The Skydiver

The funeral was in a stuffy room with thick velvet curtains that blocked the sun from creeping in through the dusty windows. The wallpaper was a pattern of roses that looked as dead as the body in the casket, and the smell of all the wreaths and boquets the mourners toted along was nauseating. It seeped up through your nose and gripped you by wrapping itself around your lungs and reminding you “Hey, buddy. This is what death smells like. One day it will be the only thing you can smell anymore, and you'll smell it forever and ever, so you better get used to it. “ I guess I got used to it. But it's a hard smell to become accustomed to, because it doesn't want you to become familiar with it. It wants to sneak up on you one day and catch you from behind and knock the wind out of you, and then after its had its laugh, it wants you to forget about it completely, so that the next time it comes knocking it's just as much an unpleasant surprise as the first time. Death and its smell, they like to keep their distance, because that way they can be stronger and stronger on the occasions when they do show up. I guess me and Death, we're rivals. We don't play by each other's rules. So the funeral was stuffy with the familiar smell of death. Lizzie nudged me, pulled on my sleeve. Her head barely reached my elbow. “Dad.” She whispered, loudly. “Dad!” “Shhh, what?” “It smells funny in here.” “Yeah, just ignore it.” She rumpled up her nose. “I can't.” “Well try.” She groaned, dropped her arms to her side and started picking at the lace on her dress. Her mom had parted her hair in the middle this morning, tying her bangs off to the left with a little pink bow that matched the ones on her shoes. All around us, women were squeezed into long wool dresses with ill fitting sleeves and men in black suits patted their backs while here and there they sniffed into kleenex scented with roses and death and cried to themselves about how abstract the most concrete of ideas somehow sensibly seemed. Me and Death, we got this way with each other because my job was to figure it out, you see, and it doesn't much like that. It resists it, it doesn't like people prodding at it, it's like the fish in the aquarium. It gets pretty pissed when you keep on tapping at the glass and shouting at it in a language it doesn't speak. Death, it kept tapping it's fingers against my tank, and so I tapped back, and we fought with each other through the thick plexi glass of understanding like little kids with their fingers half a centimeter from each other's noses when their parents say “Stop touching each other” and they think they've found an ingenious loophole to their request. I was a probate judge, responsible for cleaning up after the mess of someone's departure. Death came along, and I waved my hand like it was nothing more than the mundane and inevitable happenstance that it was, and I hardly winced at the smell anymore, because I'd memorized it, and now I was the one who could sneak up on it, instead of the other way around. Death doesn't like that very much. It keeps pulling it's tricks, trying to come up with new ones to catch me off guard, but it never does. I've heard it all. Last week, I sat at my desk with my file of incoming cases, rubbed my temples and inhaled the scents so familiar they hardly existed at all, and surveyed the aftermath of Death's most recent attempts at cunning trickery. “HA!” It laughed, dancing all around my office. “I got you this time!” I reclined back in my leather chair, threw my feet up on the cherry desk and sipped at my black coffee. “Good try, but you'll have to try harder.” The file was filled with cancers and crashes, heart attacks and heartbreaks. There was one about an old man that had died without writing a will, a depression era matress stuffer with a small fortune under his floorboards and seven children to fight over it. This one was especially dull, and I looked my old spar Death in the eyes and laugh full on in its smug face, “Really? This is all you got?” He reclined back across from me, picking at his nails. “Just you wait.” But he'd already lost that game, whatever it was. So there was no use in waiting or playing anymore. “Dad. Daaad.” Lizzie yanked on my sleeve again. I was trying to listen to the service and be respectful to the mourning family and friends, despite the heat of my black suit and incessant monotony of the ministers droning voice, saying the same thing over and over again at every service my career required that I attend. “What?” “I don't like being in here.” “No one does, Lizzie. You just have to hang in there.” She rubbed a hand over her dress, sighing. “Can we go outside?” My wife elbowed me in the ribs. She was dabbing at her eyes with a floral scented tissue, her ankles crossed neatly infront of her, arms hugging her purse so hard her knuckles turned white. “Just go, take her outside.” she said, before turning her attention back to the service. Up front, standing before the casket shrouded in its own personal garden of roses and gardenas, the minister was reading a poem, looking into the crowd with a mask of detached sorrow and pity stretched across his features. “And while I'm at it,” He read. “Thanks to everyone