Dear Damage

ONE

MERCY

On January 19, 2014, my grandfather Bill walked into my grandmother Frances’s hospital room with a loaded gun he’d purchased that morning. He set their Neptune Society cards side by side on a nearby table and kissed his sleeping wife of sixty-three years. Then he shot her once in the chest. He tried to shoot himself, too, but a spring popped from the pawn shop gun and the weapon broke apart in his hands. Correctional officers who were at the Carson City, Nevada, hospital that day arrested him. According to subsequent news stories, he wept as he was apprehended. I failed in my mission, he said.

Sun dotted my Long Beach, California, apartment as my sister relayed this news over the phone. I’d been grading student essays on a weirdly warm winter morning, and now my brain flickered, and it felt like a hand had my throat. I interrupted her to tell my husband, Ryan, what happened—My grandpa shot my grandma and now he’s in jail and she might die—and then shock propelled us: we slipped on our shoes and walked quick miles down Ocean Boulevard with the sea shimmering below us. I thought of the people in the hospital who heard the gunshot, how horrified and panicked they must’ve felt, and then the word ruined echoed in my brain, a powerful certainty that everything good about our close-knit family was finished. My grandmother shot, my grandfather in jail: these two people I love so much and know so well now shattering—and my mom, who lived with them both, left to pick up the pieces.

Ryan and I shared an American Spirit on a park bench—I wasn’t even a smoker—and I took my shoes off and stood on the shore where the tide washed over my toes. The sand looked tiger-striped and glittered with flecks of mica, and I thought about how many times Frances, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, swam in this same ocean or, years later, depicted it in dramatic oil seascapes I’ve memorized. I figured I should be exactly there, feet freezing in the water, when someone inevitably delivered the news that she’d passed. But amid the flurry of phone calls from my siblings and mom who now drove to the hospital, news of Frances’s death didn’t arrive: doctors declared that she wouldn’t survive her injury, but it could be hours before she left us, days.

When we returned from the beach, my students’ essays on the American Dream sat where I’d left them, a collection of sunny, abstract relics from just a few hours ago, the era of before, not after. I couldn’t focus enough to make sense of their words, and maybe words would never make sense again. Gun? I thought. Shot? I thought. Ruined. Surely this cataclysm must be a mistake and this nausea gripping me must belong to someone else.

I Googled Carson City shooting: news crews already filmed in front of the hospital crime scene tape—a violent tableau that somehow belonged to us. At a different link: footage of my siblings’ backs as they rushed toward the entrance. Other news outlets reported from the jail where they now had my grandfather on suicide watch. In yet another piece I’d view hours later, a woman held a microphone outside my grandparents’ home, the home that belongs to all of us, the site of Christmas dinners and sagebrush Easter egg hunts, the house my grandpa built by hand, the one we picked out moss-covered rocks for from the old mine. The house where you’ll find us grandkids’ names scratched into concrete beside our small handprints. Where my grandparents’ initials are ringed with a heart in Frances’s perfect script—an image the cameraman came close enough to film.

This isn’t a story I often share. I’ve feared others’ judgements, and I become flooded with the temptation to explain—we’re not gun people and my grandparents are more than just grandparents and, and, and.… Plus, despite the public nature of this event and the fact that strangers have dissected it in their own articles and posts, I’ve wondered which parts are mine to tell. There’s also this: the few times I’ve shared it—with a coworker, a stranger, an old friend over a beer at a writing conference—I’ve watched their faces tense, grimace, wince. Even if I offer a warning or soften it, a story like this can, for the briefest moment, drop an anvil on a listener. And I’ve decided in these past few years that if there’s one thing I don’t want to do, it’s contribute more pain to the world.

Instead, I’ve made a quiet study of pain, the blinding, bewildering strain you don’t see coming, the pain of reality biting the dust, of looking toward the horizon to see pain extending forever into the future, an unforgiving desert. Or maybe pain has made a study of me, taking up residence in my body, thrumming in my chest, skyrocketing my blood pressure to ER levels and throttling me from sleep at two a.m. until night eases and the sun slides up. Because there’s grief, yes, but it’s complicated, too: What do you do with pain caused by someone you love, for actions you don’t agree with but, on some level, understand? For a gunshot—a gunshot in public, no less—in a time of mass shootings? For my suffering grandmother? For my weeping grandfather who tried, but failed, to leave us and was now condemned to live?

This disorienting grief proved to be a baptism of sorts: even though I’ve barely been to church, I found myself in the months afterward praying in LA freeway traffic on my way to teach, tossing up pleas of no more tragedy to clouds or smog as I sailed between adjunct gigs. And if begging couldn’t change the circumstances, I figured I could at least find the sterling takeaway, a thesis statement with supporting evidence leading up to a tidy In conclusion … like I’d find in a student’s semester-end reflection essay. I wanted to make sense of not only my grandfather’s actions and the ramifications, but also of pain itself because pain, after all, was not only the result but also the cause.

