Threes

This is my third Father’s Day since Elena died.

 

Kim and I measure so much in terms of these big events. 

 

“Oh,” Kim will say, “that was before I met you.” Because we were married a little over a year after we started dating, she might also say, “That was before we were married.” I also think of that year before we married as “the year I gained thirty pounds.” But, that’s another story.

 

We call the time we spent married without kids as being “before we had Maggie.” Yes, we don’t tend to say “before we adopted Maggie.” I’m not sure why.

 

The two and a half years that Maggie enjoyed as an only child are “before Elena was born.”

 

Of course, now we are in the period “since Elena died.” Maggie is a different sort of only child. The time that she was not an only child is now often referred to as “back when Elena was alive.”

 

We use other ways to mark periods in our lives. There was the time we lived on 128th Street in Cleveland, the time Maggie was at Boulevard School or Heights Montessori, the time while Kim studied for her qualifying exams, or so many other good times.

 

Last weekend we were marking one of these times at a party for one of Kim’s cousins who had just graduated from high school. Her younger sister, Kim’s Goddaughter, now has her driver’s license. She was a baby when Kim and I got married and now she has her driver’s license.

 

The last time I was in this party room was at the party for her first Communion. Elena wasn’t yet two and was running around outside with her cousins. Kim’s relatives kept  telling us that they had seen “a little Daniel running around outside.”

 

These are the memories that sneak up on me. I’m surrounded by family at a happy event and feel the absence of Elena working the room and entertaining and shmoozing. She would never stay still. She was never quiet. Energy flowed from every pore.

 

But back to the high school graduation party we wandered around and talked to cousins and friends and then sat and ate with some of Kim’s relatives. 

 

As we walked out to the car, Kim asked, “did you notice?”

 

“Notice what,” I asked back.

 

“All three of the men at our table had lost a child,” she said.

 

“Really?” I said, “All three of us? I only knew about me and Pete.” Pete’s daughter recently died of cancer.

 

“Yeah,” she said, “Charles lost an adult son.” She told me the story.

 

“I didn’t know.” I thought a minute and asked, “did the other two notice that?”

 

“No,” she said, “but the women at the table all did.”

 

All three of us. 

 

When I was younger people used to say “death comes in threes.” They may still. Two famous people would die and some older person would say “death comes in threes.” When a third person would die, they would nod wisely and say, “see.”

 

After Elena died, two other young girls in Shaker Heights died as well. Halle died in a car accident. A third young girl took her own life as a result of depression. I suppose there were people who said, “see, death comes in threes.” 

 

For each family death just comes in ones.

 

For Halle’s family it came in ones but three at a time. The same crash that took her life also took the lives of her grandparents. I see their graves now from the bench on which I write this. I’m sitting roughly on the spot where I’ll be buried some day looking at the Elena’s stone with Halle’s and her grandparents’ markers just beyond and back a row.

 

Even if deaths come in threes — their three is not the same as our three. The grouping is in the eye of the beholder.

 

A couple of months ago Mark’s mom died. Less than a week earlier Paul’s mom died. Shortly afterwards Jimmy, a friend of a friend, died. Deaths come in threes. 

 

I can’t imagine anyone else who knew the three of them. No one looked at any of the deaths and saw it as part of the same set of three. Paul had his own set of three. His sister died just after Elena and his dad died six months before. His mom was the third to die in such a short time. Three deaths that came one at a time. One at a time but they add up to three deaths.

 

Death comes in threes. Which three depends on who is telling the story and when they start and stop the tale. I have finished collecting my stories for the book. I started with the first post and finished on the first Mother’s Day. It is the first time I read what I wrote. I remember thinking all of these things but didn’t remember them being in such a short time span. I decided to include all of the posts in between and not to edit them. 

 

Maggie has asked to illustrate the book. She continues to amaze me. She makes decisions that are right for her. She asked if she could draw the pictures for the book and yet she was comfortable telling me that she would rather not visit the cemetery with me today. It’s one of the many things I love about Maggie — she is her own person.

 

She told me that she didn’t want to go while we were shopping after I took her to flute lessons. She stopped to try on hats and to look at purses. She made an offhand comment about something I could tell Elena at the cemetery later.

 

“Do you want to go with me?” I asked.

 

“No,” she said, “that’s ok. I haven’t really been in a while.”

 

“OK,” I said.

 

“You know,” Maggie said, “if you were mom, you would have asked me like another ten times if I’m sure.”

