Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

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  The subject of buying a family plot came up. My dad wanted to buy other plots next to my brother so that he and my mother could be buried next to him. I remember my parents talking to our rabbi about having an open casket even though my brother’s body had been badly damaged and…something about his chest and forehead being caved in, and Jews didn’t typically have open-casket funerals, but my mother was demanding it.

  “He’s my son, and I want to say goodbye to him,” she told the rabbi. I remember these words exactly because I had never seen my mom demand anything from anyone. My father looked at my mother when she said that, and I remember thinking he had never seen her demand anything either. For the first time in my life, in that moment, my mother was more in control than my father.

  The rabbi was telling my father that in order to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, my mother would have to convert to Judaism. Wait, what? I thought my mom was Jewish—mostly because no one ever told me she wasn’t. During all of my brothers’ and sisters’ bar and bat mitzvahs, my mother would go up on the bimah and speak Hebrew just like all the other Jewish mothers did during everyone else’s bar and bat mitzvahs. She even went with my father and me to temple some Friday nights.

  Apparently, my mother was Mormon, and when she came over from Germany to marry my father, she agreed to raise their children Jewish. I had never heard the word “Mormon” before. I always thought that when my dad called my mom a “shiksa,” he was talking about her being German. I didn’t know that “shiksa” meant a non-Jew. Didn’t your mother have to be Jewish in order for you to be Jewish? Was I not Jewish either? More great news.

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  There was a funeral, and all I remember were my brothers Glen and Roy taking turns holding me in their laps as we all sat and cried throughout the service. I remember thinking, Why say such a thing if you didn’t mean it? Why not be extra careful when you’re on a fucking mountain peak if you promised your littlest sister that you would spend the rest of the summer tipping her over in a sailboat? Why would you break that promise to her? I was livid.

  I remember my German grandfather, Vati, coming over and saying to Roy: “You’re the oldest now. You need to take care of your brothers and sisters.” I remember thinking, Roy isn’t the oldest. There is no oldest anymore. We are a pot without a lid.

  They’d had to pump Chet’s body with embalming fluid so that his face could be viewed. He looked dead and bloated. The funeral ended, and I guess at some point we went back to Martha’s Vineyard to finish out our summer? I don’t remember.

  The day after the funeral must have been around the time that I stopped crying in front of people. If everyone in my family was going to fall apart—and the only person who held our shit together just let himself go off and die after he promised me that he would come back after his trip—then I would have to be strong on my own.

  From that day onward, if I saw my mother crying or heard my parents groaning in anguish in their bedroom in the early hours of the morning, I would leave the house and get on my bike. I would ride my bike for hours and cry, but I would not allow myself to cry in front of anyone else or show any weakness. I would not talk about my brother to my family. If his name came up, I left the room and went for a bike ride. I would ride and ride and cry and cry and then walk back in the front door numb, hoping no one was there. No one being home was better than anyone being home.

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  At some point on the Vineyard that summer, my mother was standing on the deck looking at the water saying she was just waiting for a dream or a sign that Chet was okay—something from God. She wanted Chet to tell her he was safe and in heaven. She was trying to recruit me. That’s how it felt when she tried to talk to me about Chet. It felt like she was trying to trick me into crying. I walked away from her and told her that there was no God and there was no heaven and out of everyone in the world she should know that by now.

  My mother was in pain, and I chose to stab her again. I couldn’t understand anyone else’s pain—I couldn’t even understand my own. I was confused, and I was mad. I remember thinking, If Chet ever comes back, I’m not just going to go back to the way things were before. No, I was going to punish him for what he did.

  I remember asking my dad—who would sit for hours on the deck staring at the bay—if he would take me swimming.

  My dad taught me how to swim when I was two or three. Whenever he was on the Vineyard—he commuted back and forth to New Jersey in the summer for nonexistent “used-car business”—he would carry me down from the house to the bay and hold me in his arms as he walked us into the water, and then I would swim with him on his back and climb on top of his shoulders and dive over the top of his head. I’d swim back to him holding my breath underwater, until I was right back in his arms. I loved swimming with my dad. After that, he would carry me up the path back to our house and tell me that I was stronger than anyone else he knew and that I’d probably end up competing in the Olympics.

  My father didn’t respond the first time, so I asked him a second time.

  “We’re not going in the water,” he growled. “How can I go in the water, when my boy is dead?” His face was always contorted back then. Wretched. It hurt to look at both my parents.

  I knew it was a risk to defy my father, but I was desperate for him to snap out of it. There was absolutely no light in him, and it was sucking the life out of what was left of the rest of us.

  If I could just get him into the water, I knew he would relax a little or find a little ray of sunshine, or at least I could hold on to his back and then trick him into a hug. I just wanted him to breathe—I wanted to breathe too. The water was safe, because if I started crying I could just dunk my head and shake it off. If anyone could get him to experience some joy, it would be me.

  I turned away from him and defiantly walked down the steps and across the lawn to the path that led down to the water. I never looked back, because I was scared shitless about how he would react to seeing me swim alone. The only rule I had growing up was never to swim alone.

  I thought about getting spanked in the water and how funny that would be for both of us, him trying to catch me in the water to spank me. We’d both end up laughing so hard, I’d inevitably pee, and then I’d know my dad was mine. I could always get everyone in my family to laugh. I would just pee in my pants. That got everyone, every time.

  When I got down to the water I nervously swam out about twenty yards. When I mustered up the courage, with every kind of fear pulsating through my body for having defied him, I looked back and saw he had gone inside.

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  I haven’t had a bowl of cereal since that night in the kitchen with my brother. My brothers and sisters continued eating cereal all the time growing up. I didn’t understand that—how they could do something that Chet loved so much, knowing what we knew. I didn’t understand it because I was only able to draw from my own experience and didn’t have the faculties to grasp that their relationships to cereal weren’t as linked to Chet as mine was. That not everyone has your history or your past. That my brothers and sisters had their own memories of Chet, which didn’t involve cereal, or even me. That each person has their own individual memory of the way things happened, and that you can waste so much time being angry at cereal.

  I only ate eggs after Chet died. I’ve spent the past thirty-three years looking at cereal with disdain. Cereal was for children. Cereal was for nine-year-olds before they got their hearts broken. Cereal was off-limits.

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  One day, when I was around fifteen, I went foraging through the attic and found the pictures of my brother, head caved in, crumpled among rocks. I saw the pictures most parents would have made a better effort of hiding. His head, his chest, everything was