I thought of William’s statement to me that the difference between living and dying was nothing more than dumb luck. Was he right? Had dumb luck saved Beau’s life and cost Chris his?
Or was I looking at this all wrong? Maybe death wasn’t following me. Maybe God had a hand in saving my son. Maybe Beau would have also been in Peter Oxford’s car. Maybe God somehow intervened and spared Beau, spared my family. I knew William had lost his faith and his belief in God. He said God had abandoned him and the other marines when they needed him most. He said he’d been to hell, and nothing in eternal damnation could be worse than what he experienced in Vietnam.
But I did believe in God. Maybe more now than ever.
I believed, and I thanked God with every ounce of my being that he did not take my son. I know that was selfish to think in that moment, with the Carpenters grieving the loss of their son, but I couldn’t live without my boy, and I wondered how Art and Josephine would live without theirs. How would they move forward? How else but with the grace of God? How had William moved forward?
How had the parents of all those young men?
Art wiped his tears and we followed him into the house. Josephine and their family—Chris’s younger brother and two younger sisters and his aunts and uncles and grandparents—had gathered in the family and living rooms. We stayed for an hour or two. I don’t recall. There was really nothing anyone could do but sit and console the Carpenters. After a few hours we decided to give the family some privacy and said our goodbyes.
Over the next couple of days, Elizabeth and I helped with the funeral arrangements, but it was Beau who organized the senior class to be altar servers at the funeral, perform the readings, and act as Chris’s pallbearers. Members of the football team attended Chris’s wake and his funeral with their white home football jerseys over their shirts and ties. The senior captains and coaches draped Chris’s jersey atop his coffin. Beau spoke at Chris’s wake, his tortured voice choked by sobs. He told the overflowing crowd how they all loved Chris, his sense of humor, his fierce determination on the football field, and how he always looked after those who were smaller than him, which was everyone. He told everyone that God must have called Chris home because he needed the best damn offensive lineman in the country to open holes for his running backs.
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
At night, I could no longer read William’s journal. I could no longer read about death. It was too raw. Too close to home. Too real. I set the journal aside, and I realized that was something William had never been able to do. He could not set death aside, so he did not accept death as reality.
Not until years after those deaths did reality come knocking, and death found William. He told me he felt guilty to have lived, to have made it home when so many did not.
I worried Beau would feel the same guilt, for not driving Chris that night.
I didn’t want Beau to just move on, as William had been forced to do, without processing and coming to some understanding of Chris’s death. I didn’t want Chris’s death to haunt Beau, the way death had haunted William, until he could no longer handle all the ghosts.
I asked, and Serra set up grief counseling at school. Beau and many other students attended the sessions daily. Father John Zoff, a retired priest, also talked Beau through his grief, and Elizabeth and I arranged for our family to see a grief counselor. Together we tried to make sense of a senseless situation.
It would be a process. I knew this from experience. My father’s death, though expected, had been raw and painful. The first Christmas without him, his birthday, were melancholy. He had been a large presence in his family, and it was tough to have a celebration of any kind without him—weddings, the birth of a grandchild, baptisms. I always felt his absence. As the months passed, the melancholy faded, until, eventually, when I thought of my dad, I did so with a smile.
This would happen for Beau, but it was going to take time. Beau had lost a brother and a friend he saw every day. He would think of Chris every time he drove alone to school and drove home. He would think of Chris every Friday and Saturday night, at every game he attended, at graduation. He would feel his absence in class. He would feel a hole he might not ever completely fill.
I also understood better why William had been told to saddle up and move out. It was brutal and it was harsh, but it was because life does go on, which is why I assume William wrote in his journal, “Dying is hardest on the living.”
I went upstairs the night of Mary Beth’s birthday, and I asked her for the keys to the car we had just given her. She looked surprised, shocked, disappointed. “I’ll buy you another car,” I told her. “One with airbags.”