 

“You know better than to talk about mom that way.”

 

“Sorry. I was just saying you only asked me once.”

 

“You sounded sure.”

 

“I am.” 

 

Maggie made me a perfect Father’s Day card. It had a picture of her on the back that lifted my spirits and brought an immediate smile. The card was filled with images and peppered with little comments. It’s like a hug in an envelope. Any time I want another hug from her I just take it out and look at it again. I hope it will carry me through her teen years.

 

I actually never thought I would be back at this point where I would dare to think about the future again. It feels different than before. But it’s here and many things feel possible again.

 

It’s Father’s Day at the cemetery. From my bench I watch as family after family stop to leave flowers and spend a little time. Most come and go in a minute. A family with a newly dug grave walk around and around. I remember that feeling.

 

A woman and her daughter stand motionless in front of a stone for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. Then they slowly walk around reading stones of those buried nearby. Getting to know the neighbors. I remember that feeling too.  A man and his daughter walk quietly to a grave. The man crosses himself and they walk back to the car. 

 

No one from any group speaks to anyone else during their visit. We will lay together in this neighborhood longer than we will live in any other neighborhood but there are no block parties. 

 

Death comes in threes only if you stop counting after the third one. But just as I hope that next year will bring me a fourth Father’s Day after Elena’s death, I know that deaths don’t stop at three. I am surrounded by stones — hundreds in this section alone. 

 

A woman and her daughter walk to a stone. The little girl chats away. The mom stops to take a picture. “That’s great grandpa’s headstone.” The girl looks in my direction. She’s the same age Elena would have been. The mom puts an arm around her and walks her back to the car. She spends more time combing her daughter’s hair before they get into the car than on the graveside visit. 

 

Another woman pulls up and gets out of her car with yellow flowers. Elena’s favorites. She walks just past Elena’s grave not noticing the purple flowers I’ve placed. She stops. She places one flower on Halle’s grave stone and one for each of the grandparents on their stone. She leans down and pats Halle’s stone with an open hand as I have patted Elena’s.

 

I never hear Elena’s voice here in the cemetery. I hear it all the time when I’m surrounded by life and the living. I don’t hear it here. 

 

I suppose that’s a good thing.

 

Her headstone is so still. I know that sounds so stupid — that’s the way stones are supposed to be. They don’t move in the breeze. If they had feet they couldn’t tap them. But some part of Elena was always in motion. She was so filled with life that the stone isn’t just a marker of her life, it’s a reminder that she’s dead. 

 

It’s not as if I need to be reminded. 

 

This is my third Father’s day since Elena died. I think Maggie is right not to have come with me for my sake as well as for hers. I have these separate parts to Father’s Day that probably are better kept separate. There’s the part where I am a son and can appreciate my own father. There’s the part where I am Maggie’s dad and can celebrate our relationship. And there’s the part where I am Elena’s dad. 

 

Today I called my dad to wish him a happy Father’s Day. He was in line at the I G A paying for his groceries. I think the only reason he took the call was that he thought it was my mom telling him to pick something else up for dinner. 

 

I have spent much of the day with Maggie and will spend most of the rest of the day with her just being her dad. But for this last hour or so I’ve come to sit with Elena. 

 

I wanted to site next to her stone on Father’s Day and finish this book. There will be other blog posts and maybe other books but it’s time to finish the first one. I’ve been putting off this moment since before Mother’s Day — but it’s time.

 

Baby, this book is for you. I feel your presence and your absence all jumbled together. I try to fill the hole you’ve left with my love for your mom and older sister. It always helps. Some days it’s almost even enough.

 

But each of us feel your death every day. You have changed many lives by living and others by dying. Many of us were affected by both. None more than me, Kim, and Maggie. In our family, your death is one we each feel in our own way. For us, your death has come in threes.

Introduction

Note: I am publishing some of the entries from this blog in a book. I am not taking the blog down and will, in fact, be adding to it as I identify stories that I haven’t told. The following is my draft of the introduction to the book that I wrote on this second anniversary of Elena’s death. 

Elena died two years ago today. 

I hope you’ll get to know her a bit through this book. She was a beautiful bundle of optimism and energy. She was tiny but impossible to miss. She was born happy. For her it wasn’t that fleeting happiness we get when we’re enjoying a moment. Elena had the kind of happy that was contagious— the happy that you felt when you were around her.  Soon you were happy too.

