August 8, 1994, and Johnathan Tyler Mayhew turned 40. His girls had done the decorating: the fake dentures in a glass of water beside the sink; a hand-printed sign over the toilet that read HOW DOES IT FEEL TO PEE NOW THAT YOU’RE OLD?!? other cute signs about “falling down and not being able to get up” and “hobbling down the steps with pencil knees is gonna take you an hour” until he reached a taped-together banner hanging in the living room that bid him “FAREWELL YOUTH!” colored with yellow butterflies. Funny stuff…
Jack had never felt old, even at that initial reckoning of finding that first gray hair. He smoked, sure, and it burned like hell roughhousing and burning off Angie’s energy, but he kept this to himself because ya never let ’em see ya sweat, as the old deodorant tagline went. He would wheeze and huff and puff out of sight and stay vigorous as long as he could muster.
Julia and Angie left the house mid-morning to go catty-corner to the in-laws’ and decorate for tonight’s birthday blowout with the ubiquitous black balloons and streamers that would guide Jack into early elderly manhood.
This left some time for some quiet reflection; sitting in the house alone, rocking in the chair that his pregnant wife with PBR River drinker found most comfy, relieved that he finally had it made. That the screwed-upness in his life was over. That he had Julia. He had Angela. This is all he had ever wanted out of life--so what if it took four decades to get here. Good things come to those who wait, right? He could live his life, happily and content, until his last dying embers of this reality, that, hopefully, would be a long time away.
In the early evening, he enjoyed the barbeque across the street with his inherited family and a few neighbors and friends, more old-guy gags, and plenty of inevitable juicy gossip about the Rathbun Fourth of July “blowout,” still the talk of the town.
“Well, I heard that the poor guy isn’t taking retirement too good,″ a friend said, sipping her brew, breaking the ice. “Connie Taylor said she saw him at B & B’s last week and he looked terrible. Dark rings under his eyes, unshaven. Of course, she pretended not to know about his septic tank accident—oh my god, it still makes me gag just thinking about it. Can you believe the luck? Standing right over the thing as it blew wide open? Anyway, she said Mr. Rathbun returned her greeting with a flat monotone ‘hi’ and just kept on walking, really unfriendly, straight ahead. Almost seemed brooding,” she related, reveling in her status as town crier.
“Oh, I know,” acknowledged her husband, a mechanic. “I heard his dream house has turned into a real money pit. Tom Mack at the lumber yard said Eugene comes in all the time to replace screws that had worked loose, light bulbs that suddenly had flamed up and died, ceiling tiles that have fallen to the floor. Tom said he came in last week to buy a drywall repair kit because hairline cracks were starting to zigzag up and down the walls. When Tom mentioned that hairline cracks are a rather unfortunate sign that the foundation was settling, Rathbun mumbled something about the goddamn pissless screeders and said to the air, ’Yeah, you were right, Todd, I am really quite fucked’. Personally, I think the delay with the Indian thing got him too anxious, so he pressured the construction company to get the house built fast. The first thing people should realize is that erecting a structure is a lot like fixing cars--slow and steady and doing it right the first time saves a lot of headaches down the road.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, although I can’t do more than oil changes or pound in a nail, Dan,” Jack replied smiling, plopping a gob of potato salad onto his plate. “The poor guy, though. I mean, we’ve all wallowed in crap at some point in our lives, figuratively, but to be covered head to toe in it, literally? That’s wayyyyy too much crap to handle.” A second, exaggerated, plop of potato salad followed. Then laughter.
“That’s for sure, Jack. Poor dude, he really painted the toilet on that one,” declared their son, a junior at the Castle, who only had the teacher his freshman year of band. His snickering got the others gathered round the table laughing (and cackling), too.
“Shitter’s full, Clark!” Julia, a bigger fan of Christmas Vacation than of school, chimed in.
“Talk about taking a big fat dump,” replied father-in-law, straight-faced, while those surrounding him prepared for the punchline. “All ya idiots need to know is that shit runs downhill and payday’s Friday.” He had a sandpaper wit, rough and gritty.
The salute to “the new, old Jack″ climaxed with a flaming graveyard chocolate cake, made funny by little homemade tombstones of wit; adorned with a plastic skeleton and writhing with gummy worms. Jack T. Mayhew was looking forward to the rest of his life, but foremost, to their first family vacation starting two weeks from today -- a trip to St. Louis and the zoo and the amusement park there.
2
August 22, 1994: bags packed. Ready to go. Jack got up early to load the car, then waited impatiently at the kitchen table for his girls to get up on this fine day. When the eastern sun began melting away the darkness and on his third cup of coffee, he could wait no longer.
He stood at the landing in quiet hesitation outside Angie’s bedroom door and peeked in at the little lump of tomboy lying beneath her covers. He smiled in anticipation as he thought back to the same amusement park chain just outside LA and knew the girl was in for a riot--but it ain’t gonna happen, wasting the day sleeping.
He tiptoed to the side of the bed, knelt, and gave her a gentle poke. “Pssssssstt, Ang . . . ,” he whispered, “are you ready for some fun?” but got no stir. “Angie, Angie, sweetie, wake up.” Wow, my girls sure can sleep, he thought as he did some more shaking and poking. Nothing.
As a last resort, with the subtle gesture of a bugle blowing reverie, he cast the blankets to the floor. And stared blankly.
It’s amazing how the human mind and body react to sudden trauma; how a rush of chemicals can numb the person’s emotional reactions and protect their eggshell psyche by creating a dreamlike physical detachment when reality shatters. Through the morning vapors of light and shadows, the little girl looked like a wax doll, reposing in peace, her arms cupped together underneath her head. Curls splayed out on the pillow. The rush of chemicals allowed Jack to simply gasp and gape and be lost in time and space until his mind re-engaged enough for him to face this new and horrible truth.
