This Day Again

September 11 is a date that has been bandied about in the last couple of days. Like overload. Kind of like it was that first year, three years ago. For everyone, I'm sure, it was different. We all experienced it in a different way, for different reasons. This is about my way. It doesn't begin on September 11, though.

It begins on September 1, 2001, when I got a phone call from my mother. I hadn't done much by the time I had received the call. It was a Saturday. I slept in, I'm sure. Erin was off at rehearsal for her role as Olga in the Actor Training Production of Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters. I was sitting at my desk, doing something on my computer. Looking at some Web sites, or, surfing. Working on my homework for my playwriting class. Something.

"He's dead," she screamed, crying hysterically into her end of the phone. She gulped for breaths of air, as if searching for it beyond her reach. "They killed him," she cried, her words broken by sobs. "Matthew's dead."

I sat back in my chair after hanging up the phone and successfully pushed the shock aside. Well, shit, Matthew. Look what you went and did. Got yourself killed. I was supposed to be crying. I knew that much. But I wasn't. I called Erin. Left a message. I called a friend who I knew had dealt with death. Left a message. I called another friend, Pavlina. Left a message. I spent the next four hours in a blur, as if I wasn't wearing my glasses.

The return phone calls came, one after another. The first friend wanted to know if I was ok. Yeah. I felt the tears start to come, but I pushed them aside with the shock. We got off the phone. I'm all right, obviously. I got through that phone call. Then another came. Pavlina. And so did the tears. It took me four hours to cry. I wonder why. Pavlina wanted to see me. She suggested we hang out at a park and talk. She lost her mother years earlier. She would understand the feelings. I certainly hadn't yet.

I gathered my things and started to head toward the door in the dark. But I stopped and did something that I had never done before. I went over to my desk and went for the light. Something told me that returning to a lit house would be much more comforting than returning to a dark one. But I didn't understand my need for comfort, as I reached for the string. I gave it a good strong tug. The light came on. And in one, quick, final burst, it extinguished. I stood there and stared into the dark, forcing myself to accept the fact that Matthew was dead. Shot in the face while he slept, three weeks after he turned 21, by someone who simply didn't like him. He had just said goodbye to me.

A couple of days had gone by. I spent time on the phone with Tan -- Matthew's mom -- and my mom. From out of nowhere, I was pulling down my philosophy of death. I was forced to consider things that I had the privilege of never having to consider. I started to believe that Matthew knew everything. That this little kid who looked up to me a little bit all of a sudden knew more than I did. Punk. No matter how many degrees I would have, I just knew that wherever he was, he had about him a sense of calm. Or peace. And knowing. Whatever it is, it's in the abstract and therefore difficult to articulate.

My mom and Aunt Tan said I had helped them. I didn't know that I was helping myself cope, too. The funeral would be Saturday, September 8. I was in Sacramento. The funeral in L.A. So the plan was to fly down in the morning, sit in the back of the church for the funeral, and then fly back that evening. Is this how I would deal with death? By not dealing? Yes. That was the plan. It was a good one, and it would get me through.

And then I got another phone call. This time from Tan the next day. She asked me if I would write Matthew's eulogy. I've never done that before, I thought to myself. I can't write. I panicked. I don't want to. But I should. It's the least I can do. After all, I wasn't able to save his life. But I don't want to. I can't. "Yes," I said. With this most difficult writing project of my life thus far facing me, I did the only thing I could do. Put it off. I had scenes to write for class. After I turned those in, I would certainly devote time and energy to the eulogy. I would work hard on it. It couldn't be that difficult. After all, I loved Matthew. No matter how much I picked on him, or complained about his existence, I always liked him being around. He gave me attention. He was a Leo, too. He knew how it was.

But after starting and stopping and starting and stopping a thousand times over, I found myself, on September 7, with nothing to offer. It was Erin's opening night. I wasn't going to miss that. It was the night of Matthew's rosary. Something Catholics do to say goodbye. The open casket. I was certainly going to miss that. My last memory of Matthew will be of him and I smoking cloves together. It will be of him alive. I won't participate in death this way.

I found my angle, over a cup of coffee at Starbuck's awaiting the start of her show. I would get through this writing exercise, now that I had this angle. And I would read it aloud to a few people before getting back on a plane to return to my blissful ignorance.

With only 20 minutes of sleep, I boarded the plane with this eulogy that I worked hard on without a tear. This would be easy to do, I thought, as I stood in Tan's house. As I looked at the picture. I checked in with myself every once in a while. I'm ok. Totally. As I rode to the church in the truck Matthew was killed in while he slept. I'm ok. Don't look around, I thought to myself, as I looked up at the ceiling. Is that blood?

I met the priest at the church. "You have the hard job," he said. "That's what I hear," I replied with a smile on my face, having forgotten for a bit what I was there to do. I had been in the priest's dressing room before. As a kid, preparing to read at mass. I was in a comfortable environment, one whose surroundings had protected me during the day for seven years of my elementary schooling.

