing the will to go on living after loss, even when it seems pointless.
If I turn to words, I am acknowledging the death of someone else’s sister, not mine. Not my only sister. Not my beloved sister. It requires talking about her in past tense, but more, because words hurt, it causes the day – my life – to stop.
Occasionally a well-meaning sympathizer ambushes: “I’m so sorry to hear about Letitia.” The mention of her name is an electric jolt. In a casual discussion in my outdoor water aerobics class several women retold the drug-fueled experiences of childbirth. I mentioned my mother had given birth to her first two children, my brother and me, in Switzerland, where no drugs were given. Only when she gave birth to three more siblings in the States were drugs administered without her permission. One of the women turned to me, and said, “Oh, do you think that’s what caused Letitia’s disability?” She might as well have slapped my face.
Each minute that I can forget, I move ahead, but with a dull ache, lulling myself into the familiar comfort of her routine at school, one state away, and if it’s morning, I am convinced she’s working as a courier in the medical office, running across the green campus in the Skechers sneakers I bought her, to retrieve blind Barbara for her appointment, or to cajole severely autistic Rebecca into following her up the hill to see the nurse. No one can refuse Letitia, the medical office staff always tells me, because she’s not at all bossy and she’s so sweet. Everyone loves her. Everyone trusts her. She’s the sweetest thing. Your beautiful sister. She is love. She is goodness.
In the afternoons by three, she’s in Pam’s class, getting help reading email, or writing one of her famous signature letters that likely consists of some version of “Dear Sis, Write back very soon. Tish, Love.” My mother used to suggest ideas for letter topics, like the weather, or an event that happened. Letitia at the kitchen table would painstakingly work the pen in her hand, asking how to spell the words. But as my father once astutely pointed out, “write back soon” goes to the heart of what we all really crave. Letitia’s telegraphic style, free of circumlocution, was an arrow into the human psyche, direct to the target. If she said she needed toothpaste, she really needed toothpaste. If she wanted to visit, she would give a date. When I asked her what I could bring when I drove down to see her, she’d reply, “Just yourself.” And somewhere during this time she cleverly began calling me her “swisster,” because I was born in Zurich.
On Saturday mornings after breakfast, she’s up in the stables, brushing horses and preparing for her riding lesson. “I cantered today,” she tells me proudly on the phone one day. Only later did I learn it had been a mistake, that Letitia and the horse decided to take off together at full speed, both blissfully happy, oblivious to the desperation of the riding teacher chasing them down.
Letitia loves the horses, moves around their bodies with grace and ease, even the black draft horse Big Bob, who despite his size takes comfort in his best friend, the little white pony Corey, blind in one eye. Their stalls are next to each other. All eight horses snort, their big heads bob up and down. Letitia knows their stories and their names. Her hands offer gentle, comforting pressure on their foreheads. She wipes gunk from their eyes, swats flies away from their mouths, talks to them in a soft voice.
I know those hands well, small and strong with dexterous fingers. She was the fastest worker at the sheltered workshop where she was employed for years. When we were kids, hers were healing hands, emanating warmth when she would put them on our backs or foreheads or stomachs. “Come cure me, Letitia!” we’d beg if we were sick. Or even if we weren’t. Her hands were magic.
“Why don’t you like to go to Activities in the gym?” I ask when she wrinkles her nose at the mention of it. It’s where the other residents swarm after dinner and on weekends if they’re not off to movies or theater or other events. True, it’s a cacophony of loud voices, pop music played over speakers while residents shoot pool, play cards, and dance.
“Too noisy,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “I like the quiet in the barn.”