who happened to die/ on the same day that I was born./ Thank you for stepping aside to make rom for me/ for giving up your seat/ getting out of the way, to be blunt...” It went on like that. Thanking Death for its gratitude, for it's artificial rose petal aroma, and there wasn't a dry eye in the room. The real Death, he lounged, pretended to dab it his eyes, waved its hand like it was flattered. “Come on, Liz.” “Finally!” I pulled her out of her fidgeting folding chair, past the mourners in their mindless competition of grief, and out of the stuffy home. It was sunny outside, but storm clouds billowed on the horizon. We should be safe from the rain as long as we went back in after a few minutes. We sat on the concrete steps of the Home, atop a freshly sweeped WELCOME mat, under the shade of a looming willow tree that cast shadows across her face. I pulled a bottle of bubbles out of my pocket, I always kept them there when I was going anywhere with Lizzie. She got bored easily, and when she got bored, she got whiney. I blew them into the air and she ran around to pop them all with her fingers before they floated too high for her reach. “Whatcha thinkin' bout?” She asked in her singsong voice while she chased after the rainbow spectrumed soap bubbles between us. “Just work and stuff.” “Ooohh. Will you tell me about it?” “It's all pretty boring. Money and stuff.” “And dead people, right?” “Yeah, and dead people.” “Hmm.” She chased bubbles for a while in silence, and the storm clouds got thicker overhead. “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “It really smelled in there.” “Yeah, it did.” “How come?” “Oh...I think it's all the flowers. And the chemicals.” “The ones they put on the dead person?” “Yeah, the ones they put on the dead person.” “Oh.” She popped more bubbles, getting bored after a while and sitting down next to me. “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “How come people gotta die?” I looked at Death, lounging in the shade of a cherry blossom tree across the lawn, smirking at me. “Well go on,” he said. “Answer her that one.” I cleared my voice and waved him away. “Well, Lizzie, that's a tough question.” She wiggled her toes in her pink ballet slippers with the ribbon that matched the one in her hair. I hesitated before continuing. “I'm working on a case right now, Liz, about a guy that died when he was skydiving and didn't have his parachute on right.” She looked up at me, her eyebrows scrunched together. “It was a, uh, really windy day, and he had always wanted to go skydiving. Have you ever heard of a bucket list?” “No, that sounds stupid. Is it a list about buckets?” “No, it's a list about all the things you want to do in your life. Like skydiving. A lot of people want to skydive before they die, I don't know why. It always seemed dangerous to me.” “Then why's it called a bucket list?” “I don't actually know.” “Hmm.” “So, this guy always wanted to go skydiving. And one day, he and all his friends decided they'd do it. So they made an appointment at a place that gave you a lesson on how to do it, and then took you up into the sky on a big orange helicopter, and tied you all up in skydiving gear or whatever, and then let you jump, just like they'd taught you in the lesson. But this guy, the guy from the case, he was real young, only about twenty six, and the guy from the skydiving company didn't clasp his parachute to his outfit right, and part of it got stuck. So when it came time for the guy to pull open his parachute, it wouldn't open, and he crashed.” “And he died?” “Yeah, sweety. He died.” “Oh.” she thought about it for a while and I blew more bubbles for her to pop. After a while, she said “But how come he had to die?” “Well...” I blew another round of bubbles and thought we better head back in soon before it started raining and she ruined her pretty dress. Her mother would never let that one go, God forbid. “I guess maybe it's like the poem the minister was reading when we left.” “The one about the guy wrting a thank you letter to the mailman?” “Yeah, but not that part. The part at the end, where he thanks the person that had to die to make room for him to be alive.” “So the skydiver had to di.e so a baby could be born?” She let bubbles fly past her. “I don't know, Liz. That's a way to look at it, yeah. Everyone has to go away eventually, sweetheart.” “So there's room for other people to have a chance?” “I suppose so.” “Oh.” She popped bubbles again, a crease above her nose as she thought it all through. “But how come there can't be room for everyone?” She said, her voice heavy. “I don't know, baby girl. There's just not.” She bit her lip. I'd worked as a probate judge for fifteen years, and as I've said, me and Death, we're well aquainted. We're rivals, chasing each other like dogs chasing their own tails, and we think we have each other figured out, we think we understand it now, but then someone breaks the rules. Someone steps out of the lane, and then we're back chasing each other around in circles with distance between us that never meets. People called me, they were always crying. Death was never very polite about when he paid his visits, and he never called ahead. He came in the night and left before