police would report that my parents had arrived at the market to find two men inside — their friend and employee, T, who had been stabbed, as well as the man who stabbed him. My father called 911 to get help for T, and when the operator asked my dad if he knew who did it, he replied something to the effect of, “No, but there’s a man here who might.” My parents were shot soon after the 911 call. The homicide inspector would say that the man who stabbed, and ultimately killed, T did so in a “fit of anger” over a money dispute and that he killed my parents because they could identify him. Their killer was a regular customer at the store.
A police cruiser arrived at the market within minutes of my dad’s 911 call, but the officers left because the doors were locked and they believed the store to be empty. Three hours would pass before neighbors called the police again, because the store still hadn’t opened. You can waste a life wondering what might have happened had those first officers gone inside and called an ambulance. Or you can convince yourself that your parents would have died anyway, even if help had arrived, that their injuries were too extreme. One thing you cannot do is erase the image of them bloodied and dead on the floor of their fruit market, the market where you had spent many summer and weekend days working alongside them.
I had no idea how to process my parents’ deaths, let alone the way they died. How does a fourteen-year-old wrap his mind around such violence, and such loss? How does anyone? After a foggy couple of months punctuated by seesawing shock and devastation, I locked their deaths — and their lives — away, deep within me, out of reach of my day-to-day existence.
I moved in with Rose (who was thirty at the time) and Joe and their son, my nephew Joey. I went from my ethnically diverse westside suburb to her strictly white and Christian eastside neighborhood. I started a new high school, immersed myself in schoolwork, and acted like everything was just fine. Like I didn’t miss my old home and school desperately. Like I was adjusting well to my new reality. Like I wasn’t an orphan whose mom and dad had been murdered just months before. I smiled a lot, made a bunch of new friends, and mastered the art of shifting any discussion about parents to some other topic.
“What does your dad do for work?” a classmate would ask.
“Wait, have you heard the new Tears for Fears song?” I would respond. And just like that, we’d be talking about music.
Like a pro chess player, always several moves ahead, I manipulated most conversations away from family well before they even landed on the subject. This vigilance taxed me, but I refused to let my new classmates know about my parents. I wanted to appear normal at all costs, and ninth-grade orphans weren’t the norm in suburban Detroit.
I kept myself busy throughout high school — as the class president, as the student council vice president, as the school board liaison, as a yearbook editor, as a tennis player, as a swimmer, as a clerk at the local sporting goods store, as a receptionist at an area tennis club, as a popular and smart kid with more than enough school, work, and social distractions to ensure as little parental contemplation as possible. I thought about my parents every day, of course, but I didn’t allow myself to dwell on their absence. I didn’t allow myself to feel them. And I definitely didn’t talk about them. My siblings, like me, never talked about my parents, either, which only made it easier to keep Mom and Dad locked away.
After high school, I leapt into life as a college kid at the University of Michigan. I made lots of new friends, partied a bunch, joined a fraternity, partied even more, worked several jobs, skipped the classes that bored me, excelled in the ones that enthralled me, transitioned from a Republican to a leftist revolutionary, quit the fraternity, tried most drugs for the first time, had a good amount of sex, and generally loved my four years in Ann Arbor.
Through it all, I continued to hide the fact that I was an orphan as much as I could. I eventually told my close friends, of course, but kept it quiet with everyone else. I felt ashamed to have lost my parents the way I did. Like I was deeply flawed, even cursed, because of their murder. Besides, college-aged orphans may have been slightly more common, but the murderous backstory overwhelmed people. And their shocked oh my Gods and sad I’m so sorrys overwhelmed me. Even more than feeling like a freak, I didn’t want to be pitied by my peers, and it’s impossible not to feel pity for someone whose parents were shot to death. So I continued to act like everything was okay. And, for the most part, it was.
About once a year throughout high school and college, triggered by an unexpected conversation or too many drinks or the sheer inability to suppress the grief anymore, I’d sob myself raw for hours and hours and then get back to being fine.
This was how I coped. How I survived. I disconnected from the reality of my parents’ death. I buried the pain. The truth is, I didn’t consciously do anything. It’s as though the pain buried itself to protect me, to keep me from burying myself beneath it.
But the pain didn’t really go away. It stayed hidden but present, like a parasite. Not enough to take me down but enough to weaken me. It entered my body in the form of a regular cough and a nervous stomach. It entered my relationships as controlled distance and an unwillingness to commit too seriously to anyone. It entered my sleep as nightmares, endless scenarios of violence and death. Because I wouldn’t allow for its release, the emotional pain created outlets of its own, however it could.
Still, into my twenties, I acted like I had dealt with my parents’ death and moved on. What else was there to do? I was so good at avoiding my grief, I had convinced myself it no longer existed. I wasn’t pretending I was okay; in my mind, I was healed. I didn’t attribute my nervous stomach or my fear of intimacy to losing my parents. I shook off any suggestion of abandonment issues, even after ending yet another relationship too suddenly and without good reason. Aside from the constant nightmares, in which my parents or I were being chased and murdered, I didn’t believe their death was affecting my life much at all.
I was wrong.
In my early twenties and living in San Francisco, I had one of my yearly cries. Except it lasted for days. I locked myself in my bedroom and unraveled. All the pain I’d been hiding revealed itself. Rage and devastation and hopelessness swallowed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents, grasping for any memories that my grief hadn’t vanquished. Mom, in her purple terry-cloth jumpsuit and oversize glasses, stirring her pasta sauce, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips. Dad stretched out on the family room sofa, eating popcorn from his favorite aluminum bowl, watching Star Trek. The two weeks every summer we spent at the log cabin in northern Michigan. Hours upon hours of pinochle and poker games.
Along with the memories, I focused on their murders, as though I had been there. I heard the gunshots and my mother’s screams. I saw my parents drop to the floor, as blood pooled around their bodies. I pictured their killer standing over them, his gun still cocked, ready to take another shot just to be sure. These images played like loops in my mind — the screams, the bodies, the blood, their killer — and I couldn’t make them stop. I wondered about their last breaths. Could they see each other at the end? What were their final words to each other? Did Mom think of me at all?
Then came my anger, an impossible rage, and it didn’t target just God, though it hit God hard. It went after my parents, too. Why did my dad have to buy that fucked-up market in that fucked-up neighborhood? How could he ever have allowed my mom to work there? And why didn’t she say no? The week they got killed was to be my mom’s last week at the store. For months I’d been begging her to quit, and she had finally relented. Four more days, and she would have been free. Just ninety-six more hours. Then my anger moved on from my parents and went after me. Why hadn’t I begged her harder? Why hadn’t I made her quit months before? I could have saved her life.
Still locked in my room in San Francisco, I kept mourning. I hated my parents, then loved them, then missed them, then blamed them. More than anything, I just wanted them back. I wanted more time with them. No longer in denial, I had finally woken up — to a nightmare. I couldn’t see a future beyond the pain. I didn’t consider suicide, yet I couldn’t find the point in living with so much anger and sadness. I had no idea how