My in-laws were visiting the day I found my sister Gretchen dead of an overdose. They didn’t know what to do. Provide comfort? Space?
Just go on like normal, I said.
Our town in upstate New York, about five hours from their Brooklyn home, offered suburban experiences that easily kept them entertained. A simple circuit of Walmart, Aldi and BJ’s did the trick for my mother-in-law. And my father-in-law, Angel, liked to hit the O.T.B., take a nap, maybe watch some shows on cable about U.F.O. and chupacabra sightings.
He had always longed to return to his native Puerto Rico. The eldest of nine children, he left in eighth grade and moved to Brooklyn where he would not swim in blue lagoons nor attend school again. Instead of his dreamy thoughts keeping him company on a verdant field where he might grow avocados and satisfaction, the Latin radio station “Mega 97.9” does as he drives through dirty slush in New York City, trying to hustle out a living.
For a spell, he chauffeured a mysterious friend with mysterious obligations long distances — sometimes all the way to Florida. One trip south coincided with the birth of our first child when we lived in a city where we had no family members nearby. The first visitors to lay eyes on our son were my father-in-law and his client.
The year that Gretchen died, she was one of more than 70,000 who died from an opioid overdose. Maybe the sisters of those addicts had also recognized the news of an answering machine that was full, a porch mailbox that was full. Maybe those sisters, too, knew exactly what they were walking into one cloudless Fourth of July, the air redolent of grilling meat as they slid a credit card along the side of a locked door. Saw in a room dark as closed eyes: her. Small, blue and utterly alone.
And despite having predicted it, despite having held hands with another sibling, having said, “Yes. Some day we will find her and she won’t just be sleeping,” did a moan escape when they saw her? A moan that revealed a much bigger, more mysterious space than one would think could come from a mere body, like when the whole ocean speaks through a shell?
She’d left home at 19. I was 5, the youngest of 13 siblings, and couldn’t bear her absence, even if her apartment was just three blocks away. I quickly memorized her phone number by calling her constantly.
“What are you doing?” I’d want to know every half-hour, until she lied that her phone service was turned off. But she loved me and let me come to her apartment for sleepovers, let me tear through her closet full of high-heeled shoes that she wore to her job at Fay’s Drug Store. When I played house in these shoes, my name was Gretchen and I worked at Fay’s, and I had an apartment.
“I miss the person you were,” I said at one of the many interventions over the years. “You sparkled.”
One winter when I was little, some tough kids from up the block started packing a hill for sledding in the middle of the street. Gretchen was the one who had the diplomacy to get them to see their folly without incurring their wrathful boredom against me. She was gentle, with the sweet, thin lips of a little girl. Years of hard living would fail to make her mouth look mean. I didn’t bring up the memory of her stepping into the February bitterness without a coat, her warm blue eyes melting the coldhearted kids into laughter before they began to dismantle the blockade. I didn’t compare her sparkle to the snow, the sad vulnerable snow that melts, as Blake said, in all its prime.
“It’s not easy having to sparkle all the time,” she said.
A couple days before finding her, I’d started to remove paneling from the walls in my bedroom. Expecting to find perfectly intact plaster walls beneath, I’d ignored my husband’s warning that this was not a quick fix, and commenced tearing the panels down. But the plaster was riddled with fissures and needed to be torn down. Repair plans became demolition plans for some other day in the summer that lounged ahead.
When I returned to the room, it was not with the resolve that attends a dreaded but necessary means to an end. Demolishing the wall would be an end in itself, a reason to be by myself while the house was full of apologetic company.
We have no fitting rituals for the idiotic loss of life to overdose. I picked up a crowbar.
I swung randomly, finally making a crack into which I slid the chisel and hammered with a rage you can’t unleash on a person. A sizable triangle of plaster let go of the lath, but it only revealed more of the expanse that remained. This would take forever.
In the empty room there was nowhere to sit and hold my head in my hands and cry pitiful ditches down my dusty face. Isn’t that what I was supposed to be doing?
The door opened quiet as a cloud. Definitely not the style of my alpha husband, who would enter purposefully with supplies or advice: That’s not the right tool. Use this. If you had a little more patience, I’d do this whole thing for you eventually.
Instead, it was my father-in-law, who stepped in with his own chisel, and handed me a pair of goggles.
“Wear these, Mami.” He took his position on the other side of the room. We didn’t speak for hours.
We’d always been a little shy with each other, Angel and I. Unless he was talking about Puerto Rico with that ardor reserved for lost loves, he was quiet. A clean plate spoke his gratitude for my attempt at arroz con gandules. Once after I attempted a conversation on my latest cleanse, the evils of gluten and the powers of gut bacteria, he offered a memorable compliment, “You look OK. You not too fat.”
He didn’t swing with abandon like I did, but just looked for a vulnerability and within seconds dislodged a slab of plaster. And like the limiting narratives of perfect daughters, real men, resurrections and grief, the plaster shattered.
People like to say, “There are no words” when an unexpected death happens. But the trouble with the death of an addict is that so many of the words to describe your feelings sound the same: sad and mad; grief and relief; guilt and guilt.
Addiction had ended Gretchen’s life a long time ago; death just ended the addiction. Years earlier one of our brothers had died the same way. I remember worrying that each of my parents would die of a broken heart. I remember my father saying, “It’s finally over.”
Angel never made an offering with words, a tendency of the overconfident. He just kept company. And in that room, the wild thing of grief went untamed by touch, unwalled by words, but with a witness who let it have its way. And its way was quiet.
We worked.
My ladder never moved, but Angel cleared yards of wall. Its dust coated his hands that had climbed up coconut trees, shielded his twinkling eyes from the overloving sun and caught the force of a waterfall. And with each blow I felt the cold inside me begin to melt into something blue. Blue, not like sadness, but like sky and ocean and eternity. Something like peace.
Amy Doyle is a writer, teacher and mother living in Auburn, N.Y.