Dads.Against.Death

-a troubling and hilarious tale of despair -

The meeting, held every Thursday evening, was in the bare-bricked basement of Victory Baptist Church, a former early twentieth-century civic building in the middle of a small compound, known and beloved for its surrounding, idiosyncratic landscape; an eclectic arrangement of English walnut and plum trees, the swaying branches of which could be seen through the small rectangular windows topping the basement walls.

The room, in this case and often, smelled recently vacuumed and of coffee. The semi-circle of former school chairs sat primitively as a place of council. Death, having a moment, positions himself unseen in the corner, standing out of respect, stirring a black coffee with a boned finger.

“Hello. My name is --.”

“Hi --.”

Death recognizes the newest men here tonight. He shakes his head at their sad, inevitable lot. He is capable of pity but never guilt. Theirs is a hard road. Such is life.

“I, uh, I don’t really know, uh, how to start or do. I guess I lost my son, his name is Josh, around a year ago. He was three, but he would be four now. I mean, Jesus, this is fucked.”

There are nods of encouragement and agreement.

“Um, I was at the gym, getting extra pumped. I love, loved, to work out, ya know. It was a good day. Work was going good. Just doing my usual routine. Thought I would stop by and get a little exercise in, go home and see the wifey and little man. So I come home, I open the door, and I don’t know what the fuck happened. I don’t take steroids, maybe a protein shake sometimes. Okay, creatine on occasion; I don’t know.”

-- pauses here. The more experienced men brace themselves, not for their sake but for his. Death leaves quietly through the wall. For now, he has visited these men enough.

“Anyways, I come back. I honk the alarm twice. Let them know I’m home. I always do that. Right as I open the front doorway, my little boy comes running at me full blast, like he always does, he’s so fast guys, he was so fast, and I pick him up and throw him up in the air a little bit, and, I guess, I don’t know. I lost my grip, something, I mean, because he just rockets up, like fast, and half his body just busts through the ceiling. I mean it’s just a little apartment, ya know, with the lower ceiling with the ridges and its white, and...ah, fuck, man...oh shit.”

He weeps. His wordy breaths struggling against his sobs, each attempted syllable choked on and pulled back inside. They wait, a hand on his shoulder tethering him to the room and their collective wisdom. The understanding that Grief must be managed internally but expressed externally. It is as personal an experience as Love.

“So, all of a sudden, Josh’s lower half is just hanging out of the ceiling, so I’m like ‘Oh, shit’, and I try to get him, and I’m pulling, but he won’t come down. So, I just start breaking the ceiling around him. Smashing it. I finally get my little dude down, but he’s gone. My little boy is gone, man! My boy, my boy, my boy, my boy. I threw my little boy through a fucking ceiling. They say death was instant, but that’s not even a fucking consolation at this point.”

Each man there has found themselves smothered by disbelief, choking on the surrealism of their lives. Not a man flinches. Any movement would unleash the unending torrent of pain that they all hold but can only share one drop at a time.

“Hello. Everyone. My name is --.”

“Hi --.”

“Hello. Hey, listen--, I’m really sorry, man. I’m so sorry, dude. I really am. I lost my sixteen year old daughter a little over a year ago. Four-hundred-twelve days to be exact. I’ve, uh, never talked about this, told the story, so, sorry, forgive me.”

It seems that the circumstances of death have no consideration for those who must deal with the aftermath. The chasm consuming a person in grief as they know the first question on people’s minds is ‘how did it happen’. The call of a mortician requesting some type of hat to cover the scalp of a deceased son; they couldn’t have an open casket otherwise. No mercy. The embarrassment, the guilt, the blame, the why.

“So it’s kind of fucked, actually, really messed up. Me and the wife, the wife and I, my wife and I, decided to do some weekend cleaning, ya know around the house, nothing fancy, and we mixed some chemicals in a bucket. I have mixed those chemicals together since forever. Anyways, um, sorry, and to mix those chemicals I used an old broom handle. It’s so messed up. We had such a good time. You never know its coming. For God’s sake, it was a nice fucking day!”

There are imperceptible nods. Ironically, the ones who spent the last days bedside indoors, know this most of all; that when your world has crashed and changed forever, eventually you will walk out a door, and that World will have not changed at all.

“We’re done for the night, I give it a last mix, cover the bucket, ya know with an old t-shirt, lean the broom handle against the wall. My wife says, she says is it okay to leave that there, and I say, I’ll never forget this, ‘As long as no one sucks off the broom handle’. We chuckle, and we go to bed. Well, I don’t know how to say this, but my daughter, she, uh, she used the broom handle. I don’t know. Ya know. And then you get so mad, and next thing you know you’re calling your dead daughter a bitch, but, of course, you don’t say it, and you don’t mean it, but the thought crosses your mind, and that’s even worse, and you’re sitting there, and I’m just wondering, what the hell happened to my little girl?”

The man’s eyes bulge in a frantic search for answers. There are none for anyone to give him

“And, so, um, it was on camera, a-a-webcam. Ah, fuck, dude, I don’t want to tell you guys this. I have to, right? I can’t keep it in. Haven’t seen the tape, the recording. I don’t want to. Never will. Please don’t watch it. I beg you. I don’t know if its on the internet, but it has to be right? I can’t risk it. I don’t know what’s on there. The whole goddamn world might see it. I just, I don’t, I don’t know. Ahem, excuse me. But basically, the police said, somebody offered her $100, and, uh, there you go. You know what really pisses me the fuck off? It wasn’t even real fucking money. It was some thing for a fucking game. I mean, holy shit, my daughter died with a broomstick in her mouth, so she could buy extra content or something? Holy shit, Jesus Christ! What the fuck am I supposed to think about that? And the whole world can watch? What the fuck? Seriously, what am I supposed to think about that? What the fuck am I supposed to think about that?”

