HADLEY MOORE, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
We Know Grief
My dad didn’t want to see the Jackie Kennedy movie because it made him too sad. This was late 2016 and we were reeling from The Election. He told me again the story of where he’d been when he heard about JFK: he was ten so he was at school on that Friday afternoon, and his teacher was called into the hall and came back with her hand over her mouth.
“But who cares where I was,” he said.
Jacqueline’s blood-stained pink suit will not be displayed publicly until at least 2103. Most people alive now will be dead, including her grandchildren. Everything matters; it’s hard to argue otherwise.
“The Kennedys know grief,” he said.
We also—my father and I—we know grief.
You think this doesn’t happen in America, but it does: my mother died in labor with my brother, who was stillborn. So I have long understood the importance of preserving myself. My brother was given a name, a plain 1980s boy name, and you can find it written places, on certain paperwork in a file my dad has labeled with only the year, 1986; and on a shared headstone I can picture but haven’t seen in years.
So my dad didn’t want to see the Jackie movie, and I thought this had to do with the election, maybe? Too much at once? I didn’t bring it up again, but it surprised me how adamant he was that it would make him too sad, fifty-three years later. He admired JFK in a way that seemed genuine but almost ritualized, the way dads did. For example, there was a copy of Profiles in Courage on his bookshelf but I never saw him reading it.
He also solemnly acknowledged MLK and RFK and “that terrible spring” of 1968. I was more interested in Malcolm X, and I got him to take me to the movie, which came out when I was eleven. I can picture us in the lobby of the theatre as though from some height: me this short, skinny mixed-race girl, wearing my oversize X t-shirt, and my white dad reaching to take my hand, forgetting for a moment just how grown I thought I was.
From there I gravitated toward an awareness of the adjacent assassinations, JFK of course, and Malcolm X’s infamous “chickens coming home to roost” line, which bothers me even now; and back to Medgar Evers in June of 1963; then forward to the terrible spring of 1968. My dad and I observed the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination together, watching the memorial recognitions on the TV news while we ate dinner.
This was years after my mother’s death. By 1993 I’d spent more time without her than with, my dad and I each going gamely about life for the benefit of the other. Even when I was five and she was newly dead, the excitement of a coming sibling something he no doubt hoped I would forget, I was aware he was sad and panicky. I don’t know which I was to him: a lifeline and a relief, or a burden and an impediment to the liberation of suicide. But I was sad too. Even a five-year-old can lift another’s grief, heavy as it is, to find her own.
Now I have reached middle age and my dad is nearing seventy, and it is still just the two of us. We each have our friends, but he never remarried and I’ve never wanted to settle down, romantic love sort of titillating at times but not sustainable, eventual extrication of myself the most satisfying part of any relationship.
I am unlikely to live very far into my forties. I’d suspected for a while and confirmed it a month ago—diagnosis pancreatic cancer, prognosis never hopeful. I need to tell my dad. He’s commented on my weight loss recently and I’ve shrugged. “Stress, you know. Work.”
But I keep wanting to give him one more happy day, and then one more. I’ll pick up my phone and think, OK, in ten minutes I’ll text him and say I’m coming over. Ten more happy minutes. Or I’ll find myself thinking how lucky it would be if it turned out he were dying too, just a little more rapidly than I am.
I never did see the Jackie movie, his reaction putting me off it, and this occurs to me now because it was only a movie that had pained him so much. One’s children should not pre-decease one, and at least Jacqueline didn’t have to experience that a third time. What will I get to miss? There is some relief in this thought, utterly selfish. I will get to miss his grief this time.
My mother got to miss that too, plus the death of her son and her daughter’s cancer. JFK and the rest of them, the four big ones as I tend to think of them now—Malcolm X, MLK, and Bobby—they got to miss tragic, sometimes violent deaths of spouses and children; scandals and other bullshit antics of their family members; authoritarianism come to America.
