Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (12 page)

crazy feeling

APRIL 1997

M
ay 11, 1997,
was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Renée and I had spent the entire weekend lounging in the new summer sun, reading and listening to music. We spent Saturday night at home, just the two of us. She sent me to the bookstore and the fabric store with her shopping lists. After I got home with her loot—fashion mags, rock mags, Annie Proulx and Claire Messud novels—we sat on the couch eating Indian takeout and watching a terrible old Joan Collins/Richard Burton movie on AMC. It was called
Sea Wife
. Joan and Richard were stuck on a raft with two other guys after their ship sank. Richard was the only one who knew that Joan was secretly a nun, but she made him promise not to tell the others since the hope of sleeping with her was the only thing keeping them alive.

Renée assigned me to DJ duty while she sat at the sewing machine. We stayed up late that night playing CDs, mostly old favorites: R.E.M.’s
Murmur
and
Reckoning
, Liz Phair’s
Exile in Guyville
, The Replacements’
Let It Be
, The Feelies’
Only Life
,
Marshall Crenshaw
. I remember the playlist because I left the pile of discs untouched on top of the stereo for weeks afterward. We listened to Freakwater’s “Wild and Blue,” Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Just Like Me,” The Dream Syndicate’s “Halloween,” Everything But the Girl’s
Amplified Heart
, Buddy Holly’s
Greatest Hits
, Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down,” OMC’s “How Bizarre.” The top CD on the pile was the last one we played, Dean Martin’s
Sleep Warm
, which stayed on continuous play as we drifted to sleep.

May 11 was Mother’s Day, so we left phone messages for our moms. Renée did some more sewing and listened to the Baltimore Orioles playing the Seattle Mariners on TV. Joey Cora, her favorite Mariner, was having a good day. I was in the kitchen making lunch for Renée—cinnamon toast and coffee. Renée stood up, took a step, and then suddenly fell over onto the chair by her desk. I ran to her. I held her up with my arms and tried to talk to her. I grabbed the phone with my right hand, propping her up with my left arm.

“It’s important that you remain calm,” the 911 operator said.

The coroner later told me that she died instantly, that pulmonary embolisms kill in less than a minute, that even if it had happened in a hospital, the doctors would have been powerless to save her. But I was still propping her up, trying to breathe into her mouth while the 911 operator gave me instructions over the phone. When the ambulance came, the EMTs came into the living room and one of the cops led me outside. When the cop asked me questions about Renée, I figured he was gathering information for the hospital. I was worrying that she might have suffered harm from the oxygen deprivation. The officer and I were leaning on his car, out on Highland Avenue. Every minute or so, our next-door neighbor would peek over the fence. One of the EMTs came out to talk to me. “We’re taking her to Richmond for the autopsy,” she said. “It’s standard procedure when somebody so young dies.”

That was the first moment anyone said anything about Renée dying. It seemed like such a long time before I heard my stupid voice asking, “She died?” The sun was streaking through the leaves in the yard next door. The upstairs neighbors’ air conditioner was right over my head, drip, drip, drip. The EMT said something about God, but she was just trying to be kind. Maybe it was a heart attack, she said; it was too soon to tell. I was sure they would find something in Richmond they hadn’t found here, and I knew they would be bringing Renée back later that day.

The cops were extremely kind. They were young and scared husbands, like me. They wouldn’t leave until I called somebody to come over. But I didn’t want to call anybody because I didn’t want to have to call them later and apologize for the false alarm; of course Renée would be coming back. I let the cops call St. Thomas, and they sent a young priest over right away. Renée and I knew him as the guy who’d given a sermon in which he mentioned the Primitive Radio Gods, which seemed at the time like a strange way for a young priest to try to be hip. He arrived in a polo shirt and khakis, just out of the shower, and he seemed annoyed to be there. I tried to make conversation but he had nothing to say, not even some drivel about God. I asked if he could give Renée extreme unction, and he said, “We can bless the body at the funeral,” like I was too dumb to know the difference. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to get rid of him. After a few minutes I told him I was okay, and he believed me. I needed to be alone.