I understand. The barn is a peaceful and special place, rebuilt a few years back after a devastating fire from a lightning strike demolished the old barn and killed all but one of the horses. Everyone at the school was distraught, but after the initial shock, much was made of rising from the ashes, and the rebuilding of the equestrian therapy program. I’ve visited that barn many times with Letitia, listening to the soft whinnies of horses in their stalls and smelling the fresh hay. The barn cats creep by in search of mice. Letitia’s favorite is Albert, a naughty Siamese she carries around like a baby, one of the few people who can hold him. Her blue riding helmet sits waiting for her in the protective box on the tack room shelf. She is a barn helper, cleaning stalls and attending to the horses. When asked to bring a horse out for the riding instructor, she takes the halter in hand, and gently leads the horse to the ring, each trusting the other.
* * *
When people tell me they’re sorry to hear about her, they have no idea they are killing her off again. Their words undo everything I am able to live with. Even months and now years later, I cannot talk about her with others, even those with the kindest of intentions. Their words remind that she isn’t at school, she isn’t riding horses, she won’t be coming to visit this summer, and we won’t be going out for pizza or going swimming. It means that I have no place to put her anymore, that she is lost to me, and I can’t find her. One well-intentioned remark can leave a bruise that lasts for days. A cut straight to the bone.
Her voice is in my head. The rise in her tone when she’s excited to tell a story or asking a question of importance. The slight crack in her voice, what she calls “the frog” in her throat. She has a habit of perseveration, relying on words that come most easily, and of repeating phrases and stories. But we all do this; some are just cagier about it, resorting to the rhetorical tricks that allow us to return over and over to our obsessions, while deftly maintaining the interest level of our listener. Ultimately, most talk is social glue. Sometimes her speech is fluent, when the synapses are firing off signals, usually when she’s stimulated. Sometimes it takes more effort. She didn’t start using full sentences until she was 6 or 7, and even those were short, but she was always exceedingly curious about the world, attentive to detail, and socially adjusted. And she has always loved animals, all kinds.
“Do you think Grover loves me?” she’d repeatedly ask, as my dog who was crazy about her pressed himself adoringly against her.
“No,” I’d tease. “You can tell he’s utterly miserable on your lap.”
“Do you think Mom misses me when I’m at school?”
She loves thinking about absence, what it means for others to be thinking of her when she’s not around. The deaths of other relatives – grandparents, uncles, and aunts – touched her deeply. “I miss Aunt Dorothy,” she’d say, or “I loved Uncle Stan so much.” She sweetly assumes that our whole extended family, spread out across the country and even continents, are constantly in touch when she’s at school. “How’s Oona?” she asks. “How’s Debbie and Renee?”
The very last time we spoke was by phone, when she was home in Ohio with my mother for the holidays, just a week before her sudden death. She called me twice within a couple of days to tell me about the Christmas tree they’d gotten, to remind me that one year they’d had two trees, and to share the happy memory of seeing reflections of the tree lights in my grandmother’s eyeglasses when she sat with us. The second time she called, I was feeling a little low and meditative – my usual holiday glumness – and we were covering familiar territory, so I ended up cutting short our conversation, though I ended the call as we always did, telling her I loved her, and she said the same back. I knew she would visit me in the New Year, but now, as I lay on my couch, I focused on a prematurely dark sky, the branches of the yew trees covered in snow, and the holidays of my early childhood, when my parents didn’t have a dime, but I thought we were rich because my father would paint colorful Nativity scenes on the glass windows. The royal blues and purples of the robes, the gorgeous reds, the yellow light above the baby’s head. In retrospect, I kick myself for not talking to her longer. Because there had been something in the tone of her voice in our last conversation, the way she insisted we go on, by pulling out old stories and thoughts, even after I tried to say good-bye – a lingering – that still makes me wonder if prescience was at work. And what was the impulse an hour later that urged me to call her back? But I didn’t.
If only we knew these things in advance.
My father died four years before. He had been ill for quite a while, in slow decline, with several lengthy hospital stays and iffy prognoses. He and Letitia were especially close, particularly since she had lived with my parents until she was forty, before she moved to the school.
As Letitia’s only sister and legal guardian, I was the one to make the phone call to her about the passing of our father. She had been worried about him, so whenever I called, her first question was an anxious “How’s Daddy?”
