All the Things We Never Knew (32 page)

“Margaret,” I said, hugging her hard, “would you please quit your job and go run the war? We need someone like you.”

She laughed, and on our way to the funeral home, we caught up on news of Sophie and her son Gavin. When we finally rounded the corner to the acres of graves, she said, “Weird, I've only ever come through here bicycling with the kids.” She shook her head. “It takes on a brand-new meaning now.”

We walked through the door of the funeral home, a massive place with too much marble and gold clashing with the somber tones of death. The carpeting, the couches, and the drapes all were in the same palette of tan. On the long granite countertop, four small candles burned with names in front of them. One said “David Krol.”
David Krol
, I thought,
what's he doing here
?

I had to physically jerk my body to remind myself that David was dead. It was something I experienced over and over again, a stray confused thought that maybe he wasn't dead after all. Margaret looked at me, worried. She smiled, put her arm around me, and introduced us to the woman in the tan pantsuit behind the counter who spoke in low, measured tones. It occurred to me how tiresome it must be to show empathy all day long, every day.

She showed us into a small room adorned with plaques and memorial engravings full of samples of granite and marble. These are the decisions you face when someone dies. It is the ultimate Hallmark experience, summing up a person's life by choosing the right kind of casket or the best vase to hold their remains. David would have hated this place. He would have walked out the minute he saw the money-making room. “Something simple would be fine,” I said.

“Most people prefer to have something longer lasting, something significant and tasteful,” she said.

“Something simple will do.” I noticed a beautiful, plain piece of unfinished pinewood pushed to the side of the choices. It was the type of wood David loved to shape and mold into projects. I'd seen him turn pine like that into a tree house, a chest, a fence at our first home.

“I'll take that,” I said to the tan pantsuit woman.

“Are you quite sure?”

“Quite.”

She pushed a folder of ten pages in front of Margaret. We sat at the long cherry wood desk. “We will need to read through each of these,” she said. “Let me know if you need any help understanding any part of this.”

Margaret gave me a sideways glance, pulled down her glasses, and began reading. To my surprise, the funeral director read the words out loud. “I, the widow of the deceased, David Krol,” she said.

Margaret looked up at me to see how I reacted. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't know how I felt. The terms felt so new and foreign. Widow. Deceased. I rolled the words around and around on my tongue, wondering why I was still in denial when I knew I was in denial. Deceased. That was it. I still did not believe David was dead. I hadn't seen his body. The medical examiner had transferred it straight here after determining he'd died from suicide. I hadn't seen a shred of evidence that he was dead. “I'd like to see my husband before you cremate him,” I blurted out.

The woman looked up, concerned. “I don't think that's a very good idea,” she said in sorrowful tones. “He's badly decomposed. He's been here a few days. I don't know how to say it, but there's an awful odor from the body.”

“I don't care,” I said, now convinced it was the right thing to do, to see evidence that might help me move from unbelieving and shock to believing and recovering.

The woman phoned someone and whispered, “Would you please come in here?” Soon, the morgue operator, or cremator, came in, still wearing green gloves. He explained to me something I already knew—if I were to go into that room, I would smell of death for days. I'd heard cops say it before after entering rooms where bodies had decomposed. The stink permeates your skin, your hair, your cells, and you can't wash it out.

“I can,” he said, “take a picture for you, so that you can see your husband one last time.”

I sat back down. Margaret told him, “I think that's a good idea.”

A few minutes later, the morgue operator came back with three
Polaroid pictures and put them in front of me. They were close-ups of David's face. One from the front, another from the side, and a third of his left hand. His eyes were closed, his mouth slack-jawed, as if he had fallen asleep in front of the television. There were blue and purple marks on his face from frostbite, and deep dark purple bruising under his eyes and into his cheeks from the force of the bullet. Dried blood ran down from his head past his ear to his neck. There was a small hole an inch or so above his ear. He was painfully thin, like a cancer victim, no fat left on his face at all, just skin and bone, and his hair was as wild as it must have been that morning, when he left us all behind. Animals hadn't gnawed him. The force of the blast hadn't ripped his brains apart. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief looking at the photos. The officer who called me the night of his death was right: David did not look haunted at all. He was at peace, finally. I picked up the third photo and tears filled my eyes. On his finger was the gold ring I'd given him ten years earlier, on our wedding day.

 

THE ESCAPE THEORY OF SUICIDE

Men account for four out of five suicides in the United States. Male suicide often follows job loss, business failure, relationship loss, or an embarrassing public disclosure.

Florida State University psychology professor Roy Baumeister analyzed suicide in terms of motivation to escape from aversive self-awareness. “The causal chain begins with events that fall severely short of standards and expectations. These failures are attributed internally, which makes self-awareness painful.”

Baumeister points out that most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. He argues that idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for happiness, “whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” Baumeister notes that a “large body of evidence” supports this theory.

Baumeister emphasizes that the biggest risk factor for suicide isn't chronically low self-esteem per se, but rather a relatively recent demonization of the self in response to a negative turn of events. Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, or inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated, and rejected lead suicidal people to dislike themselves and to see themselves as unlikable and unacceptable.