Our living room was just the way the EMTs left it: The couch was pushed up against the bookcase, and there was medical debris all over the floor—yellow plastic caps, syringe wrappers, needles, styrofoam pads for the heart-jumper-cables. I was grateful that the room was so trashed because it offered visible proof that something bad was happening, that this wasn’t just a bad dream. I cleared a little space and sat on the floor between Renée’s purple desk and her bureau—where her body had been—in the fetal position, my knees up, holding the phone.

I sat there alone for hours. I’m not sure how much time passed. It was maybe four in the afternoon, about an hour after Renée collapsed. Renée (unlike me) had a notebook in which she kept people’s phone numbers, so I started there. Everybody I called was surprised to hear my voice on the phone in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I simply told everybody, “I have bad news. Renée died.” There was no way to tell people—nobody had seen her sick, nobody had had any idea she was about to die. Many of the friends and family I called had spoken to her within the past couple of days. It was Mother’s Day, so both my mom and hers were expecting happy calls. Pavement was playing in New York that night, so most of our friends there were out at the show, and I couldn’t reach them.

I didn’t want to get up off the floor because I wanted to be there when Renée called and said she was coming home. People wanted to come over, but I told them to wait. Her parents, Buddy and Nadine, asked if they could come and get me, but I didn’t want to leave the house, since I didn’t want to miss the call from Richmond that would explain that it was all a mistake. I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving the room where she died; I guess I must have known I couldn’t get back in.

The sun set and the house grew dark. The call from Richmond didn’t come. I have no idea how long I sat there. Finally, our friend Susan came over, even though I’d begged her not to. Talking to her face-to-face, I realized that I had said something that could never be taken back—Renée died—and that saying it made it true. The change had come. It was irreversible. It was ten or eleven before I left the house. I packed the beagle in the car and drove to Pulaski County. I took the phone, even though it was a land line and would be totally useless in the car. But I couldn’t stand to leave the phone behind, in that room. I thought if I left it there, Renée might call, trying to get back home, and she wouldn’t be able to reach me, and I would have lost her for good.

It was a long drive, about three hours. I tried the radio only once, after the turn off of Route 646 onto the main drag in Christiansburg, a long string of truck stops and gas stations. The radio was playing “American Pie,” but I only made it a few seconds before I had to change the station. I got Jerry Lee Lewis on the oldies station. He’s still alive, I thought. Jerry Lee Lewis. Reagan is, too. The Pope. I turned off the radio and left it off. The beagle and I were both making a lot of noise, howling in our complete privacy. The signboard outside the Pulaski Baptist Church read
NO MAN IS POOR WHO HAS A GODLY MOTHER.

The next few days were a blur. Less than twenty-four hours after I was making Renée’s cinnamon toast, I was driving around Pulaski County with her parents, shopping for grave-sites. The saleslady wore a blue prom dress and carried smelling salts. She leaned on me hard to buy a grave for myself; I guess she thought it would seem romantic. I told her, No thanks, not today. She smirked a bit. “You’re young now,” she said. “A few years down the line, you’ll be changing your tune, and that spot will be taken.”

We found a spot for Renée on the side of a hill, in Sunrise Burial Park on Route 11. It was better than flat ground. You could hear the roar of the racetrack, just an exit away.

Now everybody knew it was true. I hated telling people because I thought I would have to apologize later for scaring them unnecessarily, but slowly it became obvious that the bad news wasn’t going to change. Her family was so kind to me, although I felt ashamed that their daughter had died on my watch. Neighbors brought over trays of sausage biscuits. I picked out a casket (they show you a catalog) and wrote an obituary for the Roanoke paper. Friends were calling each other instead of hearing it from me. It was out of my hands. I stayed down the hall from her parents, in the room where she grew up. We’d stayed here many times as a couple. I lay there in the dark but didn’t sleep, surrounded by her records, her photo albums, her Nancy Drew mysteries, her high school yearbooks, the model horses on her bureau.

