People I Think About; Part 1

Several of you asked if I ever think about the little girls in my Post "No Small Thing."

I sure do.

I always did, but now that I am a mother, and the truly perilous nature of their lives has become clear to me, I've not only wondered about them, I've despaired for them. Children who start life like that have little hope of a bright future.

But there are a lot of people in my past that I wonder about.

Those I wonder about the most, are inevitably those that I had perceived to be lonely, hurt, broken, or sad. People who occupied the same space and time as me, but who lived in an world drastically different from my own.

When I was in the third grade, there was one such kid in my class. I still remember his name. I can still see his face.

His clothes and his hair were ragged and unkempt. His sneakers were holey, and he never seemed to have any school supplies. His voice was oddly deep and gravel laden for a boy that age, and when he spoke, he reminded me of a croaking bullfrog.

He wasn't a bad kid, I don't think, but seemed to get in trouble for fighting a lot. I imagine, that when a kid wears second hand clothes, and carries a plain steel lunchbox, the kind with the thermos in the lid, instead of one with The Bionic Man or Puff 'N Stuff on it, that kid has to do a lot of ass kicking to avoid being chewed up and spit out by the playground beast.

One beautiful spring day, he drowned.

He and his younger brother were fishing off of a train trestle suspended over the swiftly flowing Fox River. His brother dropped his pole in the water and when he tried to fish it out, fell in. He jumped in to save the younger boy.

He did save his brother. But he couldn't save himself.

My mother told me what had happened to spare me the shock of hearing it whispered from ear to ear in the classroom or the schoolyard. She knew how tales get twisted and details grow more gruesome with each telling. She wanted to spare me that. But though she was very gentle as she quietly explained, I was, nonetheless, profoundly shocked.

A kid my age, dead. A kid. My age. Dead. Not alive any more.

Cold and blue, cold and blue, cold and blue.

I had nightmares about it for weeks.

At school, not a single word was said about him or his death. One day he was there, and the next he was not.

His empty desk was a shrieking beacon of not alive any more. The first day, it looked much as it always had; Scooby Doo stickers stuck to the metal sides, papers spilling out, a square of dried milk where the carton had sat dripping the day before. It was easy to pretend that he was just out sick, watching tv and sipping Tang on the living room couch.

The next day, that desk was just another anonymous piece of classroom furniture, indistinguishable from the rest. It had been stripped bare of all traces of it's former occupant. Who was now dead. And cold. And blue.

The masking tape bearing his name was gone from the ledge above his hook in the coatroom. The bag of marbles and the lunchbox that had resided on that ledge were both gone.

It was as if he had never been there at all.

And that scared me far worse than the thought of him lying in a dark coffin all alone.

Looking back, I am deeply disturbed by the way he was simply expunged, and how nobody took care to see that the children who knew him were allowed to mourn.

But it's not Brad Mattson that I wonder about. I know his fate far too well.

He lies at the bottom of that river. Cold and blue.

Not really, but that's how I always think of him. Lying in the murky depths, eyes closed, hair waving with the current, open mouthed fish staring at him curiously.

It's his brother I wonder about.

The kid that dropped his fishing pole. The kid that lived when his big brother died. The kid that clawed his way safely ashore after a boost from a small, grubby hand that then, slipped beneath the surface forever. The kid that was maybe reaching desperately for that outstretched hand, trying to help his brother as his brother had helped him.

I wonder if he was ever able to escape the shadow of that guilt. I wonder if he was able to grow up and be who he was supposed to be, or, if he grew up twisted and broken inside.

Or if he grew up at all.

Survivor's guilt can be a powerful and destructive psychological force for anyone. For a kid, it must be all the more devastating.

Did he get help? Did he have parents who held him as he wept, or slept with him to keep the dripping, grinning ghost of his brother at bay? Did he have someone to tell him it wasn't his fault?

God I hope so. I really, really hope so.