See, two weeks before my grandfather bought the gun, my grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It was a swift accident on an ordinary day when she’d just shared a late lunch at Katie’s Country Kitchen in Minden, Nevada, with my grandfather and my mother and stepfather, Cindy and Earnhardt. It’s the kind of thing that could happen to any of us moving quickly across a room on a winter afternoon except, in Frances’s case, her body crashed in the most devastating way possible: her chin hit the floor and her neck essentially broke. A freak thing, as they say.

I’m paralyzed, aren’t I? she asked my mom after paramedics wheeled her down an ER hallway where they’d wait for hours, other emergencies whizzing past them.

I hope not, my mom said. Then she leaned over her mother’s chest and sobbed.

Doctors later compared the damage in my grandmother’s neck to that of a victim of a motorcycle wreck. In the weeks that followed, her condition didn’t improve. She had, in fact, been especially unlucky: not only was she now quadriplegic—a life-altering condition that occurred in an instant—but she experienced a type of neuropathy that causes an unrelenting pain that the strongest drugs don’t touch. Doctors weighed options. While they did, my mom tended to Frances by rubbing lavender lotion into her feet, by applying Frances’s makeup the way she wore it, by dripping drops of Starbucks onto her tongue since Frances could no longer eat or drink. The family rallied, hovered. Frances slurred to me over the phone the lie that she was getting better every day, in every way.

Finally, doctors convened to deliver the grimmest prognosis: there would be no surgery, no healing, no returning to her living room to pick up where the strange day of the accident left off. This would be her new life instead. But in a nursing home. In perpetuity.

I want to die, Frances pleaded more than once. To my mother, with whom she shares a birthday, the two of them stitched together, best friends. To my grandfather, always her anchor. I want to turn the corner, she pleaded.

And for those reasons, Bill, my quiet, Navy veteran grandpa who’d whistle as he made coffee before anyone else was awake each morning—the most practical, rational guy I’ve known—said a word to no one about his plan, ate a sit-down breakfast that Earnhardt had prepared, and left to purchase a gun. Then he drove to the hospital with the weapon while families hiked near Lake Tahoe, brunched at noisy casino buffets, prayed at church. A mercy killing the reports months later declared.

What can I do with this narrative of suffering? It’s less than straightforward, a kaleidoscope of surreal moments from a movie I don’t recognize. It involves us viewing my grandfather’s televised arraignment, him reading a novel under the jail psychiatrist’s cautious eyes before being released on bail late one night. It involves me hugging him in the kitchen the morning after, then sitting in the porch sun together before he gifts me Frances’s wedding ring, him remarking that my gray-and-black striped dress matches his mug shot attire. It involves my mom declining to speak with politicians and network news shows that call the landline in the wake of high-profile assisted suicide cases. It involves me writing a note in support of my grandfather to the public defender and being surprised to see my words later quoted in newspaper articles, discussed in opposing ways by people who either support or condemn my grandfather’s actions.

Beyond the personal? I’ve had five years to consider that morning within a broader context: right-to-die laws, violence and privilege, the US healthcare system, the US gun system, the way we collectively view aging, the way we grapple with suffering, the way people engage in comment sections without knowing the nuances of a story or realizing that families might read every remark.

But my hands are empty: five years later, no sparkling realization, no rock-solid thesis. My grandparents are both gone now, and I’m not the person in that Long Beach living room anymore: the shock has long lifted and California is a speck behind me. Yet part of me still stands at the edge of the Pacific with my feet in the surf—still pauses on that tiger-striped beach knowing that, like the tide, more pain will eventually come. It’s human and inevitable.

Knowing that simple truth has reshaped my DNA. At a moment when the facts of our world compel us to sharpen ourselves each morning, I’m simultaneously more aware of the softness of others, their sore spots and shadows, the stories they don’t spill when we share an airplane row or elevator. I’ve paradoxically become less afraid of tragedy by knowing that there’s nothing you can do to stop it from demolishing a January morning. And, as anyone who’s been changed by grief can attest, clichés take on surprising truth: for me, it’s that one about every person fighting a private battle. It’s the kind of line I’d have spotted in a former student’s essay, a sentence I’d have circled in green pen. Cliché? I might have scribbled, a question mark to temper the judgment. But here I am, writing it. Both easing up on others and loosening my grip.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion, except this: while I’m skeptical about mining beauty from pain (Frances certainly didn’t find her pain beautiful) or landing on a diamond takeaway or even claiming good can come from it, I’ve learned that time-freezing anguish makes for micro-moments of unexpected reverence. Even when grief scrambles the big picture and clarity remains decades—or maybe forever—out of reach, the particulars come into focus. Like my sister’s voice that first day, her voice identical to mine, and the care in it as she relayed terrible news. My mother dripping coffee onto her own mother’s tongue. How, in those first days when our family paced my grandparents’ house, sick and sleepless and shocked to our marrow, strangers left meals wrapped in cellophane on that same front stoop next to my grandparents’ initials. One time, a card and carnations. One time, a bottle of wine like a sacrament. Holy,