Our friends and family converged on Pulaski County, even though it’s an hour from the nearest airport and has hardly anywhere to stay. People who barely knew each other were squeezing into EconoLodge singles together. People drove hours to attend the wake, bringing me little things of hers to drop into the casket so she could be buried with them,
Beowulf
-style. Karl brought a guitar pick because he used to teach Renée guitar. Matt brought her batting gloves; they used to drive out to the batting cage in Richmond together, and he kept her gloves in his glove compartment. I lost track of how many people brought baseballs. Uncle Zennis’s car broke down on the drive from South Carolina, which was a blessing in a way, since the uncles then got to spend the whole week in the yard working on a car together. It was just the distraction they needed, and I heard the comforting clank from the front yard all week long.

I wish I’d been together enough to organize a funeral, the kind of funeral people imagine when they say, “I want this song played at my funeral” or “Dress sexy at my funeral.” But I wasn’t. Renée was a gal with many fantasies, but as far as I knew she never spent her time fantasizing about funerals, which was one of the millions of things I loved about her. So I left it up to the preacher. I knew she had a favorite hymn (“Shall We Gather at the River”) and a favorite psalm (the forty-third), so I mentioned those. My dad called around and found a Catholic monsignor in Roanoke. I went back to Charlottesville to pick out some glam burial clothes with Renée’s sister, Drema, and her friend Merit. We spent an afternoon at our house picking out the shoes. We thought about the platform black-and-white creepers, but we decided to go instead with the pink patent leather pumps she’d bought at Fluevog in Boston. We picked out some jewelry and a green dress she’d sewn and some photos to put on the casket so people could see her the way she really looked in life. Drema checked Renée’s speed-dial just to make sure she was number one. She was. Drema and Merit then drove me back to Pulaski County. On the way we talked about the road sign
BRIDGE ICES BEFORE ROAD.
I always wondered, If that’s a problem, why don’t they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn’t made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it’s alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm.

The funeral was Thursday afternoon, May 15, in Renée’s old radio time-slot on WTJU. Nobody wanted to be there. My mom and dad sat in the pew right behind me and literally held me upright. During the funeral, I could hear a baby crying, which meant that our friend Heather had flown out from Utah with her month-old son, Eli. I counted ninety-six cars on the way to Sunrise Burial Park because I knew Renée would have counted. I was grateful for every pedestrian who took off his hat, everyone who sent flowers, every state trooper who saluted as the procession went by. We stood at the grave and listened to the cars on the racetrack make their noise.

After the service we all went to the basement of Fairlawn Baptist Church for lunch. It was a strange crowd: poker-night buddies, hometown pals, fellow baseball freaks. People sat with strangers, friends, enemies, exes, former coworkers, people they’d hoped they’d never have to run into again. They were all in one room, for the worst reason. I buzzed around the room, trying to take care of everybody; that’s what Renée would have done.

We had come to say goodbye to Renée, but many of us were saying goodbye to each other. I didn’t know which of our friends I’d never see again. Neither did they. I caught a ride back to Buddy and Nadine’s with the two friends who’d hooked up at our wedding, plus one of our groomsmen, plus Tyler, who got carded when we stopped for cigarettes. We stayed around the house all day, telling stories about Renée, arguing about the things she liked to argue about. The uncles kept working on the car in the front yard. Duane ran around to the neighboring farms to roll in cow shit. The coroner called to explain how it had happened. “Pulmonary embolism,” he told me. “She never knew what hit her.” The coroner was very kind, and stayed on the phone with me for forty-five minutes. I’d never heard of a pulmonary embolism; he explained to me that a blood clot in her leg broke off and got carried through her bloodstream to her heart. I asked why. He said, “She was just unlucky.” What can I say? Renée was healthy. She was young. She didn’t do drugs, not even pot. She took zinc and used all-cotton organic tampons. She walked the dog. She recycled glass. She wrote thank-you notes and slowed down for yellow lights. She was planning to live a long time. Still, she died, just because her blood stopped working.