Baumeister's escape theory applies well to male suicide. It depicts the individual struggling with some injury to self-esteem and shifting into a crisis mode in which the cognitive awareness of options narrows.

Chapter Twenty-Three

As soon as David went missing, I played his favorite music in my home: Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Prine. David understood and felt the power of words more than most, and somehow, listening to the anthems of these men helped me feel again. It hit me hard one day when I was preparing for an onslaught of David's family to arrive. I'd put my iPod on shuffle, and the song “Forever Young” by Dylan came on. I stopped in my tracks, remembering the nights we played and replayed that album in the Utah desert. We'd hike all day, drink tequila, and eat from the garden at night, with Dylan in the background. Hearing it again, the sobbing took hold of me so violently I had to lie down on the bed. It lasted long enough to swell my eyes, clog my nose, and puff up my face again. David had always loved what I considered to be the highest musical form, artists who didn't pander to sentimentality or bow to commercialism. He'd chosen the music that moved him, and now, it moved me to a softer, more forgiving place.

The house filled up. David's sister Adele returned from Montreal with her estranged husband in tow and her two beautiful daughters, willowy and fresh-faced, reminding me of what Sophie would look like in another five to seven years. They brought wine and bags of Trader Joe's snacks: Cheetos, potato chips, crackers, pretzels—none
of it appropriate for a meal. I laughed to myself, remembering how David had told me, “I am living proof a person can survive two years on junk food alone. I did it when I lived with Adele.”

His mother arrived again from British Columbia, sullen and hardened, barely acknowledging me when she walked through the door. “We won't be staying long,” she said, referring to her children and grandchildren. “We'll be getting a hotel tonight.”

Of course. Of course she needed someone to blame for her son's death. I reached for her hands. “Alice, I loved David. I hope you know I tried.”

She pulled away and immediately went to the hardwood cabinets where we displayed David's travel treasures. “If you don't mind,” she said, “I'd like to take this with me.” Alice held up an antique miniature bookcase David had said was a family heirloom.

“Of course,” I said. “Take whatever you like.” She gathered a few more of his things and left for the hotel.

David's nephew arrived with a friend and a trailer. I'd told him he could have the tools David used for carpentry and woodworking. There was tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in the garage—it would be of no use to me. Luke thanked me and then loaded the trailer until it overflowed with enough equipment to start his own woodworking business. David's family would need something to remember him by.

His sister Jill arrived with empty boxes and asked for David's books. I swallowed, hard. This was my fondest memory of David, his love of literature. We'd built the bookcases downstairs together because we'd filled up the library upstairs. We had loved some of the same authors: Bukowski, Carver, Gilbert, Hemingway, Kerouac. I wanted those books we'd both dog-eared, the ones we both loved. She was already filling the boxes when I resigned myself. He was gone. The books would not bring him back.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Sophie was sitting in her bedroom the day before David's funeral, reading a book. I sat down next to her and asked, “Is there
something of Daddy's you'd like to keep for yourself? Something to remind you of him?”

We walked together into David's room. She pulled out the third drawer, where he kept his boxers, and pulled the green pheasant shorts from the pile. “I think I'll keep these,” she said smiling, “and I'll always remember that dance he did when he first wore them.” That was it for Sophie. A pair of green boxer shorts, the ones that had made her dad laugh.

I tucked away a few of David's treasures for her: his family's signet ring, the compass he'd used on long canoe and camping trips, a pair of binoculars they'd both loved, his driver's license, and his cell phone. I packed those things, along with every photo I could find of David, and put them in the pine chest he'd built for Sophie when she was born. One day, I knew, she would treasure those things.

The day of David's funeral, in December 2006, Portland was hit by a freak ice and snow storm. We'd expected temperatures in the mid-sixties, but when I stepped outside to pick up the paper, there was a thin sheet of ice on the deck. My butt slammed against the deck and my elbow hit the ice, opening a small cut that bled quickly. I winced and then paused. The winds howled through the huge oak trees around our home, reminding me of David's habit of running straight into the wildest weather imaginable, his coat open, hair tangled and messy. This was his kind of day.

On Portland's black ice days, when the streets were impassable, David liked to chain up and drive around, like Mad Max, the Last Man on Earth. On many of the storm days, neighbors would see him slipping through the streets and ask him to pick up milk or eggs, or drop a sick family member at the hospital. He loved the drama of it all, him against the ice, his truck slipping this way and that. When the town was paralyzed, it was David who could move.

We'd decided on an outdoor amphitheater at Hoyt Arboretum for the funeral. He loved to picnic there, lying on his back on the
tables and looking up at the soaring pitch of the timbered shelter. I'd ordered twelve large overhead heaters, just in case it was chilly. Now, as we got out of our cars, I realized temperatures had dropped into the twenties. A friend showed up with huge piles of big, fluffy blankets.

A musician friend of mine sat inside the amphitheater, playing soft acoustic guitar. Her fingers looked cold—when she saw me she smiled so warmly I blew her a silent kiss. Dozens of people dressed in long coats, scarves, and gloves filed in and huddled close together. We'd expected seventy-five people or so, but the chairs filled quickly and then the park benches, and by the time the funeral started, the entire amphitheater was filled with people who came to pay their last respects to our family.