“Look Maggie,” I imagine her saying as she opens this book, “Daddy wrote a book about me.”

“It’s about me too,” Maggie says.

“Nuhhh uhhh,” Elena says. Because what else could you say when you are the ghost of a six year old girl.

“Yuhhh huhhh,” Maggie says back. Because what else could you say back to a ghost saying ‘nuhhh uhhh.’

“Well it’s got my name in the title not yours,” Elena says. “Why do you think that is?” Even beautiful happy kids can torment their sisters.

“Because you died,” Maggie says. She looks at Elena’s ghost and adds, “duhh.”

“Well,” says Elena, “look at what he wrote. He says I’m beautiful. He didn’t write that you are beautiful.”

Maggie is beautiful. She is eleven and a half and making that transition from child to grown up. Our relationship continues to change. She’s fast and smart and funny—she just lacks the experience and tempering that will come with age. In the two years since her younger sister died, Maggie has taken on some of Elena’s characteristics. I don’t know why. It might be that while Elena was alive, Maggie could count on her to be the outgoing one while Maggie could be more shy and reserved. I don’t know. Maggie is still Maggie but she has also incorporated some of Elena into her personality as well.

And Kim. Sometimes when I call up to Kim from the living room I hear Elena’s voice echoing my bellow. Maybe there’s someone on the phone, or I’ve just thought of something, or the dog has gotten on my last nerves. I’ll tip my head back away from the puppy nipping at my ear and shout “Kim”.

I never know if she doesn’t hear me or just chooses to ignore me. When Elena was alive she would sit up in her bed and do her best imitation of me although it always came out with the vowel altered a little bit to “Kam.” For good measure, just in case Kim didn’t know it was really Elena’s voice and not mine, she would always take it a step further and tuck her head down towards her chest to lower her voice and shout, “Kam, this is your husband calling you. This is Daniel, Kam.”

“What?” Kim would shout back in that voice that every husband knows. “What do you want?” 

Whatever it was I wanted doesn’t seem so important. I feel like saying “never mind” but I don’t. I tell her whatever it was that prompted me to call her in the first place. But really I just wanted to hear her voice. Even in annoying her, I’ve connected to her. It’s why I call her from the grocery store or on my way to a coffee shop and ask “Want anything”. 

Today as she heads out the door for Elena’s mass she asks me if I want her to pick up anything at the store.

“Yes,” I say, “a big bag of chips.”

“Like what?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Something chippy. Something fried and salted. And maybe some dip.”

“You don’t want it,” she says and she’s right. But, of course, that’s not the point.

“I don’t. But I’ll eat it anyway.”

“What about the small bags my mom brought?”

“I’ll eat those too,” I say.

She signs and says “ok, I’ll get you some chips on the way back from church.” 

Kim heads out to the 8:30 mass for Elena. It’s snowing. I always smile when it snows this time of year. Elena was born in a big snow storm in the beginning of March. I pull out my laptop and start to write this introduction. The phone rings. It’s Kim.

“Are you ok?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. 

“What’s up?” I ask.

“We missed it,” she says.

“Missed what?” I ask.

“Missed the mass. I must have had the wrong time written down. The mass was at eight.”

“Not eight thirty?”

“Nope. They’re done already. They’re coming out of the church.”

“You ok?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says.

“It’s kind of perfect,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“Elena would have been late.”

“I know,” she says.

It’s a hard day for all of us. It’s hard enough given that it’s the anniversary of Elena’s death, but on top of that Maggie is home sick. She went to the doctor’s with a sore throat two days ago. Exactly the same as Elena did two years ago also on February 20. The doctor sent her home saying nothing was wrong. Same as they did with Elena two years ago. We didn’t really know the doctor that sent Elena home. This doctor we’ve known forever. She was Maggie’s doctor when she was little and she saw Elena just days after she was born. I know that Maggie is fine and yet she’s home sick today the same way Elena was two years ago.

So many thoughts.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Elena?”

“Why are you writing a book?”

“I’m not really. I wrote the book already except for this Introduction and something I’ll write at the end. I wrote the rest of it for my blog. Really I’m just publishing what I’ve already written as a book.”

“Oh.” Elena processes that last bit of information. The conversation is not yet over.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Elena?”

“Why did you write your bog.”

“My blog? I don’t know. I went upstairs the day after you died and started to write. I wrote about you and Maggie and people we knew and things we’d done and even imaginary conversations like this one. I wrote about losing you, about my feelings, and about all of the little details wrapped up in saying goodbye.”

