dispatchesfromkansas

Prologue

Reflections on Mill Creek                                                              December 3, 2007

It’s very difficult to look at the World

And into your heart at the same time. – Jim Harrison

Mill Creek is low now, embroidered with a ragged fringe of thin ice sharp as razors. The colorless sky above reflects through a wild tangle of twigs and branches, irregularly splintered by the upthrust arms of trees long drowned. The beauty of water is in its many moods, only a few of which are controlled by that vast arc above. A few days ago I was driving home from work in the half-gloom of dusk when out the window I saw a roadside pond still holding a bright blue heaven though all around was gray and light bleeding away. It seemed an unconformable reflector, or a sapphiric window into a distant world beneath our own.

Today Mill Creek has none of that. Its sinuous track is a quicksilver snake weaving through winterwoods, mirror to a polar sun banking into nothingness. I could shatter that sky with a stone but there seems no reason to so I remain still. Overhead a skein of snow geese soundlessly wings southward. The north wind rises. A storm is coming.

Not far from here a man took his life. Years past a fellow employee at Burns Security put a shotgun in his mouth and yanked the trigger. Before that but not long before I would sometimes place a loaded .357 Magnum against my temple and pull the trigger as far as I dared. I could be accused of not being entirely serious or else I would have applied a little more pressure but that misses the point. 

Sometimes I’m amazed to still be standing as I wasn’t always sure I’d reach this age. Now that I have I’m finding it addictive. The hammering of a woodpecker against a hollow trunk or the skirl of leaves drifting onto the still surface of the creek have enough loveliness within them to smother even the most intractable mood, though getting to the point of being able to see such beauty is often impossible. Clinical depression has been likened to being at the bottom of a dark cavern, which paints a merely adequate picture for the unafflicted. Toss in nightmarish creatures closing in and the inability to reason and the image is more comprehendible. 

What I’m trying to say is I wish I could have met Robert Glenn Bennett on his way to the tree where he ended his life. Being here is an uncomfortable intrusion into a stranger’s most intimate affair and I question my motives even as I wonder if my intent, hopeless as it sounds, was to intercept him. But I am too late and know it. And still I’m drawn to this place. 

Whatever drove him was apprehensible, acceptable and remediable. Let’s get that out of the way first. Let’s also ditch any half-baked theory about his being weaker than the rest of us, as those stonethrowing moral stalwarts among us would have us believe. I didn’t know Bennett so I can’t sit in judgment but I suspect that something hounded him into those woods, something he had no defense against. Even the most undaunted creature wearies of retreat. 

Being here carries another burden, that of survivor. Perhaps it’s a stigma burned into my forehead, my own scarlet letter, but it seems that those closest and dearest to me questioned my motives the most. Beneath it was an accusation that I was dancing too close to the edge, that my own peculiar madness would swallow me whole in those barren woods and like Bennett I would enter and never return. One morning before I work I slipped a .380 into my pocket and saw a look of shock and mistrust on Lori’s face. I assured her it was because of the remoteness of the place and it was mostly true, though I left out the part about feeling exposed and somehow watched when I was there earlier in the week. I wanted to say, “It’s not for that,” a term which required no accounting. And I didn’t. Nevertheless it hung in the air like a guilty thought, and I hurried to leave. 

I was looking for the tree. Armed with a crude pencil sketch, I headed uphill from the road and immediately realized the futility of it. Trees look more or less alike and yet the one I sought was singular in form. I pushed through thickets of red-berried buckbrush and tripped over half-hidden branches and reached the top of the hill and turned back, knowing I’d gone too far. The tree when I found it stood out from the others. I placed my hand on it and felt an immense emptiness that might have been sorrow or something greater. Unbidden, the pistol slid into my hand, a cold, icy comfort. I held it in a blank state of mind until a chickadee scolding from an adjacent tree pulled me back, and I tucked it back in my belt and walked away. 

I don’t begrudge Bennett for doing what he felt he had to. Our lives are controlled by so many outside forces but in this alone we have the final say. It might indeed be that this is all the control we possess, our single godlike power unless we consider love. 

The rising wind whets its knives on my exposed flesh. I’m reminded of once coming indoors with ears so cold they burned, and Lori cupping her hands around them laughing and the warmth in her hands and eyes exploding through me like heat lightning. I pick up a dead leaf and drop it into the creek. It alights soundlessly but fractures the sky’s pallid reflection with tiny ripples that spread and weaken and slowly become still. I say a prayer for Robert Glenn Bennett, wishing him peace and fortune on his journey. While I’m at it I say one for me. 

Dancing into oblivion—the final journey of Robert Glenn Bennett

He is rended, he rends himself, he dances,

he whirls so hard everything he is falls off.

– Jim Harrison

A story, like a life, does not end but goes on and on like a river. 

