In the Process of Sagging

I’m slipping and tripping my way through the mud, strewn with timid patches of slimy grass. It is pouring rain and already dark, even though it is only four in the afternoon. I am the only one here. 1

I’m not sure why I’m here, what I intend to do. All I know is that I got into my car, unable to spend one more minute in the crypt that had become my room, and realized this was where I was coming. I had spent the past week exclusively in the company of my sangfroid thoughts. They festered in my mind and in the pit of my stomach, so when I couldn’t take the lurching and clenching any longer, I had decided I had to visit him. Visit William.2

As I approach, I start scanning for him. I have never been here before. The paths are overgrown, but strewn with flowers, which are all sagging under the persistent pressure of the rain. The entire place gives off the impression of a wet cat, wounded and bitter. The flowers I am carrying are falling apart in my hands, but I hope they’ll make him feel better. Maybe they’ll only make me feel better.3

I walk along, the mud sucking my shoes into the ground with every step, until at last I see it—“William Gower.” I walk up, and then turn around and let myself collapse into the mud, back first. My body is immediately pulled into the soil’s wet embrace, relaxing into the chilly brown mess like into a down comforter after a long day. 4

“Hi William,” I say, softly, “How are you?” 5

But of course he doesn’t respond. Dead people can’t talk.6

The plot of William’s grave is tidy, a strong granite headstone bearing only his name, his life span (1990- 2007), and inscribed with a short epitaph that began “In loving memory…” The impersonal sentimentality of it overwhelms me, and I realize this is the reason I came. I want to be overwhelmed; I want to let go of my grief in a mad rush, all at once, and let it take control of my body.7

My fingers slip into the soil and clench fistfuls of it, so that it oozes satisfyingly between them. The soil is curling around my body, the rain turning it into a makeshift quicksand, pulling me deeper into it— closer to him. I don’t fight it. I don’t move. The soil is soft and kind; if I pull myself so deeply into memory that my mind’s eye portrays the past and not the present, I can feel as though it were not the soil embracing me, but him. Him, wrapping his arms around me, enveloping me in his overlarge coat and his soft body. Never holding me close enough, always letting go too quickly. The soil doesn’t push me away. 8

Tears begin streaming down my face, leaking out of the secret pockets of my eyes that control sadness. They come in fat, fast droplets, fat as the drops of rain falling onto my face from the sky, and I don’t fight it. I try not to blink, hoping that a particularly well aimed raindrop might collide with my cornea. In this moment, I can’t imagine a greater pleasure than the wet splash of rain against my bare eye. I feel the beginnings of madness lurking at the edges of my grief, and wonder at how often these two things seem to coincide: madness and grief, grief and madness. One acting as a catalyst for the other. I wonder, which one was his catalyst?9

The masochist in me wants to fall asleep here. My tears are slowly subsiding into a passive, heavy pressure, gathering itself up on my chest, prodding and needy like a large and lethargic housecat. The weight on my chest makes it hard to breathe, but I am managing it with concentration—deep, measured breaths. In: one, two, three, four. Out: one, two, three, four. The slow breathing and cathartic grief have sucked the adrenaline from the marrow of my bones, and I allow myself to slip towards unconsciousness. 10

---11

For five years William had been one of those faces in the crowd of my student body that I’d recognized and known the name of but never talked to. Then junior year began and he was in my math class. We were introduced through a mutual friend, and I was smitten within a month. We used our friend as a medium through which to get to know one another and form a friendship on our own terms, which happened slowly, over time. 12

William was about half a foot taller than I at my 5 and a half feet, with dirty blonde hair that was always just a little too long, and a round, open face like a toddler’s, inviting empathy and love. Even sitting still, the angles of his body gave the appearance of constant motion. His voice was a creamy tenor. He was a singer; as a boy, he had had one of those voices that sound like an impossible mix of the divine with the earthly. He always seemed so vibrant, full of friends and ideas and emotions, which made him alive in a way that I envied, with my timid mind and mouth. 13