On this particular day, it was clear she knew something was up, even before her teacher Pam handed her the phone. She began fast-talking, in an overly bright and cheerful voice: “How are you?” and “How are the cats?” and “How’s Grover?” until I finally said, “Letitia, you know Daddy has been sick. . . .” But she kept interrupting me until finally I said, “Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Daddy has gone, Letitia, he is dead.” And she giggled and laughed, and then the phone fell, and Pam picked it up and said, “I have her,” and then I heard my sister’s unholy wail. I couldn’t be with her, because I was on my way to our mother’s eight hours away to bury our father. My sister’s grief was worse than my own, and all the way to Ohio I wept for her. Pam took Letitia home with her that night.
* * *
After his death, whenever Letitia and I were together, hiking along on a trail or buying groceries at the co‑op, she’d ask, “Where do you think Daddy is?”
Beneath the simple veneer of that question lies the great existential query. It’s what we all want to know, and yet cannot. Together, she and I would ponder the possibilities. I don’t believe in heaven, but I believe in spirit. Sometimes I believe we just evaporate. Sometimes I believe we return in other ways. We talked about feeling someone’s spirit even after death. She asked if I ever felt Daddy, and I said, yes, I do. Pam told her our father was shaking hands with Pam’s father in heaven, because she believes heaven is a place. Letitia said she felt closest to Daddy at his grave site. When she would visit my mother, she took daily strolls to the cemetery where our father’s simple stone protrudes from the ground in a beautiful spot near trees and a little stream, and she would talk to him. “I sang ‘Ave Maria’ to Daddy,” she’d tell us on her return. “I love Daddy,” she’d add, and close her eyes and hug herself.
I find myself asking the same question Letitia asked about my father: Where are you, Sister? Where are you? And another, why are you gone? My father had been ill, his body betraying him in ways too numerous to list. He was also eighty-three years old. Letitia is five and a half years younger than I am, so I’d always assumed I would precede her in death. In 2002, I became her legal guardian. My biggest worry then had been who would take care of her when I was gone.
* * *
A few facts: Letitia was an angel, but not angelic. She had a wonderfully perverse sense of humor, and a loving, open heart. She traveled and lived in other countries with my parents. She loved music and art, and could identify pieces of music and works of art. She was brave and open, trusting a world that was not always kind to her. I used to say she had clear channels, no static. She was the middle child of five, sandwiched in birth order between my brother Mark and me, and her two younger brothers Anton and Nathaniel. Mark and I had been a duo for more than five years when suddenly there appeared a tiny, doll-like being with the most intense blue eyes that took up most of her face. Since Mark and I had planned to get married when we grew up, we dubbed her “our baby.” We didn’t know anything was “wrong.” But my mother suspected from the start, and there were all the tests at medical centers, and my mother’s tears and phrases whispered between her and my father like “delayed development.” Wildly protective, I would explain to new friends she was “a little slow.” How they responded to her was the litmus test for whom I could trust.
Cleaning the house recently, I inadvertently came across one of the new Word Search books I’d bought her on her last visit, sitting on the bookshelf. With trepidation, I opened the Big Book of Word-Finds to see if she’d written in it. She had partially completed “Pastimes” (checkers, chess), the odd page on “Staining Wood” (apply, brush) and even odder “Ostrich Ranching” (breeding), and “Outdoor Fun” (fishing, beach, frisbee, etc.). Also “Flowers” (tulips, daffodils, roses). She was careful to check off in pencil the words she had found. I wondered if she’d enjoyed the puzzles I had sent her, along with colored pencils, for her December 15 birthday and then the holidays with my mother. I thought about all the CDs and DVDs she owned, and the well-loved stuffed animals, and the clothes I’d bought her, all still crowding her closet and shelves. Because I couldn’t bear to clean out her things, I asked the school to donate everything, to let her friends there choose whatever they wanted.
