Isaiah 44:18

The first thing I did upon my release from the hospital was to grab a bite to eat from that new roast beef sandwich shop who’s name escapes me now but I remember being very good and served the biggest sandwiches known to man alongside the best onion rings I have ever tasted. The food in the hospital was positively ghastly, and while all I had really been eating was beef (as it was the safest choice when compared to the odd and off-putting gelatinous fruits and vegetables they served), I have always used good meals to reward myself. If I have gone through something hellish, I treated myself to the unhealthiest, greasiest, and delicious comfort food I could find.

Eric met me in his station wagon. I was hoping he would have brought my car so I could have gone to my mother’s grave after lunch and I could just drop him off at his house. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I was mostly just content with seeing a friendly face and eating some onion rings that didn’t taste like shoelaces fried in cardboard breading. It was on my mind, but I waited until after we ordered to ask where my car was.

“Yeah. I don’t know how to tell you this, but they repo’d your car, dude.”

I had a pretty good idea why and who they were. My inspection sticker had lapsed while I was in the hospital and before I went init wasn’t exactly at the top of my to-do list with the parents funerals, shitty job, school starting, debts, and having my girlfriend cheat on me. I was still wondering, however, why my car was impounded from a private dead end street with only one house on it that belonged to Eric’s family.

“First, let me also say that your windshield is busted. Not badly, just really cracked. A tree limb fell on it during a storm last week, but I pulled it off. Point is, the neighbours called the police department and said it was an eyesore.”

“Eric, you don’t have any neighbours, and the two houses across the street from you have ten foot high hedges they couldn’t see over without a ladder.”

“Yeah, but they walk their dogs there all the time.”

Maybe it was the Effexor talking, but I wasn’t mad or upset. It just continued my feelings of being completely under whelmed by humanity. Eric lived in one of the richer sections of Worcester and those hedges essentially were the dividing line between the wealthy and the merely well off. It was legally parked, but a Pontiac Sunfire with a busted windshield that is parked for more than a week clearly didn’t fit the neighbourhood aesthetic and was visually disturbing to the dogs that come to shit on Eric’s lawn.

“I tried to stop them. I ran out of the house screaming ‘Wait! Wait! Stop! He’s in the mental hospital!’ but it was too late.” Eric really did scream the part he said he screamed when retelling the story causing the whole restaurant to turn to me as I just snickered. I told Eric not to worry about it and I would go get it tomorrow. Eric also agreed to drive me to the cemetery once we were done and offered me his car for the night provided that I drive him to work in a few hours and pick him up. I accepted the offer mostly just to say hello to my coworkers and tell the management that I would be back to work soon.

I asked Eric if he told anyone else I was out of the hospital other that Julie and Tina who I had called myself. That was when they usually exuberant Eric looked uncomfortably awkward.

“Yeah, I told lots of people you were getting out today and that includes Kerrilynn. I hope you aren’t mad at me.”

“I’m not mad, I’m just not going to talk to her.”

“She wants you to call.”

“I’m not fucking calling.” My Boston accent flares up when I get flustered despite it rarely making an appearance outside of a heated conversation.

“She feels terrible, Andy, and she’s my friend, too. I don’t agree with what she did, but she needs to hear you say it wasn’t her fault.”

I dropped my sandwich onto the platter and watched the lettuce explode outward onto the serving tray and all over my jeans. “But part of it is her fault, Eric. Don’t you see that? I know from that fucking story you spout off all the time that you know what heart break feels like.”

“But she feels bad...”

“Fucking good. I’m glad she does.”

“Don’t you think you are holding just a bit of a grudge?” Eric also had the annoying knack of coming off as pandering and patronising when I don’t think he really meant to be as was evidenced by the use of the finger pinching gesture with accompanying inflection when he reached the “just a bit” part.

“Come to me in a few years and ask me that again. Right now it is all too fresh for me to give a flying fuck about anything she wants from me.”

The short version of the story, because I don’t remember exactly what was said, is that Kerrilynn was my girlfriend shortly before my hospitalization. Technically speaking she was the fourth girlfriend I ever had, but she was the first I truly loved with all my heart. At times, she seemed to feel the same way.

Kerrilynn went to university in New Hampshire weeks before I had to go back in Boston. We talked almost nightly and even though she couldn’t attend my mother’s funeral that night she stayed on the phone with me from some time after midnight until some time after eight in the morning.

Kerrilynn was very impressive and more than a little crazy; certifiably so, but that is a story for another time. She always liked to show up unannounced, so a few days after the funeral I decided to pay her a visit like she had done to me so many times before. Apparently it wasn’t a good time since I caught her in the middle of having sex with her best friend who had previously sworn to everyone around him that he was gay. It would later turn out that he wasn’t gay or even bi, but just an asshole who liked to lie to girls about his sexuality in order to gain enough of their trust to get them to sleep with him, but that’s not the real point. That’s merely a bonus. It turned out they had been hooking up for years and never told anyone about it. It was going on before I was in the picture and it went only long after I wasn’t.

