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Jeremy
Title: Jeremy
Fandom: none/original nonfiction
Date Written: June 19, 2004
Dedication: To Jeremy & Kristina Fisher
Notes & Summary: Out of nowhere, I felt I had to re-write "Death of a Boy" again. I decided that for once, rather than mull it over in my head, I would go ahead and write it while I had the inspiration, and generally I love how it came out.



June 19, 2004 2:19PM

By Megan McGory

"Jeremy"

Something wasn’t quite right in my dad’s voice when I heard his voicemail, now almost a week old; "I would like to speak to you," sounded so formal, so...so much like an oncoming lecture.

At the age of 20, I wasn’t so accustomed to those anymore. Since I’d moved to college, my dad became more of a chum than a strict father, so when he sounded like that I knew something was bothering him.

It was the weekend I moved back home after completing my sophomore year at Fairfield University, and because of my parents divorce while I was still in high school, I lived with my mom and made time to visit my dad. Since I didn’t live with him, he stopped lecturing, I stopped "rebelling", and we embarked on a different kind of father-daughter relationship--one that only comes with maturity.

So again...that lecture voice had me worried; that same kind of worry when you hear your name called to the principal’s office and you don’t know what you did wrong.

He looked happy to see me when I pulled into the parking lot of the local Dunkin Donuts; I was only waiting for a bomb to drop, but hid my uneasiness with a smile. I may have been 20, but at that moment I felt 14.

We sat down, and before I could get into my tirade against Fairfield and why I was so glad I was transferring, Dad said, "I never knew you wrote a story about Jeremy Fisher."

Oh shit.

"What?"

Dad pulled out his notebook that served as his memory. "’Death of a Boy’," he said, "your uncle Timmy found it first--he just got internet, you know. So he told Oma about it, and she read it and now it’s all she talks about."

Oh no.

If Oma--my grandmother--had found that story, no doubt she already showed it to her best friend, Linda Fisher. Jeremy’s grandmother.

The story sat for two years in anonymity online while most of my family remained oblivious to the internet. Meanwhile I had a website, an online journal, several stories published that I never let them read because I wasn’t ready for them to read it. I didn’t want to know what Jeremy’s family thought about me writing his story--I hardly knew him and it would no doubt bring up painful memories. I never wanted to hurt them, and I was so afraid that this story could hurt them more than anything else. And after knowing that his grandparents read it, I wondered if I would be able to look them in the eye.

###

Oma and Linda Fisher went back a long ways--while growing up in Germany in World War II, they lived only a couple blocks from each other, yet didn’t even meet until they emigrated to the States in the mid 50’s, where they lived on Staten Island with their officer husbands. The two families eventually moved to eastern Connecticut, in the Norwich area, where Linda’s four boys and Oma’s four boys grew up together. I became the only grandchild, and Linda’s son Billy became the father of her first grandchild in 1984. I was born in February on the day before Valentine’s, Kristina that December on the 43rd anniversary of Pearl Harbor. We met for the first time when we were only a few months old, and we wouldn’t have believed it if a grainy home video didn’t prove otherwise.

I first remember meeting her a couple days after I got kicked out of preschool, when I was only four. She had just turned three, and her new baby brother was 11 months--his name was Jeremy.

Following that first visit, I saw Kristina a lot, and Jeremy almost always followed until we, as six-year-olds, decided that a three-year-old wasn’t cool enough to participate in our Barbie parties and sleep-overs. We became best friends until we were on the eve of adolescence, and she moved to South Carolina.

###

Seven years later, I was a senior in high school. I had just finished sending my applications to universities and was working on finishing the year without coming down with "senioritous" while Kristina entered her seventh month of pregnancy. We had been out of touch for more than two years and I learned about her pregnancy from Linda over Thanksgiving dinner at Oma’s. Another girl in one of my classes was seven months pregnant too.

Oma rarely called me except to invite me to dinner after my parent’s divorce, and when she called on a particular Thursday at the end of January, I was eager to tell her about my up-coming job shadow at the local newspaper. Instead, the first words out of her mouth silenced me.

"Did you hear about Jeremy? He’s in the hospital."

"What? Why?"

"He got in an accident the other day; it was in the paper but they announced it as Gary Fisher."

I knew I’d read that brief article of a teen boy who was hurt in an accident in the neighboring town. To be honest, I didn’t even think Jeremy was a teenager yet, nor did I know he even lived in this state. "Oh," I replied, "he was the boy who was in the dirt bike accident? The 14-year-old?"

"Yeah," she said with her slight German accent, "he’s in a coma. He might die; he hit his head."

Call me callous, but the news of Jeremy didn’t really to affect me too much. People in comas came out of them and lived to tell great stories of their road to recovery on TV. While growing up I heard only stories that proved to me that the Fishers were invincible. Jeremy’s father had been through two house fires and witnessed the car accident where a train collided with Linda and her other boys. There were never any fatalities; this would be another one of those close calls.

