Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(15)

Simone took what was left of our ice cream cones and headed to the kitchen to toss them into the trash. I stood frozen, looking at my mother, who wasn’t talking, and I was wondering if there was an intruder in the house. And if so, were we supposed to run out of the house to get the police and leave her there? No, we can’t do that. Was he still in the house? What was happening? Why wasn’t anyone saying anything? Seconds felt like minutes.

Simone came back from the kitchen to the bottom of the stairwell, where I was standing, still frozen, and looked at me with dread in her eyes, and then looked up at my mother’s distorted face.

“Your brother’s dead.”

My mom didn’t specify which brother, because she didn’t have to. Simone and I both knew it was Chet. He had gone on a trip and didn’t stay with the family, and now he was gone forever.

Just like that.

You don’t believe these moments when they happen. You believe they have the wrong guy—that it was his friend, it wasn’t him. Your brain is moving so fast thinking of all the things that have changed in just the blink of an eye—what it all means. It means we are five. Not six anymore. It meant our family was broken.

There are only five of us now. That’s not the right number. We need six. Six is our number. We are a team. Now I have a dead brother? What do you mean, “dead”? Is that final?

    I ran into the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs and threw myself onto the bed and cried and screamed and wailed in agony. Death is agony. There is simply no other way to describe it. It is getting the wind knocked out of you over and over again, and just when you think you have enough strength to take a deep breath, it knocks you down again. There is no break from the pain. It is arduous, unyielding.

I remember thinking, This is what you’re supposed to do now: Jump onto the bed and bury your face in your tears. Just pretend you’re acting. Do what they do on soap operas.

I didn’t think about my mother or my father or my brothers or my sisters. All I could think about was what he said to me—that he lied to me. My brother left me with the very people he said he wouldn’t. My bookend was gone, and now things were really out of control.

No, no, no. This isn’t happening. It isn’t him. It can’t be. He’s too strong to die. They’re going to find his body and find out it’s someone else’s brother. I got down on my knees and prayed for someone else’s brother to be dead.



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? ? ?

“You have to get up. We have to help Mom. You need to come upstairs and be with Mom.” It was Simone. Simone was the oldest girl and Chet was the oldest boy. She had just lost her partner too. That never occurred to me then.

I sat on the bed with my mom as she recounted my father’s phone call from New Jersey. I remember sitting there, wondering if this was what she was going to look like from now on—a foreigner.

    She said when my dad called to tell her, she only heard moaning on the other side of the phone. The police had come to my father’s door, and somehow knowing he had a heart condition—he’d had a heart attack a year earlier—they had sat him down before they told him. He couldn’t talk when he called my mom. He just kept moaning into the phone until the police took the phone and told my mother what had happened.

Years later, my sister Shoshanna was telling someone the story of how she found out Chet had died, and it was similar to mine.

“You weren’t there,” I told her. “You weren’t with us.”

“Of course I was there, Chelsea. We were all there together. I came home from babysitting, and you and Simone were upstairs with Mom. Simone went outside while Mom told me because, I guess, she couldn’t bear to hear the news twice.”

I had no recollection of Shana being there that night. I only remember Simone taking me out for ice cream at the Dairy Queen in Edgartown, and bumping into some of her friends at the gas station, and they asked about Chet.

“He’s in Wyoming, hiking. He’ll be back next week.”

The thing I remember most vividly is the ice cream and Simone knowing to throw it away when she saw my mother’s grief-stricken face. She knew before my mother said a word to throw the ice cream away. I remember wanting to ask her why we needed to throw away perfectly good ice cream, but I knew enough not to.

    I remember our neighbor coming over with a bottle of red wine, which I remember thinking was inappropriate, because we weren’t celebrating. I remember wondering why all of the sudden we liked our neighbor when all we’d done was talk about what a pain in the ass she was. I didn’t understand why she was at our house, or why my mother who almost never drank alcohol was drinking red wine.

I remember waking up in the morning and thinking that all deaths should happen in the daylight. All bad news should come in the morning. That way, you have the whole day to get used to your new reality, so that the first daylight you see after death doesn’t feel like a plane nosediving into the ocean with the damage becoming worse the deeper into the sea you go. In death, the aftermath is worse than the crash.

My mom packed up our family van, and we got on the very first ferry off the island to Woods Hole and drove the five hours back to New Jersey. No one spoke.



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? ? ?

My father and my brother Roy walked out the front door when we pulled into our driveway. Chet’s car was parked on the bottom left-hand side. Roy and my dad were both crying and walking toward us like zombies, with their arms open. I had never seen my father cry before, and I didn’t like it. It was sunny out, which made no sense to me. Birds were chirping. The weather was not commensurate with death.