you could wake up, and then you're calling me, and you're crying. You're saying “Hello, this is Judge Ellison, right? Yes, my name is Something Something from Somewhere Somewhere, my Something/Someone just passed away, yes yes it was so very sudden, it's so hard to believe they're not here, you know, Mr. Ellison, they had money/real estate/ something something, you see, and I have this many brothers/sisters/somethings, and my Something Something, the one who has passed, yes, his/her will is missing, you see, or they don't have one/ I'm unsatisfied with what it says...yes, thank you, Mr. Ellison, it's so nice to hear a kind voice in all of this...” And I'm nodding, and my feet are up and I'm writing down what you're saying. Then you come into my office. It's been a couple weeks, you're still crying, but it's the kind that's purely for the sake of not wanting to appear heartless, and you're dabbing at your eyes with a tissue you carried in your purse/pocket. So I get to know the corpse, my old friend Death stands over my shoulder and looks down and sneers and says “I seem to have made this pretty hard for you” and I say “Nothing I can't handle, ole chap. Screw off.” And across the desk you're rambling about the dead man blah blah blah blah blah. Me and the dead man, we become pretty tight. I kind of rob him of his privacy, but it's okay, because you're getting money/ real estate/ etc out of the deal, and he's dead, so we all figure it doesn't really matter. And then I get you what you want and the dead man goes back to being dead and Death says “One day I'm gonna make it impossible for you and you're gonna have to realize that he/she is gone forever and you can't undig that.” and I say “you're pretty insecure, eh?” and Death steers clear for a while, until the next day, when the same thing happens all over again. The case of the skydiver was a little deeper than I knew how to tell Lizzie. His name was Joey Bennett, and like I said, he was twenty six. He was in that helicopter with four other people, his best mate and his girlfriend, and the woman he was planning on making his fiancee that very day. The other couple, they jumped first, they held hands, and they laughed the whole way down and their parachutes billowed out behind them like they were supposed to, and they kissed when they landed. Then it was Joey and his girl's turn, and at the last minute Joey suspended himself over the side of the helicopter, and before he jumped he turned back around to look at the girl, she was a pretty blond, and she smiled and said “I'm so nervous, Joe, oh my God,” and he said “before we do this I have to ask you something,” and she said “is now really the time?” and she was laughing and she said “okay what is it?” and he said “will you marry me?” and the girl was crying, but it was a completely different kind of crying than was practiced by my clients, and she said “jesus, yes, oh my god, yes I'll marry you,” and the skydiving teacher shouted “JUMP!” so Joey jumped and then the girl followed him and when it was time to pull her parachute, she looked down and realized that joey hadn't pulled his. She tried yelling to him but he couldn't hear her, and then she saw him pulling at every string he had, tugging and tugging, and nothing happened, and he looked up at her and he was crying and he said “I love you” and even though she couldn't hear him through the raging wind soaring past her as she floated down, she saw the words formed by his mouth, and when they landed, she felt like she'd died, too. She told me all of this while she sat in my office across my desk, Joey's parents sitting to her left. They were arguing over who should have Joey's house, his family or his would be fiancee, and I sat there staring at the whole lot of them, thinking that Joey's world was a completely different one than the one my last client lived and died on, and all of my clients were born into their own worlds and went on creating them and creating them until they died in them, and that world popped, and it wasn't just a person or a life that had ended, it was a whole universe, and maybe that had to happen so that another universe would have the room to build itself up around its edges but maybe that's only something we say so that somehow it will make sad sense, and that's what I tried to tell Lizze. She popped bubbles. I blew more, and told her maybe death was like popping bubbles. “Maybe all the people could fit, but all the worlds couldn't, you know? So we have to pop some of them.” She thought about it. “I guess that makes sense.” I blew more bubbles. She popped more bubbles. “It doesn't have to make sense, sweetheart. It's okay for it to not make sense.” Death leered under the cherry blossom tree, came and sat between us on the WELCOME mat under the willow. “Toldja one day I'd pull one over on you.” he sneered. I waved him away. Lizzie got up and walked around a bit, hopscotching along the sidewalk while she thought quietly to herself about the things that were actually very simple but for some reason are very impossible to understand. Maybe because death has been around for so long, just lounging under cherry blossoms, we think that we should understand him by now. But that's the