Besides, I was 17. I'd been through my share of bad accidents--like a car accident when I was nine where the car flipped several times and I escaped with a bump on the head. If I survived that, I could survive anything. While I'd lost close relatives to age or cancer, I hadn't lost any of my friends, and they hadn't lost any friends or siblings; in one word, we were invincible.

The next afternoon, as I talked to my dad, he brought up the conversation I had had the previous day with Oma, and that reminded me to ask of Jeremy.

"Oh he’s dead." He said it so matter-of-factly that I wanted to scream at him to have a little more emotion in his voice. I wanted to scream at him that he had to be wrong--but I only meekly asked, "what? Jeremy Fisher?"

"Yeah, he’s dead. There was no activity in his brain and they ended life support."

The rest of the conversation was a blur. I vaguely heard that his organs would be donated, which was a good thing- for some stranger I would never know. An eight-year-old boy had just been hit by a truck near my house that same week, and I thought he would die before Jeremy. Other people died, not people you actually know.

No matter how many times I told myself he was dead, I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t sure when his services were, but I knew I had to go. It just didn’t seem real; the last time I saw him I picked him up and tossed him in a pool. That was already five long years before, but seemed like yesterday. Jeremy was always a curly-haired kid in the background whom I never paid attention to, and now I was sorry for it. I had written him into a fictional story set in 2005, but little did I know he would never live to see that year; he died in my story too. You know, you write a story featuring your best friend, and you kill the little brother because, well, he’s the little brother. He once told me I sang well.

I couldn’t imagine how his father was feeling at the moment- his only son, and youngest child as well. In two months he would be a grandfather, but his only daughter wasn’t speaking to him. I could only imagine that he had felt he lost both children, and being only a girl whose 18th birthday was in a week, that reality was unfathomable to me.

The wake, days later, was so---silent. My father and I inched along with others in line to view the casket; some ladies who weren’t standing in line were whispering among themselves and stood asides as we slowly migrated toward the coffin

I knew Kristina was there though I hadn’t yet seen her, I was apprehensive, nervous--what do you say in a situation like that? I gave her a small wave when she saw me, but I wanted to give her a hug right away; somehow, etiquette did not seem to permit that before the viewing of the deceased. It just seemed so awkward to stand there, slowly advancing, while one of my closest friends sat not four feet away crying like everyone else around me. When we were next to approach the casket, I tried to brace myself.

Jeremy laid there, wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt. His hood covered his head, his hands in his pockets. As I looked at him, a twinge punched me in the stomach as I realized that he was the mirror image of the Kristina I knew not so long ago. When I saw the grayish make-up on the corner of his lips, I realized he was dead and this my last time to ever see him--blue was my favorite color, was that something we never knew we had in common? Was it even his favorite...

When I turned from the casket and looked at his father, I didn’t recognize him. He had shaved off his familiar moustache, his hair was gray, his eyes red, bloodshot and swollen. I could see the devastation in them, and the look on his face was as if he did not see me, didn’t know me, but just saw another person who couldn’t help him with his grief.

Kristina said nothing, because nothing needed to be said. All I could do was give her a hug and the simple action meant more than any words I could have said. I don't even remember if I said anything at all.

A group of four girls came in, very upset, and they sat by the wall to calm down. One of the girls seemed more upset than the others; she was blonde and pretty and looked to be my age but was probably younger. A group of boys came into the room shortly after, and the previously mentioned girl went to one of them and they both tearfully embraced. When they parted he pulled a picture frame from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She looked at it and smiled, looked up at him gratefully with tears in her eyes and whispered, "Where did you get this?"

With his answer, she broke down and sobbed.

That day was a difficult day, yet every time I said that I felt selfish; that I had no right to say that because I wasn’t in the same position of his parents, Kristina, or the girl. Did I have the right to say that day was hard? Who gave that right? I eventually gave the card to Jeremy’s mother after the funeral home had run out. She needed it more than I did.

While driving back Dad and I knew that if Kristina had a boy, she would name him Jeremy.

###

The next day in school I was relieved that I didn’t have to write a term paper on existentialism. With Jeremy’s death I was left asking myself why he died; existentialism told me that life and death meant nothing. I refused to believe that; 14-year-old boys were not taken from this life for no reason. If that were so, this complicated life would be a cruel joke. I left school early; the funeral was early in the afternoon and I knew I had to be there for Kristina.

When I arrived at the cemetery, many people had congregated. There were so many kids and teenagers, and more kept arriving. When the services started, over three hundred people gathered closely in order to hear. His father and his uncles were pallbearers, and his uncle said a prayer. Excerpts from the Bible were read, such as when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. The man reading said the excerpts from the Bible were meant to be comfort in this time of mourning, and after the service was over, a heavy weight seemed to be lifted from the crowd.