The night following my discovery, she dumped me on instant messenger. I had left without saying anything, but her saying plenty about how needy I was over the past week. I was in too much shock to even come back with “Sorry my mom died this week and it led to me walking in on you fucking another guy,” but I was in too much shock. I don’t even remember going home. I couldn’t break up with her then and there. I was too confused by everything going on and I was about to explode. It was just making matters worse that she so disingenuously robbed me of my right to be angry with her by beating me to the punch. I don’t remember the conversation save for “we are just in different places right now in more ways than one,” but I do know if it weren’t for Eric and Megan calming me down and the strange fixation I had developed on the Shell gas card next to the computer, I probably would have taken my life that night.

“All the times that she said she needed me and she just showed up, I showed unquestionable loyalty, Eric. I never once turned her away. The one time I showed her that I needed her because everything in my life was legitimately shit and she fucks me.”

“Actually...”

“Don’t you fucking joke right now. You know what the fuck I meant. I would calm her down from her hysteric fucking fits that she got if someone looked at her the wrong fucking way, and the one time I really needed her support, announced or unannounced because I know what the fuck you are thinking right now, she betrays me and I get dumped for catching her in a fucking lie.”

“You have no idea what I am thinking right now because what I am thinking is that you need to get down off your cross Jesus. You want to talk about lies? How’s this for a lie? ‘Andy are you doing OK? Do you want to talk about it?’ What was my answer a week later? You half passed out and shaking while I drive you to the ER.”

I backed off from expressing my anger outwardly, but on the inside I was still seething. “She cheated on me. I loved her.” I said it as calmly as possible.

“I know and she is sorry. I’m not telling you to take her back. I’m telling you to forgive her. You don’t have to forget what happened, but if you don’t let it go neither of you will move on. Alright? Now we are going to change the subject because I am sorry I brought it up in the first place.”

The conversation moved on to more pleasing topics like sports, school, hospital food, and 9/11 since it was still fresh in everyone’s memory at the time. Kerrilynn’s name wasn’t uttered by either of us for the next few weeks.

We made our way to the graveyard two hours and a few more rounds of onion rings later. The sun seemed pretty high overhead despite it being almost five o’clock in mid-September. Eric waited in the car since I wanted some privacy while I replaced my mother’s flowers and talked to her for a bit.

It had rained almost every day since the last time I visited and as such I got lost finding the place marker denoting where she was buried. I had to brush away the dirt from several of them since it appeared my flowers from last time had blown away or been stolen. When I found her I didn’t say anything profound or even cry. I just let her know her son was doing fine and that he hoped she was doing the same. I scheduled an appointment with her for roughly the same time next week. She didn’t reply, but I knew she was free. I could always drop in on her unannounced.

On the way to the pauper’s graves where my mother was buried you have to pass through something at turns brilliant, beautiful, eerie, and sad: a children’s only graveyard. I walked through briefly on my previous visit and the sight of it all left me crushed. Instead of flowers there were rusting Tonka dump trucks and faded, dirty stuffed animals that seemed to take on the inherent sadness of the area around them. No one over the age of eighteen was buried in this section of the cemetery, as stated in the copy of the by-laws I had been given. Out of all the graves I saw, however, I was hard pressed to find anyone who had grown older than a toddler.

Once row of newly laid stones had always caught my eye; four children all from the same family who died on the same day only three months prior. Two were twins as they had the same birth date and never made it past the age of six. One was an eight month old infant and the other a twelve year old boy. I had wondered before what could have happened to cause them to pass away all at once. I further wondered why the same bible verse was inscribed on every stone: Isaiah 44:18

On the way back to the car I saw a woman this day, kneeling and sobbing in front of the graves with a cane beside her. A much older man stood watching at a safe distance, gently wiping the tears that rolled down his cheek through his bright white beards that seemed to be closely cut at some point in the recent past, but had fallen into a state of disrepair.

Morbid curiosity led me to ask the man quite sheepishly if he knew the woman who I assumed quite correctly was the mother of the children. The old man was her father-in-law and he was giving her space to grieve. It was the first visit she has had to the graves of her children and her husband who was buried in the same section of the graveyard as my mother.

The old man fought back tears as he told me what happened. Once he began telling me the story, I had remembered reading about it in the newspaper. The family was on their way from Grafton to Hyannis when the father, who was at the wheel, slipped into a diabetic coma almost instantly. Everything happened so quickly that the mother was powerless to stop it. The steering wheel jerked and their van spun sideways before rolling and flipping over the median into oncoming traffic.

All but one of the children were pronounced dead at the scene. The father died waiting for the Life Flight helicopter and the last remaining child (one of the twins) passed away later in the day from haemorrhaging that the doctors were powerless to stop. This was the mother’s first day out of the hospital; only a week after emerging from a coma.

Her father-in-law asked if I was here for someone I loved and without going into too much detail I told him both my parents were there and died within weeks of each other.

He bit his lip and seemed to be holding back hysteria that desperately wanted to come out. “At least you are young. You can find solace in the fact that things should be that way. A child should always out live their parents...” The hysteria took over as the old man bit his lip and let himself go. “...you should never outlive your grandchildren.”

And for the first time in my life a stranger had made me cry. It was also the first and only time I ever hugged a relative stranger when I wasn’t dressed in a mascot suit for work and the stranger was a young child. We calmed down and wished each other well, but before I left I had to know what Isaiah 44:18 meant. The old man shrugged a little.

“That was my wife’s idea. You should probably look it up yourself because I would cock it all up. I will say that if you are in this place for someone you love that you will understand.”