I am tying up my affairs. I have started to prepare a list for my dad—here are my account numbers, with you as beneficiary; here’s contact information to turn off the utilities in my apartment; I really don’t care how you dispose of my body, but cremation is OK. It is precious little, considering, but I can do this for him. I can do it rigorously. I will get to miss his checking things off, but I can ensure my own neat end.
I hate the thought of being mourned, though. There remains this weird innocence to JFK that makes me feel embarrassed for him. He’s forever grinning on a sunny day, leaning his elbow out of the car, when the rest of us know what happens next—and next and next and next, for more than half a century. It’s embarrassing to be vulnerable, to inhabit an animal body.
So this is the thing that has happened to me. I had that thought last night, at my dad’s house. I shouldn’t say it out loud; this is not the way to introduce the topic. I used to think the thing that had happened to me was being motherless, but maybe the main thing is the last thing? Sometimes, but I’d argue that JFK’s assassination was the main thing for both him and Jacqueline; therefore the hiding away of the pink suit. Hard for anything to eclipse witnessing your husband’s murder.
The thing that has happened to my dad is an aggregate: outliving his entire family. He could have decades left, and I suspect this will still be it.
So far the list of my affairs is on a legal pad, not a note on my phone or even in a Word document. I take a new picture of it every time I add something, and I realize how inefficient this is, but I think my dad will want something on paper. I’ll need to re-copy it, though. Maybe I will make a binder, with tabs and color-coding. This has its appeal, but I think all that evidence of pre-meditation might make the news worse. I will tell him, then I will give him my notes, though first I need to finish them.
I like writing things down and crossing them off, and paying bills, and deleting emails, and doing all that everlasting tidying. My dad is the same. We both like it more than we should, because these are just chores that add up to nothing. I have to remind myself that tying up my affairs is not like the usual tidying, that daily staving off of entropy.
So I will tell him. I will tell him, but first I will give him one more happy day.
*
My daughter thinks I haven’t figured out that something is going on with her. I will not press her. I trained myself to resist overprotectiveness and hovering when she was all I had left, and now, more than thirty years later, I can wait for her to tell me, or not tell me. Whatever it is will pass or not pass, and she will bear it.
This is a lot of bravado. I worry about her, about whatever’s going on. But I will wait.
There is some release in the decision I made early on not to bear down on her life, by which I mean the fact of her being yet alive. It was as much for me as for her, a way of letting myself off if I couldn’t keep her safe either.
As she was growing up I think a lot of other parents admired what seemed like my “perspective.” What was a skinned knee when you’d been through what we had? Perspective was part of it, but what they didn’t know was that I had absolved myself. If I lost her too I would surrender to my own thorough dissipation: quit my job, eat whatever I wanted, give over my daily occupations to napping and watching TV, stop all the constant calibrating toward self-preservation. I might continue to look both ways before crossing the street, or read books, or even still eat some vegetables, but these would be for my gratification.
I also sometimes entertain this giving-in fantasy when current events encroach. It makes me feel guilty, but it is less fiddling while Rome burns and more roasting marshmallows. I can remember lying in bed the night of the JFK assassination, when I was ten, and wondering if this might portend the literal end of the world. Then it occurred to me I could probably eat ice cream for lunch and dinner the next day and not attract any notice from my mother and dad.
Still, I recognized I would have traded the thrill of my new freedom for what happened—and my parents’ distraction was short-lived anyway, because this was not the end of the world.
But there is no trading, and everything that has happened seems inevitable after a short while. First the horror, then the torment of mental bargaining, and then the quasi-relief of inevitability: it had to happen this way because this is the way it happened.
My daughter and I incline toward each other though we don’t touch, quite; we are not propping each other up. We are like two trees in a field, a simile I could stretch to nonsense, but the point is that sometimes I worry what she’ll do when I’m gone. There is this lean to us both I don’t think I could have helped.