I went to the front of the church and saw some friends who had come for the funeral. Checking in every once in a while. I'm ok. As I turned around to watch the others arrive, to see how many people Matthew knew, I spotted the hearse pulling up. I checked in. I'm not ok.

That symbol of death. Who designed those things? The long bodies, the carefully designed roofs. It doesn't need signs to relay its message. It just does, telling those it passes "I am the death carriage. I deliver the bodies of the beloved to their final resting places." The symbol. As the tears started falling down my face, as my insides became unable to deal with the heaving, I turned to take my seat in the church by myself, away from everyone, away from the aisle where the coffin would sit during the mass. Why the coffin?

I wasn't understanding the insistence on shoving death in everyone's faces. In my face. I took my glasses off, because I hadn't the courage to face Matthew's death with clear vision. The blurriness would save me. I didn't move throughout the mass. No communion. No handshaking. I had to prepare. I had to go onstage. I had to say goodbye to him in my own words, for everyone, in front of everyone. They were my memories, my relationship to him. Me and Matthew.

The priest called me up, introducing me as his cousin (family convention dictates that, if I call his mother "aunt" then I call him "cousin"; no one ever questioned it). I got out of my seat, while everyone else stayed in theirs. While Matthew lay there, dead in his coffin in the middle aisle of St. Elizabeth. I had walked that path before to read from that stage. Morning masses as a 10, 11, and 12-year old. Easter Vigils. My confirmation. Yes, knees shaking, I had read from that pulpit many times. But always as a child, and never for this. I climbed the three steps to the grand pulpit, and unfolded the paper on the platform. Why hadn't I used a bigger font, I asked myself. I still wasn't wearing my glasses. Maybe they would all go away, the hundred or so people watching me, if I couldn't see them. Maybe that meant they weren't really there.

The paper unfolded, wrinkled, I was ready to begin. But my mouth wouldn't open. I recalled Matthew's dad offering back at the house to come up and help me if I needed it. Why wasn't he coming up to help me? No one was moving. I couldn't hear them if they were. It felt dark to me. I clenched my fists, which rested on either side of the wrinkled eulogy, hoping somehow that would get me to open my mouth. I had to get through this thing. Why did she ask me to do this? I can't. It felt like I had been standing up there forever. As if everyone in the church watching me had an opportunity to solve all of their life problems, while I stood there trying to figure out how just open my mouth. How to begin. All I had to do was read. But I had seen people do this with no problems in movies. And they weren't even reading.

Was I failing Matthew by having not memorized it? Tan? Read. Just open your fucking mouth and read. You have it easy. You're not the one lying in a coffin, your life cut short, because someone chose to use a gun, rather than fists. I was sobbing inside, helplessly. But what came out, as I imagined it, as it felt, was a shimmering wall of tears running down an invisible surface that sat just in front of me. My voice quivered the entire time as I recalled memories of Matthew coming to me for comfort during an early-morning Los Angeles earthquake; fetching q-tips for me out of fear of what I'd do to him if he didn't comply; his infectious smile; telling him that, yes, he would indeed grow, wouldn't always be this short, when he asked me while we were stopped at a stop sign just to the right of the church one day, years ago. Through this strange wall of tears came the words. I was failing him. I just wanted to get through it.

You're my new guardian angel, I said to him, as I folded the paper back up and came down from the pulpit. When I sat down, my friend Yani, whom I had known since second grade, had come and sat behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. The priest said some more things. It was over. The casket was gone. I didn't want to see another symbol of Matthew's death again. I walked out of the church and went for my change of clothes. Yani and I went to the first- through fourth-graders' bathroom. How small it seemed. And how it hadn't changed in 19 years. Yani and I reminisced about being short. About being in elementary school. Second grade. We looked at pictures that were posted in the school hall. Remember, Yani, when I beat Carlos up right over here. Oh, and over here, that's where I punched Robert in the stomach. I was laughing. Duty done. Death and denial. I said goodbye to Tan. And my mom. And Yani took me away. We ate. We laughed. And my head began to ache.

I looked out the window of the plane before it took off. Time had slowed. The events of the day blurred into one big moment of nothingness. Nausea began setting in. My head was killing me now, pounding, as the plane took off. I leaned my head against the window, hoping to feel myself leave him. The vibrations felt good. I was there. And then, as if those thoughts were dangerous, the reality set in. There were all those cars down below. Their lights giving them away as they sped in the darkness with no direction. Didn't they know what had just happened to Matthew? Didn't they care. They were driving right next to that hearse, carrying his body about the Valley. And they didn't notice. Why not? Why didn't they care? Three days later, was September 11. No one was certainly thinking about Matthew now. And I could no longer think about death.