off the road

chapter 17

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In the middle of our senior year, tragedy struck the Goodspeed family.

As it was told to me by Tommy, based on what his family had told him and from the news and police reports:

His Aunt Liz—the single, childless woman his father called the “blue sheep” of the family due to her blue streak of hair—died in a car accident.

She was on her way home to Albany (where she was an adjunct professor of biochemistry) from the Kinderhook Lake house, where the Goodspeeds had spent their Christmas, when—on a long, straight stretch of road—she somehow lost control of her Subaru, flew down a ditch, and crashed head-on into a tree. I hoped and imagined that she died suddenly and painlessly.

The weather had been fine. There was no ice on the road, and it was not snowing. The Goodspeeds insisted she had not been drinking, and Tommy confirmed this to me, corroborated by a toxicology report.

“Another car, is what I surmise,” Tommy told me. I had never seen him so hopeless and torn. “Must have been coming from the opposite direction, someone drunk, maybe. They ran her off the road, she avoided them and crashed, and they continued on. Heartless.”

I wasn’t sure about that. Who could know? Apparently not the authorities, either.

I didn’t attend the funeral. I was too frightened. Death was an ephemeral abomination to me. I didn’t give it much thought because I didn’t think it belonged in my young life, which it didn’t, but, of course, that wouldn’t stop it from entering at some point anyway. I had been lucky up to that point. Both sets of my grandparents had died when I was young, and if grandparents are already gone from a young person’s life, then any other death, until their parents’ old age, is a great tragedy. I was fortunate enough to have escaped that.

Which was why the tragedy of Liz Goodspeed was a tragedy with a capital ‘T.’ Parents are not supposed to see their children die.

I did attend the wake, which was in Albany, and I will never forget how Grandpa and Grandma Goodspeed shook, especially Grandpa Goodspeed, the patriarch of the family I had seen so cool and in charge at the lake house. He was torn down and deconstructed to the basics of grief that burden us all. Would canvas paintings of food really heal him of this hurt?

He couldn’t speak when I hugged him, neither could any of his sons, until I approached Mr. Goodspeed.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Goodspeed. Aunt Liz was really cool,” I told him when I gave him a hug, and I meant it.

He nodded. “Thanks for coming, Jude, you’re a good kid.”

I could tell that Mr. Goodspeed did not have the emotional skillset to deal with the loss of his sister. It was a problem he could not yell at, throw money at, or ignore. I imagine he retreated into his work managing the grocery store, sniffing around for a buyer, trying to extort the highest dividend in escaping the grocery business for good, as if doing so would heal him of her memory.

I sat in the rows of seats at the funeral home by Tommy and his family, next to his mom and his cousins, Maggie and Madison, who had only become even more beautiful over the years.

“How are you, Mrs. Goodspeed?” I asked her as I sat down.

I didn’t see her much anymore. It used to be that she would always make us snacks when I came over, go out of her way to make sure we were comfortable, say hi to me, ask how my family was, and how school was going, but no longer. I thought it was because we had gotten older, and maybe she thought we didn’t want to be bothered anymore, but there was something else to it that had to do with her strange neurological confusions, which were getting worse all the time, despite her day-to-day functioning remaining in order.

She looked at me with a nice smile that contained shades of Tommy’s. “Hello, dear,” she said, and I felt sick when I realized she had forgotten my name, unique as it was.

“How are you?” I reiterated.

She leaned in close to whisper: “Who is it that died?”

“Uhm, Mr. Goodspeed’s sister, Elizabeth,” I said. “I think,” I added, feeling like it was rude of me to so assuredly possess such information that she didn’t have. She nodded with appropriate solemnity and backed away.

Tommy leaned in on my other ear. “What did she say?”

“She just said hello,” I lied. I leaned closer and whispered back: “How has she been?”

Tommy shook his head. “Sometimes herself, more often not. Doctors said it’s not Alzheimer’s, so…” He shrugged.

The death of Aunt Liz was one of the few deaths I encountered in my young life, and while I didn’t know her too well, it did make me sad, if not immediately, then in an existential way, to know that someone I had once met was now no longer meetable. Most importantly, it taught me the etiquette, traditions, and formalities of a death as it happened with the wake and funeral. But it didn’t fundamentally change me, not like it did Tommy.

Much like breaking his leg playing soccer, the death of his young Aunt Liz opened up something new in Tommy. His disposition changed, as if his lust for life and living fast and fully had been accelerated by some jeopardy he had discovered in her death that was theretofore unknown. He knew then, fully, that death was real, and if so, life needed to be lived, and the heart he put into everything was never in vain.

This led to less-than-good decisions, like at our senior prom.

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