Stranger in the Corner

A personal essay on death and loss

It’s like when you've been sitting near a campfire and then you turn away into the black night and your face still tingles with the heat; your skin feels tight and dry, and the fiery figures still dance before your eyes and then are lost in the endless night. And you glance back for a moment, and you’re flashing in and out of the flames, and then the images fade, and the fire dies, and the quiet night sets in.

I step down from the airplane onto the jetway, and the dry, summer air blasts my face. After more than twenty hours of crowded terminals and cramped, economy-class middle seats, I hobble along the walkway on wooden legs, lugging an old American Traveler bag stuffed with as many heavy items as the frayed, black canvas cloth or the dull-toothed zipper can possibly hold. My coat pockets bulge with the journals that I kept while in Ukraine and with whatever else I managed to cram in at the last moment. Up ahead of me is the portal, and there’ll be a lady there who gets paid to look nice and smile and say, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas,” over and over and over. I can already hear the familiar clink of quarters from the slot machines in the terminal, and cigarette smoke is just beginning to tickle my nose with the smell of home. I feel as though with each step, the airy mists of some perfect dream unravel behind me and trickle off into nothing. Twenty four months wash by me in an instant, and for a moment I wonder if it has all been just a dream.

You never take really enough pictures of people when they’re there, and then they’re gone and you have to try to find something to substantiate their existence, to make them seem real again. You go through old photos on the computer, just to remember... and here’s a Yalta sunset, and there’s a castle in Crimea, and there’s a grassy riverbank. And then there are the photos that you copied from Facebook after you got home, because somehow over the course of so many years you didn’t end up with a single picture of him. And at first you think that maybe everyone’s just kidding about it all, and you go to his house because you think that maybe seeing his mom and sister will help you to hold on a little bit longer, but then his mom just cries and Melanie won’t look you in the eye.

I knew something was wrong when I asked about him on the way home from the airport. The whole family got quiet in an instant, and Maren looked over at Mom real quickly as if to catch an expression before it evaporated from her face. And the air conditioner was like thunder in the silence and the sun was fire on the hood of the car. “Greg,” she began. “You remember that last year, I wrote you to tell you that Julien had gotten married... Well... things weren’t really working out for him and his wife, and Julien started to have some emotional problems, and then, last December... last December, Julien killed himself.” She had taken a long enough time to build up to it, and I had read enough books and seen enough movies to know what was coming at the end, so by the time that she said it, I had already gone back to Ukraine, back to the simplicity and beauty of a sunlit bank on a river made of glass and light. And as I gazed through the grimy glass of our car window, the other cars seemed to just race by one after another and disappear into the sun’s fiery glare.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to cry at a funeral, and I still don’t really know. When grandpa died, I cried, but that was because mom was crying�" I didn’t really understand what it all meant. Because at first, Death is just a stranger in the corner, and you don’t really get it at all. You just start to not remember anymore, and that’s what death is for you. It’s not the bullets or the bombs or the cancer that they show in all the movies: it’s just a not-there-anymore, an absence.

And yet for its absence, once recognized, Death is always there. At first, you refuse to acknowledge him, though you’re sure he’s looking over at you, staring with his empty eyes into your sorrowing soul. But then after a while, you start to realize that death didn’t really choose his lot either, and he’s only doing his job. That just the way that things work. And maybe, in the end, maybe for Julien, death wasn’t just a stranger in the corner. Maybe after so many years of so much pain and having seen so much hurt, that stranger in the corner was an old friend with a warm embrace and a promise of rest.

But sometimes you find within yourself a different stranger, that of Regret for letters left unsent and words unspoken�" of thoughts trapped within your self-interest and my apathy. And the tears you never shed were not for him anyway; they were tears of self pity for a shattered reality, for a puzzle piece missing right out of the middle of your picture of life. You’re back in “your life,” and you’re sleeping in “your bed,” but the thumbtacks that hold you onto what was once “your reality” keep wiggling out one by one and falling to the floor with a ghostly chime that seems to ring out for an eternity.

And sometimes, you go back and look at the pictures, just to remember. His face is a gray sky and his eyes are a storm. And the winds draw his gaze far off�" far beyond the standard-issue camo and past the darkening dunes, back to something bright and ephemeral. And all the while you can’t figure out if your eyes are stinging because it’s four in the morning or because you’re staring at a bright computer screen in a dark room. And sometimes, you pull down the blinds so that no one will see, and then you sit and just rock back and forth and back and forth and remember. And then you recall something that they used to say and you laugh, and you’re not really sure if it’s for joy or anguish, whether it’s somehow become funny to you or whether you are just trying to hide the pain. And then it’s time for class or for church and you put on a brave face and you go.

Back in Ukraine, I had a sheet of paper with people’s names on it so that I wouldn’t forget anyone in my prayers, and I felt kind of dumb reading them all off when I could have just said, “bless all my friends and family.” I guess I felt like saying each name aloud would somehow do more for them or would bring back into reality for a moment the existence that was then so distant, so inaccessible. I still have that list on an old, crinkled piece of paper that’s traveled across the world to sit in a ziplock bag in a desk drawer, but anymore, it’s one of few pieces of him that really exists for you. And as you read over it, the fiery figures of life still dance before your eyes, and your cheeks are still warm and tight, and you close your eyes for a moment, just to remember, and you’re flashing in and out of the flames again. And it still hurts but not so much this time as it did the last. Because that’s part of the not-remembering. And that’s why we sometimes choose the pain.

Author's Note

Do I need a transition after the first paragraph, or is it clear that we're switching gears, as denoted by the line break?