He gave her another shake, this time on cold skin. “Goddamn it, Angela Rose, GET UP! PLEASE! Please . . .please . . . please”. Oh PLEASE! Oh NO! Oh, God! “FUUUUUKKKKKMMMMEEEE!”, he shrieked.
“Hey Babe, what’s with the --
Julia’s startled arousal became unplugged the nanosecond she stood in the doorway of Angela’s bedroom and stared vacantly at her sweet little girl lying in her warm little bed. And when that perfect, peaceful interlude between a lightning strike and the ensuing thunderclap ended, the shockwave rolled Julia good. She collapsed to the floor, limp and wailing, her essence crushed like an ant by God’s fucking golden boot.
Mercifully, the many days that followed were very much like the theta wave reality one experiences just before drifting off to sleep--Julia and Jack caught between two worlds, and both worlds as surreal as hell: feet plodding forward as if the ground was quicksand and their shoes were bricks, through an endless fog of hugs and weeping with ethereal mourners, and classmates too young to fully grasp death; sitting in the front pew trying to make sense of the small bronze box with silver handles covered in red roses gathered from the garden; the sudden, utter quiet after the three-day parade of people and potluck; the strain of just eating, sleeping and breathing. The blame. The regrets. The guilt. The gnawing, if only I could have done something. . .
Yet, this would be the easy part of losing a child. When the rush of chemicals wears off and reality hits full force, the quaint notion of hope and home and happiness will be h-bombed into vapor.
3
It was determined that Angie died from Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), a life-threatening emergency that happens from an “abrupt and unexpected loss of heart function leading to loss of consciousness and collapse”. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2,000 young, seemingly healthy people under age 25 in the United States die each year from SCA. When it happens to seemingly healthy young people, there is usually no obvious injury or medical reasons the patient or family knew about. Some young people who suffer SCA may have previously experienced heart-related symptoms, such as shortness of breath, chest pain, or fainting, that weren’t thought to be anything life-threatening. Others, like Angie, never have any symptoms of heart problems until the SCA event occurs. Despite being happy, secure, and full of life, the little girl died of a broken heart.
The body of Angela Rose Scott-Mayhew was laid to rest five tombstones down from her great-great-great grandfather, Solomon Jenkins Salisbury, in a country cemetery of rolling grass, amid a small copse of shade trees and a running stream, just outside its sister ghost town of Burnside, Illinois.
The family plot is the eternal resting place for three of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s brothers. Solomon, their nephew who died in 1929 at the age of 89, was brought to the area as a baby after the Mormons were forced into religious exile from Missouri back in 1835. The small rag-tag but growing religious sect had settled in Hancock County, Illinois determined to build a city from the ground up along the Mississippi River that they would call Nauvoo.
In his autobiography written late in life, S.J. recalled those early, embryonic settlement days well:
“I was born September 18, 1835 in Kirkland, Ohio, the third child of Wilkens J. Salisbury and Catherine Smith Salisbury, his wife. Soon after I was born, we had to leave Ohio and go to Missouri. Shortly after our arrival, the mob spirit arose, and our family, with all the rest, was driven from the state, my brother Alvin, who was born in a covered wagon on June 7, 1838, included. There were about one hundred and twenty families in the caravan, guarded by the Missouri Cavalry. We crossed the Mississippi River at Quincy; then from there our family moved to Plymouth, Hancock County, Illinois in the fall of 1838, what month I do not remember, as I was only three years old at the time.”
Julia’s family was indeed tied directly to the founding Mormon prophet, yet her pedigree went back even further, as detailed by the long and distinguished Smith and Salisbury family tree researched by the Latter Day Saints. Her genealogy traces back nearly a millennium with the marriage of Galfridus Spencer and Emma Harcourt in the early 1200s.
The main line of the Joseph Smith family entered the New World from New England nearly 350 years ago. While not a Mayflower family, they were descended from at least three of the 23 of the Mayflower through women who married into the family. Since Samuel Smith, who was one of the promoters of the American Revolution in New England, rated just below John Adams and John Hancock in prominence, this family has been one of the most important families in the United State’s early history.
Joseph Smith Senior, six foot two and an amateur wrestler, was born in 1771, and married into the prominent Mack family of New England, known in history as another great family of the nation. He cast his lot with his namesake son in ministerial work in the Latter Day Saints Church, which his son founded in 1830, ten years after his publicized first angelic vision in 1820. He and his wife were teaching school when Joseph, Jr. was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont.
SJ’s father, Wilkins Jenkins was born in Rushville, New York, of a prominent American family who came to the Massachusett colony in 1648. Both his father and grandfather drew the sword and fought with New York troops in the American Revolution. The Salisburys were a first-class family descended from British nobility, getting into that on a battlefield of the Third Crusade, where Richard the Lionhearted knighted one of them.
Wilkins Jenkins married Catherine Smith, sister of Joseph Smith, Jr. in the autumn of 1839. He was a blacksmith by trade, who died of typhoid fever at Webster, Illinois, on October 28, 1853. The union produced eight children, including Julia’s great, great grandfather, Solomon J, who was laid to rest in January of 1927 just a few yards from Julia’s beloved grandfather, Earl “Buzz” Grotts who was tragically killed in 1973, flattened by a bulldozer that was left in gear, when she was only eight.
The linear generational progression of tombstones was broken after Angela’s death. The yawning graves next to Earl’s were meant for Julia’s mother, and then for Julia and Jack when they died of old age, not skipping three spots as the final resting place for a sweet and innocent child who was very deeply loved.
Woe to Galfridus Spencer and Emma Harcourt!–had they not met and married 900 years before, all this pain would have been avoided!
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