thing, he's always there, so as a result, we're not always here. Our bubbles pop or we don't attach our parachutes right and so we don't have much time to make sense of him. So his smell is never familiar, no matter how hard we try to figure out what it's made of. “Liz?” “Hmm?” “You know we love you, right? Mommy and me and everyone else?” “Yeahhh.” she says, picking at the grass at her feet. “And you know that just because sometimes the bubbles pop doesn't mean they weren't really great bubbles while they were around?” “Yeah, I got it, Daddy. Love you, too.” “It really doesn't have to make sense right now.” She plucked at the grass at her feet, stomping the dirt off her toes. “Yeah. I know.” It started to sprinkle, and I took her back inside before it started pouring, back into the dried rose wallpaper and cherry blossom candles and tissue dabbing cryers. We sat back down, and my wife cried into my shoulder, and I patted her back. Death leaned over my shoulder. “That was a good story you told her out there, man.” he whispered. “The one about the Skydiver.” “Yeah.” I said. “Most of them are.” “Your stories?” “The lives. The bubbles.” “Ah.” Death leaned back, propping his feet against the back of the chair in front of him. “Funny, though. I don't really recall that one ever happening.” “Maybe you're just getting old. There're a lot of skydiving accidents. They all probably run together after a while.” “No...no...” Death scratched its forehead. “I never forget a name. And I don't recall making aquaintance with a Joey Bennett, at least not yet...” He eyed me, smiling. I shrugged. “Well, either way, it's got all the proponents of a good story. Life, Love...” He chuckled. “Even me!” “Yep. Even you.” “It's funny, sometimes, you know? How stupid the endings to so many good stories are!” “Yeah.” The minister was wrapping up the service. “So much potential...a really great bubble, so you say. Then it pops all because someone forgot to properly attach a parachute! It's dissapointing, really.” Death laughed, crossing his arms behind his head. The minister closed the service, and we all muddled around the Home, awkwardly hugging and shaking hands, offering condolences. I told Lizzie to be polite and be quiet for a while, and she tugged on my sleeve again. “Daddy?” She said. “Hmm, baby?” “I know the bubble thing doesn't really make much sense, and neither did that poem, but I think I get it a little better now.” “Oh?” “Yeah.” I stood off to the side after a while, holding her hand. We ambled over to the table that held the dead person's pictures, and a copy of the obituary. We were just teaching Lizzie to read this summer, so I picked her up and pointed at the words to see if she could sound them out without my help. Her teachers said she was coming along promisingly, and would probably be able to help the other kids next year when they were having trouble. We started reading. “Daddy?” “Hmm? “It smells so weird in here.” “I know, sweety. It's the flowers and the chemicals.” “The ones for the dead person?” I squeezed her hand. “Yeah, baby. The ones for the dead person.” “Daddy?” “Hmm?” “It's not the guy from the skydiving lessons fault, I don't think. That the guy, Joey, died, I mean. I don't think it's the parachute guy's fault.” “I don't know, honey.” “Well, I don't think it was.” My wife came over, still dabbing at her eyes. “Oh, you're reading!” She said, trying to sound cheerful. “That's great!” She stood next to us and Lizzie went on reading the dead person's obituary, us helping her when she stumbled over words. Death and me, we're rivals. We chase each other like a dog and his tail. He comes up, pats my shoulder. “You're taking this rather well, my friend.” “Yeah well, you've slipped, mate.” He stepped back. “What? I don't slip.” “But you do. You never give warning calls. You sneak right up behind people. But me, you let me memorize your scent. That was your first mistake.” He shook his head, sadly. “Maybe so. But Judge Ellison, does it really matter? If we're friends or not, you and I? I'm still here, mate. I'm still poppin' bubbles. Messin' up parachute strings...forgetting to clasp life jackets...” Elizabeth Anne Ellison, age 6, passed away last Sunday, June fourth, at 1:26 in the afternoon by cause of drowning while she was swimming with her mother and father, Nicholas and Mellissa Ellison, at the backyard pond of an Ellison family friend, and had forgotten to reattatch her life jacket upon returning to the water... “You're right.” I told Death. “It doesn't matter one bit.” I kissed Lizzie's forehead before they closed the casket. Mellissa cried, they were always crying, when we walked out of the Home with the dusty rose petal wallpaper and terrible velvet curtains, over the WELCOME mat and willow tree and cherry blossom branches. Death strolled behind us, as he always does, and he said, again, “Man, I really did like that story about the skydiver. But I dunno, maybe it WAS the parachute guy's fault? Maybe he should have double checked?” “Screw off.” He laughed, scuffling along on the pavement. “I'll see ya around, Nick. I'll see ya around. But hey, I toldja I'd get ya, one day. What'd I say?” “Yeah.” I tell him, popping bubbles while we walked. “You told me.”