He suffered from insomnia, and some days he would come into class with an intensity fueled by insufficient sleep, an intensity I didn’t understand or know what to do with. It was usually on these days that his low points, his divergences into the land between sanity and madness, were the worst. One day in February he’d dropped himself into the chair beside me, his eyes hot.14

“How are you today?” I asked.15

“I only slept for three hours last night. I’m frickin’ insane!” He swung his arms about wildly to illustrate his insanity.16

“Oh. Why didn’t you go to bed earlier?”17

“I couldn’t sleep.”18

“Again? Why can’t you ever sleep?”19

“I don’t know… I think too much. I hate myself.” I laugh a little at this. People were always saying things like that—“I hate my life, fuck my life, fuck, fuck, fuck,” but it was never sincere. I laughed to play into the game like, “oh chortle, me too.”20

“Why?” I ask.21

“Why not?” He did this sometimes. He’d say something provocative and then when I pushed him to explain himself, would turn it on me and make it into a game of “But why? But why?” He flip-flops inexplicably between intelligent and immature in a way I wasn’t always sure that I liked.22

I stare at him blankly.23

“Why shouldn’t I hate myself? Give me one reason why I shouldn’t. And don’t say ‘because.’” He leans forward across my desk, so that he was nearly hunched over me. I have to look up to meet his gaze. My mind pirouettes in empty circles; this conversation has changed tracks too fast for me to keep up with. I don’t want to play this game, but I feel like this is a test, an intangible yet essential one. Give him a good answer, and I’ve proven how I feel about him; give him a good answer and I pass. Fail to give him an answer, and… And, what? I sweat. I start three sentences, “Because…”24

“What reason do you have to hate yourself?” An answer that is no answer. A cop out. I am such a coward. 25

He stares at me for a moment, and then his lips curve into a teasing grin. “This class, for one” he replies, laughing. He’d then changed the subject and seemed to return to his usual self, the fire fading from his eyes. But I couldn’t shake my melancholy and the inexplicable sense of failure. 26

“Veronica, tell me something about yourself that you don’t usually tell people.” He prompted me in class one day, around the time when the chronic morning slush that follows a January snowstorm had made its first appearance. As our friendship solidified, our conversations came to resemble amiable cross-examinations, with questions ranging from “Have you ever been naked?” to “Do you believe in love?” I looked forward to each class with nervous anticipation, reveling in the attention of his fascinating mind. Through these interrogative perambulations I began to feel like I must be one of the people who knew him best, and this pleased me. I wanted to know him, and know him, and know him…27

I think for a minute, deciding how personal I want to get with him before I know what he’s planning to reveal. This is always the enigma for me, the conflicting desires between wanting to tell him everything about myself and being afraid to expose exactly how much I wanted him to know. How much I wanted him. “Sometimes I wish I was famous,” I say, choosing middle ground, “because sometimes I feel anonymous. And I want people to notice me, to notice when I look particularly cute, or when I say something witty. I want them to be as fascinated with my life as I am. Which is really selfish, I know.” I laugh self-deprecatingly. 28

“That’s not selfish. Well, maybe it is, but no more selfish than other people are.” I blush a little, because he stares straight at me when I talk, and my stomach twists.29

“What about you? What don’t you tell people about yourself?”30

“I see a shrink every week,” he says, immediately jumping into heavy territory. 31

I can’t decide whether or not I’m allowed to ask why. I risk it. “Why?”32

“I’ve been suicidal since I was eleven years old.” I don’t know what to do with this information, how to react or what to say. I don’t know what it says about him that he would throw this into the conversation so cavalierly. Is it not a problem anymore? Or is it still, and he just trusts me enough to know? Is it a subtle plea for help? Or perhaps he is just altogether madder than I could have predicted, and likes to frighten people with this intensity.33

“Oh, my God, all the time?” I’m at once heart-thuddingly curious, and also highly aware of how inappropriate my curiosity is. It’s not exactly my business how suicidal William is or has been, or when. I’ve known—in the vague sort of way that you know things about people you’ve gone to school with for several years without talking to them much—that he was one of those people who felt things more dramatically than most. His personality had an exuberance that bordered right on the edge of Manic Depressive. But I hadn’t realized it was this serious. 34