That same morning of her death at 6:30 a.m., the funeral home called about 8, and I had to handle the autopsy request and the cremation long distance. I moved as if through stone. When it was done, the faxes, the paperwork, proof I had power of attorney, the legalities of interstate death, the world was suddenly empty and airless, and there was no respite from the winds and snow and ice, and blood-chilling temperatures below zero. Periodically, when pacing couldn’t calm me down, I would go down to the basement to crouch on the cement floor and howl so I wouldn’t scare the dog and cats. An ugly, raw, inhuman voice.
Shortly after her death, the visitations began. Without warning, she appears in flickering images of motion, standing on a grassy hillock at her school, her hands and arms animated. She is wearing her familiar light blue shorts and black Chaco sandals – the ones I bought her in a raucously funny adventure we shared – and the darker blue Izod shirt I bought her. Her dark brown hair is yanked back in a ponytail. Patterns of light dance around the edges of the frame. She stands turned to the side and gestures toward me with one fluttering hand. Summoning me. There is something so seductive in her look that I can hardly resist. I want to follow. And when I realize what she’s asking of me, I fall on my knees and weep, telling her I cannot come with her just yet. I am alone in the house, alone with animals who do not judge me and try to comfort. There is nothing anyone can do. After a few seconds, Letitia smiles and moves off, running fast across an expanse of green lawn, leaving the frame. I can no longer see her, and then the image goes dark. It is confusing. I sometimes call these “hauntings,” but that would make her a ghost, and she’s not a ghost, she is real. Sometimes when she returns, I want to reach out and touch her. But I am afraid, too. What does she want from me? This goes on for days. At first, I am glad to see her, then unnerved. As weeks pass, she shows up less often, except for one spring afternoon when she stood next to me as I washed dishes at the kitchen sink, and together we watched a green-winged hummingbird dipping into the bright red bee balm outside the window. I didn’t dare turn to face her, afraid I’d scare her off. So, we stood silently and enjoyed the bird and then after a few breaths, I turned to look and she was gone again.
This time she didn’t come back.
Over the years I’ve lost many people I loved, some to violence, some to illness, some to accidents, murder, drowning. As I grew older and the distance between me and my own mortality narrowed, I looked back on all the chances I was once willing to take, and wondered who that girl was, so open to the world, not careless, and not naive, but curious and reckless.
The death of a parent, regardless of age, is a defining moment. Parents are the final barrier between us and our mortality, yet their passing follows what we think of as a natural order to life.
The death of a sibling, especially a younger sibling, is inexpressible. It is the world out of order.
We are all of us fragile animals, from the tiniest of creatures to the largest; we all share the same fate. We live. And then we die.
* * *
I drive through one of many snowstorms to talk to an Episcopal priest. I no longer believe in God, but the pain that grips my body demands I do something, and when someone suggests I join a grief group I am appalled. It burns to be around people. It burns to read a book. It burns to write down anything. I don’t want to hear other people’s suffering. This is mine, and mine alone. This is not a time when narrative works. Letitia isn’t a story I can tell. I fear most the sympathetic nods, the familiar pablum of pity. There are of course exceptions. My cousin Renee, who was close to Letitia growing up, told me, “I am so wounded,” and I loved her for it. We wept on the phone together. I am wounded.
The priest invites me into his tiny office, filled with bookshelves. I am angry, and sad. But I am desperate. I confess to being a lapsed Episcopalian and tell him I simply don’t know what I believe, and mostly any notion of God eludes fixed ideas. He smiles and says, “But you’re here.” I tell him that my sister is gone, that my father is also gone, and that after my father died, I attended two evening prayers at the church, and actually felt the presence of my father, an avid Episcopalian, as I sat reading the words. The priest reminds me that Episcopalians are pretty good on the mortality question, that they acknowledge it openly and honor it. “Like Buddhism,” I say. “Not exactly,” he says, “but maybe sort of.”