“Daddy, do you ever worry about these imaginary conversations?”

“No, baby. I know they’re not real. Just every now and then I need to hear your voice—even if I’m the one choosing the words I hear you say.”

“Just as long as you’re not losing it.” I’m touched by her concern. Even though it is me choosing her words, somehow it really is her voice in my ear with her worried hand on my shoulder comforting me. Once she sees I’m ok, she gets back to her original question.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Elena?”

“So why are you writing a book? I mean, why are you publishing a book?”

“Because lots of people liked what they read in the blog.”

“So why not just leave the blog?”

“I am. But there are lots of people who don’t read blogs.”

“Do you think people will read this book?”

“I don’t know, baby.”

And I don’t. I’m writing this book for two reasons. First, there are plenty of people who don’t live online and who would prefer a book they can hold in their hands. But second, I have never gone back to read any of the entries in my blog. I stopped writing because I couldn’t remember which stories I had told already. My plan is to take some of the entries and put them together into a book while keeping a list of stories I want to tell but haven’t yet. I’ll add these stories to the blog and perhaps to another book.

There is, however, the issue of other people’s words. There are the people who added their comments to the blog. I think that that is what makes the blog special but it is not part of this book. So I am leaving them online but not reprinting them here. There are also books and songs and people who I’ve quoted. I will ask their permission, and hope that it is granted so that  I can include those stories.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Elena?”

“Do you still think about me?”

“All the time, baby. All the time.”

“See Maggie. He thinks of me all the time.”

Elena’s Voice

Pictures of Elena fill me me with memories, but the sound of her voice touches me to the core. It evokes deep sense memories of her sitting close enough that she could rest her foot against my leg just to know I was still there. It brings back the feel of her in my lap as we read a story or watch a baseball game.

If you’d like, I’m ready to share a bit of Elena’s voice with you.

I decided to enter the Public Radio Talent Quest contest. This was a public contest to pick three shows that would audition for a public radio show. We were supposed to introduce ourselves in a piece that could not run more than two minutes. We were to demonstrate our hostiness.

And so I thought about my background in radio and where it had started. I have always found radio to be magic. More magic than television. My first appearance on radio was when I was six. I read the weather and original poetry about dinosaurs on a show hosted on the local college radio station by the son of my first grade teacher.

When she was six, Elena had recorded an ad for Mrs. Eagleton. She wasn’t in Mrs. Eagleton’s class yet but she knew she would be.

Every year the second grade runs the Boulevard candy company. The kids sell stock in the company to raise money for the raw ingredients. They then take orders from the other classes so they know how much of each item is needed. Then they melt chocolate down and mold it into suckers and other shapes. They collect the money for the orders and fulfill the orders and pay dividends on the stock.

Elena came up to my office one day and recorded a commercial for the Boulevard Candy company. I love the raw take that she did but I also edited it into a thirty second commercial.

It is the last recording I have of her before she died.

I decided to lead off my piece with her voice. My piece was about me and radio, but it was also about parenting. My daughter was on it and my parents were on it. People who voted on the entry didn’t know that Elena had died shortly after the recording. I didn’t want to get sympathy votes. I didn’t move on to the next round but I was voted in the top one hundred of the fourteen hundred entries.

You can listen to it at http://www.publicradioquest.com/node/502

It is called “With a push from Elena.”

Note: I have dated this entry April 28, 2007 because that was the day I submitted the entry. I have waited to post this link until after the contest was over.

The Accident

Kim’s car was hit by a woman driving too fast in a school zone, while eating cereal, and talking on her cell phone.

All of that would have mattered except that Kim had parked on the wrong side of the road to drop Maggie off at school.

Maggie was already in the school and didn’t know anything happened. Kim pulled away from the curb and was hit hard in the side. She’s ok. The other woman, a teacher at Maggie’s school who was running late, was ok. Kim’s car isn’t looking so good.

I know it’s just “stuff”. It doesn’t matter.

And yet Kim and I have this discussion several times a week where I tell her to take the extra minute to go around the block so that she’s facing the right way. “There’s going to be an accident,” I say.

“Everyone does it,” she replies.

I’ve got to say, usually being right feels a lot better than this.

Kim calls me on Kelly’s cell phone. She’s lost her own weeks ago and just cancelled her service rather than replace it. Neither of us say anything about her being on the wrong side of the road. She mentions the other driver’s speed, cereal, and cell phone.