“No, not all the time. I’ve had good years and bad years. But, you know.” Actually, I don’t. But I want to be empathetic. So I nod.35

“So is this a good year or a bad year?” 36

“I’m not sure yet.” 37

In April, a couple weeks after Spring Break, we were up to our usual games, bantering questions back and forth, when our conversation verged into the raw kind of territory that always left me feeling unbalanced and anxious.38

“How do you want to die, Veronica?” He asked me, out of the blue. He’s asked me similar questions before, and they always unnerve me; I feel as if he’s looking for a certain response that I’m not able to give.39

“The day after my 92nd birthday. Preferably in my sleep.” For once I had an immediate answer for him—I’d thought about this before. The evenness of the number pleased me, and 92, comparatively to other aesthetically even numbers— such as 100—didn’t feel like it was asking for too much. A satisfying age at which to die, I thought. 40

He’s quiet for a moment. “That’s awfully old.”41

“It’s only 92. By the time we’re actually 92 that will be a young age to die.”42

“Maybe so. Maybe our bodies will be able to sustain themselves for a longer life, with advancements in science and whatnot. But we’ll still be aging, won’t we? We’ll still be 92, and we’ll be decrepit, and we’ll have wrinkles and age spots and say things that don’t make sense, and forget the names of the people we love the most.”43

“What are you getting at, William?”44

“I don’t want to grow old.” I laugh at the way he sounds like Peter Pan. I tell him so.45

“You sound like Peter Pan. Everybody has to get old, William. That’s how it works.”46

“You don’t have to. You’re in charge of your own life, aren’t you? You don’t have to let yourself grow old.”47

“I don’t understand. How can you stop yourself from growing old?”48

He looks me then, his muddy brown eyes staring straight into mine. “Well you can kill yourself, can’t you?” I look away.49

“But then you’d be dead, William. Then you’d be dead, not young.”50

“Or young forever. Why live beyond your youth? All that happens after 65 is endless waiting. You wait for yourself and everyone you know to die, while being a questionably lucid burden to your remaining family. They’re just trying to enjoy their own youth. Why should you impose on them to take care of you—their senile, dying relative? Why would I want to wait around, diseased and pathetic, to watch myself die?”51

“William.” I say simply, my mouth sagging into a frown. “How can you think like that?”52

He shrugs. “It’s the truth.”53

“Your friends and family love you, William. They’d much rather have you be a living burden than a dead liberation.” 54

He shakes his head. “I’m not going to live a day past 65.” And nothing I said could change his mind. 55

But disconcerting as it was, I didn’t give the conversation much consequence. I thought that even if he was serious now, he’d change his mind by the time he’s 65—when he’ll have a wife and kids and grandkids, and too much love invested in the world to allow himself to die, much less instigate it himself. 56

---57

I’m pulled out of the past by the slippery squelching sound of feet approaching in the mud. Absently, I wonder if I should make an effort to remove myself from the dirt mound on top of his grave, but decide that it would require too much exertion, and I’m too comfortable as I am.58

“What are you doing?” An acerbic voice asks me. I crane my head awkwardly, trying to look at my visitor without moving my body. Tegan is standing at my feet, with Ben, slouching uncomfortably, at her side. 59

“Hi” is Ben’s contribution, offered up in his hopeless monotone.60

Tegan and Ben were two of William’s best friends. I had been friendly with them before, but I hadn’t seen or heard from them since William’s funeral, 2 weeks ago. Tegan is taller than me, by about 3 inches, with one of those naturally long, slender bodies than other girls envy. She has dark, smooth hair cut at angles around her chin. Her eyes are wide, deep brown, and challenging. They are narrowed at me as she speaks.61

In contrast, Ben holds himself like a turtle half-receded into its shell, not sure whether it wants to be exposed to the world or hidden safe within itself. His hair is nondescript, and always has the appearance of not having been washed thoroughly. He appears bored, like he is only hanging around until something better occurs.62

I reach my hands up out of habit to rub my face and succeed only in streaking it with mud. “Hi guys.”63