Then I ask him the question that I can’t shake, and only when I hear my own words do I realize it’s the same one Letitia had asked me about our father. Where is Letitia? Where did she go? He pauses for a moment and smiles reassuringly. “We don’t know exactly, but I can tell you this – your sister is safe.”
I burst into tears. Safe. Safe. I repeat the word several times. She is safe. Is she free? Free of what? Some future suffering she has been spared. I get up and hug the priest, which makes him nervous, but I am past caring about protocols. I tell him I’ll be back to badger him about everlasting life. I never return.
My sister is safe. Safe is something I tried to keep her all her life. Safe from unkindness. Safe from those who might take advantage. Safe from anyone who might not take good enough care of her. Safe from those who do not understand who she is. The first two years she was living at her school, I drove down monthly, without warning, to ensure she was happy and okay.
After her death, I lost words. Silence took over. This is no small matter for someone whose life revolves around reading and writing. I have come across attempts to write down my thoughts at that time in various notebooks. The handwriting is a terrible scrawl, the words read like gibberish. Mostly, I paced, moaned, and paced, leaned against walls, and wept softly. It was too cold and icy out for walks. It was too cold for the woods. My house was silent and sad. The wind whipped around. The snow fell. In the morning, my mother would call, and we would weep together. My poor mother who, at 90, had to see her precious and special child die.
That awful morning my phone first rang at 4 a.m. January 4, 2014, was one of the bitterest of cold days, ice curling its way inside the thin windowpanes. The city was snowbound, and everywhere was sealed in by whiteness – a total absence of color. The number on caller ID identified her school. It was LaDonna from the medical office. My whole body froze stiff as a board. The details spilled out in a series of phone calls for the next two hours, starting with the news that the woman making rounds on night watch had found Letitia vomiting, whereupon she stood up and her last words were a cheerful, “Hi, Debbie,” before she collapsed; then there was the ambulance that LaDonna followed in her own car, the efforts at the emergency room to save her, the repeated compressions to try to revive her, her system and organs shutting down one by one, and poor LaDonna on the other end repeatedly reporting “She’s breathing again,” and then “Oh, she’s not breathing now,” before having to deliver the final, “She’s gone, honey, she’s gone.”
I didn’t scream or deny, the way people in movies do. I simply sank into silence. Disbelief. Mechanically, I dialed my brothers’ numbers. No one was answering. When I finally spoke with Mark, I was most certainly incoherent. Who would tell my mother? He would talk with our youngest brother Nathaniel who had been living with my mother since our father’s death. I couldn’t bear my own grief, let alone hers.
Then came the logistics, the mundane details that require focus. When the funeral director tried to explain on the phone how they would “take good care of your sister,” I cut him off. “How much do I owe you? How much is cremation? What’s the next step?”
How I envied my musician brother Anton, who does not deal in words. I would wake up in the mornings and cry for hours. I became convinced this would never end. About two weeks after, my brother Mark, in the middle of a conversation about unrelated matters, finally blurted out, “Letitia was our baby.” That was all he needed to say. I knew then he was suffering. Mark was four when Letitia was born. I was five and a half. When my mother brought her home from the hospital, she was laid in the crib in the room the three of us shared. She was so tiny, with long skinny legs and arms like a marionette, and the most enormous eyes that took in everything. We loved her blindly.
