Against Closure
By Karen Bennett
On September 28, 1981, my father went to take his morning stroll in Valley Green, a nature reserve in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park, where cars were prohibited. The area was a favorite among walkers and runners, and my father, who was 76, was known to the regulars there. The walk in Valley Green had become a staple of his health regimen since his recovery from surgery for an aortic aneurysm five years earlier.
The only motor vehicles permitted in the area were the city’s Department of Sanitation trucks. On that beautiful day in September, the driver of one of those trucks had pulled up to a shed to get some trash bags. He left the truck idling. Two other workers were with him in the front seat. The driver got the bags, got back into the truck, and put it in reverse. He hit my father, who was dragged under the truck’s rear wheels. A witness heard him gasping. We do not know if he died instantly; there were conflicting reports. Records indicate that he died later at the nearby hospital where he was taken. I choose not to belabor the particulars, because I would have to revisit in detail a scenario that is simply too painful for me to dwell upon. The months that I spent poring over documents, talking to police officers and lawyers, are a blur now, but the event of my father’s death changed, irreversibly, my relationship with life.
I was 29 when my Dad died, and I moved to New York eight difficult years later. I was writing about music then, and I spent many late nights in jazz clubs. Afterwards, my friends and I would often migrate to a small, inexpensive Middle Eastern eatery and take-out shop on Greenwich Place that stayed open from lunchtime until the wee hours. It was frequented by musicians, students, neighbors, club-goers, doctors from St. Vincent’s Hospital, and friends of the shop’s hard-working Syrian proprietor, Mustafa, who was hospitable and engaging.
One night as I sat eating a falafel, I watched a man turn over his empty Turkish coffee cup, rotate it in the saucer, and a little while later, pick it up and “read” the grounds. When I had my coffee, I asked Mustafa if he would “read” my cup. He explained that it was, technically, haram in Islam for him to read my fortune, although many in his homeland did it. I told him that I was not interested in predictions (being at odds with the notion of a ‘future’ since my father’s sudden death): I just wanted to know what there was to see in an espresso cup. So he obliged within my parameters, pointing out certain patterns and silhouettes in the sediment, suggesting what they might represent. After peering into the cup for awhile, I could actually appreciate some of the interpretations. “And this,” Mustafa said, indicating a particular configuration, “could be an older man, a father or uncle, who is watching over you and wishes only good for you.” “My father is dead,” I said levelly in response. “The dead don’t have wishes?” Mustafa countered.
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On that day in September of 2001 that would become infamous, and in the months that followed, I felt the tragedy of decades ago re-inhabit me. The shock, the devastation, the anguish of knowing that one’s loved one died alone in unfathomable circumstances. The haunting photos on phone booths, trees, subway walls — - they made me recall the Donald Justice poem, Presences. “Everyone, everyone went away today. They left without a word….” And there they were, having gone.
On March 11, 2002, I went up to the roof of my building after sundown to view for the first time the Tribute in Light, which initially ran for a full month. Two neighbors whom I’d never met came up shortly afterwards. We greeted each other and our talk immediately turned to that day, six months earlier. Then we fell silent in the damp evening, gazing at the beams that evanesced into the sky. I felt as if those thousands of souls, having ascended beyond the suffering that we can inflict upon one another, were reflected there. They had attained grace, and I wished fervently that they had attained peace. Every night that month, I went to the window specifically to look at the beams, and though I mourned, I also felt a sense of reunion. I was disappointed when the period of commemoration ended.
My father planned to come home early on the day he died, to take my mother to pick up her car, which was being serviced. When I eventually picked up the car, I saw that a monarch butterfly was crushed in its grillwork. I extricated the pieces, wrapped them in waxed paper, and set them in a cabinet. Ten years later to the day, and acutely aware of the anniversary, I was cooking dinner in the kitchen of my small apartment on the seventh floor of a Manhattan high rise, when a monarch butterfly flew in the open window, flitted through the apartment, and out again. It seemed remarkable to me, and at the very least, it served as a reminder.
In the past decade, ‘closure’ has become part of the vocabulary of suffering. It signifies a resolution of sorts, an ending that enables a beginning. It seems to be something the living wish for. But Mustafa’s
pronouncement made me ponder what the dead might wish for, when they are beyond wishing, after all. Perhaps they ‘wish’ for our enlightenment regarding what becomes of the life we are living. Perhaps they wish to be remembered in a way that mutes the concept of closure, a way that transcends the divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Last year, on the evening of September 11, I went up to the roof deck of the building where I now live and contemplated the beams of light, as I will again this year. They absorbed and diffused the pain of the day. They reminded me of those beautiful spirits, still with us. How might it change us, as a city, as a people, I wondered, if, budget be damned, the beams might become permanent, and we were reminded nightly that there are no conclusions to be drawn.
