A Year Without Joel

A year without Joel

Saturday, May 15, marked a year since Joel died. Although I still feel the two days of the week, Thursday and Friday, make this mark, not the Saturday on which it fell this year . The date moved by one day to Saturday and will continue to move each year. But Saturday didn’t feel like the one year mark like Thursday and Friday did to me. Many have called it an “anniversary”. But I always considered anniversaries to be celebratory for events, weddings, birthdays, family vacations, the day you got a dog, fun events. There was no celebration on the one year mark of my son’s death. Yesterday, May 20, was one year since his wake, and the last time I was ever to see him again. It is a very sad thing to see your own son lying in a casket, not looking at all as he had when you last saw him. His chest was distended; his face looked as though he had gained twenty pounds. His hands lay cradled together over his stomach.

Joel had become a strapping young man at nearly six feet and One-Hundred, Fifty pounds. His shoulders were quite broad and his long arms very strong, lean, and sinewy. He ran every day after school and then moved to calisthenics for an hour. Everything he did looked effortless and fluid. He was always busy and could be found pounding steel at his forge, working on a tree fort at a friend’s house, or long-boarding around town. His hands were continuously working. Now, they were just cradled together, motionless. His long fingers would never grip his fly rod again or do something as dellicate as tie his own fly. Seeing him lay still and not breathing in the casket was the hardest and most horrible thing I’ve ever had to do. I approached the casket with tear filled eyes. As I approached I saw the bill of his fishing cap and then his lifeless face, eyes closed. It was private, just me, my wife and surviving Son with immediate family, there, all weeping uncontrollably until I asked that it just be we three to spend the last few moments with Joel. We held each other and I heard my wife tell Brandon that it wasn’t Joel it was just his body. We had a decision to make, "Open or closed?". Brandon said, “closed,” without hesitation. He didn’t want anyone to see Joel like that. Joel was just too full of life and the love of life to be seen by any one dead and still, lying in a casket. So the casket was closed and no one else saw him ever again.

Several-Hundred people showed that evening at the funeral home and many had the courage to step up to the podium to remember my boy. Some were life-long friends who were in diapers with him so long ago. Others were parents of Joel’s friends who were so touched by Joel and inspired by him. Many of them felt a deep emptiness in their home as if they too had lost a son. Joel touched everyone he came in contact with. He was magical like that. Even as he lay dead in the street so far from home, strangers were weeping on the roadside and someone had already planted a small cross for him during the hours it took FHP to mark and photograph the scene. They didn’t know him but somehow they knew that someone very special is now gone. But the image of my boy lying in a casket haunts me every day. And May 20^th will be remembered as the day I viewed my dead son in a casket. Laying motionless in one of his favorite fishing shirts. Hands clutched together, never to move again. Never to hugg my neck and say, "I love you, Dad."

With the casket closed we displayed pictures of him on and around his casket. His long skate board leaned against the front. And his fly-rod with some of his favorite flies lay in the flowers on top. A friend of mine, a very large man standing six foot six and very big stature, who had really never met Joel, cried overwhelmingly at the sight of it. I walked to him to thank him for coming but he buried his face in his very large hands and sobbed uncontrollably and shook violently with his very loud cries. He tried to say he was sorry but could only burry his face in his hands again.

The room was packed with school friends, most crying and holding each other. Girl’s cheeks stained with mascara showing the path of each tear. On a flat panel screen, the funeral director made a show of photographs of Joel’s life, each fading into the next, and put to selected music. One of Joel’s favorite songs by Tool, “Right In Two,” was the last to play in the loop. It brings me to tears every time I hear it. And now Brandon, now my only son, is learning to play it on his guitar, which I am proud of but at the same time, it rips me from the inside out. I think it makes Brandon sad too.

“Don't these talking monkeys know that
Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly old monkeys,
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in two”

Most of the kids were there to remember Joel and were genuinely shaken up by his death. But there were a few who apparently had no conscience, no sympathetic or empathetic core to them at all. They seemed to be there to hang out as if it were any other Friday evening, joking, laughing, and with a general impression of loiter. One young “lady”, Becky Huggins, is the most disrespectful, rude, loud, obnoxious child I’ve ever met. I got to know her better than I would have liked as Joel thought she could be a girlfriend for a brief period. After the crowd thinned out, I looked for a way out of the reception area and found a friend in a small parlor. We shook hands and didn’t speak as red-swollen eyes summed up anything that could have been said. We leaned against a big table and stared forward blankly toward some windows. After several minutes I was finally able to choke out the words, “I never thought I’d burry one of my children.” It was dark outside and we could barely see through the reflections in the glass. But then a ghostly figure appeared and opened the door to come in. It was Becky. She looked at us, bright eyed and with a big grin and asked, “Are you guys checking me out, ‘cause it looked like you were?” I told her she was a stupid cunt and she went skipping away.

It took a very long time for me to understand I would never see Joel again. I obsessed over him. I obsessed and did nothing else. I obsessed over his thirty-mile journey to the small town of Bowling Green where he was killed while crossing the road. He walked through the night, Thursday May 14, through rain in drenching inches we haven’t seen here in nearly a year. I’m sure it soaked him to the bone. I went to the spot where Joel died the Sunday after and the man who covered up Joel in a blanket remarked to me several times through our conversation how white my son’s feet were. He said they were so white he thought he had on socks. But no, it was because my son was suffering from hypothermia and his body was pulling all the life’s blood from the extremities to keep the core alive. I remember Joel as a young boy, probably up until he was thirteen or fourteen, after a shower in the morning before school, I’d have to pick him up from a crumpled ball in the tub. He’d lay there with a towel over him, shivering, too cold to get up and dry off. His lips blue and his fingers wrinkled and water logged. I’d pick him up and dry off his shivering body.  I’d dress him and get him ready for school. He got so cold so easily. If it was below eighty degrees and he was wet, he’d be cold. I’ve thought about him lying in the bottom of the tub many times since that night. It was a latent memory that surfaced as I’ve tried to understand how cold and all alone he must have felt that night. And so, in my obsessing, I’ve traced his steps several times and formed a timeline both forward and backward of where he must have been over the twenty hours he went missing. This timeline seemed so important to me. It’s all I could think about for months. I somehow thought that if I found the answers, I could change the events. There had to be a magical switch to pull that would change it all back to the way it was supposed to be. I lost my business from this obsession. I couldn’t focus and couldn’t function. I did my work from home and a thought would come into my head and I’d go off to look through his dresser drawers, boxes of keepsakes, his clothes, and then my notes to find anything I may have overlooked. I never found the switch. And now I don’t think it exists.

“Some people hear their inner voices with great clearness….

And they live by what they hear.

Such people become crazy… or they become Legend.

--Jim Harrison

Joel is Legend.