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Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life we are in death.
The first time I ever saw someone die wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead person, that would have been at my baby brother Daniel’s funeral long before, a child version of me seated on my grandpa’s knee, my mother a composed, black-clad pseudo-statue, her beautiful face colorless and still, not even twenty-six yet and her second son in three years headed for the ground. She was unable to hold me, too stricken, not entirely well, so my paternal grandpa did the honors.
My father was…away from home, nearly a scandal, that. His six-pound son lying dead, passing on mere hours into this world in his mother’s arms, and where was he? People whispered about him, asking what sort of man would not come to comfort his family at such a time? They didn’t know enough about it all to understand, as even I already did, the truth being that he almost certainly did not even know and was still looking forward to his son’s arrival a month down the road. They didn’t know either about my father’s long job-related absences, which my mother and I accepted, the restrictions, the precautions of the life he would live throughout my years of growing up, or of those imposed cautions that so readily descended by outside standards into the realm of low-grade paranoia, part of a profession all too readily glamorized but which contained in reality nothing glamorous whatsoever, a career about which I was taught early-on to mislead, and those to whom I told the truth rarely failed to disbelieve me, including priests and even my best friend. My father’s employers were everywhere, people acknowledged, yet when they actually encountered someone in the rank and file of his profession it was as if they could not encompass the stark reality that they exist and are among you.
“Don’t you want to say goodbye to him?” my grandpa asked me there in the chapel as I pressed myself up onto his shoulder to stare at the crescent of dark-attired strangers seated behind us.
“No!” I said forcefully in my little voice. “No!”
So no one made me go up, but I did see over the tiny white casket where an equally miniscule infant lay wrapped in a blanket, eyes closed, mouth pink as a rosebud, the little brother I would never have this side of paradise.
So that was death, yes, but not dying.
The initial occasion I saw the spark leave another human being, saw the body become that graceless thing it graduates to be when death catches it in its irresistible shroud, I was seventeen years old, it was April 1, 1996, a Monday, an April Fool’s Day, as it happens, and I was again in the company of my grandpa, an ardent baseball fan who would not admit to having missed an opening day in half a century, who always took pride in telling me that every spring the first game of the major league season happened right there, in his hometown.
He’d ask, “And do you know why that is, Ellie?”
“Sure, because the Reds are the oldest professional baseball team in the world, so they get the honor.”
He knew I knew, he’d been quizzing me every spring for as long as I could remember.
We’d been to the big Findlay Market Parade that accompanied opening day, its route snaking from Over-the-Rhine to the former Riverfront Stadium, an almost holy ritual in a city where schools let out for the occasion and something like one family in six came down to line the streets for the parade’s two mile procession. There were clowns (scaring almost no one back then) and Shriners in tiny cars, the Budweiser Clydesdales were stomping, and the United States Marine Corps Marching Band did John Philip Sousa proud. Pete Rose, the sport’s leading hitter, disgraced everywhere but his home town, was in a lead car that advertised---what else?—Schott Buick. As he passed each street corner people yelled to him, “You deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, Pete!” And Rose would look toward those people and wink, a cocky sunovagun but heck, they loved him, he was one of their own, a boy from the humble west side who’d made good as no others of their numbers ever had.
On Opening Day in the American Heartland what darkness could possibly arise from beginnings like those?
Grandpa was acquainted with people in the Reds organization and the result was he had gotten us good seats for the game, behind home plate and little to the right, about a third of the way to first base, maybe ten rows up, close to the Cincinnati dugout, close enough to see the facial features of anyone standing at the plate. We were there early, the weather was perfect for baseball, the organ was playing, the crowd was ready, vendors were hawking their wares, in a German town so many beers were available, a buzz filled the ballpark (itself now gone, replaced by a better facility, though not one with half the meaning to locals), and I was impatient. Baseball….bored me, to be honest, still kind of does, and were it not for the fact I was spending time with my grandpa I would have been carrying a book to read, probably A Canticle for Leibowitz, which enthralled me that spring. Grandpa had taken my cousin and me to see a World Series game in 1990, something I treasure more in hindsight than I likely did at the time. Now I am so glad I went.
Am I glad I was there that day, though, April 1, 1996? I guess, but…..
At long last things got underway, Air Force jets from Wright-Patterson flew overhead, the national anthem was played and back then I think darn near everyone stood for it. The teams were introduced, the stands roared for the hometown team, and lastly the umpire came out and tipped his hat to the crowd. He was a large-statured man named John McSherry, and I admit I didn’t pay him much attention, though later I often thought of that moment, since in a very few minutes Mr. McSherry would lie dead in front of all 60,000 of us, spared no humiliation in the act of his passing.
When it happened, his legs giving out, his bulk spilling forward and downward, a look of odd madness taking over his darkening face, tongue protruding, it did not make sense for a moment. I thought what? The first pitch had been thrown by a dignitary, the umpire, McSherry himself, had called out, “Play ball!” and as I remember a batter approached . Then McSherry called time out, turned back toward the dugout, as if to walk rapidly away…and fell face down.
For just an instant the entire stadium went quiet, then the noise became loud indeed, and many stood to get their money’s worth of an unexpected tragedy.
My grandpa said, “Look away, you don’t need to see that.”
I did look away, kind of, during the next few awful moments as the dying man on the ground was surrounded, as TV cameras rolled, as onlookers gawked, many taking pictures and even videos on the bread-loaf sized camcorders of the era.
