For most of my formative years, I possessed an imperfect but quite personal relationship with Death. I was raised by my grandmother and great-grandparents, so I was constantly in the orbit of the oldest members of my family. I attended a number of funerals before I hit my teens. The pageantry, the grieving – all of it confusing and off-putting. I finally came to understand that a funeral = death, and then I hated them even more. It wasn’t Death himself that truly scared me. I understood He was a constant and tat life was finite, but the unrestrained grief at these events felt unbearable. At each funeral, I struggled with the suffocating emotional pain washing over me, threatening to suck me down into a vortex from which I would not be able to surface. I would come home upset, confused, and unable to adjust immediately to the land of the freely breathing – the land of the living. For a little kid, I got quite morbid after each funeral, like, noticeably so. After each gathering, my grandmother would do everything she could to get me to take interest in my friends again. Finally, around the age of 10, I put my foot down. I would not be attending any more funerals with my family. I was done. Good people that they were, they respected my wishes. There was still Death in my world – an elderly relative here, an elderly neighbour there – but I remained safely cocooned in my stubborn insistence to not attend funerals. I saw my grandmother cry, usually upon hearing the news of another life slipping away, but I didn’t see the raw grief on display at a public memorial of any kind. That’s the deal I struck, and it seems workable, right? I thought I was “good” with Death right into my mid-teens. He picked off elderly folks, helping them shuffle off their mortal coils, while I went on with my life – young and immortal. My senior year of high school, however, disabused me of the notion that He and I had any détente to speak of. I took the phone call before leaving for school one beautiful autumn morning in September of my senior year. In one month I would turn 17. I was so engrossed with my morning ritual of curling my hair and putting on makeup that I didn’t even think it strange that the phone rang at 7 am. My friend’s mom was on the line, asking to speak to my grandmother. I cajoled her, what had my friend done now? Was he in some kind of trouble? He was quite the prankster, and his parents were prohibitively strict, so I was having trouble imagining what might necessitate a call from his mom to my grandma this early in the day. “He’s dead,” she said, then all I heard was sobbing. Nineteen years old, playing goalie for his soccer team, and he dropped dead of a heart attack mid-game. Nothing they did could revive him, and he was gone. Just like that. Just. Like. That. The rest of that day is a haze. I remember handing over the phone. I vaguely remember some screaming in my bedroom, along with tears, and that familiar pull of grief from so many previous funerals. I remember going to school and hearing people openly speculate about what happened, even though none of them had spoken to his family. All of them were guessing and spinning scenarios in that particularly cruel way that teenagers in a small town will do. I remember telling one classmate, who falsely insinuated a drug-related incident, that I hoped she never had to go through something similar with her friends. In what turned out to be a painful moment of prophecy, she lost her younger brother to a one-car DUI accident almost exactly two years later. The whisper campaign was vicious, but that’s high school, right? I wrestled with the need to protect myself and the need to see my friend one last time. In telling my family that I would no longer go to funerals, I was also making a vow to myself, one that I was willing to break only for a chance to say goodbye to a dear friend. I finally accepted the realization that Death would not be kept at bay by my funerary quirks and going this once would not give Death any extra power over me. Attending my friend’s funeral turned out to be a mistake. A theatrical production that combined strict religious tradition with melodramatic high schoolers, it was worse than any school play you’ve ever endured. So much performative grief, including his girlfriend of a few weeks in the star role of The Grieving Widow. His parents – father sitting stoically, mother sobering hysterically. This wasn’t who he was. This wasn’t what he would have wanted. I left the funeral home sick to my stomach. I threw up next to my friend’s car in the parking lot, a brief but untidy remembrance of a horrid day. Draped in black crepe and smeared with ash, my 17th birthday came and went with little fanfare and even less interest. No one really felt like celebrating, least of all me, but with my increasingly cynical