Brief Candle

by H.

No one believed. They listened at his heart,

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

—Robert Frost

“Out, Out—“

Mom was fixing quail for her big game cookout when she told me about Megan’s death.

“Where’s Shane?” I asked as I came in the door. My stepbrother was supposed to have come up from Knoxville to join his father and other hunting buddies as they ate the fowl they had killed the previous fall. But neither his ragtop Jeep nor he was anywhere in sight.

“Well, let me tell you what happened to Shane,” she said as she turned from her frying pan.

“Oh God,” I thought.

“Do you remember Shane’s little cousin-in-law Megan?”

“Yes,” I said, recalling the picture Shane’s wife had shown me when she took Megan to an ‘NSYNC concert. I remembered blond hair, but not really a face.

“She was killed last night.”

“Oh no. How?”

I listened to my mother tell how Megan, just 14 years old, and her family had been camping the night before in the Great Smoky Mountains. She and her 5-year-old nephew, Austin, were sleeping in a concrete block addition on the side of the main cabin. Within minutes, a storm came and blew over an old oak tree, which fell onto the addition. The wall collapsed, crushing Megan and Austin on the air mattress they were sleeping on. Megan’s arms were cradled around her nephew, protecting him from the storm and all its demons, and when the mattress burst, he had enough space to crawl out. Megan didn’t. She remained pinned by branches and bricks that were squeezing the life out of her like pliers.

It took 45 minutes for the rescue squad to come because so many trees had fallen over the roads. Meanwhile, her family was trying to move the tree, the cinder blocks, yank at her arm, do anything to free her, but she just wouldn’t budge. Apparently she was screaming ‘Mom, don’t let me die here!’ and Austin was pleading “Get Meggie out!” One of her arms was exposed, and her father held tight to it, clutching fingers, finding pulse, until there was nothing.

When she had finished the story, Mom went out on the deck to refill the iced tea glasses, but I stayed in the kitchen, not quite feeling up to hunting stories. I started washing dishes and tried harder to imagine this young girl, whom I had never met, whose picture I had only seen once, trapped under this pile of debris. Did it hurt, I wondered? What was she thinking about while her face was slowly being crushed? And the poor family—helpless for almost an hour while one of theirs perished in a freak accident that was dragging out way too long—what gouges would this leave on their hearts?

Trying to make sense of this senseless event, I called friends, typed emails, wrote letters, but there was still something I couldn’t shake. My grandmother would say it was Megan’s time, that God needed an angel, and he chose her. But I believed this was nothing more than a case where a human got in the way of nature and was extinguished. Megan was dead, and that was that. It’s just like it was before she was born—nothing—no pearly gates or golden streets or crowds of loved ones who died before her. If it was that simple, then, why was it picking my brain raw?

The next day, which would have been Megan’s first day of high school, my mom, step-dad, and I drove down for her funeral in Knoxville. Everything took morbid shape as we walked up to the door of the white, colonial mortuary. Under any other circumstance this would have been a pretty place, maybe a five-star restaurant or bed-and-breakfast, but it was where dead people waited to be viewed by all those who can still think and feel and remember. Next to our parking space was a sign for “Deliveries,” with an arrow pointing to a garage in the basement, as if someone were simply dropping off boxes of light bulbs at Wal-Mart. But these were no light bulbs we were dealing with; these were real, honest-to-God dead people.

Shane and his wife, Bobbie, met us at the door. “She was like a daughter to us. She was such a good kid,” said Shane between tears. Bobbie went into detail about all the things that have been and that never will be—Megan had just gone shopping and bought new school clothes; she just got her hair cut; she had just told her mom about her boyfriend; next week she was supposed to get braces and contacts. “I don’t know how her parents are going to deal with this,” she said. “It’s bad enough for me and Shane, but to go back to a house where everything is Megan—I just don’t know how they’re going to do it.”

Shane and Bobbie returned to the receiving line, and we went to the back of the line of friends, which wound through every hallway in the building, around house plants in shiny brass planters, casting distorted reflections of the legs that walked by them. “She must have been a special child,” I said, “for this many people to have come to her funeral.”