She is the most singular person I know, by which I mean something containing independence but going beyond it, to sovereignty and beyond that. The lean in her is unnatural, and there is little I could suggest to help her with it when I am dead. Make some new friends! Try online dating! Anyone might shrug at these, though maybe only at first. My daughter will be left with the usual grief, but I fear it will be unassuageable in the usual ways.
Sometimes I think about my boy, my little son. I got to hold him, but not before he was dead. It was as sad as anyone can imagine, my wife dead too and me alone with all the knowledge. Our daughter was with my parents. I hadn’t called them yet, and my wife’s parents were in transit and therefore unreachable, back in the pre-cell-phone 1980s.
I held the body of my son when a nurse handed it to me, and I was aware of making a good show, tears coursing, but I was thinking how pointless. Of course, holding the baby was not for him, it was for me, and I recognize there are likely some regrets I avoided by taking my dead baby from that nurse who offered him and looking at his face gone blue, to acknowledge here was the product of our months of hope and planning, months of assuming we would hold on to happiness, as though it could be held.
*
It is time. It is past time, and if I wait much longer the wait will be part of the cruelty of the telling. But how long did you know? he will ask, aware I did not come rushing from the doctor’s office; I am not in tears, my notebook of tied-up affairs is neatly and soberly prepared. There will be some betrayal in my calm, and he will swallow it, but very soon the mercy of giving him one more happy day will become the heartlessness of keeping my news from him.
So tomorrow, Friday, I will show up at his place after work. I will bring some takeout, I told him, and maybe we’ll watch a movie. Still this putting him off the scent. At least I didn’t suggest Jackie.
I have copied my notes into a half-size spiral notebook. It is yellow, plain. It cost a dollar at the drugstore. Better no fanfare, I decided, and there are plenty of pages left if I remember other things, or for his own notes. I have rehearsed what to say as I hand over the notebook, but I think there must be no preamble, no I don’t know how to tell you this or I am so sorry, but—.
I think of him at the hospital in 1986, alone, needing to tell my grandparents and me what happened, and I wonder if he put it off for us, for a minute, and a minute more. I don’t remember the telling, or much other detail. My five-year-old memory is only impressionistic.
Now, though, as long as we have the capacity we will remember tomorrow evening. He’ll remember it like he remembers the assassinations, and like we both remember 9/11, and The Election. It can’t be helped, and I can’t soften it, though even now I am trying to think of ways I might. I already locked the notebook in my car, a reminder I must not put off my task, again, and it looked so small and prosaic on the passenger seat, this half-size yellow keeper of grocery and to-do lists.
It will matter very little, but for now, for my dad, this is one last happy day. I almost want to call and tell him to enjoy it. If I prayed, I would start now and pray all day and all night and all day.
*
Of course I know what my daughter is doing. She is going to tell me she is gay (I’ve wondered), or she is being downsized, or she is ill. Maybe she needs money, though I doubt that, or she thinks it’s time to talk about preparing for my dotage.
I can wait. I will eat whatever food she brings, and offer sodas or beer, and clean up while she sits at my kitchen table. Then she will tell me, or she won’t and I will never know, or she will get up her courage only later and we will go through this ceremony again.
I hope she is gay, I hope she needs money. My prayer for her is Just be OK, be OK.
*
He has a few more happy minutes, tens of minutes, maybe an hour if I can’t spit it out. I have parked in front of his house. Here is the right-before moment. I am grinning on a sunny day, leaning my elbow out of the car—or maybe he is. I am Jackie, then, or I am Lee Harvey Oswald.
We are in the motorcade in Dallas, or we are on stage at the Audubon Ballroom (New York; Malcolm X), or on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel (Memphis; MLK), or in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel (Los Angeles; Bobby). If you pay close enough attention to the seconds preceding, is this the time no one will have to die?
Bobby’s heart was still beating when they transferred him to surgery. I learned that from one of those fiftieth-anniversary stories, and had to stop reading when I noticed a bit of hope rising in me. He died then. He is still dead. There is no other angle. It should be easier to grasp knowledge and accept it and make it stay put, but our brains are far too eager to shield us.
