Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away …

Hugh Mearns, “Antigonish”

My room was on the second floor, which meant I had to take the stair. Not such as easy thing to do with all the things that lingered there. The closets too held much to fear, and underneath the bed. I checked them first before I slept. Who’d want to wake up dead?

I was somewhere on the stair when it rang, about as far away from the phone as you could get and still be in the house. I think the call was not unexpected, the news dreaded but no real surprise. I listened to my mom’s side of the conversation as her sister (my aunt) must have said something like “He’s gone,” because all my mom did was stifle a cry or maybe repeat as a question “He’s gone?” in the way that we do when we can’t think of anything else to say. I sat down on the stair and thought about my uncle. It was daylight, and it was the first time someone close to me had died.

He’s gone was as good an explanation as any for a five-year old. It meant that I wouldn’t see my uncle again. I think I must have liked him, my now-gone uncle. I felt like someone had taken away my favorite toy and I wouldn’t get to play with it again. I had a sense of him — a strong man, brusque and assertive with a hearty laugh — as being larger than life. He wasn’t.

My aunt recovered, but I understood nothing then about how that might work. I only knew that several years later I met an Air Force pilot when they came to visit. I was coming into my own, thought I was strong as a young bull. He agreed to arm-wrestle. He won handily, but he smiled and pretended like I’d given him a run for his money, and I liked him for that. Later, the plane he piloted crashed into a mountain. There was another phone call. He’s gone. This time, it made the news on TV.

Neighbors had a boy about my age, just one year older. In those days, and in that part of the country, any boy around your age was a friend. But I think he might have been a friend under any circumstances. Later, I was fourteen and healthy, and he was fifteen, with a brain tumor. My father took me to the hospital. He was so small. I tried to look and not stare. He smiled, weakly. He’d always been a gentle boy. I stood not far from his parents at the grave site. They’d quickly grown old and bent. He’s gone, I thought.

Another neighbor, a farmer like my father, lived just down the road and over the hill. Turns out he had cancer. During harvest, people from near and far pitched in to help. They finished in just two days what normally took three weeks. It was quite a sight, all those combines sowing what had been reaped. By this time, I wore what had become my funeral suit.

I grew out of that suit and into another. (That kind of fashion doesn’t change much.) For my wedding I could put on something different, and I did, but a suit still hung there in my closet. I put it on again — or if not that one, then another just as practical — when later something went real wrong and later still we stood beside the tiny hole dug just for him in Forest Park Lawndale, plots set aside for infants and young children. And then, several lifetimes later, my son would stand on similar ground (not once, but twice). The clothes we wore were much the same, our postures a perfect match.

And then my father, and then my mother, and for each I wore the proper clothes and even spoke the proper words in public, and other words more proper still in private.

There were others too, less relevant perhaps but no less gone. Family, and friends. You don the suit, you take it off, and on the stair you stop somewhere, somewhere between both up and down, somewhere between both big and little, somewhere between both then and now. I stopped there yesterday, and yesterday upon the stair the loved ones I once loved weren’t there. They were not there again today. It looks as though they’ve gone to stay …