and sullen attitude, who would want to party, right? Later that month, things were just beginning to return to normalcy when another classmate was murdered by his brother. I’d been bus mates with him for a few years, and he’d graduated the previous June. I didn’t know him well enough to go to his funeral, even though that didn’t stop many others with less tenuous connections from attending or from playing up their attendance when they returned to school on Monday. Again, the whole high school fell into a maudlin pantomime of grief and loss, fuelled by typically petty teenaged one-upmanship. The beginning of my senior year had all the trappings of an extended funeral, which I had the privilege of attending six hours a day, five days a week. When November rolled around, I remember thinking now who will we lose? These things come in threes, right? I felt like Death was lying in wait, flowing through the periphery of my life, and I wondered when he would come calling again. A gentleman suitor I neither wanted nor needed, but persistent in his stubborn interest in my life and pool of friends and acquaintances. Just after Halloween, a friend offered me a ticket to attend a symphony concert with her family at the college near our homes. She and her mom picked me up, and we enjoyed a lovely evening of Tchaikovsky. It felt so grown up to sit in a blouse and skirt and listen to classical music for a few hours. They dropped me back at my house around 10 pm, and my dad’s car was in the driveway, an unprecedented happening when he wasn’t stopping by to pick me up for the day. Few things are more concerning than early morning or late-night calls and unexpected visits from family. When I went inside, my grandmother was crying in the kitchen. She wouldn’t, couldn’t talk to me. My dad lead me into our living room, which we rarely used, and asked me to have a seat on the couch. “There’s been an accident,” he started, talking tentatively, feeling his way through each word, each intonation. I interrupted, like I often do when I am nervous, was it my great-grandmother? No, he said quietly. My great-grandfather? No, he said again. You said “accident.” Were they both killed in a car crash? “Levi is dead.” I remember shaking my head in the negative – my mind swimming. Or was it sinking? My baby brother Levi couldn’t be dead. No. You’re wrong. That’s not possible. I remember repeating “no” again and again in increasingly hysterical tones, growing louder, until the word itself had been wrung dry of all meaning, my dad reaching toward me as I pulled away. But it was possible. It had happened. Levi slipped and drown in the bathtub at the age of three years old. Far too young for Death but gone just the same. After staying while I needed him, to let me cry and wail, to let me scream to the heavens about the unfairness of, well, everything, my dad finally left some time after midnight. My grandmother retreated to her bedroom long before, incapacitated with heartache. As soon as my dad left, I transformed into the adult in charge. I grabbed my grandmother’s emergency credit card and bought us plane tickets to Florida for the funeral. These were pre-internet days with an airline agent on their 800 number. I kept my voice calm and low, impersonated my grandma, and arranged all of our travel. I called a friend in Florida, a true friend who took a 3 am call, and he agreed to meet us at the airport the next afternoon. I placed a call and left a message with my high school, again impersonating my grandma. Casey is not coming in tomorrow and won’t be for the foreseeable future. There’s been a terrible accident... The next few weeks reside in my memories in hazy way, a muted palette in monotone with splashes of colour from lucid flashes, snippets of that time. Getting off the plane to the familiar smell of rot and humidity endemic to the subtropics, the sun blinding after so many hours of jolting awake after trying to sleep on the couch the night before and on the flight that day. Being approached by a couple of hippie dudes as I cried on the sidewalk outside of my brother’s funeral home viewing. They stopped, and one said, “It’s gonna be okay, little sister. One day, it’s all gonna be okay,” before moving on by. The cold, waxy feel of Levi’s forehead as I kissed him goodbye. Tucking in a favourite toy with him. Getting out of a limousine at the graveyard and having to catch my grandmother as she collapsed with grief. Greeting people at my mom’s house – accepting their casseroles, sandwich plates and condolences – because my mom couldn’t talk to anyone. She just sat on the couch and stared into her drink. I picked up all the adult roles because no one else seemed capable. Besides, staying busy is a great way to avoid your feelings, right? I flew home right after the funeral, but my grandmother stayed