They have seen this too, Bewilderment, a close cousin to Grief. But they are doomed to sit. Their offerings must be quiet ones, their only possible condolences being words, nods, and giving the man someone to see when he looks up from the floor aghast.

“Hello to you all. My name is --.”

“Hi --”

“Wow, uh, that is some pretty heavy stuff guys. Mine’s not...well, I lost my newborns last year to, uh, SIDS. Yeah, two months old. Same fucking night. My wife used to check on them obsessively, women right, heh, and one night she goes in and, I mean, you don’t forget those screams man, you fucking can’t. So I just jump and go in there, and we’re, you know, trying to figure out what to do, and what happened, and we call 911. And in the midst of it all, we get to the point where we are both on the ground crying and rocking our children, we’ve called the ambulance and I realize that I never put any underwear on. I mean, who the fuck has that thought in the first place, but I did. My wife always wears a nightie or whatever, so no worries, right? But I’m sitting there, having just lost my brand new babies and I’m naked. So what the hell do you do, man? Do I leave my wife and kids to put on underwear? We’re both in hysterics. We lost our kids before my wife has even healed. I’ve just lost my babies. Do I let the paramedics come in to find two wailing parents, one butt naked, sitting there, drowning in grief? Ya know, I mean, it haunts me. It really does.”

The cold wind continues to blow outside where, beyond the window panes, the trees have begun to retreat inside themselves, shedding what was beautiful to endure the cold winter ahead. The sidewalks crunch pleasantly underfoot of passersby.

“Hi. Nice to meet everyone. My name is --.”

“Hi --”

“So, my wife and I, we actually belonged to this church as missionaries. I just came back about a month ago. This was our home church, so that is why I am here. We were missionaries to Indonesia. We being myself, my wife and our precious daughter, Abigail, who had just turned ten years old when she passed. Thankfully, I guess, I wasn’t there when it happened. But that’s not true. If I was there, I could have saved her. But I wasn’t. I was not there. No, I was not. Anyways, we’re supposed to tell the story, right? I’m studying, my Bible. I am studying my Bible, the Holy Bible that is, the Word of freaking God, and like all the rest of the stories, my wife starts screaming her head off. What’s up with that? She starts screaming...she just...”

He pauses. Despite himself, the man realizes he is losing it. He realizes that he is behaving erratically in front of strangers. He has lost his cool, and he is not one to do so. Perhaps that self awareness saves him from a psychotic break. Perhaps that is why they are here. The men look on, immune. Get it out, brother. Get it out.

“And she is screaming because there is a python in our front yard, just laying there in the sun. And I’m sure, you can guess, there is this big bulge in the python’s mid-section. She’s already past the gullet, if you have ever read about Python anatomy, I didn’t but I have, well now I have. I know everything about them now. And, so anyways, we think it’s a little piglet that we had on the property, which of course we had bought for Abigail. And we keep looking for our daughter, and this little fucking pig just comes oinking around the corner. And my wife and I look at each other and she just, she just starts chasing the God dang pig, and I’m just staring after her. I kinda come to, ya know, and I go and I grab a machete and hack that motherfucker, that snake’s head off and I split him open, and there she is. There she is guys. My baby. She was cold, and she died alone, and she couldn’t even breathe enough to scream for her Daddy. And I wipe my baby’s hair back, and my wife comes running by screaming, still chasing that fucking piglet with a machete. And I call the ambulance and there is nothing they can do. And I’m trying to catch my wife, but she’s trying to catch this pig. But she finally catches the pig and hacks it to death, and I can’t get anywhere close because of the machete, and I don’t want to leave my daughter but the ambulance wants to take her, and then my wife starts shoving the pig’s corpse down the throat of this dead snake. Like, what the heck is she doing? And so I just have to leave her to stay with Abigail. I’m sure you all know the drill. Death certificate and all. I can’t find my wife when I come back at first. It takes me weeks to find her. And it turns out within a month she had started a snake cult out in the jungle, just like a church. She had a congregation, the whole shebang, just dancing around in the jungle, singing, butchering pigs to shove in that snake’s corpse. I had to have her tranquilized just to get her home.”

At this, Grief imposes itself on the room. The death of a child is a family affair, and loss compounds. Their wives reactions too distant but too personal to talk about, a shared but private hell for them alone.

“Okay, fellas. Thank you guys. We know, all of us know, that time heals all wounds. Remember we are here and there for one another. When you’re out and about, if you start to flounder, you hold on because we’ll be right here next week. Remember we are here for each other. Dads Against Death will be here every week, rain, snow or shine. Feel free to more coffee. Alrighty then. Thank you guys.”

Every man felt the night’s chill to its fullest as the door swung open. They filed out the front, holding the door for whoever was behind them but never stopping, their arm stretching backward as far as it could go. Eventually, they would reach back, find nothing, and keep going forward.

Follow P.CM. on Twitter: @plzcallmechrist