What They Don't Tell You

What they don't tell you about death is the phone call. They don't tell you that you can't tell the difference between a normal ring and one that brings bad news, that there's no warning and no time to get your bearings.

It's a couple days after Christmas, and I'm on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia with my family exploring the Jamestown settlement and the recreations of The Mayflower. My best friend hasn't returned my calls for the last two days, but finally the phone rings. So I pick it up, expecting a conversation about Christmas presents or schoolyard gossip. Instead, the voice on the other line asks to speak to one of my parents. I hand the phone to my mother and watch her facial expression change: her eyebrows come together, her forehead crinkles, the corners of her mouth turn down. Her voice becomes low, hushed, and urgent.

Finally, she hangs up and sits down next to me on the bed. Then she tells me, carefully, as if divulging a secret. My classmate of nine years died in a freak ATV accident in Costa Rica by plummeting over a cliff while on winter vacation with his family.

After the phone call there are no words, just thick silence. No one is taught how to react in this situation. Because no one expects to be in this situation. Things like this only happen to other people—they happen to them, not us. Not me. Then come the tears. Endless tears. Tears until my chest aches and my abdomen cramps, until my cheeks are chapped and caked with salty residue, until I'm lightheaded—and then they keep coming.

What they don't tell you about death is that it lasts forever.

That may sound silly and naïve, but I used to live under the impression that what is broken can always be mended. In a society accustomed to instant gratification, I sometimes feel as though I'm above reality, indomitable. But death is permanent; no amount of stitches or tape or hope can fix it.

I realize this as I sit at my desk in my classroom, while an eerie silence smothers the air and makes my body feel heavy and fatigued. Brian's empty seat taunts everyone. His nametag is still taped to his desk. His books and other belongings remain untouched—just in case.

Every time the wooden door creaks open, I—along with the rest of my classmates—whip around. Each and every one of us is expecting him to walk in as if nothing happened, as if his broken body wasn't currently being reconstructed and embalmed in the basement of a funeral home. I jump whenever the doorknob turns: my heartbeat quickens and I hold my breath. But it's never Brian.

There is no one to raise his hand in math class to challenge the teacher. There is no one flicking blond hair out of his eyes while he argues. There is no one to throw the school's rubbery hotdogs at the chalkboards to see if they bounce.

He can't be gone forever. Nothing is forever.

But I suppose that means life isn't forever, either.

What they don't tell you about death is what to say.

Standing in line to offer my condolences to his family at the wake, my chest aches. How am I supposed to tell his mother that everything will be okay? It won't. He'll never hug her again, never tell her he loves her, never smile. His room will always be empty, haunted by his smell and his absence. His little brother, who bears a frightening resemblance to Brian, will continue to ask where he is until he's old enough to understand that he isn't coming back.

"He's in Heaven," people tell him as they grasp for words, simplifying the fragile situation into nothing but clumsy syllables.

But they don't know that he's in Heaven. There is no proof of Heaven or Hell or anything in between. And even if he is in Heaven, is that supposed to make everything better? The fact remains the same: Brian is dead.

When I finally reach the front of the line, there he is wearing his green and gold basketball jersey, awkwardly positioned in the casket with his hands folded on his stomach. Plaster, cotton balls, and makeup have disguised any evidence of his bone-shattering accident. He looks like a wax figure; his shiny skin is too perfect to be human.

I burst into tears as I hug his mother.

"I'm so sorry," I manage to choke out several times.

I realize at this moment that "sorry" is utterly meaningless. Such a small, overused word can't even begin to vocalize what I want to say. There are no words significant enough to express the emptiness in my chest, the hollow pain, or the lingering thread of hope that I cling to even though Brian's lifeless body lays in front of me.  

"He didn't deserve this," "He was a great person," "Let me know if you need anything." I could say any of these things, but none of them would help. I wish I could open up her ribcage and fix her heart. I wish it were that simple.

His mother holds me to her frail body as I cry—her own tears long dried up—and tells me it's okay. She holds my face between her hands and thanks me for coming.

What they don't tell you about death is what to say, because no words can make it any easier.

