Time After Leonie Died

The day I turned eight, I realized I was going to die. As far as I can remember, nothing traumatic had happened. There wasn’t anything particularly depressing or scary about that birthday (although later on, that year would be extremely depressing). And I’d probably known about death before then–that technically I was going to die at some date far off in the future. But when I turned eight, on that birthday, I knew it differently, as though I had been served–along with a slew of Pound Puppies and the Lite Brite I’d asked for–my death sentence, official and tangible. Because that day, I knew not just that I was going to die, but that I was racing to it, swept by time, shoved to it, my heels dug in the ground, pushed hard toward the darkness. I remember crying in my room as I clutched the Rockstar My Little Pony my friend Morgan had given me. I’d thanked her politely in my voice devoid of r’s, “Oh Moigan, you have such a sense of humuh.” She did too. Little Morgan with her freckles and feathered mullet, short and spunky and happy. I, unfortunately, did not. 

I’m not saying I didn’t have an amazing time at the party. I did. Anyone would have looked at me and thought, for that moment at least, that I was normal–that I knew how to enjoy myself. I became obnoxious and excited as I usually did when I was in my element. I convinced everyone to put on a dance show of which I was the star, singing passionately into a rotating fan. But as soon as everyone had left, all breathless, stomachs sore, I gathered my toys and slunk away alone to my room, exhausted from being the life of the party, off to contemplate death. My guests would have been surprised to see that instead of rocking out with the My Little Pony or braiding her tail, I sobbed into her jeweled mane and thought about my deteriorating body, its heart using up its allotted beats with alarming rapidity. Eight years down. Eight years. It had gone by so fast. I knew my double sums. In eight more years, I’d be sixteen. Five times eight and I’d be halfway done. My panic turned quickly to disbelief. What exactly was I celebrating anyway? Why were my parents happy about this? How did everyone else live so calmly? How did people just accept the fact that we would all end in tragedy, marking time by laughing, giving gifts? That night, I sobbed myself to sleep, balling up a fistful of neon orange hair in desperate, confused rage.

A few years ago, I found an old Christmas card that my dad wrote when I was kid. In his description of me, he said that I told him I always had “numbers running through my head.” In the letter he wrongly attributed this fervent obsession to my non-existent love of math, probably hoping that I would go on to become some sort of strange genius. Instead, I just became strange. In reality, my preoccupation with numbers had nothing to do with the subject I spaced out in during my entire school career, and instead with a relentless fear of time. Time, I knew now, was moving too fast, was getting away from me, and I counted it to get a handle on it. After my eighth birthday, I started having attacks of crises of time accompanied by frantic counting and repetitive calculations. I must have mentioned the numbers to my dad, but probably didn’t talk about it much. If I ever mentioned my age, my mom just laughed at me. She didn’t consider eight very old or think my death was imminent. No one understood. 

On the first day of third grade, I wore an outfit covered with little dancing clocks. 

It was five months after my morbid revelation. That summer, my family had moved out of our rented duplex in a neighborhood of subsidized housing and moved into a big, old house on an emptier street where neighbors separated themselves carefully with hedged lawns. I took it just as hard as I’d taken turning eight. Moving meant I would never see Morgan again or ride down to Michael Mart with my sisters for slushies. It also meant starting a new school with rooms full of strangers and not the kids I’d known since I was five. That year, my developing shyness, which had before been broken up by games on the playground or birthday parties everyone was invited to, would grow creeping and unchecked until, in addition to minutes and hours, I could count the number of words I choked out like sobs that year at Randolph Elementary School. 

Needless to say, third grade was the worst. My teacher, Mrs. Reisner, a short old woman with floppy jowls that swung furiously when she was angry, seemed to take my silence as a personal affront. I had nightmares that year of getting my name written on the board, or of receiving a dreaded pink slip ripped from a pad on her desk with her sweaty, shaking hand. It would tell my parents I hadn’t been listening again and for some reason, even though my parents didn’t care, the injustice of this mortified me. But maybe I could have gotten over Mrs. Reisner if the other kids had been nice–the kids I desperately wanted to be friends with. There was Anne-Marie with hair so orange I dreamed of putting a chunk in my mouth and sucking on it like a Starburst, and Meghan short and freckly, who reminded me so much of the lost Morgan. Years later, we would become good friends, but back then they hated me just as much as I loved them. I caught them grinning when I got in trouble and making sure I didn’t sit next to them at lunch. They could tell from the first day in my matching clock shorts and blouse that I was weird, and they smelled my vulnerability with that uncanny sense only third grade girls possess. 

This crisis of loneliness was bad timing coming as it did right on the heels of my existential crisis. Now, in addition to dealing with the fact that I was a miserable mortal racing towards inevitable death, I had to also accept the fact that for a good portion of this short life, I’d be ridiculed and despised, or–best case scenario–invisible. The other part of me–the funny part, the light part, the part that was loud–would become reserved only for close family members in the safety of my home. But while I was at school, while I was with anybody else, there would be no break from these new gloomy ruminations. I wouldn’t find any relief talking all night during slumber parties with Meghan and Anne-Marie, or playing tag at recess. Instead I would spend my best years on the playground in the middle of a pile of tires that were meant for us to climb on–hiding out, thinking–counting. During recess, I muttered to myself like a demented old woman while other kids crawled excitedly over me, shrieking with some unfathomable joy. I would become so lost inside my own mind in there, that I remember several times looking out from the tire and seeing an empty playground after I had somehow missed the whistle that had called everyone else inside.