I nod. I’m not happy. Kelly picks up on that and wanders over to diffuse the situation. Now that I know everyone is ok, all that I can think of is that I’ve just quit my job and now we’re going to have to buy a car.

Kim drops the car off at the Honda dealer and we wait. The car is ten years old. We got it just before we adopted Maggie. We figured we needed more reliable cars if we were going to be driving kids around with us.

A few days later we get a letter from the insurance company. They are totaling Kim’s car.

Maybe it was meant to be. We couldn’t really sell this car. This was the car in which Elena died. There in that back seat on the same side that was hit in this accident. Maybe this would help us move on.

Kim and I shrugged. We’d figure things out.

She called the Honda dealer to see how much time she had to come clear out her car. “Why?” the woman on the other end asked. She explained that we had misread the letter from the insurance company. The car was worth saving and that was how much money the insurance company would pay.

The equation changed. We wouldn’t be moving on from this car. To our surprise, neither Kim nor I were ready to move on.

The things you find out by accident.

Tax Forms

Missing my little dependent.

Spring Snow

We’ve had an odd Spring. It was warm and wet and beautiful early and so the flowers started to bloom and the trees started to bud. And then the snow came back.

The garden for Elena and Jan had come to life as if putting on a grand finale for Jan’s husband George before he moves away. It was that shock of color after a long winter that grabs your attention and brings you back from months of not paying much attention to the world around you.

And then it snowed. It snowed a lot.

First it snowed a little. The flowers shrugged off the flakes and pushed their heads through. Their color was all the more striking against the white background.

Then it snowed more. A heavy, late-season, Easter snow that blanketed our world. You could no longer see proud flowers standing up beneath the snow. The stems were bowed over. Kind of sad that the garden would be ruined this year.

But as the snow melted, the flowers stretched a git and shook off the weight they’d supported for a week and began to stand up tall again. For the most part, the flowers had made it through the snow and the garden looked like nothing had happened.

People started to weed it again, to water it again, to walk their dogs past, and to notice it.

A spring snow always makes me smile.

The Chicken Song

“Why did Elena used to smack herself in the head at the end of the chicken song?” Maggie asked.

“To make you laugh,” I said. “She loved to make you laugh.”

Maggie smiled, pleased with this answer, and said, “yeah.”

When we first adopted Maggie she was an adventurous eater. She’d eat almost anything we gave her. She loved vegetables. But then something changed. She went into a stage where she’d mostly eat processed meat. She took salami for lunch every day. If we’d let her, she would have eaten salami for dinner as well.

Elena, meanwhile, would try anything.

When Elena was three and Maggie was five I cut up some chicken and put it on their plates. “You just have to try it,” I said.

Maggie put a piece in her mouth and started to chew looking like she was going to gag. She put a piece of hotdog in her mouth and ate it to wash away the taste.

Elena tried the chicken and liked it. Maybe to suck up to me or maybe to taunt her sister she asked for more.

Elena never lived through a moment for which she couldn’t make up a song. So when I returned from the kitchen with half a dozen bite size pieces of chicken on her plate she left to her feet and began to sing.

“Gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken.” And then she took a piece of the plate and popped it in her mouth.

For some reason, Maggie didn’t feel teased. She thought it was funny and laughed.

So Elena added a dance to the song.

“Gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken.”

Maggie rolled her eyes at me but she laughed at the end of Elena’s song. With more pieces on chicken on her plate, Elena needed to embelish more. This time instead of eating the chicken at the end she added a mock swallowing sound which she sang - sustaining he last note.

“Gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken, ahhh-goooom.”

Elena knew that she had a hit on her hands but she wanted to evaluate it for herself. So she climbed onto a chair so that she could see herself in the mirror while she sang the chicken song again. Pleased with how it looked, she sang it once more with feeling. Slowing down at the end for the big finish where she drew out every note.

“Oh yeah, I say you just got ta try this chi-i-i-i-i-i-i-ken.” Big pause. Deep breath. “Ahhh-goooom.”

Over the years, every once in a while Elena would reprise the chicken song. It could be at dinner. Often it was when Maggie, Elena and I were sitting playing cards. Maggie would say, “remember Elena’s chicken song dad?”

Elena would leap to her feet, “oh yeah. I love that song.” And she’d sing it again. When Maggie stopped laughing at the song, Elena added a final embellishment: the head slap.

“Gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken, gotta try this chicken.” Elena would then slap her forehead with her palm like she’d just forgotten something really important. Then she’d finish, “ahhh-goom.”

Maggie would roll her eyes at me. But she’d always smile at Elena. And that was all the reward and encouragement Elena ever needed.

Quiting time

I quit my job today.

I loved the company I worked for and was able to do some amazing things over the past four years. I respected most of my co-workers. There was an unusually high number of smart committed people. I have nothing but good things to say about the founder and icon of the company.

But then there was my manager.

He was hired while I was away after Elena died. When I came back to work he wasn’t my manager yet but he was somebody I’d have to work with. After our first conversation I was horrified. Here was a guy committed to doing as little as he could while appearing to be thoughtful and competent. He convinced the CEO (also the founder) that he would spend the first six months on the job just learning the business and then he would start producing.

I was stunned. I called the CEO and told him he should get rid of this guy immediately. He didn’t. And the next thing I knew I was directly reporting to this man.

He was a micro-manager who couldn’t make a decision. I had to run everything by him before doing them. They would sit on his desk and wither until the deadline had passed and nothing could be done. I watched as all of my active projects died and by Christmas I had little left to do. He would fly me out three thousand miles to meet with him and then he’d have a schedule conflict and not show up.

He loved meetings and soon I was scheduled into many weekly phone meetings that seemed to serve no purpose. Each Friday night at around nine the phone would ring.

“Don’t answer it,” Kim would say, “you know who it is.”

But how could I not answer the phone. Sure enough it would be my manager. It was six pm on the west coast and everyone had left the office. He needed someone to talk to. Some reason not to go home. Some way to convince himself that he was busy.

With all that, I stayed at the company asking to be transfered to another position. Two things tipped me over the edge. The first should have been enough.

I took the week of February 22 off. It was the anniversary of Elena’s death and I didn’t know how I’d feel but it seemed like a good time to take a vacation. I told my manager why I was taking the week off and let him know that I would not be checking email. I explicitly told him that the 22nd was the anniversary.

The phone rang all day from friends and family checking that Kim and I were ok. Sharing a memory of Elena. Letting us know they were there.

Mid afternoon I picked up the phone and it was a former boss who now worked for my current manager.

“I’m sorry to call today. I know this is a hard day for you.”

She’d come to the funeral the year before. It was nice that she remembered. We’d been friends over the years.

“But,” she continued, “xxxx asked me to call to get you to book a flight to San Francisco to meet with Intel in a few weeks.”

“Today?” I asked, “it has to be done today?”

“It does. He wanted to make sure it was done today.”

Like an idiot, I did it. On the first anniversary of my daughter’s death, I took time to call Continental and book a flight. Maybe he asked her to call - but she made the call. She didn’t tell him “not today.” And me? I did what they asked.

And here, in retrospect, is the most puzzling part of that story. I didn’t quit my job then. I came back from vacation and flew to San Francisco and went to the premeeting. Sure enough, my manager had forgotten that he had double booked the slot and wouldn’t be able to make the meeting.

I continued to work for the company but something felt different. I had been covering our conferences since before I came to work for the company and now I had been told to miss two in a row. A couple of weeks ago the phone rang at about ten o’clock on a Friday night.

“Don’t answer it,” Kim said, “you know who it is.”

Sure enough, it was him.

“I finally had my meeting with [the director of conferences],” he said. This was the meeting he had supposedly been trying to schedule since November. This was March. He had sent her a budget for how much our services would cost her. In it he would be charging her tens of thousands of dollars for the use of one of her employees. He was surprised when she reacted badly to that.

And then he dropped the bomb. “[The marketing director] doesn’t want you to come to conferences any more. They don’t think you’re a team player.”

I was stunned. I had just done her a favor two nights before when she was in a bind and needed me to help her post some files quickly. We had always had a great working relationship.

He should have left that alone - but then he gave himself away by saying “And they don’t want you to call either of them to confirm that this is what they actually said.”

When I later told the story to Kim, I said that that was like Elena coming home from school and saying, “I was really good in school today. You don’t have to call my teacher and check or anything.”

Over the last couple of weeks I made some calls. Kim, as always, had the common sense approach. She said, “you can’t fight this battle from three thousand miles away. He’s had you working through him for seven months so all they know of you, they hear through him. He’s gotten to paint their impression of you.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, “they’ve known me for years. They know how I am.”