The one cliché about death that holds true is that only the good die young.

It's raining as my classmates and I file into the church as part of the funeral service. We line the center aisle wearing our school uniforms while the pallbearers carry the casket during the procession.

There aren't enough seats to accommodate the hundreds of friends and family members. A section has been reserved for our class, now one person short of the original sixty of us. We pass tissues along the rows, our cheeks and eyes swollen from grief. Memories flash in and out of my mind and I squeeze a Kleenex between my fingers and stare down at the pleats of my skirt.

Brian duct-taping his hand-me-down navy blue uniform pants because the button fell off and he only owned one pair. When the tape didn't stick, he escalated to trying the stapler. Our art teacher Ms. Passias, who had been harassing him to fix his pants for over a week, finally intervened. I watched her sew a button back on during class while he still wore them.

Brian's pointy and seraphic features crinkling into a smile, his mischievous laugh spreading through entire classrooms. The one Friday afternoon in seventh grade during clean-up when he snuck up behind me on his knees and poked me in the butt with a coat hanger, and then ran away—still on his knees.

Brian insisting to our math teacher that his (Brian's) new theory or formula about algebra worked better than the original we learned in class. At least ten minutes of math class every day had been devoted to these arguments.

It's raining outside. No sun shines through the stained-glass windows. The air in the church is thick and muggy despite the bitter January air. We all watch as Brian's frail mother shivers in the front row, skin barely clinging to her bones after days of not eating.

Before Communion, our class arranges itself on the altar to sing the hymn "Angels Among Us." I believe there are angels among us… Sent down to us from somewhere up above… They come to you and me in our darkest hour…

What they don't tell you about death is that only the good die young because—according to the words of Therese Pearman—God "broke our hearts to prove to us, He only takes the best."

What they don't tell you about death is how to move on.

All of the books, the prayers, the expert advice of psychologists—I can tell anyone firsthand that none of it works. For months I thought I caught glimpses of Brian walking the halls of our quaint middle school, only to have him turn around and be a different person. For months I replayed his voice in my head to make sure I wouldn't forget what it sounded like. Now all I can recall is his laugh. For months going over thirty miles per hour in a car terrified me: all I could think of was how Brian felt speeding over the edge of a cliff.

They say that time heals all wounds, but it's not true. Time is like Spackle: it covers wounds, but that spot on the wall will always be more vulnerable than it used to be. Perhaps with enough time, at the very best, thick scar tissue will grow and protect the wound from further injury. But at the same time, that scar will always be a visible reminder of the familiar hollow pain and emptiness.

Brian's accident was not the first time that I encountered death, although it was certainly my most jarring experience. In fact, I've lost count of the number of wakes and funerals that I've attended over the course of my life.

It sounds awful, but I can't even remember all the faces and names, just the conditions: old enough, too young, natural causes, suicide, overdose. I grew accustomed to kneeling before coffins and staring curiously into caskets. I hovered at my mother's elbow, dressed in black and dreading sitting through a church service. Funeral receptions became routine.

All of my experiences, especially Brian's, with the mortality of humans have left me both horrified by and enthralled with death. My biggest fear now is loss—I know that anyone can be wrenched from my life in an instant, leaving nothing but the residue of a personality in my memory, and soon even that begins to fade.

In my fascination, I stumbled across my first episode of the NBC show Without A Trace, about the missing persons unit of the FBI, and fell into an obsession. I realized that I could study death by looking at the people viewed as the dregs of society: the murderers, the serial killers, the rapists. The irony does not escape me: these people are just as obsessed with death as I am. But who better to learn from?

Not only can I attempt to explain death through those who inflict it, but I can also see the effects it has on the victims' friends and families. I can help them cope; maybe even provide them with the answers or reasons that I wanted to hear as a child.

Perhaps by keeping death so close, I'm hoping to keep it at bay, to rise above it. By interviewing the most violent of all offenders, maybe I will discover some secret about death that will relieve me of my fear and my obsession.

What they don't tell you about death is how to move on because you can't. What they don't tell you about death is that it haunts you forever. What they don't tell you about death is that you'll never be the same.