Good Mourning (19 page)

“It's Henry,” I finally said, wiping tears and snot from my face. I was bright red, and my hands were shaking. “We went to school together.”

Bill quickly covered the whole body with a sheet and put his arms around me. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I didn't know.”

The truth is, none of us did—at least none of the twelve people I was supposed to have dinner with that night. To be fair, Henry and I weren't that close. I mostly knew him through other friends, and so our interactions over the years
consisted mainly of clinking our glasses together or dancing in a big group of people. But the group of us had been text­ing and e-mailing for over a week to set up plans, and I knew I had seen Henry reply that he would be there. I pictured our friends—mostly Upper East Siders who had known each other since elementary school—sitting down at the table and sending increasingly offensive texts to Henry, probably accusing him of ditching them for a hot girl. We had been planning a big night: dinner and drinks first, then clubbing and an after-party on Gaby's rooftop. It all seemed so trivial now.

“Can I see the folder?” I asked Bill, who was standing in front of me with his arms crossed, a concerned look on his face. It was dead quiet, except for the sound of my sniffling. Somewhere in the middle of my breakdown, Bill had turned off the music.

“I need to see the folder,” I said firmly.

Bill walked over to a shelf and handed it to me. I was looking for a death certificate. Sure enough, the cause of death was just what I had feared: drug overdose. And yet the word “overdose” flashed in front of my eyes, over and over, as if it might alter into something else if I just kept looking at it long enough. Like plenty of Manhattan prep school kids, Henry had experimented with drugs in high school. It was the usual stuff. Pot. Cocaine. Ecstasy. Nothing that you couldn't find at any party, on any Saturday night. He went off to a good college, and while we heard through the grapevine that
his “experimenting” had turned into more of a full-on habit, nobody worried about it too much. College, we assumed, was for partying. We thought,
Okay, he's doing drugs. So what?
Who
hadn't
seen someone snort coke off a coffee table to get the night going or to push through a long night of studying?

Henry tried to get clean after graduation. At our little dinner reunion a year earlier, he looked better than he had in years: the skin under his eyes had lost that gray tint, and he had put on some healthy weight—a good twenty pounds. Instead of talking about it as a recovery—which, come on, that's what it was—people just said that Henry was “growing up, thank goodness.” As though all the drugs and addiction weren't serious problems, but merely a silly hurdle he had been tripping over and finally cleared.
Bravo, Henry!
was the general tone.

I had heard he was using again, and while it bummed me out, I wasn't surprised. The Facebook photos said enough. Henry at a club with wide, red eyes. Henry with two girls on his lap at a club with four $500 bottles of vodka on the table, the empty ones turned over in an ice bucket. Henry looking thinner, and grayer, and unhappy. He may have been spoiled his whole life, but he was always a good time. And so for the most part, we ignored the mounting evidence that he was spiraling into addiction.
I'm sure if it were really bad, his close friends would do something
, I had thought the last time I bumped into Henry at a club. I shouldn't have trusted that they would.

“Who brought the body in?” I asked.

Bill explained that it had been the usual: the family called saying that the body was being brought in from the morgue. Henry had died early that morning, alone, in his bedroom. They wanted to keep things quiet. Didn't want a big scene, given the way Henry had died. That was all Bill knew.

I had to get out of that room. I thought about going home and calling Henry's mom, but something about it didn't feel right. I didn't know her very well, and I couldn't even imagine what she was going through. My dad's death had been painful, but I had had years to prepare for it. I also had the comfort of knowing that he had lived for sixty amazing years, filled with a loving marriage, fulfilling career, and kids who adored him. What would Henry's legacy be? What were
his
parents left with? Plus, Henry's mom had asked for privacy. Maybe she needed the night to herself before she could face the rest of Manhattan.

I found myself out on the sidewalk, a breeze whipping across my face, which was sticky with dried tears. Instinctively, I held my hand out for a cab, and as soon as one pulled up to the curb, I got in. “Greenwich and North Moore Streets,” I said. Then I grabbed my phone and ­texted Gaby:
ON MY WAY.
I thought about adding,
I HAVE BAD NEWS,
or
I HAVE TO TELL YOU ALL SOMETHING,
but it was pointless. There was nothing I could write that would prepare them for the fact that Henry was not coming to din
ner, because Henry was under a sheet, on a cold metal table, dead.

In the back of the cab, I took a few deep breaths and tried to get the image of Henry out of my mind. I had to get myself in a calm place so that I could be there for my friends. I was around death all the time—it was always hard, but it also wasn't shocking. For them, this would be a major blow—and maybe, for some, a wake-up call.

“Lizzie!” Gaby said when I arrived, jumping up from her seat and throwing her arms around me.

“Hi, guys,” I said, forcing a smile. Three bottles of wine were already open on the table.

“We thought you ditched us,” said Oliver, another childhood friend who lived a few blocks over from my mom's apartment.

I knew the longer I drew things out, the worse it would be.
Deep breath
, I told myself, holding on to the back of one of the chairs.

“I just came from Crawford,” I said.

“I hope you washed your hands,” joked Oliver, shouting from the side of the table.

“Guys, the thing is . . . um . . . it's Henry. Henry died of a drug overdose. This morning,” I said.

The whole table went silent. I noticed a couple at the table on my right, probably out celebrating an anniversary or something, looking up at me in horror.
Well, you sure picked the wrong spot for a romantic evening
, I thought.

“Wait,
what
?” said Gaby, her face squishing into that ­expression people make before they cry. I grabbed a small bag of tissues from my bag, wishing I had more on hand. “Like,
Henry
Henry?”

Oliver looked down at the table, shaking his head. “Dude had been using some serious drugs for a while now,” he said. “Should have just stuck with coke. Nobody fucking dies from blow.”