But then life returned to its ugly normal. I stayed near Kristina, who had a group of her own friends there. When they weren’t talking, we heard others viciously gossiping about Kristina’s own pregnancy; they were saying how Jeremy was such a good kid, and how Kristina failed in life. I didn’t see how that was the case, after all she would be bringing a new life into the world in two months, and she felt as though she could give it the best life she possibly could. How could others ridicule her for that? What kind of people were they to gossip and talk about Kristina behind her back, when her brother lay deceased not twenty feet away? She was bitter toward the people who were less compassionate, but also towards some of Jeremy’s friends. I hadn’t noticed that a group of boys had broken away from the mass until Kristina hissed, "Look at them!" She gestured toward the group of boys through tears, only now coming into focus, "Getting stoned like he never died- figures. They only got out of school to come smoke weed. These people are hypocrites!" Silently, I had to agree with her, feeling like a hypocrite myself because it wasn’t the time nor place to pass judgement on others.

She didn’t go to the reception at her father’s house; she left with her mother, and I knew that for the moment, my job as a friend was finished. Our friendship had run its course; we were moving in different directions. She was going to have a baby soon; I was going off to college. The doors of our childhood were closing now, about to block our friendship off. Life was just a series of doors, where one door closes, another one opens.

When I graduated from high school that June, the article that ran in the paper about the graduation was right next to an article about how students at Jeremy’s high school planted a tree and made a memorial in his name on the school grounds.

###

The day after Thanksgiving almost two years later was a raw day, with a heavy mist hanging over the cemetery as I pulled in with my car. I was alone, and despite the passage of time I hadn’t been in this cemetery since Jeremy’s funeral.

Kristina’s baby was over a year and a half old now; much to the surprise of Dad and I, she hadn’t named him Jeremy. Actually, I was floored. Oma sometimes told me that Kristina was living nearby, working as a waitress somewhere. I hadn’t talked to her since the funeral.

Looking for the grave wasn’t easy; I remembered where he was buried--in the part of the cemetery behind the ugly supermarket; I looked for ten minutes before I realized there was no gravestone.

There was a plate of sorry-looking day-old food on the ground, near a picture of a baby named Gabriel, and as I looked at the food, I realized it was very clearly the same kind of German food that Oma made; Linda made it too and had taught Kristina how to make it--the large German dumpling told me I had to be staring at his grave, even though I couldn’t believe it because I didn’t see his name etched in stone.

###

When Dad and I met for coffee that day about six months later, we were only a mile from where Jeremy was buried. He still hadn’t visited even though two and a half years had passed.

He was still trying to reassure me that Oma would only show Linda the story if she thought she would like it, and no matter what I wasn’t so convinced.

But his voice grew serious again after we talked about Jeremy. "You know, I checked out the website myself and I found another website of yours--it looked like a journal," he said. "And there were some things in there that I wish to talk to you about."

Oh great. I knew exactly what he was talking about right away, and tried to convince him that all the references to sex were definitely jokes, but it seemed like he’d gone through the thing with a fine-tooth comb. Everything he questioned was a joke though, but still...he definitely hadn’t called just to talk about Jeremy.

Despite the questionable nature of the jokes in my journal, I still felt that the one that could get me in the most trouble with friends of the family was the story.

###

A couple weeks later, I was helping my boyfriend, Mike, with his college radio show when he turned to me after he cued up a CD. "Did I ever tell you what I want to name my future kid...if I have one?" he asked.

"Probably," I said, looking for another CD, "but I don’t remember. Tell me again."

"Jeremy."

I spun around and faced him; I wasn’t expecting that. "Why?"

"Because of the Pearl Jam song, ‘Jeremy.’ No one would ever guess."

Got that right.

He’d cued that song up to play next, too.

Mike had also been the first person to ever read "Death of a Boy." I started writing it two weeks after Jeremy’s death, and it wasn’t even finished yet when I let him read it while we were sitting in Domino’s waiting for our dinner before driving around to talk for hours. It had a deep impact on him that he never told me; the only way I could tell was because of how silent he became after reading it--at the best time his best friend was only 14. Maybe that’s why it hit so close to home.

I tried talking to him about the story, but he didn’t remember reading it. Most kids don’t remember last week once they get into college; while I couldn’t be surprised, I had to admit I was a little disappointed.

When I originally wrote "Death of a Boy", it was supposed to be like a final goodbye, but as the years pass, I find that his story isn’t finished yet. It seemed like it signaled the end of an era, of Kristina and me because we had been so inseparable, but as time goes on it’s not about me or her at all.

The original story ended with "For Jeremy, the final door had closed," but it never felt that way; not with the constant reminders, the articles in the newspaper that occasionally mention him. Because I didn’t know him well, his name shows up now as frequently as it used to when he was alive, so somewhere I know that his story isn’t over yet. As I said once, fourteen-year-old boys aren’t taken from this planet for no reason.