It’s easy to fall into clichés about the intellectually disabled in terms of “gifts” and “specialness.” Sometimes I think it’s a way of rationalizing the disappointment and fear that often accompany having a disabled child. Except that Letitia did have a gift – a gift of unconditional love and fealty to those around her. And while the early years were painful for my mother, Letitia was in her own way a gift to us all, as well as a mirror to myself, hard to reconcile as a teenager, grateful for as an adult. Of course, she was also my annoying pesky little sister, who shadowed me till I’d scream “Leave me alone!” and invaded my space and touched my stuff without permission. Still, I protected her with sororal fierceness. She did attend regular high school but was assigned to that dumping ground known as “special ed,” and eventually at 21 she graduated with a diploma, which always amused my mother, since Letitia’s skills lay outside academics. She was very matter-of‑fact about what she could and couldn’t do. She was not afraid to ask for help, and yet she was quite capable of making herself useful. She was darling with animals and babies; she could clean a kitchen and could fold laundry like a dream. And she was also just good company, always open to adventure and new experiences, like the time she flew out by herself to visit me in San Francisco for a week. The plane was delayed in a layover in Denver, and while I panicked on my end, Letitia apparently endeared herself to the flight crew by helping to pass out drinks and peanuts. As I used to tell her, “I’m happy to help you with the things you need help with, like reading. I wouldn’t let you balance my checkbook, but I’d sure trust you with my animals, and I know you’re fully capable of cleaning your room and folding your clothes.”
Mostly, Letitia was comfortable in her own skin. It was pure chance that a job brought me to Indiana after years in California, so that I was just a three-hour drive from her school. She would visit me in Bloomington, or I’d whisk down to visit her in Frankfort, and often I’d take friends along with me, and they would marvel at the beauty of the school campus and the fact that Letitia often was accompanied by a large entourage of women pouring out of the dorms, each vociferously proclaiming, “Letitia’s my best friend.”
Letitia’s true best friend was our mother, with whom she had spent most of her life, the two of them often alone as my father was gone. They developed rhythms and habits and routines, so that even though going away to school was the best thing for Letitia, my mother grieved for her. Otherwise, Letitia had no favorites; we were all loved equally: her three brothers and me, her cousins and aunts and uncles. She was generous in spirit, always offering to help, a wonderful combination of loving heart and mischievous rascal.
It took eight weeks to get the autopsy report in the mail. In the meantime, her cremains were shipped to Ohio within a few days. The day my mother went to collect them, my three brothers were all there, two driving in from the East Coast. I have never felt more alone. I considered getting a tattoo of Letitia’s name on my arm, have something indelible of her, but then my mother asked if I would like them to set aside some of her ashes for me. This had never been done in our family. We are not sentimental people. Death is death. I chose from the website of the funeral home a small, lacquered box with a yellow butterfly on top. My brothers confirmed it was perfect, that it was something Letitia might have chosen herself, and one day the package, which required a signature, arrived for me at my campus office. I was unprepared for the fact that it would be wrapped in a huge red transport sticker, ghoulishly labeled HUMAN REMAINS, or that the poor secretary who had to sign for it almost passed out at his desk.
* * *
Autopsy reports are their own genre. The eight weeks of waiting were interminable. During that time, I imagined injury, accident, and all manner of horrible possibilities. And then when the official document arrived, it was full of seven single-spaced pages of words that eventually concluded “natural causes” next to the explanation of her death.
There is no way to humanize an autopsy report. Its purpose is to be clinically clear, its language medical, the physical body spoken of in parts, measured, weighed, assessed – heart, kidneys, spleen, stomach, sexual organs – the very parts of ourselves we never see. But as I read the details of my sister’s body, I felt closer to her again, knowing as I did things about her that none of those who had cut her apart knew at all. The way she moved, the way she smiled, the color of her deep blue eyes, her thick dark eyebrows and wavy hair, the small scars on her shins, the way she would eagerly agree to anything I suggested we do.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:
“The decedent is a well-nourished, well-developed, white female whose appearance is consistent with her given age. Her body is 5 feet 5 inches long and weighs 134 pounds. Rigor mortis is partially developed in the upper and lower extremities as well as in the mandible. Livor mortis is posterior, cyanotic, and is blanchable, and slightly diminished. The body is cold.
Head hair is brown/ grayish tied up in two braided ponytails and measures up to 14 inches in length. . . .The ears show slightly enlarged ear piercings in each lobe which contain blue stone earrings which are each given to Deputy Coroner John Cook. . . The mouth is remarkable for a full set of natural teeth in good repair and good hygiene. . . .