A few other people were crying, and a cloud of grief hung over the table, somewhere above the plates of prosciutto and cheese. I thought about ways that I helped families when they came into Crawford, right after someone had died. If they were having a hard time, usually I would ask them to tell me a story about their loved one, like a favorite memory, or the funniest moment they ever shared.
That could work here
, I thought.

“Is it completely hypocritical or totally appropriate to order another couple bottles of wine and toast in Henry's honor?” I said. “Not sure if it will be a toast or a roast, but there will be some good stories.”

“I like that idea,” said Jen, the old classmate who had hugged me at my father's funeral. Jen had dated Henry's brother for a while—she knew him better than the rest of us. “Henry would have liked it, too.”

For the next five hours, we talked about the time Henry crashed his dad's brand-new Bentley, the crazy parties he used to throw at his parents' beach house, his affinity for
Asians and blondes (he wouldn't date anyone outside of those categories). Nobody had lived the life of a privileged WASP better than Henry, and even though he was a womanizer who often had white powder around the edges of his nose, everybody liked him. (Well, everyone who wasn't sleeping with him liked him; he made any girl who was actually interested in him batshit crazy.) He was sweet and funny when he wasn't strung out on whatever pill or powder was hidden in his pocket. And love him or hate him, he had been one of us, a neighborhood kid, who got caught up in the same crap many of us had tried at some point or another. We all knew it could have been anyone at the table. This time, it was Henry.

I couldn't sleep that night, and when my eyes were still wide open at six a.m., I called the only person who I knew for sure would be awake: my mom. She had never been much of a sleeper; even when Dad was alive, she was the first one awake in the mornings, two cups of Earl Grey deep before the rest of us had climbed out of bed. I knew she would find out about Henry eventually, anyway—news had a habit of traveling fast up and down Fifth Avenue, like a game of telephone played from penthouse to penthouse instead of ear to ear. By the time the story of Henry's death came out the other end, who knew what people would have done with it.

Mom picked up on the first ring.

“Hello, Mom?” I said, not realizing I was crying until I opened my mouth. I looked around my empty bedroom and
suddenly wished so desperately that it was ten years earlier. Henry would have been alive. Dad would have been alive. Whole families that had been broken into pieces would suddenly have been reglued.

“Elizabeth? Are you all right?” said Mom, sounding concerned.

I wanted to tell her about Henry, but all that was coming out of me was a puddle of emotion that had been pent up too long. Mom asked again if I was okay, and I realized I must be freaking her out.
Say something
, I told myself, trying to catch my breath. I opened my mouth to explain. Instead, all that came out was, “I . . . [sniffle] . . . miss . . . [sniffle] . . . Dad.”

“You've been stabbed!”
Mom said, now yelling into the phone in a panic.
“Where are you? Who stabbed you?”

I was still sobbing. “No, no, no,” I said. “
Dad.
I said I miss
Dad
.”

“Oh my God, you gave me a heart attack,” she said, audibly relieved. We were both silent for a moment, and then, in the strong, calm tone only she was able to pull off in hard moments, she said, “Elizabeth, everything is going to be okay. Take a deep breath.”

I inhaled and let it out right into the receiver.

“Now tell me what's wrong,” she said.

I rehashed the whole night, from Bill's call to seeing Henry there under a sheet—his hands, white, probably cold (I hadn't touched them). I told her about the dinner and my
friends, and how it seemed that life was going really fast all of a sudden, and I didn't know how to slow it down. When you're young, it feels like life is really long—and there are so many possibilities, it's almost overwhelming to think about all that you can do. But all around me, things were ending. At work, with my friends, even the way the family felt now, with Dad gone. So many things were just . . . over. Henry might have been young and fun and privileged, but none of that was bringing him back.

“Do you want me to come to the funeral?” said Mom softly.

I shook my head no, even though she couldn't see me. I didn't want to put her through seeing Henry in a casket. She hadn't known him, but she knew
of
him, and it seemed like a lot of unnecessary sadness to put her through. She deserved a break from the bad stuff in life. “No, you don't have to do that,” I said, wiping tears from my face. “I'll probably be running around anyway. You wouldn't even see me.”

I expected her to protest a
little
, but Mom simply said, “Okay,” and told me that if I still couldn't sleep, I should take a walk—it always worked for her. It wasn't until we hung up the phone that I wished, maybe for the first time since Dad died, that I was back in their apartment. It seemed weird to think that Mom was still there, eating at the same dining room table, reading on the same sofa, walking by the same fireplace in the living room where we used to open
presents Christmas morning. Everyone else had moved away and moved on. I thought about dialing her number again and asking her to walk with me but talked myself out of it.
I can handle this alone
, I thought.

“ARE WE
BURNING
or burying?” asked one of the Crawford staffers, some part-time guy from our sister funeral home who was helping out a few days a week.

“Seriously, could you not?” I said, shaking my head.
What an asshole.
“This is someone's son. And we're burying, thank you.”

I wasn't personally working on Henry's funeral, but I couldn't help but check in on what Tony was doing to make sure that everything was just right. A lot of people I knew would be there, and I didn't want any missteps. Bill was already finished working on the body, so all that was left was to check that the photo boards had been placed in optimal positions around the room so that they wouldn't interfere with the receiving line, and that the projection screen was working so the family could play the photo slideshow of Henry's life. Tony said that not
once
during the planning did Henry's parents talk about the fact that he died of an overdose—instead they decided to show pictures of him sailing, skiing, and surfing—even though most of them were from before high school (and before he got into drugs). “We want this to be a celebration,” they said. Normally I would have
agreed with them, although it was hard to feel the same about Henry's death as I did about older clients. Henry had had every opportunity—a few
too
many, perhaps—and there was something tragic about how he wasted them.