By K.R. Van Sant
The first thing I remember from that night is watching a Woody Allen movie on a borrowed TV.
We girls had begged endlessly for our parents to buy a TV. But our parents stayed firm in their opposition. They didn’t want us wasting our days cooped up inside in front of an electronic box.
Woody Allen, however, was deemed worthwhile. So when they heard his film Sleeper was to be the NBC Sunday Night Movie, our parents invited the neighbors to come watch it at our house, and to bring a TV as well. They set up the television facing the couch, and the whole family, the neighbors, plus a few extra friends (of which there were always some around) watched. They turned off the lights and everyone busted up laughing at the famous comedian’s ingenious jokes.
We girls—only five and six-years-old—didn’t understand a thing. However, happy to actually be able to watch TV with our parents and not behind their backs at friends’ houses, we insisted on staying up until the movie was over. We laughed with our parents and their friends, pretending to know why, hoping to affirm our maturity by showing that we understood grown-up things. We both fell asleep before the movie ended. My sister and I lived that day like we lived all others: functioning nearly as a unit because of our closeness in age.
When it was over, our parents carried us off to bed without waking us. We dreamed of the images we’d seen before falling asleep – a man dressed as a robot lost in the woods, a woman with a lot of makeup drinking water with her friends in a glass house.
Suddenly, our parents interrupted our dreams by urgently stirring us awake. It was not morning yet. But our parents were dressed and our mother had her purse. Something had happened, they told us, and Mommy had to go. Daddy would tell us about it in the morning, they said. Still half asleep, we accepted our parents’ kisses without questions and returned to our dreams.
The next morning we woke up with the sensation that something had happened. Or that we’d dreamt something had happened, but couldn’t remember what. When we saw our father frying eggs for breakfast, we remembered that our mother had left during the night. Knots formed in our throats.
“Where’s Mommy?” we asked.
Our father said he’d explain it all after breakfast. Nothing like this had ever happened before and we could not calm our imaginations.
“When will she be back? Why did she leave at night?” we asked between sobs.
Our father realized that he couldn’t wait until after breakfast. He turned off the stove and set the spatula down on the table. The three of us went outside and sat on a bench in the backyard, one daughter on either side of our father. He took off his glasses, took our hands into his, and began to cry. When we saw the tears slide down his cheeks and disappear into his beard, we cried too. We still didn’t know what had happened, but we could feel his deep pain.
“A terrible thing has happened,” he began. “Last night two men went to your grandparents’ house and they shot PopPop with a gun.”
“That’s why your mother left,” he continued. “She’s in Florida with Mom-Mom.”
He sighed and seemed to forget he was speaking to his five and six-year-old daughters.
“It’s horrible to think that humanity is can be so sick,” he said. “Pop-Pop was a great man. That they could have done this to him makes me…”
He couldn’t finish his sentence.
“Why did they do it, Daddy?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Sweetheart,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“What about Mom-Mom?” my sister asked. “Is she okay?”
“Mom-Mom is in the hospital because she’s hurt,” he explained. “They stabbed her in the back.”
As he said these words, his voice broke and he buried his head in his hands.
“But Mom-Mom is going to be okay,” he assured us.
We didn’t ask any more questions.
The truth is, we hardly knew our grandparents, who lived far away. They had been to visit, but not since we were quite little. Nonetheless, we cried and cried there with our father. The entire family’s suffering flooded our bodies.
We imagined our mother in the hospital with our grandmother, bravely waiting for her wounds to heal. We imagined our grandfather, fat and pale in his coffin. We thought about how our mother must have felt when a voice on the telephone informed her of her father’s murder. We thought about our aunts, who had also said good-bye to their kids in the middle of the night.
Victims of a cruel attack that both debilitated and strengthened our family, my sister and I held hands. And that physical contact joined us not only with each other, but with our relatives we had never met, crying at the same time in distant parts of the country.
Our grandfather’s blood defied space and joined the hearts of a dispersed family. Some of them had only met him a couple of times, and like us, didn’t know him well, if at all. But now that the aunts, uncles, and cousins were all simultaneously living the same horrific reality, we felt close to them all.
For my sister and me, everything was so big, so far, so incredible, but at the same time so real. We didn’t understand the tragedy the way the adults did; we simply felt the sadness and suffering caused by it. We listened to our father’s words. The facts he spoke did not produce an image, but rather a feeling. Those facts only took on meaning many years later. At that moment, at that young age, we were incapable of assimilating it. We could only feel it.
We went back into the kitchen and ate our breakfast. Then we walked to school where we learned and played just like any other day. But we both knew that something had changed forever.
We had encountered death for the first time.