Sally looked forward to my routine doctor's visits. She loved to tell me about her Ricky.
He was something, my Ricky, she'd say. Couldn't keep still, that boy. Her chatter cheerfully disrupted the monotony of another long wait in my doctor's office.
I listened in silence; occasionally I nodded in agreement. Sally and I had a certain kinship. Death had robbed us both of sons. Her Ricky at 23; my Keenan at 16 months.
Ricky left home in his pickup one July night in 1998 and drove off the road not far from home. He died alone in an empty field. His friends found him.
Two months later, Keenan slipped away. I remember him lifeless on my living-room floor in front of the fireplace. Cardiac arrhythmia, the coroner later called it.
As my internist walked into the examination room, chart tucked under his arm, he overheard another of Sally's stories about Ricky. He knew about our bond of sadness. As Sally's words trailed off, Dr. Miller used humor to try to inoculate himself against the unthinkable.
"Yours is a club I don't ever want to join," he said.
But Sally and I already knew that membership isn't optional. You don't volunteer for tragedy; it finds you.
Several years later, Dr. Miller was awakened one April night by a friend asking if there was anything she and her husband could do. Dr. Miller didn't know what she was talking about. The friend broke the news that Dr. Miller's 16-year-old daughter, who was out with friends, had been in a car wreck.
The frantic dad and mom called their daughter's cell phone in vain. Then the physician called all the area hospitals. He couldn't find his daughter. With a mother's intuition, his wife finally said, "We can't reach her because she's dead."
Now we were three: a physician, his nurse and their patient, no longer merely linked by my infirmity and anxiety. We were three parents left to ask unanswerable questions and to erect monuments to the memory of our lost children.
I encounter the doctor's shrine to his lost daughter in the solitude of his examination room. After I undress, I sit and wait. I pass the time reading the poems pinned to the wall, studying the framed photographs of Michelle, the beloved second daughter.
There is Michelle the ballerina; Michelle dressed as a marionette dancing in a shopping mall; Michelle posturing on the lacrosse field; Michelle sitting in dad's lap.
Then there is a letter to the editor from Dr. Miller, the irate father, writing to complain about parents who buy high-performance cars that their children are too inexperienced to control. Michelle was a passenger in one of those cars.
The shrine to her includes a picture frame, a father's day gift from "Shelley."
"My doctor is the daddy who makes me feel secure."
Death alters a father's perspective. My physician grew fearful for his older daughter who was studying in Spain for a semester. Terrorist fears and the threat of war compounded the loss of one daughter. He wanted her to return home early, something Michelle never would have wanted. The physician became an overprotective father.
I never met Ricky, but I know him from his mother's stories. She shares them not just with me but with everyone she meets at the doctor's office. Her Ricky, like my Keenan, is very much alive in her memory.
Sally erected a monument, too. At Ricky's grave lies his granite headstone. Engraved in brass is a firefighter in combat overcoat and helmet. He's a silhouette, a man without a face dousing unseen flames. The initials, RVFD, Riverview Volunteer Fire Department, says where Ricky belonged.
Next to the firefighter is a boy sitting beside a riverbank, knees bent, holding a bamboo fishing pole. Ricky loved to fish, Sally said. She used to sit up all night cleaning and frying his catch from the river.
On weekends and special holidays, a candle burns at the grave, its flame tickled by the wind.
Sally read my son's obituary in the newspaper the day after Labor Day. She later read a piece I wrote to commemorate what would have been my son's second birthday. That work remains my most visible monument to my lost son.
I, too, have framed pictures hanging on the walls, his eyes and cheeks typical of Down's syndrome babies. One of my favorites shows Keenan dressed in a red corduroy jumper and flannel shirt, an outfit his older brother wore, as did the younger sister he will never know. My son is a framed silhouette hanging on the wall. His ashes sit in a box wrapped in brown paper.
Keenan is my unfinished business. I have no final resting place for him. I'm restless and rootless. Mine is a continual search for reasons to belong, for strains of commonality, for links to those I meet in passing - those like my doctor and his nurse - living, breathing, grieving still.
- Andrew Skerritt is an assistant editor for the St. Petersburg Times in Hernando County.