I looked at my feet…then peeked down at the terrible events on the field. I gazed up at some gulls circling above, seemingly as at home on the river as on the ocean, oblivious and uncaring about what anyone was doing below.
And then I looked again and saw the poor dead man’s feet sticking helplessly out between two paramedics who had flipped him over. There was something horribly pathetic about seeing his feet like that, then I saw his face…his face for just an instant, and I don’t think I looked anymore after that.
They called off the game, only logical, though some complained, saying never had a Reds’ opening day been canceled in a streak that went back practically to the Civil War. As for me I didn’t see how anyone could have thought of playing a game under those conditions, not just out of some sort of respect but because the entire afternoon was suddenly tinted with morbid darkness. Maybe they were tougher than me, maybe I was weak, but I had just watched someone die, and that awed me and made me feel cold. I thought how just a few minutes before that umpire had walked proudly out and tipped his cap to the stands as the announcer introduced him, he had minutes to live, and now he was gone. Was he in pain even then, as he made his entrance? Was he afraid? Was he telling himself the sensation in his chest was nothing…just go on?
Grandpa and I left among a crowd that milled not quickly toward the exits, the conversation around us focusing on nothing else but what we’d all witnessed.
“That’s all we’re going to hear for days,” Grandpa predicted. “And you watch, El,” he said, “there’ll be people who will lie and say they were there today when really they weren’t.” He asked me if I’d ever heard 25% more people claimed to have voted for Kennedy after his murder than ever did in 1960. He said, “Same situation.”
Grandpa had liked Kennedy, and he didn’t like liars.
He and I trekked about ten blocks north to a place called Arnold’s, an interesting bar and restaurant which dates to about 1861, a little older than the Reds themselves, and in standing-room conditions Grandpa had a beer and got me this in-house craft cream soda that came out of an actual wooden barrel and cost an unimaginably pricey (for 1996) $4.50. He asked if what I’d seen was upsetting me much, and I said no, it was okay. (I’d have dreams about it all, of course, I was like that.) Grandpa commented that people ought to watch their weight, and I agreed they should, weight being my paralyzing post-tennis obsession, but I likewise thought for the millionth time of how people also should not smoke, and my grandpa was an incurable, unapologetic smoker.
My father was off in another city that day, again away from home when a tragedy struck, though for nicer reasons this time, preparing to watch the Kentucky Wildcats, “his” basketball team play (and win) the national title that was wrapping up March Madness, so I was staying with my grandpa til Dad got back. I kind of felt sorry for my grandpa living alone the past year since my grandma died after a series of strokes, leaving him to himself in that big old house of his, a house that had once buzzed with energy and life and which now seemed shunned, as if it was always Grandma, not he, the family came to see, as if she was the house’s very soul, taken too young, too young. At least I still came to see him.
He went into his study and smoked, I did my own things, eventually toward evening knocked on his study door and asked if he wanted me to fix us anything, and he said he didn’t care, so I threw something together but neither of us wanted to eat after the day we’d had.
He said he didn’t understand why people let themselves get out of shape and fat and I said maybe they couldn’t help it, and he said they always had a choice, they could help it, people just did what was easy.
We finally took a walk together around sunset, back to this hilltop we called the overlook, a place we’d gone together since I was very little (a place I take my own children these days) and though he was sixty-six my grandpa hiked up that hill with ease, smoking not seeming to slow him down any more than the accumulated years, and I honestly can’t remember if I noticed that he was remarkable in being able to cover that distance so well, or if I just took it as part of the way things had always been, but it was something of a feat, him in such good shape he could trek all that distance across rough terrain and reach it the same time as an athletic teenager. In retrospect I am proud of him.
From that height we watched the sun turn the sky pretty colors, and we talked up there, mentioning other times we’d made the climb together, me being so small on some of them I had to hold his big rough hand, and finally, too soon in memory, we went back before darkness turned the woods as lightless as a cave.
I said goodnight to him, kissed him on the forehead, and went upstairs to the bedroom that had once been my father’s, while he went back to his study and smoked while listening to WLW as men called in to talk sagely about the day’s tragedy, pretending they had insights, their tones of voice authoritatively self-important, therefore slightly silly, though I doubt they thought so.
Knowing I had been there at the ball park, everyone, it seemed like, called me, wanting to hear details, the more lurid the better. That’s how it is, people want to know all about something tragic, don’t they? Mostly I failed to oblige, I just didn’t want to, but I told a lot of it to my best friend’s younger brother, who was actually a close friend of mine in his own right, almost like my own brother, I erroneously thought then, a classic only-child always seeking someone to fill the role of sibling, missing the fact the kid was in lust with me (and every girl he knew). And I told all of it to my boyfriend, who suggested it might make me feel better to talk about it, so I said okay, and I did just that, even telling him about McSherry’s feet sticking out between the paramedics who rolled him onto his back, and good Lord, how his wide-eyed face was red and his jaw was gaping open so it looked like even in death he was gasping for breath.
Horrid.
It didn’t make me feel better at all to tell him all that, it made me feel sick and it messed up my dreams, just like I told him it was going to, and he said sorry. I held the phone to my ear and he held his as well and neither of us said anything else for a while, just stayed like that. We were better at meaningful silences, he and I, than anyone I’ve ever paired with since. We could speak entire conversations by saying nothing at all. It was a gift, and a useful one that particular night.
So, it was the first time I ever watched another person die, I wasn’t nearly as old as I liked to think I was, and the experience was truly awful.
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