CLOTHING:
. . . The decedent is received wrapped in a white sheet and is wearing a blue and white hospital gown. There are three hair ties holding the ponytails together. . . . There is a white sock on the left foot. . . .
This was followed by details of the internal examination, the “body . . . opened by means of the usual ‘Y’ shaped biparietal incisions.” Then a list of her organs.
The imagination can be a terrible place to live, and so I suppose, while questions still haunted me, I had a medical answer: natural causes. Her body had failed her, even if prematurely, but as all bodies eventually do. Perhaps most difficult to read were the details of her hair in braids and the white sock on her left foot. These images, so intimate, touched me more profoundly than the explanation of her rapid decline.
I had bought her those hair bands. I wondered if they were the blue ones, her favorite color. I kept picturing what might have happened to the other white sock, where it had gotten lost, if it was on the floor of her bedroom or in the ambulance or if it had dropped out somewhere on a road. No one who found it would know the story behind the sock. She had such tiny feet. And one of them was bare, as she lay on a gurney, alone, in a hospital emergency room.
I remember the little blue sneakers she wore as a toddler. And her overalls. And the little striped long-sleeve shirt. And her two long braids and giant blue eyes and her enormous smile.
There is no way to fit details of a person’s life on a page, or even many pages. There is always something missing. And that is the way it is for me with Letitia.
Even now, I still feel responsible for her death, for not protecting her enough, for not seeing the signs, for not being with her at the most important moment. The day before the end, the school nurse had called to report Letitia was bending over as if in pain but refusing to admit anything was wrong. A year before she’d been diagnosed with necrosis of both hips, and her gait had changed, and she was having a harder time mounting the horses. The orthopedist couldn’t believe she wasn’t in agony, but the truth is, among many intellectually disabled people, the pain threshold apparently operates somewhat differently. Letitia could always tolerate a lot, which gained her our tremendous respect as kids. We used to say, “Letitia’s so tough . . . nothing hurts her!”
The school nurse wanted my permission to send her to the orthopedist that afternoon for a check on her hips, and of course I gave my consent. Letitia kept insisting she wanted to return to class, but the nurse sent her to the doctor who examined her hips – if only he’d known! – immediately determined nothing had changed, that there was nothing urgent, and because they didn’t know what else to do, they wrapped her left wrist, which she readily agreed “might hurt.” Typical of Letitia, being pressed to admit to discomfort, she would always deflect. Noted on the autopsy report – she was wearing a wrist brace. After the doctor visit, the nurse kept her up at the school medical office while she ate dinner, which she held down, and then scheduled more tests the next day. Letitia seemed better and was acting more normally. I requested that the night watch check on her hourly in her dorm room, and that the tests be administered first thing in the morning. We said good night. But I did not speak to Letitia, something I will always regret.
There was one clue I now cannot bear to consider. Earlier that day the nurse could not get a urine sample from Letitia. We both attributed this to the fact that she’s what I teasingly call “a camel,” that she has never been a big water drinker. I went to bed thinking I’d done what was necessary, that I’d hear in the morning that she was all right.
There are all the “should haves”: I should have talked to her directly, I should have driven down to her school to look at her myself, I should have insisted they keep her in the medical office overnight. . . .
Waves of remorse washed over me daily. I still have not gotten up the nerve to ask anyone if I could have saved her. I had saved her before, but not this time. This time she was gone. This time she was not coming back.
I have not been courageous enough to ask my family members if they blame me. And even if I did, they’d never say they did. Perhaps selfish, I lived for a while in an emotional prison.
One night I dream that we are all sitting around a table on a screened porch – my father, my mother, and my three brothers, and me – and the mood is light. And suddenly I cry out, “Look, everyone, Letitia’s here! She’s alive!” And all heads turn and there she is, smiling from the doorway with an impish grin on her face, and I move into semi-wakefulness believing we’ve all made a huge mistake, that she isn’t gone at all, she has just tricked us and is here. And I start to call my mother to give her the good news. Until I remember.
