I wondered…if they had known that time would pass quickly and my mom’s life cut short, would their eyes have lingered longer? Would their hands have gripped each other tighter? I was suddenly envious of my parents, of the time they did get. They had twenty years together. They would always belong to each other now. My mother would always be Janelle Wilson Jensen. I would never be Josie Judd.
When the house was quiet and Johnny and my dad were asleep, I put her wedding dress on, arranged my hair, and carefully applied my makeup. I played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata very softly on my CD player. When I finished the comforting feminine rituals of many a bride, I stood in front of my full length mirror and stared at myself for a very long time. The words of Jane Eyre came to my mind, and I understood my literary friend as I never had before.
“Where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday? Where was her life? Where were her prospects? Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman - almost a bride - was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects desolate.”
My dad found me asleep on the front porch swing the next morning, still fully dressed in my stiff white dress, wrapped in the long lace of my veil. I had come outside to sit in the pale light of the moon, unwilling to remove the dress and relinquish what remained of my wedding day. I had fallen asleep to the creak of the wooden swing. My dad had spoken my name, waking me up to the dawn of the day after. He had sat down beside me and pulled me into his lap, rubbing my back in slow circles, rocking gently, letting the sun rise and the horses wait while he sat with me and held me in his arms. My anger eventually unraveled as it was sucked into the black hole of my profound disappointment. The life I had envisioned would never be, and I mourned for it almost as desperately as I mourned for Kasey.
The months after Kasey’s death were like a strange play where I became the leading lady with a helpless supporting cast, and where the props of daily life kept me functioning in a stilted parody of existence. No one knew what to do or say. My outrage at my loss would return randomly, causing me to keep my own company in order to not lash out at loved ones who only wanted to help. I played my music constantly, even as I slept. It wound its way around me and through me, and helped me retreat from my reality.
I would run through the hills around my house, down the long country roads that meandered around the familiar farms and homes of my neighbors. The distances became longer and longer, endless nocturnes, concertos and sonatas saving me from thought, the tempo of my breath whooshing in tandem with the percussion of my pounding feet. I’d decided to wait until January to start school, but I was actually looking forward to leaving for the university after Christmas. My lifelong dream of musical renown now felt very empty, the loss of someone to share it with had made it seem as hollow as an abandoned shell. But I still wanted it. I needed it. I needed to reclaim it, to reshape it. And I craved the anonymity of a town where nobody knew about my pain. Hiding it would be so much easier.
My dad was relieved that I seemed to be moving forward, and I’m sure a cloud lifted whenever I left the house, though he never would have admitted it. How painful it must have been for him! How intimate his knowledge of my pain! Ten years before his anguish had mirrored my own. But his empathy provided him a seemingly endless patience, and he cared for me now as I had tried to care for him then.
And poor Johnny. I had been so irrationally angry with him. He’d tiptoed around me for the first month, trying to communicate his love for me in little ways…making my bed, stocking the fridge with cold Diet Coke though he and my dad drank nothing but Pepsi. One day he’d even washed a load of my whites, folding each sock and lacy under thing neatly and placing them on my bed. I’d eventually started doing some of the same things for him ... asking his forgiveness and returning his love by gathering the clothes from his bedroom floor, putting Twinkies in the freezer so he could eat them frozen the way he liked them, cleaning the mud from his work boots and shining them up, leaving them sitting neatly on the back porch - such little acts of kindness that were easier to perform than words were to speak. And we never did speak of that horrible day.
About a week before I planned to leave for school, my dad left work early because of a terrible headache. I was upstairs boxing up some of my things when I heard the kitchen door bang open, and I called down to him in question. I heard the cupboards slam and then a glass break and I sighed, wondering what he was up to.
“Dad?” I plodded down the stairs and into the kitchen to find him swaying at the sink with a bottle of aspirin in his hand and broken glass around his feet.
He turned to look at me and teetered, grabbing for the edge of the countertop. He lost hold of the opened aspirin bottle, sending little white pills scattering all over the floor.
He started to speak, but his words were slurred, kind of the way he sounded when he’d had too much to drink.
“Dad! It’s 2:00 in the afternoon! Are you drunk?” I accused angrily, arms akimbo.
“No booze,” my dad mumbled out, and he fell to the floor as if his legs would no longer support him.
Fear slammed through me like a freight train, and I rushed to him, seeing the shadow of death’s long sickle pulling him from me as he tried to right himself, his eyes squeezed shut in a terrible grimace.
“No!” I shouted, momentarily crazed at death’s all-too familiar and terrible visage. I put my arms around him and threw his left arm around my shoulders
“Dad, we’ve got to get you to the hospital!” I helped him to his feet, and we staggered like a pair in a three-legged-race out the kitchen door and down the back steps. Somehow we made it out to his truck, and I toppled him onto the passenger seat and wrapped the seat belt around him, trying to hold him upright. Calling 911 would mean waiting for an ambulance to come from Nephi, and we didn’t have time for that. I didn’t know what was happening, but something was very wrong.