But people need ends. They need things neatly wrapped and tied. In the case of Robert Glenn Bennett, they need closure. They need to know what happened. Where he disappeared to. So here is an end, but it must be understood that it’s really just a beginning.

Two adults and four kids enter the woods south of Washington. They’re on an autumnal hike, taking in the changing colors, the coolness in the shadows, the birdsong. The mother, Janice Radford, poses her children on a log. She snaps the shutter on what will become the iconic image of this tale, and they march off again. Her daughter points to something beneath a tree and asks what it is. Something to do with hunting, Radford says. Something camouflaged. On they go, but Radford turns and looks back. 

“I think he wanted me to find him,” she says later. “It was like he kept trying to point himself out to me but not to the kids. First the picture taking. Then walking by him and still not seeing, and then it’s like he told my daughter to tell me. It was like he was saying, ‘Look, here I am. I want to be found after all.’”

She sets the photo on her work desk. It’s a typical family shot except that the tree behind her daughter has a faint blue-green thread looped around a fork. A small dark lump rests against the bottom of the trunk, obscured by her daughter’s smiling face. 

“If my daughter wasn’t there you could see him,” she says. 

The discovery of Bennett’s body on Nov. 11 brought to a close the longest search for a missing person in recent local history. “Other than on rare occasions when someone goes missing for a few hours, usually an elderly person, I can’t remember anything like this happening in the county,” said Washington County Sheriff Bill Overbeck. 

Bennett was reported missing on Aug. 2 by his father, Robert S. Bennett. Overbeck’s reaction to the news mirrored that of many others, and not just that of the family. “I was relieved,” he said. “Then I was disappointed.”

His disappointment had more to do with a young couple finding the body and how close the search had come to finding him, but he was not alone in his feelings. It’s one thing to believe the rain-swollen waters of Mill Creek swept him away, as most did, and another to learn he died at his own hand. But to those who knew him best, it wasn’t at all improbable. Indeed, it was almost surprising that he made it as far as he did. 

After the funeral, his mother, Margarette Bennett, reminded her husband of something she’d said 25 years before: “Robert will die young and at his own hand.”

It might not have happened if events had transpired differently. If his vehicle hadn’t broken down 1,200 miles from home. If he hadn’t left home under such circumstances. If he hadn’t been so alone. 

“This was the only door open,” said his wife, Judy Burkett. “I don’t feel he had a choice.”

Robert Bennett, 46, Hazel Green, Al., was born in Ft. Benning, Ga., lived six years in Germany and thereafter moved frequently. He received straight A’s in college and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. The U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Control hired him as a software engineer, a contract position that left him time to pursue his interests. He was a bookworm, a pilot, a scuba diver, a dancer, and, near the end of his life, a freelance photographer. He enjoyed exploring caves and once swam in manatees off the coast of Florida. He was, his mother said, “an adventurer.” 

He was also manic depressive. 

A marriage lasted seven years and collapsed when his wife left him.

Treatment did little to help him and medication left him feeling empty, a friend recalled. Sometimes he was irrational, obsessed with fiscal debt, government spending, things he had no control over. He would leave for days or weeks or pace the floor all night—he called it “working,” part of his spiritual journey. After dabbling in square dancing, he progressed to contra dancing, a traditional early Americana form of English country dances. Contra dancing did something no other hobby could do: it drew him out of his self-imposed shell. 

In contra dances, dancers form a parallel line and join together to live music, usually reels or jigs. Eye contact is encouraged, partially to keep tabs on your partner’s next move. By the end of the evening it’s likely every dancer has danced with every other dancer at least once. 

“Bob was an introvert,” Burkett said. “Dancing gave him a reason to meet people.”

More than that, it was a chance to meet happy people. “You never see mad people dance,” Burkett says. “Dancing gave him happiness and pleasure. It was a positive experience.”

So positive that he took up photography to try to capture that happiness. He specialized in dance photography, capturing that effervescence, that melding of people and motion. In his photographs the dancers’ eyes are the focus. For the first time people noticed him and commented on his work. And it was at a dance in River Falls, S.C., that he met Judy Burkett.

Burkett’s marriage was near its end. There was no attraction between her and Bennett, yet when he complimented her on her dancing it gave a welcome boost to her ego. 

After her divorce, while she lived in Hendersonville, N.C., a fellow dancer invited her to a dance in Memphis. Bennett was there and asked her two questions: how was her husband, how about a second dance. Before the night was over he invited her out.

“He swept me off my feet,” Burkett said. In short order she sold her house and moved to Alabama. Bennett moved in the same day.

He wasn’t working at that time, having quit his job for a dancing and photographic sabbatical. A van outfitted with a computer, 30-inch monitor, generator and satellite dish served as his mobile photo lab, and a small trailer was always packed to embark at a moment’s notice. Burkett’s spacious yard had plenty of room for his rig.

It wasn’t long before they exchanged wedding vows. As she slipped the ring on his finger, Burkett told him, “I love you for who you are. You’re unpredictable. You’re there for me. You care about life. You’re passionate, full of love, you’re giving, you’re kind, you’re spiritual, and you are loved.”

He was all those things and more, she said. His unpredictability manifested itself in many ways, from an occasional desire for seclusion, a penchant for misplacing things and an obsession about government spending. His passion for hobbies flared white-hot only for so long and then abruptly burned to ash. It was a moment-by-moment mode of life, spontaneous, unrehearsed, extemporary. Because of this nature, he insisted on not being caged by a controlling relationship, something Burkett was only too willing to accede. For Bennett these weren’t faults but part of his spirituality, integral to his personality.

“This was very important to him,” Burkett said. “He worked hard at figuring out his spiritual beliefs. He felt in the spiritual world more than the material world.” 

And he could be romantic, such as the time he set an orchid arrangement in the center of the bed and scattered photographs around it. “It just took my breath away,” Burkett said. 

Smoking was a vice he could not overcome. Determined to finally break the habit, he told Burkett he was moving to the van for a few days, that he wasn’t going to be bearable. When that failed, he went in search of an isolated place where he could get completely away from people. Like everything else he did, it was impulsive and without a known destination. He ended up on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations in South Dakota, the stomping grounds of the legendary Crazy Horse, whose biography Bennett was reading. 

What transpired there is unknown. When he returned he was able to concede to his habit by rolling his own cigarettes and using organic tobacco. 

“It didn’t bother me that he wanted to go off by himself,” Burkett said. “It didn’t bother me that he sometimes left his tools out in the rain, or tracked mud onto the carpet. The thing about Bob is I could see and feel something about him. He was so wonderful I was able to accept him with all his imperfections. I never knew what to expect of him.

“I didn’t see his mental illness, his depression,” Judy said. 

Until it was too late.

Bennett had been at his parents’ house for a few days and returned home with a promise of a nice supper. When she arrived from work, he was asleep on the couch. Perturbed that he’d broken his promise, she drove to the store, bought groceries and returned to start cooking. She was not a happy camper.

He realized it. It was the first time he’d seen her this way, and he reacted by calling his dog, Oscar, and loading him in the van. Burkett knew he was leaving and didn’t try to stop him. He’d left before but always made a point of keeping in contact. 

This time was different. It was July 13, 2007. Burkett would never see him alive again.

(Continued next week)

Dancing over the edge – the final journey of Robert Glenn Bennett Part 2

He is rended, he rends himself, he dances,

he whirls so hard everything he is falls off. – Jim Harrison

Suicide is what the death certificate says when one dies of depression. – Peter Kramer

Robert Glenn Bennett phoned his wife, Judy Burkett, one day after walking out. He told her he was confused and had to get away. The date was July 14, 2007.

Leaving was an impulsive act but well within his nature. “He lived very much in the moment,” Burkett said. Clara Welch, a friend who struggled with depression most of her life, warned him of his impulsiveness, especially when dealing with the illness. “When casting out demons,” she said, “don’t cast out the better part of yourself.”

But those demons are resilient.

Those afflicted with clinical depression have described it as a sensation of drowning, falling down a mineshaft or being buried in a dark tunnel. An utter absence of light or hope is universal. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than two million Americans suffer from manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder. Twenty percent of those die at their own hands. Many others consider it.

Winston Churchill called it “the Black Dog,” and confessed to keeping safe distances from the edges of train platforms and ship rails. Franz Kafka was so miserable that he found joy in imagining a knife twisting through his heart. “The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. Abraham Lincoln described himself as the “most miserable man living. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.” It was familiar terrain for Bennett.

Anyone familiar with depression will tell you that being alone leaves them defenseless against their demons. Bennett would be alone for the rest of his life, and his demons were gathering.

***

A week went by without another word. When he called Burkett it was to say his van broke down in Valentine, Neb., a town of 3,000 straddling the Nebraska-South Dakota line. The transmission failed and the vehicle could only maintain a speed of 25 miles per hour. He asked if she was angry with him. She told him she couldn’t wait for him to come home.

For more than a week he called her every day. He holed up behind a hotel in Valentine and tried to sell photographs through a local art dealer. Then, in desperation, he started limping home. 

On the way, a sympathetic rancher gave him $65 and two meals for loading hay. 

By July 29, he reached Washington County. His emotional state was volatile, a pendulum of ecstatic highs and devastating lows. When he wasn’t driving, he e-mailed Burkett nearly continuously. “My goal is to get home as fast as possible,” he wrote. “You are the only person who has ever loved me and I’m going to focus on our life together.”

Two days later his mood darkened. “I’m sorry I failed you so badly,” he wrote. “I’m stranded and I don’t see a way out.”

Bennett’s presence in Washington County didn’t go unnoticed. After seeing a van driving on the shoulder of U.S. 36, Deputy Corey Riggs pulled it over. Riggs noted expired tags and gave Bennett a warning. He suggested seeking help at the Pony Express Truck Stop between Washington and Marysville.

In vain Bennett searched for a pay phone. The truck stop didn’t have one but he heard that Wal-Mart in Marysville did. “I will risk arrest if I try to get there,” he wrote. “I have no idea what to do. I’ve been crying for days.”

On the evening of July 31, Bennett’s e-mails to Burkett were rapidfire. “No more spiritual journeys,” he wrote. “I think I screwed up bad this time. I’m afraid I will die here.”

He discussed calling AAA, having his van towed to Wal-Mart, finding a job when he returned to Alabama, renting a Ryder truck. The mundane planning seemed to calm him.

“This trip taught me that you are the only person I will ever love,” he wrote. “My spiritual journey is over. I will no longer be looking for a community. You are all the community I need.”

Three minutes later he wrote, “I got where I need to be! This trip was awful, but I finally defeated my demons!”

Almost at once the demons regrouped. “I am too depressed to think,” he wrote. Burkett agreed to call his parents to see if they could help.

The next morning, Aug. 1, Burkett greeted him with a message. “Here is something to look forward to when you get home,” she wrote. “The garlic is ready for a taste test.” Bennett’s favorite snack was pickled garlic, an expensive treat he had tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Burkett had perfected a recipe that needed 21 days of refrigeration to infuse. 

Bennett responded with a message saying he had contacted his parents. “Wish me luck,” he wrote.

He gave his parents the address of the Pony Express, where he was staying temporarily, and promised he would seek psychiatric help on his return. Worried about his spiraling mood swings, he asked his mother, Margarette Bennett, if he suffered from schizophrenia. “I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with me,” he said in an e-mail.

“Dr. Mom thinks you are bipolar,” she wrote. “You can go to the health clinic and get medication for that. We love you, son, and you are going to come out of this just fine. Hang in there and we will see you soon.”

“I’ll be here,” Bennett wrote.

When asked to leave the truck stop, Bennett relocated to the campground beside the Mill Creek Dam in Washington. He called his parents to tell them of the change.  

“Mom, something is wrong with me,” he said. He was nearly hysterical. His mother assured him that his father would arrive the next afternoon to bring him home. 

His final e-mail was sent at 8:40 a.m. “I am afraid for Judy,” he wrote. “I love her very much and I fear I’ve lost her. I fear she will never trust love again. She is a wonderful woman, mom. She is the best I will ever find.”

“Depression exhumes our shames,” wrote E.M. Cioran. But it does more than that—it flays its victims with them, methodically stripping away flesh and tendon, each lash reveling in another bloody layer of their own worthlessness. In his e-mails over the past 28 hours, Bennett had agonized over his failings, or what he considered failings, and though he was able to hold them at bay for a while, when at last alone, stranded, faced with returning in disgrace, of having again to be subjected to therapists and medication, of finding another job, of trying to prove himself, he instead gathered a length of climbing rope and walked away. One of his last e-mails lamented, “I am sorry for all the pain I caused.” Impetuous, in the moment, tormented, he would do the one thing that would defeat his demons for good.

***

Bennett’s father, Robert S. Bennett, arrived the next afternoon, Aug. 2, to find the van unlocked and the generator running, both things his son would never do. He grew frantic when Oscar, his son’s dog, emerged matted and muddy from the woods. When he called his wife for advice, she told him to contact the sheriff. Nine hundred miles away, Margarette Bennett walked over to the calendar and penciled in, “Robert left me today.” 

***

From the start, Washington County Sheriff Bill Overbeck had no idea what to believe. He could have a murder on his hands, a drowning, a confused stranger wandering off into unfamiliar territory, or even a man looking to start a new life elsewhere. The search began the next morning. 

Overbeck was half-right on all counts though he wouldn’t know most of it for several days, nor would he know the rest until three months later, when Janice Radford posed her children on a log in a wooded area south of town, raised her camera and snapped the shutter.

***

“In hindsight you wonder what you could have done differently,” Burkett said. “There’s all this guilt. But I really don’t feel guilty. I feel sad. And I miss him like crazy. I wish I could have known him longer. He taught me so much that I can’t even put words to it.”

When her husband was in Washington he was dealing with a lot of dead ends, she said. “He wasn’t working so he didn’t have much money. He was in debt. His van wasn’t working. He was so alone, so desperate, in so much despair, that he didn’t see any other way out. I wish he would have called me, but he was in such a terrible, terrible place he couldn’t.”

“He was a tortured soul,” his mother said. “It wasn’t in our power to help him. I don’t blame him for what he did. He couldn’t survive in this world.”

***

On Dec. 1, the remains of Robert Glenn Bennett were laid to rest near Weaver, Ala. 

His memory remained very much alive. 

Margarette Bennett and her husband attended a memorial service at Burkett’s home, where more than 150 cards arrived the day of the service. Strangers approached her with stories of how Bennett helped them through their own personal crises. “I didn’t realize how many people he had touched,” she said.

When she canceled the annual Christmas family reunion, her other son, Robbie, vowed to keep the tradition alive, even if it meant doing all the cooking himself.

“I really felt young until this happened,” she said. “It has aged me 10 years. My hair had a little gray in it before. It’s completely white now.”

The State of Alabama refused to recognize Burkett and Bennett’s common-law marriage on grounds they hadn’t filed in time. Burkett contacted Overbeck and asked if her husband’s wedding ring had been found with the remains. Having no record of it, the sheriff returned with a metal detector and located it a few feet from the tree. He subsequently mailed the ring to her.

Friends told Burkett that Bennett’s death was a tragedy. She disagreed.

“Part of me thinks maybe it wasn’t a tragedy just because he struggled his whole life and that he tried to live and survive on this earth as we know it,” she said. “And it just wasn’t working. Maybe his tragedy was being on earth, if that makes sense. Who knows what happens after you die? But he struggled so much that part of me thinks of him as being brave to be able to do what he needed to do.”

After a quiet pause, she added, “I need to believe that for my own way out.” 

“It was an amazing chapter in my life, like a whirlwind,” Burkett said. “Those 15 months I was with him, I would do it all again, I would do it all again in a heartbeat, even knowing what I’ve gone through the last three months. He really was a good guy, but he probably didn’t know that.”

***

Radford keeps the photograph on her work desk. Bennett’s death haunted her for weeks, especially the coincidences involved with finding the body. 

“How else do you explain them?” she asked. “I think it was meant to be. Why we were chosen to answer that question I will never know. I don’t get too upset about it anymore because I remind myself that his family now has closure. The question ‘where is he?’ has been answered.”

Aftermath

We will always have sticks                                                                   January 7, 2008

In the aftermath of our mini-ice age I gathered my bow saw and went to work on the larger limbs littering our yard. The afternoon was warming toward the high forties under a sky veiled with thin clouds. My shirt was quickly soaked with sweat so I stripped off my jacket and tossed it on the picnic table. The saw blade easily ripped through green boughs but rasped sharper on the deadfalls. Blanched bits of sawdust freckled my trousers and floated in the air like motes of dust. 

Being outdoors and productive felt exhilarating. I threw myself into the work, sawing the larger limbs into eight-foot lengths and dragging them to the roadside like some landlocked beaver. Those in the shadow of the house had to be ripped from the ice. I tried methodically clearing backwards from the street, a plan which worked until I reached the side of the house. There, it appeared as if an entire forest of narrow single-trunk trees had collapsed across the fence or speared into the grass. Several were meshed into the fence itself, requiring a bolt cutter to remove. 

My immobile profession was telling within a short span of time. Muscles I’d forgotten scolded me for my woeful lack of exercise. They tightened and tensed and ached. Like a clock winding down, I incrementally slowed, each heavy branch a heavier burden than that before, the distance from origin to destination yawning greater with each. Looking west along that fenceline was a depressing sight, with broken and splintered trees lying athwart the barbed wire or piled haphazardly along its length like bodies stacked in a Civil War photo.

And that was only the larger pieces, the trunks and branches big enough to see from the road. Beneath them was an irregular carpet of smaller twigs and sticks, hundreds of thousands of them that needed to be raked into piles and carted off in a wheelbarrow. It was a daunting task that stopped me in my tracks. I hung the saw on a broken branch and surveyed the yard. Everywhere I looked were sticks. Long sticks and short sticks, thick sticks and narrow sticks, sticks with reddish buds and sticks with fractures. Sticks and more sticks. 

The beginning of this project was abrupt enough—freezing drizzle endlessly raining down in the dark hours of a winter night. The end would be endless. I removed my gloves, retrieved the saw, and called it a day.

There are always fewer beginnings than ends. Real beginnings, true beginnings, are fresh, pristine, raw universes unfettering our imaginations. Endings are theories more than actualities. Endings echo and reverberate, pulse and resound, regenerate. Endings remain, even if sullied by memory or bleached by time. Endings are instilled in our tissues, infused into our cells, woven into our memories. Beginnings occur exactly once and no more.

I can’t pinpoint when Robert Glenn Bennett first weighed on my heart. Mid-November or thereabouts, plus a few weeks or even months where the man was less a man and more an abstract thought. A missing man, with all the baggage and suspicion that brings. A gone man. But at some point he became a real man, a beginning, and everything that followed was connected to his being. 

Certainly crossing Mill Creek south of Washington twice a week kept his presence alive. Somnolent, drowsy, a minor prairie stream of occasional moodiness and rampant wildness, which many of us feared bore him away—blameless, it turned out, but destined to be forever linked to his story and by that link forever bequeathed. Mill Creek forever and ever, without end, amen.

Finding Bennett in the shadow of that hill should have been an ending. It was, I suppose, and it wasn’t. Bennett turned into a face and a person and a man I both admired and recognized. And pitied. And when I pursued his story a strange thing happened: Bennett turned into Bob. 

Writing is a slow process for me. It begins with an idea and expands from there like a seed germinating and sprouting into multi-branched stems. As it grows, as more information is gathered, the stem thickens into a trunk. A weeding process then occurs where pertinent facts or quotations are retained and extraneous material is pruned away. When the story is finished, what’s left are the branches. The sticks are discarded. But oh, sometimes there are so many sticks, a carpet of sticks, and each stick reinforces a memory. 

With the Bob Bennett story, after hours of interviews, reams of notes and e-mails, research into depression and suicide, and one scary walk to the brink of madness, I had a rough draft. Weeks of pruning followed with input from others close to Bob. In many ways it was the most difficult story I’ve ever written and not merely because of the enormous amount of information to be whittled down. I was cutting too close to home. One slip of the saw and blood would flow.

This last weekend I had an ending to the story. There was only a final copyediting and revision to do, and then I could move on to other things. The relief I felt was exhausting. Which was why taking the saw to the downed trees proved such exhilaration—it was a catharsis of sorts, and anyway strenuous activity following mental wrangling clears the head and, perhaps, the heart.

I fear I did not succeed in telling Bob’s story. No matter what I do he is still with me, even as our yard is blanketed with the remains of trees that once provided shade and beauty. These are the sticks of our endless endings. We will always have sticks.

Not alone in waiting                              April 23, 2008

All evening the wind howled and raged and tore at the house as if trying to level it, and a deep restlessness settled over me so that I paced the floor or stared sightlessly out the windows or knelt to rub Sheba, our little black angora rabbit, who in that way of familiars instinctively inferred something was amiss. I downed a beer and went to bed and lay there listening to the rhythmic slap slap slap of a loose shingle and the rattle of storm windows and felt the bed beneath me vibrate and thrum. The clock’s pale glow emphasized the emptiness of the room and nothing more. Closing my eyes brought no sleep but a view of a wooded knoll crowned with two stately pines and a sense of unfinished business down a narrow dirt road I did not want to go, and a question I was afraid to ask: what would change with her coming? 

After a while I rose and made a pot of coffee. As it brewed I sat on the floor rubbing Sheba, who curled against me like a cat, and when the coffee was ready I told her I would return around midnight or a little later. At the last minute I slipped the Glock under my shirt, though I could not say why. 

There were other questions of course, some half-formed and floating unspoken on the edge of consciousness, others that would come later. One I wanted answered was whether the dead depart or in certain circumstances are imprisoned in places where violence has occurred. Even considering it bordered on a madness that seemed all too proximate, so I tried to shunt it aside. Once raised, though, forever invoked: It clung to me like a second skin.

The night was sound and motion and a force battering at the door. Opening it unleashed a hurricane that rocked me back, and only with effort did I push back and exit the house. The plastic end table we keep by the door was missing and the trash can knocked over. The former was out by the street, legs upraised, rocking wildly in preparation for further flight. I retrieved it and stood listening to the gale roaring through the trees, a raw, elemental dissonance of mindless fury. It was easy to imagine pioneers in their ill-jointed soddies going mad from the sound. Madness I understood. It was madness to stand there beneath the creaking, groaning trees, already splintered and weakened by ice and now strained by winds funneled up from the Gulf.

I thought of a tree where a man had hanged himself and recalled the terrible emptiness I’d felt after reaching out and touching the rough bark. 

After the howling and buffeting, the interior of the truck was anti-noise, more than silence, deeper than stillness. The sudden transformation was almost unnerving, but a respite, too. Beyond the thin layer of glass the nightworld churned and danced and I was immune to its cadence, sealed within my own atmosphere and realm.  

At the end of the block a stop sign shimmered in the wind, wildly flapping back and forth as if angrily trying to free itself. Small branches skittered across the road like fleeting thoughts, briefly passing from darkness to light and back into darkness. The city looked different, a mere five hours’ time difference between my normal commute, and yet a quantum leap. Businesses normally closed were brightly illuminated and peopled, houses lit that were normally dark, vehicles traversing streets normally haunted by foxes, feral cats, and opossums. I felt like a stranger though one with a darkness in my soul and a loaded handgun sitting on the seat beside me.

It was the final disconnect. I would throw myself into work in an attempt to exorcise the wakefulness and something more, something that came to me when I left Washington earlier that afternoon. I had just crossed the bridge over Mill Creek and saw the knoll and felt a stab of loss as I sometimes do, but this time a different emotion welled up, one of breathless anticipation. But it wasn’t an anticipation coming from within—it came from the knoll, distinctly and clearly, and with it words that were not words, a statement fully formed, unsummoned and unmistakable: She’s coming. 

Rattled, I wondered if I were injecting my own thoughts into the moment, but as the hours passed I mulled over the experience and grew more certain at what happened. Lori was gone to work and the house empty and in that emptiness fertile ground for imagination or clarity, depending on where one believes that nebulous demarcation lies. 

She’s coming. Judy Burkett, the widow of Robert Glenn Bennett, was due to arrive in Washington for the weekend, and we were to meet at her request as friends. No news articles or interviews, merely a private act of closure privately administered, in and out, no fanfare and then the long miles back to Alabama. The newshound in me reluctantly agreed but I understood and could no more than accept her wishes. I would want the same for me.

But her coming created a storm of emotions and raised questions I found both fearsome and fascinating. And in asking those questions opened myself to a place outside the normal boundaries of existence, a place that once entered holds no escape or release. 

And then there was that voice. I hesitated to even consider it or give the idea legitimacy, but if what I’d felt crossing Mill Creek was real, it seemed I was not alone in expecting her. 

(Conclusion next week)

He is not here             April 28, 2008

“I’ll probably never come back,” she said.

We were standing in the city park in Washington, a crisp wind rising in the north and the sky glazing into a seamless white field. The day before had been in the seventies under windless conditions, ideal for a widow pilgrimaging to a place where her husband had taken his life. I nodded and looked away; there was nothing more to add.

I almost hadn’t come. In the week leading up to Judy Burkett’s visit I’d let days pass before responding to her e-mails, days spent in nameless anxiety. Months before, when I was researching Robert Glenn Bennett’s life and final hours, we spent hours together on the phone discussing their short life together, how they’d met and fallen in love, their search for a perfect house, his talent as a photographer and contra dancer and the depression that would ultimately destroy him. Together we wrote his story, and now she was coming to see for herself the ill-fated tree and had asked to meet, and I was having a meltdown. It made no sense. 

I’m certainly no stranger to inexplicable emotional surges but I can usually decipher their deeper causes. This had me stumped. Believing in many ways that we’d taken a sad and painful journey together, I was eager to meet her in person for a final culmination. And yet in stories such as ours a separation had existed, a distance both safe and perhaps even necessary, and her coming would change the complexity of our relationship. Maybe she wouldn’t even like me, finding me someone different than she had imagined. Maybe I would find her a stranger. Maybe this was a mistake.

If not for that voice I’d heard when leaving town a few days earlier, I might have found an excuse that worked. I couldn’t. Taking it as a summons I went and arriving early paced restlessly until a small blue car pulled up. Judy got out and I walked over and folded her in my arms. It was the unambiguously proper thing to do and with it something hard broke loose within me.

She and her sister had visited the tree twice, once the day before and again that morning, when she left a small memento. She told me of the memorial service in Atlanta where a clearing had been made in the center of the dance floor except for a single small table piled with letters people had written of their times with Bob, a kind of scrivened history of one man’s legacy, and when the assemblage asked Judy to dance solo once around those accounts she did, and at the finale swept in like mantling wings and gathered her into a collective embrace. The writings then burned to ashes to meld and fuse and become one chronicle placed at the base of a tree 1,000 miles away on a crisp April morning.

Her eyes were brown and clouded with too much sorrow.   

We spoke of healing and its incremental pace, of memory and loss and deliverance, and asking questions for which there were no answers concluded that suicide is an inherently selfish act that leaves too many victims, too many puzzles and not nearly enough defenses. That we who remain can only accept the unacceptable and carry on, for such is our burden and our salvation.

After a while words bled away into raw emotion. She said that meeting was somehow necessary, by which I understood the curative power of shared experience and empathy, and the necessity of firsthand knowledge. In darkness only do our fears flourish, and here was light and warmth and the dawning of a new day.

After watching them drive away, I drove to the base of the knoll and parked. Any attempt at gauging my emotional state ended in a contented emptiness, an absence that left me distrustful. Wild turkeys scrabbled before me as I walked along the fenceline and a pair of red-tailed hawks swooped and dived overhead in an aerial mating display. A phoebe called, then a cardinal. The trees blocked and filtered the wind so that a breathless hush descended, and I moved on straining to hear a familiar voice and hearing nothing but birdsong and my own plodding footsteps swishing the grass came at last to the tree where Robert Glenn Bennett had died. 

I didn’t know what to expect and so expected nothing. Sorrow perhaps, as I’d felt before, or loneliness. I placed a hand on the bark and blanked my mind and when nothing came opened my eyes and caught the movement of a little brown bird. It flew into a clump of broken branches and I turned to follow. The bird flushed into a deeper thicket and went to ground. Circling the thicket brought no movement but a strange sort of dawning that I had neglected my reason for coming. With a pang of remorse I glanced back at the tree and found it a tree only and no more, surrounded by others similar to its shape and form like mirror images or protectors and beyond it the ascendant slopes of a squat knoll crowned by two stately pines. Had its shape not been burned into my soul I could easily have mistaken it for any other there. But its shadow was gone and had been before my arrival. A smile crept across my face. “Goodbye, Bob,” I said.

I was halfway back when I heard a car door slam. One of my biggest fears in writing Bob’s story was that the tree would become a destination for thrill-seekers or worse, though I also knew that others might come simply to pay their respects to a stranger who had become one of us. And though I had wanted to visit the tree one final time alone and in solitude, it was with altogether lighter steps I was leaving, and the farther I walked the lighter I felt with an unconstrained joy overwhelming me. If I met pilgrims on the way as we are all pilgrims I would not shy away but tell them the news: “He is not here.” And passing on to the base of the knoll I would drive away and not look back, I would never again look back, for the tree was just a tree and my friend Bob was not there.

The unspeakable yearning                                                                                            August 20, 2008

“If you dive down deep enough there are no words to bring you up,” the poet Jim Harrison wrote, that deep being familiar territory to artists, writers and other introverts. I was surprised to read where the essayist Edward Hoagland refused to approach deck rails on a cruise to Antarctica for fear he would throw himself overboard. It wasn’t that he was particularly despondent but that once accepted the idea of suicide becomes a second shadow, inescapable in bright sunlight or the darkest night. Sylvia Plath put her head in the oven. The Soviet poet Sergei Yesenin used a rope, also used by my friend Robert Glenn Bennett, a photographer and dancer whom I did not know until afterward and there was no time for conversing other than the mute dialog of two men brought together beneath a scarred tree in an empty forest. 

No words can bring you up. Lately I’ve been immersing myself in poetry and shying away from sharp instruments, knives especially, though the new single-blade razor in the utensil drawer caught my eye and held it for a breathless lingering moment that left me weak-kneed as always and contemplative of the severing of veins. It doesn’t help that I ran out of pills for a medical condition and my legs now dance to their own unfathomable tune, day and night but mostly night which I have come to dread. “You’re keeping funny hours,” the guard at the plant told me one morning a few minutes past midnight, to which I could only nod. We’re basically strangers so it would have been uncouth to admit that it was either go to work or tumble over the edge.

“It is profoundly startling not to trust oneself after decades of doing so,” Hoagland wrote, something he blamed in part on failing health and a body past its prime. The decade in question was his fifth, midway through, a point I am about to attain granted the heart continues its regular beat. A shattered body sent the playwright Spalding Gray out to sea though I believe the usual culprit is an accumulation of disappointments, a mathematical formula of equal parts addition and subtraction and whose sum never balances. 

When I mowed a vacant lot last week I asked myself what I wanted to accomplish before I died, the query couched in the theory that I would not attain a ripe old age. After all it’s mine, the one true thing that belongs to me and me alone, disregarding the connect to the woman I love, that intangible bond. (Even then thankful in a sick way that our roles were not reversed, that I had to labor under the anxiety that she might take her life and leave me destitute. The guilt biting as acid.) The only thing summoned forth was to see the Grand Canyon again. This was followed by thoughts of how best to finagle the deed, to arrange a tumble, a fall from the heights, oh how metaphorically perfect that would be, to slip, to fall, to break apart on the stones below! The grass was deep and mowing slow and as I wended my way up and down those rows and around the concrete foundation with its unruly border of weeds and fledgling elms I managed to set that as a limit. After that, anything goes.

And now my right foot launches into a sidestep and a pirouette, a tap dance, the twist, the funk and jive. Its life its own and not mine, as if I could even imagine owning my own body. The mind thinks it holds the aces but its hand is empty as dreams, to coin a metaphor for a game I was never interested in nor good at. 

This is not self-indulgence but a simple statement. I sing as did Walt Whitman only of what and where I am. After one particularly grueling day I sat on the front porch as the evening sun sank into the west and watched nighthawks stream past accompanied on a lower plane by green darners, black saddlebags and other migrating dragonflies. Caught in the dying light they seemed to glow with a lambent flame I thought I recognized, something I possessed once but long ago and far away. That flame a warmth however fleeting, drawing me back as no language can.

No words can bring you up but maybe other things can. Birds at dusk, Pleiades rising, my wife’s entwining fingers, moonlight on the river, the hum of crickets.