Through a Dark Age
t of the entire ordeal. My brother, dressed in his favorite blue leisure suit, lay in his casket in the back of the parlor, his face calm, almost as if he were sleeping. Little Travis, then 3, rushed up the aisle and grabbed my finger, pulling me toward Mike and saying excitedly, “Come and look at my Daddy.” Come and look at my Daddy. So innocent, so beautiful, and so completely unaware, a small boy in a green outfit asking me with such pride to look at his dead father. Who could witness such a scene and not be moved? I wish the killer could have seen Travis that day, and Michael, too. Perhaps then he would realize the magnitude of what he had destroyed.
We stayed with them for a couple of hours, numbly trying to wrest sense of the senseless. Then it was time to make Mike’s funeral arrangements. Dad and Mom dropped my sisters and me at Joan’s again and left to perform that grim task.
I may have eaten something, may have gotten some sleep, but by 1:30 Monday afternoon I was awake and restless. Unable to remain idle, I decided to walk through the old neighborhood, reminiscing about snakes, frogs, turtles, and ground squirrels, and the exchange rate for salamanders. That Monday was hot and humid, as Sunday had been. As I headed south on Sheerer toward Downing I thought about irony. It was ironic that Mike wore his bullet-proof vest 90% of the time but hadn’t when he needed it most. He’d taken it off because of the heat. Had the night not been so hot, he might have survived, for the fatal wound was to his chest. It was more ironic that he’d been there at all, answering that domestic call. He hadn’t been scheduled to work, but agreed to come in for someone who needed time off. I have never blamed the officer in whose place my brother died. It wasn’t his fault. He had requested the night off not to avoid death but because he had something else to do, something routine, adjusting his schedule as people in every profession do all the time.
As I turned right onto Downing I started playing the “if only” game. “If only” Mike had not gone into work, “if only” he had worn his vest, or, for that matter, “if only” his killer had never been released on parole in Kentucky and come to Waterloo.
Maybe there’s a parallel universe where “if only” come true. In this universe Mike stays home with Denise and the boys and watches TV. Yes, but then, just before Dead Man’s Curve comes on, he impulsively decides to take Michael and Travis to a convenience store for a soda. En route his Blazer is broadsided by a semi, instantly killing all three.
In another universe they get back safely from the convenience store, but one of the boys plays with a lighter, ignites a curtain, and fire guts their trailer home. In those universes Mike’s grieving brother laments “if only” they hadn’t gone out that night, or “if only” they had kept the lighter out of the reach of little hands. Or “if only” Mike had been scheduled to work…
After all, what bad could happen to a cop in Waterloo, Iowa?
Perhaps there are an infinite number of scenarios in an infinite number of universes, and somewhere one may exist where everything always goes right and there is no need to play the “if only” game. But that is not this universe. Horrible as Mike’s murder was, we can never know how many other tragedies were averted when he reported to work that night. What happened, happened. There is only what is and what was. It is pointless to wonder what might have been, because what might have been, wasn’t.
That was difficult to grasp on the afternoon following my brother’s murder. I turned right onto Scott Avenue, the street where I’d spent the first ten years of my life. As the sun beat down and I approached my old home, I noticed how little things had changed since I had last lived here, fifteen years before. The two elm trees that used to stand in the front yard had been removed, but otherwise everything was much as I remembered. Pausing momentarily at the foot of the sloping driveway where I had once ridden my bike, where I had watched a garter snake give birth to live young, I was surrounded not by ghosts but by the actual physical trappings of my youth. Mike and I had roughhoused in this front yard. Our dog Bandit romped in the back. Tom lived next door, Kevin across the street, Bob at the end of the block, and Kristi around the corner. All gone now, all of them, out of my life by death or distance. Only the buildings remained. I was struck then by the immense gulf that separates one age of our lives from another. We can walk the same ground and never touch the place we knew.
Mike had passed away. Every memory and every future experience would be forever filtered through that stark fact. The rose in the glasses had lost its bloom.
