First time by text

The words staring up at me from the iPhone bubble strike me mute. 

No quaver. No cracking voice. Still, the sterile stream of alphabet contains a rip in the fabric of reality. No, the soundless words don’t contain the rip, they launch it. Like a rocket. It starts inside me, silent, and spreads outward like a new kind of bleeding. Absent all sound— except my own sharp inhale.  My own croaking throat. No words. Just a gasp holding a slight moan.

My brain backfills the feelings as I re-read the message.

After trying to infuse my feelings into my own mute message, I am unsure if I should telephone in that moment. 

Her exhaustion comes through in her answer

Dana has become a surrogate sister and her dad Fred a surrogate father since my own father and sister died in quick succession twenty years ago. Although she probably knows I am off all social media this evening given the expected flood of posts about my sister, Dana also knows that news of her dad’s death will be spreading fast on Facebook and Instagram from our small hometown.

Uninvited, the scene of me telling Fred about my own dad’s death so long ago floods forth as I stare at the phone.

My dad and Fred had been best friends for years in Wellsville, Ohio, the way that old Catholic men are friends after all those Sundays managing the commentators’ schedule for Mass, right up until the day the diocese closes the tiny parish. The way old men drive to other small Ohio towns—and even across the bridge into West Virginia—every month for Knights of Columbus dinners. The way old men trek through Indiana snowstorms to sit freezing at Notre Dame football games.

The morning after my dad died in his hospital bed right there in his own living room, barely ninety days after his cancer diagnosis, I’d been awake only an hour or so when Fred rang the doorbell at my dad’s house on Riverside Avenue, holding a potted white flower that was at least two feet tall.

The freshness of a sunny but cool April morning slips inside as I open the door.

Offering the plant to me, Fred says, Good morning, Cindy I brought your dad an Easter lily for his birthday.

He’s gone, I stutter. Still in shock from watching the ambulance take my dad’s body away just a few hours earlier as the sun was creeping over the gray-green hills on the West Virginia side of the river and seeing a first pinkish gold ray of dawn land somehow gently on Dad’s cheek and forehead as he lay on a gurney down on the sidewalk in front of the house he’d lived in for more than thirty years. His face remained uncovered as dawn was breaking because he had not been officially declared dead yet and the ambulance drivers, who knew Dad, had felt some kind of deference to my sisters and me standing dumbstruck on the front porch.

Gone where?

Fred is confused, his voice rough.

He’s.

I can’t say it again.

The ambulance from a few hours ago had driven Dad less than one block to the funeral home just up on Main Street.

Fred has stepped inside the front door as we speak. I close the door on robin trills spilling from just beyond the porch, and silence settles around us. Fred sees the empty hospital bed, which we had moved to the living room that past weekend since today is Dad’s birthday and the rest of my siblings will arrive from out of town and the side porch room we had made into Dad’s bedroom after his surgery when he could no longer climb the stairs is too tight and stuffy for birthday visitors and attempted celebration. 

Fred stares at the rumpled sheets thrown hastily across the bed.

He’s gone?

This time Fred’s voice cracks. His face goes gray and he takes on the look of an old man whose best friend has just died.

All I can do is nod, throat tight, eyes burning.

Now, in place of his daughter’s text message, I see Fred’s face staring down at me—this warm September night on my own porch in Pittsburgh, flooded with sharp weedy scent of the potted geraniums I was watering when the text message came in, and suddenly serenaded by piercing cardinal cries. Fred’s face is not gray but jovial and radiating joy the way it did when he met me at his own front door all those Easters when I joined his family for dinner with my kids after Dad and Cathy were gone.

Fred was six feet five inches tall back in the day.

He delivered the eulogy at my dad’s Mass of the Christian Burial at that tiny red brick Catholic church we’d all gone to forever. And just a year after Dad died and Fred lost his best friend, I lost my best friend when my sister was killed in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on that blinding blue Tuesday morning. A month later Fred stood next to me in the brisk air outside that same little church where we had only a Memorial Service because none of Cathy’s remains had been found yet. That day the whole town of Wellsville filed through the reception line to tell what was left of my family how sorry they were that this happened to Cathy. To us. Fred stood next to me and my children again in 2007 when the Wellsville town council dedicated a stone engraved with the words We will never forget up on 2^nd street by the floodwall, a memorial to Cathy’s death. In the biting winter afternoon, Fred waited quietly as I exchanged hard hugs with fireman and policemen who’d been in junior high when Cathy and I graduated from high school.

Now, still staring at Dana’s message, my mind fills with questions that can wait for later: How did Fred die? Was it COVID—he would be at least ninety-six years old now, but hadn’t I’d just seen Facebook photos of him tending his huge backyard garden?

Who was with him in those last moments?

Something larger looms in this moment.

This learning of Fred’s death contains Dad’s death.

Contains Cathy’s death.

Contains the death of a man who loved me—when Cathy was the one to call me and say those choking words.

Contains even the death of little Marcie Gualtier, a five-year-old hit by a car running home from our house—that same house on Riverside Avenue —so many years ago.

This moment hangs suspended within the spirals of time, containing all the deaths, lined up like tumblers on a lock.

I see my words to Fred the day my dad died.

I see Fred’s stumbling responses.

Words written out and bound into bundles of iMessage bubbles, sprouting forth from Dana’s message on my phone like blue and white Easter lilies. They pop out of—no—they pop into each other, like reverse Russian nesting dolls, moving inward instead of outward, each new death reopening the grief of every death that came before.

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