“What are you doing?” she repeats, clearly not in the mood for pleasantries. That’s ok, I’m not either.64

“I’m…” What was I doing, exactly? What was I doing that I could explain to another human being? “We’ll I’m… I’m sad. And… I miss him. A lot. So I came here, because I wanted to talk to him a bit. But he doesn’t say anything back.” With the last sentence, which I hadn’t planned on saying, I begin to cry again, pathetically, like a small child who doesn’t understand the concept of death.65

“You’re sad, are you?” Her incredulous voice only barely attempts to disguise the true question: “What does that have to do with you laying the mud, fucking up his grave?”66

I sigh, “Yeah.” This kind of grief is new to me. This kind of grief is tired and inexplicable.67

Instead of arguing, as I expected, she sits down in the mud at my feet, cross-legged. Ben follows her lead, sprawling out in a masculine way—legs everywhere, arms propping him up in the grass behind him. “Do you know what happened to William, Veronica?” Tegan asks me.68

Obviously. “He drowned.”69

“Yeah, but do you know why? Or how?” Something in her voice tells me to be wary of what would be coming next. I consider her question. I had been with him only an hour before the end, but I don’t really know what happened to him. 70

My memories of that day are like poorly developed negatives, opaque and dark. What I know about May 12th is that at 5:00 p.m. William called me and asked me to go on a walk with him. He seemed to be in decent spirits. It was a Saturday. I picked him up around 5:30, and by 5:45 we were strolling through the woods that surrounded the park. The sun wavered through the branches of the trees, casting an ephemeral glow on the forest around us. I was content, walking through the sun-kissed woods with this boy, this boy I liked and maybe loved. 71

Around 7:00 we came to a bridge that stretched across a small river, which was churning with the extra water from a recent volatile spring thunderstorm. We sat down in the middle of the bridge, dropping our legs over the edge and swinging them in the evening breeze. Slyly, William clasped my hand in his, and conversation lapsed into a mutual, connected silence—feet swinging, minds spinning, hands holding. If I had to put a label on a cache of perfect moments, this would be one of them, as long as it could be taken as a single unit, independent of the day of its occurrence. The events that followed should have been a continuation of this perfection, but they were marred, spoiled somehow. Perhaps by William’s dark plans, perhaps only by life’s propensity to ruin perfect moments. Either way, when William turned and leaned in to kiss me, things went wrong. 72

At first, all I was aware of was adrenaline gushing audibly into my bloodstream, my veins curling and my heart pounding, and William’s lips approaching mine. And then he was kissing me, and everything was wrong, because my adrenaline turned from lustful anticipation to something bordering on fear as he kissed me too hard, clutching my face too tightly. He was hurting me, and seemed unaware of it. I shoved him in the chest, trying to push him away, and for a terrifying moment he resisted. This wasn’t the William I had known, the William I had lazily wandered through the woods with, held hands with, and been friends with. This wasn’t a William I had ever seen before, and it frightened me. 73

I stood up frantically, wavering on the edge of the bridge for a moment, my haste throwing me off balance. After I had pushed him away, he’d turned his head away from me and folded in on himself, staring fixedly down into the churning water, obviously focused on not looking at me. 74

“I have to go.” I’d said. He didn’t respond. “William, I have to go. Please. Do you need a ride home?” He sat still for moment, and I waited, pulse pounding uncomfortably in my chest, disarmed by first his unexpected attack and now this eerie silent treatment. Finally he shook his head, subtly. 75

Conflicted between my desire to leave immediately and my concern for him and this abrupt change of events, I turned to go. Then I turned back again, wavering. At last I muttered a quick “Bye, William,” turned back the way we’d come, and ran, wiping tears from my eyes and tripping over roots that were hard to see between the descending darkness and the blur of water in my eyes. I’d gone home and curled up in bed, hurt and confused, and didn’t hear any more from or of William until the next day, when a friend called to tell me he’d drowned. 76

“No, I don’t know” I admitted to Tegan. She nodded. Eyes wide and penetrating, she began to fill in the missing pieces of the story.77