on to help my mom get her shit together. It was the first time I’d ever been alone in my entire life. A few of my close friends took turns staying overnight with me, and bless them for dealing with the night terrors and my middle-of-the-night screaming. It was all I could do to remember to wash my hair sometimes, eat occasionally, and show up to school Mondays through Fridays. My grades tanked. My penchant for seeing patterns where there were none grew stronger. My paranoia and anxiety ramped up like a tsunami slowly building from the ocean floor to become the towering sea monster that haunts the dreams of the coastal folk. At the end of November, my grandmother, having recently returned home and hoping to give me a bright spot in the holiday season, offered me an early Christmas present. She’d already wrapped it. I gratefully accepted it and was excited to tear off the paper and find a Stephen King book I hadn’t read yet: Pet Sematary. I began reading it almost immediately. Main character traumatized as a child by the death of a sibling. Toddler killed violently. Toddler returning to life violently. Toddler dying again violently. Everybody dead or broken by the end. From our collective vantage point nearly 40 years later, and as horror aficionados, I’m sure you see the problem that caused, right? My grandmother felt so bad when I told her the plot, but I assured her it was still a welcomed gift. Fictional pain, horror, and grief were far preferable to the real thing. I was able to parse it into emotionally manageable pieces. Instead of finishing the book in just a few days, it took me a few weeks, but I did it. And it was good. When December passed with no further visits from Death, I could have sobbed with relief. By January, I was together enough to get back to the things that reminded me how much I enjoyed life: gaming and writing. I pulled myself together enough to finish the academic year strong, but I had a new outlook. I made plans but didn’t revel in them. I worked hard but took less joy from it. Life became a series of goals, some hit and some missed, but that’s what being an adult is all about, right? Levi’s death was really the pivot in my life. I never feared Death, but I had a healthier respect for the damage His actions wrought. Every relationship changed with the grief I endured during these months. Even my relationship with myself. My writing, a mere bud on the bush at that age, took a swift and dark turn, blooming into a crimson rose, its stem laden with thick and plentiful thorns. Fanciful and crappy teenaged poetry made way for more philosophical and thoughtful fare, and I worked hard on my writing skills to make my words and ideas live up to this tough emotional place in which I now resided. In college, I transitioned from games like Dungeons and Dragons to Call of Cthulhu. I read less light fantasy and retreated into more hard-core horror. Fictitious horror became more and more enjoyable, the darker, the better. There was comfort to be found there, even when the bad guy didn’t always get what he deserved. Even when Death came for all the characters with varying degrees of success. That was like real life, right? Now I write those horrible accidents. I bring Death to my worlds on the page. I drag characters through pain and grief and death and all manner of misery. For your entertainment. For catharsis. For the sake of good storytelling. For you. Because someone out there – it could be any of you – might just need a diversion, something that fictionalizes your pain and grief and shows you that one day, it’s all gonna be okay. And that’s all we can ask of our fiction, right? Casey J Rudkin Casey J Rudkin is half of the writing team of JC Rudkin, along with her husband James. Fans of pulp stories, HP Lovecraft, and modern urban fantasy, they are also role-play gamers and board gamers from back when D&D came in a red box. Their previous collaborations include academic articles, pulp horror short stories, their debut novel Cthulhu: A Love Story, and two daughters. They live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States where they often have to shovel more than 20 feet of snow each winter. WEBSITE LINKS Follow JC Rudkin (and sometimes their dogs) at: JCRudkin.com Twitter @JCRudkin Instagram @ jcrudkin_author Facebook @ jc.rudkin.77 Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21600210.JC_Rudkin Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/JCRudkin/e/B095XFV588?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2&qid=1626021445&sr=8-2 Our short story “Christmas Cookies” will also appear December 2021 in Angela’s Recurring Nightmares, a horror anthology from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers http://glahw.com Cthulhu: A Love Story: A Love Story |
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