We waited in line for about 2 hours, and all the while I wished I could just leave. I’m not good with crowds in mourning, and this one was especially difficult. Too many young people, who should be organizing their new notebooks or talking about the new guy in class who looks just like Freddie Prinze Jr, were instead crying their eyes out and wishing their friend had slept over at their house that night instead of going camping with her family. A cluster of teen-aged girls, in denim skirts and peasant blouses, stood in front of us. One girl, who I presumed to be Megan’s best friend, floated in and out of line, from back to front, while dissolving a tissue in her tear soaked palm.

As we neared the chapel, I could smell the chrysanthemums. Their heady fragrance signaled death just as surely as a doctor’s frown. “I wonder if it’ll be an open casket,” I asked Mom.

“Probably, since this is a southern Baptist funeral.”

“Seems to me that would make it harder on everybody to see her lying there.”

“Yes, but that’s just the way they do it in the South.”

“I know about Southern traditions, Mom, I just think it would be harder, that’s all, considering the way she died and everything.”

“Well, yes it would be. That’s why I want to be cremated. Just put me in a pine box and burn me up and sprinkle my ashes on a Tropicana rose bush.”

“Me too. It seems like such a waste of money and space to bury someone in a steal casket and concrete vault. What are they preserving anyway? I wouldn’t even mind if you propped my body up against a tree and let nature have at it.”

“That’s illegal, you know.”

“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be.”

We rounded the last corner, and I hated to think I was straining my neck to see a corpse, but I was. Too many people were in front of the coffin, though, and all I could see were their bodies, with heads bowed.

At the chapel door stood a collage of Megan’s pictures, pasted on a poster amid farewell messages from friends and family. The picture in the middle showed a blond girl with a big, bright smile—the face I couldn’t remember. As we drew closer, I caught a glimpse of the casket. “It’s open,” I whispered. I could see yellow hair and a blue dress, which was probably bought just for the occasion. I also noticed that she had some sort of padded bra on. What was the point of that? I wondered too how Bobbie stood to come and “dress the body” the day before. “We fixed her hair like she would have wanted,” she had told us. What a strange beauty parlor that refrigerated room must have been.

I watched as a young boy doubled over after seeing his dead friend. He could barely make it out of the room. Megan’s mom just kept looking at her daughter and shaking her head, tears streaming the whole time.

There were more pictures at the foot of the casket—Megan as a cheerleader, Megan and her sister, Megan in Girl Scouts. Bobbie and Shane stood there too. Bobbie said, “She’s holding a blanket that she was making with all her favorite stars’ names. There’s ‘NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Josh Hartnett. And we’re burying her with her little Dalmatian. At first, her mom wouldn’t give it up because it had Megan’s blood on it. But, she washed it and dried it with Downy because Megan liked it to smell that way.” How many years would that air-tight casket smell like fabric softener?

Finally, I saw Megan’s face—the first time I had ever seen it in person. It was unusually dark, probably from so much make-up. It had been crushed after all. We hugged her parents and said, “We’re sorry to meet you under such circumstances.”

*****

A month after the funeral, my mom and step-dad went to Knoxville to a UT football game. They stayed with Shane and Bobbie and visited Megan’s parents. I asked Mom how it went.

“We went over to their house and visited awhile. Her mother has one entire wall full of Megan’s things—pictures, toys, letters—like a shrine. The school sent her a big print of Megan’s picture—the one she had made the day she died, before they went camping, and that’s set up right as you come in the door. They’re clearing out the trees in front of their house to make a memory garden, and they’re making one at the school too. You know they weren’t even scheduled to go camping that weekend. But at the last minute, someone canceled.

“We also went to her grave. You’d love the cemetery. It’s an old country cemetery overlooking the Smokies. There’s a little creek running by. A 92-year-old woman is buried there, and on the stone is a picture of a farm and barn. It looks just like the place you have always said you wanted. They told me it was her old home place. They’ve ordered Megan a stone just like it, and they’re going to put a picture of a rainbow on it and a poem she wrote, something about God’s love. You wouldn’t believe the doo-dads and flowers and whirligigs on her grave. There’s hundreds of them. Her mom said she comes every morning and evening for 45 minutes and talks to Megan. Her dad just lays on the grave and cries. You know the sad thing is that after all this is over, after the garden is planted and the marker is set, what are they going to do then?”

“I don’t know, Mom.” And all I could think about were those whirligigs on Megan’s grave, spinning night and day, trying to make sense of the wind.