And then, just as I had resigned myself to despair–to life as a sad outcast, thrust to the margins–a life hidden in the cool rings of tires–two deaths happened. First, my dog died–run over by a car, legs twitching in the air.

Libby was a beautiful Chocolate Lab, and still just a puppy. My parents had bought her with the idea that she’d be one of the good parts of moving–we were now in a house where we could actually have dogs. It was a good idea, I guess, and for a while, it’s possible she did take my mind off the grave. But who could have known that in less than two months, I’d be watching my dad dig one for her? 

One evening, my family had gone to my grandparents’ acreage out in the country and, while my grandma made dinner and everyone else played or watched TV, I went outside with Libby. Looking back, it’s possible that her death was my fault. I remember trying to make her sit with me on a swing my grandpa had tied to a tree. I probably had some romantic vision of holding her, just a girl and her dog. I’d lean back so she could rest her nose on my shoulder, the world blurry for a moment below us. I was becoming a little dramatic in third grade. But Libby, my new beautiful dog, was not having it. She nipped at me as I wrestled her awkwardly with one hand, holding the rope with the other. I think I got her halfway on my lap, but I wasn’t even able to sit all the way down before she squirmed away easily and darted toward the long driveway next to the swing. I watched her for a moment, thinking she’d come back and planning how I could trap her, but Libby excitedly moved farther and farther away, sniffing at things up the driveway, invisible things that lured her closer to the busy road. I tried all my old tricks–“Libby, goodbye! I’m leaving!” I shouted, turning toward the house and smacking my legs for her to come. She stopped once, just for a moment and looked back at me, her tail still wagging, her decision already made. And then she turned and ran fast, head down and bounding to the street. By the time I dragged my mom and sisters out of the house, she was already dead or dying. We saw her legs up and clawing weakly at the air as cars sped past, swerving at the last minute around her body. 

Later that year, I wrote that my mom pushed a “crying glob” of kids back down the driveway, and I still imagine us gray and gelatinous, oozing back to the house, boneless, no spines. Now I remember her dead body distinctly, even though I’m sure I didn’t see it–a mess of fur and blood, a smashed-in face pulled away from bared, bloody teeth. I remember kneeling on my grandparents’ bed and pulling back the curtain to watch my dad carry a black garbage bag out back by the fence where we weren’t supposed to see. I saw him pick up a shovel. I wrote later that my mom and I didn’t cry right away, while my grandma “sobbed and shrieked.” I’m not sure if that’s true, but I remember now, lying in bed that night with my sisters, my mom sleeping on the floor in the hallway between our rooms as we sobbed quietly and reminisced with scratchy throats. 

The second death that year was a lot less personal, and I’m not entirely sure why I sometimes think of it even today. Her name might have been Jessica. She was in the class next to me and of course I never spoke to her or participated in her Four-Square games, but her class joined mine every once in a while to watch videos. On good days when the weather was bad, our teachers wheeled a TV in on a metal cart to the front of the room, and in the months before her mom killed her by turning on their car in a closed garage, Jessica and I and probably forty other kids shared a few hours on rainy afternoons together. For a few months in 1991 or 92, we watched a man called Slim Goodbody dance in his unitard with painted intestines and glutes gyrating in front of us, kicking and leaping across the screen as he gushed and sang about our amazing bodies–bodies which I already saw as nothing but ticking time bombs. I only have this one memory of her. I sat at the head of a table and looked at her a few feet to my left staring up at the TV, chin in hand. The lights were off and we sat in the darkness, Slim Goodbody our only light. Now, that’s all that’s left of her in my mind–just her face already ethereal in the faint glow of the TV, bored and sleepy like mine, obediently learning about her body–a body that was almost already nothing. In third grade, I started writing. 

I’m not sure why my little girl, Leonie, died before she turned six. Some people, I gather, are surprised by these things. I’m guessing some people have epiphanies after the death of a loved one, might gain some important perspective or make drastic changes in their lives. “Death? My god, I’d completely forgotten about it,” they might say. And that’s wonderful, though I cannot possibly imagine it. For the record, I don’t think that these blissful people deserve to have someone die any more than I do, or that anyone needs to experience death so that they can appreciate life or something like that. No one, absolutely no one, needs death. And I do not care to talk about its usefulness. I refuse to admit even one of its benefits. No amount of usefulness could make the pain of death worth it. I certainly wish I hadn’t thought about death so much as a healthy eight-year-old kid, and that it hadn’t haunted me so much throughout my life. It’s far better–I’m certain of this–to be surprised by it, to have it knock the wind out of you as you’re running along carelessly through the world. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that that’s the way to be. 