I went to bed early last night and woke before midnight with the thought of going out to my car to get the yellow notebook and read it over once more. But I just fell back asleep, before I even had to talk myself out of it. When I woke for real it was with that whooshing relief like coming out of a nightmare.
I don’t want my dad to look out the front window and see me sitting in my car. That would poison the minutes he has left. Time left—as though the prognosis were his. When I was sick as a kid he’d tell me he wished he could take it from me, the flu or whatever. He wished we could trade places.
I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe things happen for a reason—I believe in cause and effect, but that isn’t what people mean when they say that. This is the thing that has happened to me. If I prayed, I would start up again now, because I have to get out of my car and walk up to the house, and only I know what happens next.
Hadley Moore on “We Know Grief”:
“We Know Grief” is part of a manuscript in progress that is shaping up—I think (I hope!)—to be a collection of thematically linked short fiction focused on characters who have a fascination with or perceive some connection to the assassinations of the 1960s. I’m finding that to discuss any given portion of it is to invoke the project as a whole, so let me give a little background.
Several years ago I was taking a walk on a dark winter’s evening and hit upon the idea to write about the assassinations, mainly those of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. I was immediately excited by this idea, but it was vague—because, well, what about them? It’s a big topic, and a concept is not enough.
But I kept chewing on the idea and eventually a few concrete narratives emerged, and those induced others. (When I started initial reading for this project, I also did a lot of image searches, so I’ve got many, many famous photos in my head.) My aim in each instance is to focus squarely on the story in front of me, to make it as strong and integrated as I can, to let it stand on its own regardless of this larger theme I have in mind. That said, I think we can be too precious sometimes about the notion of inspiration; writing is not magic, and a story is a made thing.
So, “We Know Grief” is one of my recent made things, and among its questions are What is the story of one’s life? Must it always be the worst and/or last thing that’s happened? (Indeed, these are questions that permeate the entire manuscript in progress.) As a culture I’d say we pay rather more attention to, for example, JFK’s assassination than any other event or aspect of his life—his election, say; does this obsession with the swoon and spectacle of tragedy have implications for how ordinary people think about our lives too? I think it does; I think we can’t escape that influence.
Of the two first-person narrators in “We Know Grief,” the daughter’s voice came to me first, and I let her speak for a while before I started to hear the father’s voice too and ended up including a few sections in his point of view. These characters have a shared experience of loss, and the daughter has news she’s not yet told her dad that’s going to compound that for him. It wasn’t premeditated, but the story is stripped down in terms of detail: their names aren’t used, there’s no indication of geography, we don’t know what they do for work, and so on. This can create a kind of intensity, and I’ve also noticed I tend to use this type of spareness in story-telling only in relatively short stories (“We Know Grief” is just under 3,000 words); it feels harder to sustain in longer ones.
This story is set in present day; the father is old enough to recall hearing about the JFK assassination in class, the way millions of schoolkids did, and it is his daughter’s memory of his refusal to see the 2016 movie about Jacqueline Kennedy “because it made him too sad” that provides the opening. From here, the two narrators speak to the reader and past each other, weaving bits of their own history with capital-H History until the moment before the moment of reckoning between them, when they will face what the reader already knows. I am often drawn to these right-before times, as well as to a knitting-together kind of storyline.
There’s so much mythology around this period of American history, and I want to try to avoid ending up in the arena of mawkish nostalgia. The truth is, though, that even though it well pre-dates me, I think that season of assassinations will never stop breaking my heart.
Hadley Moore’s collection Not Dead Yet and Other Stories won Autumn House Press’s 2018 fiction contest, was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection; won the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award’s short story/anthology category, as well as a First Horizon Award for debut books, and was on the short list for the grand prize; was shortlisted in the short stories category for the Rubery Book Award; and was the prose finalist for the Sixth Annual Phillip H. McMath Post Publication Book Award. Read more here: https://www.hadleymoore.net/