“So, you left him alone in the woods, around 7:30.” Her tone was informative, impartial to the story she was telling, as if trying to distance herself from it. “I’m with Ben, and we get a call from him at 7:48. He’s all worked up, shouting incoherently about you and a bridge and a river, and the current. He kept repeating ‘the current, the current is so strong today.’ We—Ben and I—we couldn’t make any sense of it. We’re wondering, “What river? Where?” and “What the fuck did Veronica do?” We try to get him to tell us where he is, but he hangs up on us. Now, William being hysterical or incoherent, that’s not entirely unusual. But this is different, and we can tell. ‘The current is so strong today,’ he kept saying, ‘the current is so strong.’ We started to get worried.”78

Ben’s face is no longer bored, but pinched and puffy. Clearly trying to hold back tears, he picks up the story and continues, “Ten minutes later he calls us again. This time he’s totally calm. ‘You guys’ he said, ‘you guys are my best friends. I love you guys. There’s a really beautiful river here. I wish you could see it. I’m standing on the edge of the bridge, you guys, and the sun is setting, and the river is so beautiful.’ The hysteria had worried us, but that calm shit- that was fucking scary. ‘Where are you?’ we asked him, ‘Where the fuck are you? We’re coming. We’re coming to get you.’ But he kept going on about the river, and how beautiful it was. And then he said ‘I’m going, you guys. I’m going now. Goodbye.’ And he hangs up the phone.” He stops, and I know he’s choking on his grief like I am, like Tegan is. It’s rushing up from my stomach and into my throat and I can’t hold it in it’s pouring out like vomit I can’t hold it in and neither can she or Ben and we’re all in the mud spitting out our tears into the grass on top of his grave and we miss him and he can’t be gone he can’t be gone oh William.79

We wait out our grief, and it’s a while before Tegan reclaims her composure enough to finish with, “The autopsy calculated his time of death as being around 8:00p.m.” And we can all fill in what happened in the minutes between when he hung up with Tegan and Ben and his time of death, and it’s too easy, too horrible to see.80

---81

The day of William’s funeral had been sunny and hot, so different from the grieving storms of today, and less fitting. There were hundreds of people squished into the sturdy wooden pews of his church, sweaty and bloated with the shock of loss. Family, close friends, classmates, teachers, acquaintances… It seemed everyone he’d ever known had come to pay their respects. William had had a way of touching people like that.82

I don’t remember the service very clearly; the walls between my mind and the world around me were too thick for me to process much of it. I can conjure up only a vague impression of generic platitudes and bible verses that weren’t appropriate to celebrate the enigmatic delight that was William Gower. I remember being peripherally angry at the priest for drifting into a tangential lecture on the sin of suicide, magnifying the manner of his death rather than glorifying the person he had been before.83

I left during the last hymn so that I wouldn’t have to endure a hundred empty voices intoning “I’m sorry for your loss” to one another, a platitude which only ever made the speaker feel any better, and as I was leaving I remember passing Tegan and Ben sitting alone outside the doors to the sanctuary. We exchanged forlorn attempts at silent acknowledgement, and then I went on my way without exchanging a further word with them. 84

I didn’t go to the cemetery to see him lowered into the ground. I didn’t want to witness the concrete evidence of William’s future being buried under several feet of thick soil.85

---86

“Do you know what time it is?” I ask. Ben pulls his phone out of the pocket of his soaked, worn-out jeans.87

“7:50.” I’ve now been here almost four hours.88

“I should probably go home,” I say, not moving. I stay where I am for a last couple crescendoing moments, trying to memorize the way I feel: the mud sucking me into the surface of his grave, warm and embracing, and the mixture of rain and tears that streak across my muddy face, leaving a fresh and salty aftertaste in my mouth. 89

The rain is beginning to subside. I glance at the scraggly bouquet I still hold in my hand. The flowers have sustained some casualties in the downpour—many of the petals and leaves have been stripped off, and what’s left is broken and drooping. But they still retain some of their initial beauty, intrinsic and powerful and hard to destroy. I set them down, pushing their stems into the surface of the soil, as if trying to replant them, urge them to start life anew. 90