By Megan Saunders
Spring 2019 Kaplan Award Winner
I’ve always hated loud noises. Loud, banging, ringing in your ears noises. Noises that shake you to the core, the sounds that make your body rattle and your heart tries to steady you but cannot. Your heart beats faster, faster, faster. Thump, thump, thump, thump. Your hands tremble. Your legs weaken.
“Are there going to be guns today?”
“I don’t know, Megan,” my mom said. She knew what was coming. She always said she didn’t know but she knew. But she didn’t bring earplugs this time. I need my earplugs.
She held my baby brother in her lap as we sat on the cold metal seats. I was already shivering. But it wasn’t cold out. The clammy backs of my thighs stuck to my tights. I tugged on the thin fabric. I secretly hoped it would rip. Maybe we could leave.
“I think there’s going to be guns,” I said.
“I’ll hold you, sweet girl. I can cover you with my jacket,” Terrie said. She was always there, but I didn’t know why. I loved her.
As a child, you encounter so many people and don’t know why they are present in your life. Or maybe it was just me, because our house was a revolving door at the time. People in and out constantly. Mostly I just watched my sing-along song VHS tapes and stayed in the corner of the room. I’ve heard that I would eye the visitors from a corner with a solemn look in my face. Hollow almost. But I would quickly turn back to the television.
Terrie was one of these visitors. She and her husband Mike and son Jeff. Terrie was a heartbeat of a person. She was always smiling. She was warm. I found out when I got older that Mike worked for the Kennewick Police Department, and she was a licensed therapist. Which explained her understanding nature in more ways than one.
As we sat there, men in blue uniforms marched forth with flags. They stomped. They yelled—loud and booming like always. I could never understand what they were saying. But I understood why they did it. Death.
They planted their flags into their golden stands with a unison thud. Then yelled more, stood erect. And marched off. The ceremony started.
I was on edge, my little body shaking as the time passed, leaning closer and closer to Terrie. I tugged on the jacket she had splayed across her lap. The men approached again, like giant statues coming to life. I knew.
I dove under the navy blue jacket, it’s scratchy fleece rubbing against my face. I didn’t care. I wanted protection. A cocoon of blue enveloped me, and then went black. I squeezed my eyes shut with all of my force. I plugged my ears with my fingertips. I tried to subdue every sense—so I wouldn’t feel anything. I wanted to be numb. Just numb.
Thunderous BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMs hit the sky with a force that I felt rushing through my whole body, vibrating from my toes up to my brain, and then to my eyes. I began to shake as a steady stream of tears rushed down my face. I tasted the too-familiar saltiness that I hated.
It’ll be okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.
* * *
My mom never hid the manner of my dad’s death. From the time I can remember, I’ve always known. She told me as I got older that people would ask why she told us the truth. Why she didn’t just say he passed away in his sleep or simply leave out the manner of his sudden death. I was young enough, after all, and she was still pregnant with my brother.
“That’s ridiculous,” she would say to me in her recollections. “Why would I lie to my kids? I’d rather you hear from me than the news, or other people. You deserved to know everything.”
Yet, even as I sit writing I don’t—I can’t—remember the first time she told me. Which is comprehensible because I was a toddler. Just two and a half. My mom said she told me right after it happened. I have imagined this conversation in my head but always stop before I allow myself to delve deeper into my own psyche, my own feelings of ‘what if.’ Because it’s too painful. How do you tell your two and a half year old daughter that half her life force—half of the caregiving unit that she knows as her two true loves, has been torn from her in such a violent, senseless way?
My dad, a Washington State Patrol Trooper, was shot and killed in the line of duty. I’ve always known what guns were—and what they were capable of doing. Tearing apart families. Ripping the seams of my mother’s wishes for her own family, the chance she had to separate herself from her own parents’ dysfunction. A daughter’s dreams of playing sports and daddy-daughter dances and an aisle-walking future—all dissipated like a mirage. Reach out to touch it and it’s gone.
Looking back, I believe at a certain point I realized that guns were loud, which meant pain to my ears and my body, shaken violently from the inside. I knew that guns killed people. In ways that go beyond comprehension yet seem so simple, my developing brain must have pieced the two together. Loud noises equal death.
Guns. Bagpipes. Sirens. They reminded me of my dad’s death.
The peculiar part is this—imagining his death was always silent. Muted. Almost numb. And fragmented.
I could never picture him talking, just silently approaching a car. A pickup truck. The color of the truck always changed. Sometimes it was red or blue. Most of the time it was green. It was dark outside, pitch black with only the yellow street lights illuminating on the scene. It was always on the same empty road. And so silent.
Maybe it was because I didn’t remember his voice. But I couldn’t imagine anyone else talking either. I could see his face, expressionless. The people in the truck didn’t have faces, nor any identifying characteristics. But I could imagine their presence, heavy and evil. Lurking.
Some of the time my imagination would end there. Other times it would start with a silent gunshot, striking his temple. His body falling slowly to the ground. Tires spinning. Darkness. There was no blood in my vision until I got older. But it was rare. Even into my adolescent years I hardly imagined much, just a splatter of red trickling down into a shallow pool of blood on the narrow street.
Just laying there, breathless. Silent.
I couldn’t see his face anymore.
* * *
By the time I was 14, I had attended dozens of memorial events with my family, ones for my dad and other fallen officers. I was used to the ceremonial details. I nearly had them memorized.
Honor guard marches in, bagpipes blaring, the familiar ringing in my ears usually overwhelming my senses, my brain looping in an endless circle—“I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” until inevitably tears would fall from my eyes. I would always recite my “I’m okays,” staring at one spot—on the checkered floor, the corner of a brown square in a gymnasium. Or the dot in the center of an intricate pattern of a ballroom floor. Or the bottom of the microphone stand smack dab in the middle of a podium. Yet, this time, there was nothing to focus on.
I tried to find something in the bagpipers marching in, a sea of blue. Their music blared, ringing in my ears. I looked up at them, at each of their stone faces. My eyes didn’t waver. As I looked around the room I felt for the first time an overwhelming sense of—nothing. Empty. Careless. Shallow.
I felt what I always wanted to feel—numb. But not okay.