The final straw came when I talked to two women. One was the woman who had supposedly said I wasn’t welcome at conferences and I wasn’t a team player. She said that she had said neither and invited me to let her know which conferences I wanted to attend. The other was the woman who had called me on the anniversary of Elena’s death. She was a woman I’d worked closely with for four years. She told me that she had heard I wasn’t a team player.

“But you know I am, we’ve worked together for four years.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought but [the marketing director] says that you’re not.”

“Really?” I said, “did she tell you that?”

“No,” she said, “but [my manager] said that that’s what she said. Why would he lie?”

I’ve been watching people and politics for long enough that when smart people trust something they’ve heard over their own experience, there’s no way to convince them otherwise.

And so I quit today.

I don’t know what I’ll do. I have no job waiting for me. I didn’t quit in order to go somewhere. I quit in order to get away. But in the hour since I quit I already feel so much better. I should have done this months ago.

Note: This was much harder to read because I’ve gone to such pains not to use anyone’s name. The point of the story wasn’t who did what. In my resignation I summed up what I had done for the company over the past four years. I’m really proud of what my team did. I also summed up what the company had done for me. I’m very thankful for what they’ve given me. I probably could have gotten some sort of money out of them for the abuse and hostile working environment but it was more important to start fresh and move on than to worry about every little detail.

Shoes

For months, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update anchor Chevy Chase would look into the camera and announce “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

Steve and I were high school juniors back in the fall of 1975 when Franco died. We would watch the show each week in his parents’ basement at least through the fake news cast. This line resonated with us.

The line may have been created in reaction to all of those death watch stories where we were told week after week prominent aging or sickly person “is still alive”.

Hearing week after week that Spanish dictator Franco was “still dead” was pretty funny. It was a fact that didn’t need restating. After all, once you’re dead there’s no real need for an update. Things may change about your legacy or former possessions or family and friends. But you don’t have much of a choice. You remain dead.

Except that that’s not really the way it is for the family of a dead person.

After Elena died, friends suggested books that we should read. One of them was Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking.” At one point I picked it up and started reading it. I wasn’t ready then. I’m may be ready now.

This morning, CBS Sunday Morning ran a story on a one woman play based on Didion’s book starring Vanessa Redgrave. The story showed Redgrave on a sparse stage talking about shoes. She just couldn’t give away her dead husband’s shoes. What would he wear when he returned.

And that is the year of magical thinking. It’s what Kim and I have struggled with for a little more than a year now. In the news story, Didion puts words to this vague feeling that Kim and I have not been able express.

“I discovered that, literally, I was holding two contradictory ideas in my mind at the same time. One was that he was dead and the other was that he would come back. And I don’t mean come back in some — I’m not talking about religious resurrection. I’m talking about come back. Walk in the door. Wondering why I had given away his shoes, you know?”

And so thirteen months later, Elena Maxine is still dead. I think, however, upstairs in her closet we still have her shoes.

Cheers

Kim and I had to run up to the grocery store for a minute. Maggie was playing at a friend’s house. As we headed in to Heinen’s we ran into Diane and her mother on their way out.

We stood outside and talked for a while. Diane is the math department secretary at Case. We’d talked a lot while I was there. Kim’s office was right down the hall from Diane’s and it might even have been Diane who suggested I go down and talk to Kim.

Diane turned to her mother to introduce us saying, “this is Daniel and Kim. You’ve met them before. They both used to be at Case.”

We talked a little bit with the mom and a little more with Diane and then they carried their groceries to their car and Kim and I grabbed a cart and went into the store.

I looked at Kim.

“I know,” she said. It’s one of the many things I like about her. She and I often know what the other is thinking.

“Still,” I said.

“I know,” she said again.

Diane’s mom hadn’t really known who we were. She was just being polite. Kim and I both knew — or assumed we did. When we’d gone into the store, the mom had looked quizzically at Diane had said, “those are the people who lost their little girl last year.” And then the mother would have remembered who were were.

I know.

Kim and I got home and finished putting away the groceries about the time that Ruby’s mom brought Maggie home. Kim was putting laundry in the washing machine so I walked out to the car. We didn’t yet know Ruby’s parents very well and I thought I should say something about Elena. I don’t know why, but I felt it explained a lot.

I started to say something and Kathy cut me off and said, “I know.”

And then, as if she was reading my mind, she added, “everyone knows who you guys are.”