Still, all was not darkness on that sunny day, nor in the days that followed. Many uplifting events transpired in the aftermath of the shootings, a kind act here, a compassionate word there. Perhaps the most spectacular were the thousands of people, from all walks of life, who after Mike’s funeral lined the streets along the route to the cemetery, bowing their heads as his hearse passed. It was a touching gesture of respect, one Mike would have appreciated. His family certainly did.
The most personal of these experiences took place during my sojourn through my past that Monday afternoon. The parents of a young woman named Paula lived near the intersection of Scott and Sager. Paula had resided in Alabar Hills when I did, fifteen years before, although I hadn’t known her then. As often happens in life, we didn’t meet until we both moved away. In our case, it was in the dormitories at the University of Northern Iowa in the late 1970s. Even there she was never more than a casual acquaintance, but she knew who I was and had heard about Mike. When she saw me stroll by her parents’ house, she came out and joined me. We walked for blocks, never once touching, never once speaking. Paula asked nothing, expected nothing, offering me the company and silent comfort I didn’t realize I needed. Unlike Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, I have never depended upon the kindness of strangers, but on that day I did. I don’t know how Paula knew, but she did, and I will always be grateful. I have not seen her since that day, twenty-seven years ago. I hope she has had a happy, fulfilled life, and that, when sorrow came, she had someone to walk with her.
After parting with Paula I returned to Joan’s house to spend the next day and a half in a state of complete unawareness. I vaguely recall watching reruns of The Rockford Files at 10:30 on Monday and Tuesday nights—a program I once enjoyed but have never been able to watch since—but otherwise I have no memories of anything between Paula on Monday and Mike’s services on Wednesday. All I know is that we all stayed at Joan’s until the funeral.
And I know it was at the funeral, with Mike’s closed casket draped in a flag at the front of a Baptist church he had never attended, that the devastating truth finally sank in: my brother was gone, and he was never coming back. At last, at last, after three days, I allowed myself to weep. My uncle Dale, sitting behind me, offered me a handkerchief, and as I dabbed my eyes I felt my entire body shudder. I had not experienced death in any meaningful way since 1969, when my maternal grandfather succumbed to the injuries of a car accident. Even then, I was only 13, incapable of fully understanding what it meant when somebody died. Now it was no longer an abstraction. Death was here, hard and merciless as that coffin enclosing Mike’s body. There could be no appeal, no reprieve, and no more denials.
Mike was dead.
He was dead.
He was dead.
This is why we insist on staging funerals, to force bitter facts on the unbelieving, the appalled, the frightened, the desperate. It is an acknowledgment that one of our own has crossed into that undiscovered country, and will not, whatever our religious beliefs, return to this life and this time again. The service is the last time, ever, we will be in the physical presence of our beloved dead. We gather to sing and remember, to celebrate and grieve, to pray, wish, hope, and lament. We gather to hold on and we gather to let go.
Funerals mean goodbye, but they are only the beginning of closure, not the end. Next comes the committal service, the interment, the well-wishes of friends, the reunion with long-absent relatives (who will soon disappear again), and the aftermath, when we go home to our altered lives and face the question, “What now?”
Along with all that we had to deal with the media, at the church, at the cemetery, through the killer’s capture and trial, and continuing, to a lesser extent, even to this day. For the general public most deaths are noted by an obituary in the paper or a sound byte on the local news, but then memories of the departed are left in dignity to the grieving families. But in Waterloo, Iowa, bad things usually do not happen to police officers. When they do, it is news. Big news. Unending news. In the hands of the media this news is sometimes intrusive, sometimes sensitive, sometimes unfeeling, opportunistic, and cynical, sometimes well-meaning and inspirational, but almost always a ratings bonanza.
For us it was constant. Every local newspaper and TV news program carried the story every day. Every day. Every day.
At the cemetery my friend Paul resorted to interposing his body between us and the ubiquitous photographers so our pain would not be displayed on the front page of newspapers. (Although it was anyway.) A local woman took advantage of the occasion to espouse her personal political agenda, and the media jumped on that. A TV reporter called Dad a year later and asked if Mike’s death still bothered him. Letters to the editor. Front page, back page, every page except the sports. Lead story for hard news, fluff piece for human interest. Every day. Every day. Every day.