But my little girl just died. And when something awful happens, don’t we always look for meaning? Not to redeem what happened, not to balance something out that could not possibly be balanced–not to find something of equal weight when there is nothing at least in this world that weighs as much–but to snatch something back–to walk away maybe destroyed, but not empty handed? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been thinking about something I can take away from Leonie’s death–some new understanding, and I cannot find any lessons. Not one. Listen, I already knew about death even if my life had been relatively easy, good even. For some reason, some flaw in my being, I was born dreaming about it. I have always been obsessed with it, ever since I turned eight. And nothing about it has surprised me. Grief has taught me nothing. Even as a kid, I was already a morbid little thing. Just look at my writing in the third grade. Was I not the author of “The Hard Year”–a book full of all kinds of imaginative deaths–where pioneers’ limbs are cut off like soft butter–a book full of fevers, and blindness, and drought so severe my characters were forced to water the lawn with tiny paper cups? Was the climax of my third-grade autobiography not the gritty description of my dog flipped over under the wheels of a car, smashed up and bloody in a garbage bag? Did I not spend my days counting how long I might have left to live, dreading every birthday, alone in the dark shadow of a pile of tires? What could someone like me possibly have to learn from death? It is utterly pointless; I can take nothing from it. Someone like me walks away empty handed. Someone like me can’t walk away. 

But that’s not true. I lie. Sorry. I’m angry. If I’m honest, there is something, it seems, that has changed. It’s something that took me a while to believe. It’s something to do with time. 

All these years, I could never see it correctly, no matter how I tried to calculate it. Throughout my life, I’ve known as we all do that things seem to go too fast or too slow and I used to think we were all just imagining things. I’d count back and forth, and even sometimes write down everything I did thinking that if I accounted for time spent, things would add up properly and I could balance out my life like my mom and her checkbook. I thought then I’d be able to look back and say, thirty-nine years? Yes, absolutely. That seems reasonable. That’s correct. But, Leonie, after you died, I gave up. I just stopped. Maybe I’ve realized that there’s nothing constant about it at all, there’s nothing real to try to catch hold of. I can’t reconcile myself to a regular pace of time because the truth is, it doesn’t move steadily at all. All my life, I thought I didn’t understand it. I thought that we had, in fact, been given enough of it, that it was logical and fair–a constant, real law. But now that you are dead, I know that it does, in fact, cheat us–that it is cruel and devious and changing. And so, since you died, it has become nothing to me at all. I’ve stopped playing its game. 

How long have you been gone? I don’t know, Leonie. But I refuse to answer that. There is no answer. The answer is only that you are my center of gravity. You have bent everything toward you, my past and future. Now, when I see what I thought was before, I see only movement, a slope falling towards you. My past is stretched thin, so thin I can see your smile through it. And what is my life now? It doesn’t exactly move forward anymore. It revolves around you. You are the center, the crease where I press my past and future together. Let others move along with their time if they must. Let them ask me how long. My love and my pain which are now the same thing are outside of it now, outside of its torment and far, far outside of its healing. 

Does time say you only lived six years? It’s not true. It’s nothing but a lie. A cruel, horrible lie. I need you to know this, Leonie. You have existed for at least as long as I have. Listen to me. You know and I know we weren’t strangers when we met. Every mom who loves her child knows this. At some point, even if she realizes it gradually and can never quite put it into words–a mom knows that she has always loved, has always known her child. There is a secret, hidden memory, a knot in us tied by an invisible hand, that we recognize as ancient, whose beginning we cannot see. Because the beginning is even more mysterious than the end. In the beginning sits the knowledge that you have always loved this person, that someone, maybe your mom, always loved you. If you think about the beginning seriously at all, you have to recognize that it does not exist, you have to leave time. 

And when you say goodbye, you have to leave it again. It’s just love, you might think. Easy to explain. Love doesn’t go away after death. Everyone says that. But it isn’t easy to explain at all. It isn’t easy to explain that you were with me long ago, so that when I look back, I find you before you. And it isn’t easy to explain that something stronger than a memory is left now. Six years? No, absolutely no, Leonie. You are no blip. You are no piece, no chapter, no footnote in my life. Let me stretch you, if I may, to your true dimensions. You are in all the places in my story even if your presence is sometimes soft. And aren’t stories themselves eternal? Who can read a story without eternity in her heart? I can’t tell you even when my own stories begin, when the germ of them starts growing in my brain, when the truths that drive them are put into motion. And the end? Everyone knows that any good story stays–stays even if it changes–stays long after the words disappear on worn, yellow pages. 

Oh Leo, maybe I’m crazy but I believe this even in the most literal sense. You know I do. And time then, my old nemesis, must go. 

But I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m jumping the gun. Maybe it’s here with me now, clocks ticking, my heart running out of beats. Maybe sometimes on bad days, I think, “How long?” now knowing time isn’t too fast after all.

But Leonie, time too must run out and even it, in the end, must die. So, for now, let me at least call out its lie. Let me let you live.

Six years?

Six years?

Oh my love, you are ancient. You, Preciosa, are eternal.