There are mornings I can’t get out of bed. But I do so because I must go to work, to meet students, to switch gears and focus on classes. Yet everything feels fragile, like walking on blown glass, my own body more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt it before.
* * *
Her school held a memorial and sent us all DVDs of what is popularly known now as “a celebration of life.” It arrived in the mail when I was at home. Because I was afraid and yet couldn’t bear not watching it, I popped it into the machine and pressed play. My mother and Nathaniel had watched it together in Ohio. Mark watched it alone in DC. Anton still hasn’t watched it. There were students gathered, the school director spoke glowingly, then invited others to approach the mike. When I thought I couldn’t bear any more tearful tributes, lovely and sincere as they were, one of her quirkier resident friends, a small, wrinkled woman with a raspy voice, stood up to say, “I loved Letitia. She was so funny. When we had movie night, she made us laugh. Letitia was even better than the movie!”
Out of this snowy darkness I emerged a different person. Nothing will touch me like this again. She is the bullet to my heart. She is whatever will finally take me down in the end. I am more careful, more cautious, more guarded, knowing I am not ready to go where she is. And while eventually she would stop showing up in shimmery form, beckoning, cheerfully inviting me to join her, I know the time will come, as it does for us all. For now, what separates us – the living and the dead – is just a thin pane of glass.
The grave digger had already dug the hole. We lowered her box into the ground. My mother gently laid Virginia bluebells on top. I borrowed a shovel and covered the grave with the dirt, tamping it down with my rubber boots, just as I had done with my father. I garden, and turning earth and covering holes is a form of meditation.
Letitia is buried next to my father, in the place, the funeral director reminded my mother with mild approbation, traditionally reserved “for the wife.”
My mother countered, “It is where she belongs.”
“Letitia Ann Elizabeth Miller” is inscribed on the back of my father’s tombstone. I learned only after her death that Letitia was the name of my mother’s childhood friend. Not surprisingly, her name means light and joy.
My mother had protected Letitia’s cremains in a beautiful bamboo box on her bed for five months until the weather cleared and spring emerged. There were seven of us at her grave site service: my mom, me, my three brothers, and my two sisters-in‑law. And my dog Grover whom she had loved and who loved her. The day before, a tornado had swept through, and because spring weather is unpredictable, I’d ordered a tent. The seven of us stood close together as a gentle drizzle fell. The priest performed the rite. He asked if any of us wished to speak. There was silence, during which we could hear the sounds of birds in the overhead trees. I stood up and faced my family. From a sheet of paper, I read Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Here’s why:
When Letitia visited me a few years ago, she was in my campus office with me, perusing the bookshelf, when suddenly she exclaimed, “Wordsworth!” I looked over to see her pulling a little Dover edition from the shelf. “Can I have this?” she asked.
It’s a very Letitia story, since she often was full of surprises. So, it was sweetly puzzling because she read maybe at a second-grade level and had likely never read Wordsworth. I asked her on the way out to the car what the book meant to her.
“I love Wordsworth,” she murmured.
After strapping herself in her seat, she opened the little book to the first page. After a pause, she began to read aloud, haltingly.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils . . .”
Over her life there had been surprises like this where absolute concentration and excitement merged, or what my mother called “the mystery of synapses clicking” – what made her good at jigsaw puzzles, or quick to recognize a Verdi aria and hum along, or distinguish a Van Gogh from a Pisarro. Now she read with intense focus, and when she stumbled over a word I would help her along, and in this way, she made it through the whole poem. I sat stunned for a moment, before starting the car to back out of the campus garage. She was still turning the pages to find another poem. I didn’t want her to see me crying.
Alyce Miller is the author of three story collections, a novel, and the non-fiction book Skunk (Reaktion Books/ University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her work has also appeared in Kenyon Review, Story, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares.