Three Tragic Childhood Experiences, Part One
Photo by Caleb Woods
I lived in the small town of Sigurd, Utah. A Mormon community, with a population of around 300 down-to-earth souls. The Jack-Mormons — those who were of the faith but didn’t follow the rules of no drinking or smoking or going to church on Sundays — had an average of 2.5 kids whereas the more religious ones had five or more children. One family had twelve built-in babysitters.
I loved growing up there until my father turned religious. But that’s another story. I loved being able to walk around town and along the canal, hang out at the river bridge to gaze into the water below, wander down by the slough to check out the forts the boys had made, or ride my bicycle down country roads to explore old trash piles for treasures without feeling I was in danger. As I wandered, those times made me realize that my favorite colors were yellow for the sunshine, blue for the sky, and green for the green fields I’d pass by on my treks.
Entering my teens, I rode my bike in the summer to visit my cousin, who was a year younger than me. We would go up into their barn’s hay loft with binoculars because it had a perfect view of the river. During the heat of the day, we’d be able to watch the boys skinny dipping. Those were precious times.
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But this story is not about those precious times, it’s about the year of deaths and traumas that kids shouldn’t have to face. The year my friends and I were turning eight years old, the year three classmates, who were also my friends, died much too young, all at different times.
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In retrospect, it seemed that when the ball of death started rolling, it wasn’t going to stop. But we didn’t realize the ball started rolling with Charlotte, and it would gain such disastrous momentum.
Charlotte was a beautiful Japanese girl, fun and funny, and I liked riding my bike on the dirt road to her farm to visit her. She began to change little by little as she showed signs of fatigue. She missed a few days of school here and there until just before the school year ended for the summer and she didn’t come back anymore. I rode my bike to go see her but was told that she was very sick. She had leukemia, her mother explained, which was a word I didn’t understand. Nor did I understand the power it held when it took my friend away forever. But I didn’t understand what ‘forever’ meant either. Until tomorrow? I wondered.
I didn’t understand any of that when I went to their farm with my parents one day all dressed up. I thought we were paying them a visit and I was excited to see my friend. Yet somehow, I felt I wouldn’t be able to play with her; I just didn’t know why. When we entered the house, I recognized the smell of apple blossoms. It was the family’s favorite fragrance Charlotte had told me when I would smell it when I visited her. I saw that there were vases full of apple blossoms sitting on tables on each side of a large box.
Walking into the living room, we were greeted warmly by Mr. and Mrs. Inouye who thanked us for coming. Mrs. Inouye took my hands and squeezed them and told me how sorry she was about my losing such a good friend. She had tears in her eyes as I looked at her in confusion. I watched the tears streak down Mrs. Inouye’s face as my parents pulled me along and stopped at the big box. I saw my good friend asleep within a satin-lined bed within the box. She looked beautiful and peaceful with her hands together holding a small branch of apple blossoms. I wanted to touch her and wake her up.
“Charlotte!” I whispered, but she didn’t seem to hear me. I hadn’t understood my parent’s words when they told me that she wasn’t going to wake up that she had gone to Heaven. What was ‘heaven’? I wondered.
“She’s with our Heavenly Father,” they explained. I went to church enough to have heard about Heavenly Father who watched over us and stuff like that, but if he was watching over us, why was Charlotte here but not waking up? I couldn’t grasp the concept of her being ‘dead’. “What does that mean?” I kept asking.
They put it in simpler terms by saying that I wouldn’t be able to play with Charlotte anymore and that made me very sad. The next day we went to church and I saw the fancy box that my friend had been sleeping in at her house. It was at the foot of the podium where the bishop was speaking. I tried to listen to what the man had to say that would help me understand what was happening but he just spoke of the sadness of loss at such an early age and about things that I didn’t want to hear. I just wanted my friend back but somehow got the message that that wasn’t going to happen.
Photo by Fredrik Solli Wandem
After the service, we went to the cemetery that was out of town on the same dirt road that went to the Inouye farm. The wind had picked up a bit and the air was thick with dust. It was spring, so it wasn’t too hot but it seemed to me to be an unsettled day. A day I didn’t like. A day that made me feel very bad in my sadness because everyone else was sad, too. There were lots of tears and I thought that I should also be crying but I wasn’t sure why yet. I was afraid that I would find out one day and really feel the sadness, but at that moment, I could only wonder and question and try to understand why my friend was in a box that was going into a big hole in the ground.
I knew that a cemetery was for dead people, but the people there had died long ago and I didn’t know who they were, which made them unreal for me. It didn’t seem right that my friend would be put there, too.
I was in a fog for several days about the whole episode of the ‘viewing,’ as my mother called the visit to the house, and seeing my friend in the box, then the meeting at the church my mother called a ‘funeral’, and then seeing the box lowered into the ground at the cemetery that I passed by on my bicycle many times but never paid much attention to…it was all too complicated and scary and I didn’t want to think about the whys of it. I didn’t know what to think about to help me understand. My parent’s explanations were unthinkable and didn’t make sense, so I didn’t ask them anymore. Maybe one of my other friends would know more. But the ones I asked were as vague about the whole thing as I felt.
Time helped ease the confusion in my mind and I thought that if I didn’t think about it anymore all would be well. I got used to not having Charlotte to play with and she soon became just a memory. But there were two other events that happened that summer which brought the memories and sadness come charging back full force.
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Click to read part two.