My family understood all this. We knew it was a big story that would go on for a long time. We knew the public had the desire, and the right, to know. We accepted that our grief would not, and could not, be private. But surely there comes a point, after the newness has worn off, after the bodies are laid to rest, after the arrest and trial and sentencing, when the needs of the families outweigh the needs of the public, when those closest to the victims must be given the space and the time to heal.
If that time ever came, it was too late, for the emotional scars left by that night are deep. The media certainly didn’t kill my brother and his partner, but they exploited the tragedy to their own benefit, and they replayed it continuously, as if it were theirs to use any way they chose. It almost became a regular feature, like a sitcom without the humor, or a blockbuster event during sweeps week. Except that this sweeps week lasted for years.
But in my anger there was hypocrisy. The human interest media focused its attention, rightly so, on Mike’s wife and sons, and on my parents. While outwardly I resented the papers and TV for not leaving my family alone, for forcing them to relive the nightmare over and over, there was a tiny, entirely contradictory voice inside my head that said, “Hey, what about me? I lost somebody, too. Why don’t you ask me how I feel?”
The media never did ask, but the people close to me did, and in the end that was what mattered.
Nothing can erase the emotions of such a traumatic event, but time blunts even the deepest hurt. I suffered my annus horribilis in 1982, a debilitating, year-long depression that started ten months after the tragedy, one so severe that the only reason I’m here today was because I knew my parents could not bear to lose a second son. With the help of family, friends, good counselors and, of course, time, I overcame the depression in 1983, although I still refer to that period as my lost year.
I’ve come through a dark age since July of 1981. The weeping is over. The sharp grief is gone. There is still an empty place in my life, unfilled and unfillable, but for the most part I have reached an accommodation with Mike’s murder, and, in a larger sense, with death itself. Since then I have lost both parents to cancer, Dad in 1989 and Mom in 1996. Aunt Joan succumbed to the same affliction in 2000. Watching loved ones suffer and decline was excruciating, but their deaths were natural and, ultimately, expected—and, except for obituaries, media-free. My sisters and I were our parents’ bedsides when they died, and I was with Joan until an hour before she passed away. Of course it was difficult to let them go, and I will certainly miss them, but we had made our peace. With nothing left unsaid between us, I can look back without the turmoil of “if only.”
Mike will always be harder, for his life was ended at age 28 not by accident or disease, but by the hand of another. Would he have chosen to die that way? I think not. In the line of duty, yes, but finding a lost child or rescuing a hostage, not asking some people to turn down their music. He would have chosen to live, to watch his boys grow up, and, after a long and satisfying career, to withdraw to a dignified retirement of well-earned comfort, with a nice house and regular visits from his grandchildren.
That was not to be.
He will be remembered in this community as a hero who died young in the performance of his duties—and maybe he was, maybe he was a hero. In any case, it’s good that people honor his sacrifice. But they know him only for his death. I knew him for his life, and so I choose to remember him not as hero or even police officer, but simply as my brother. That’s enough for me. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “He was a man, take him for all in all; I shall not look on his like again.”
His family endures. Cindy has one son, Patti two. Several years ago they moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where all are happy and healthy. Mike’s widow Denise is remarried, and his sons Michael and Travis are now fathers themselves.
I have never left the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area. The life I was waiting to begin in 1981 finally did. My part-time job at the University of Northern Iowa library blossomed into a rewarding, full-time career, and in 1999 I married for the first time. My wife Joni brought two great children into the marriage, Jon and Jovan. And so I am a father, too, of the step- variety.
I still have no religious beliefs. Perhaps someday I will find an answer I can believe in. If not, if I can never look forward to a reunion with my loved ones in the soft glow of an afterlife, then the time will come when at least I will join them in serene darkness, covered by the warmth of the earth and the beauty of the sky. That will be all right with me.
I hope my remaining family members are at my side when I die; that my thoughts return to Alabar Hills, with its snakes, frogs, turtles, and ground squirrels, with salamanders that could be spent like money; and that my last memories, que les éclairer se faner, are the faces of my Dad, my Mom, and, of course, my brother Mike.