“Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.” –Tryon Edwards

I used to drive long distances easily. Back and forth alone to California in my unairconditioned, Volkswagen Beetle. I had the famous repair book for the complete idiot in the back seat but there was no way I would even attempt to change my tire. Nor did I want to. When I stalled on a hill, a trucker showed me how to suck the air out of my gas line which was something I needed to know as I drove at fifty-five miles per hour across the country. 

Today I am on the final stage of a drive from Northern Michigan to Central Jersey where I saw my parent’s headstone, attended my kindergarten, elementary, junior high, high school reunion and caught up with another wonderful old friend. I chose to drive since there was no way to make flying and renting a car work.

Visiting the cemetery in Princeton was a Gothic, rain-soaked quest. The cemetery guy was kind but busy and showed me on a map where my parents’ and sister’s headstones were. I had visited my sister’s grave as often as possible but moving far away had made it hard. At thirty-two she had died before I could tell her so many things. She never met my baby, and when she was killed her baby was three. The intensity of grief I felt seeing her name and the message,” __,’s beloved mother”  always shocked me. Somehow, deep down I denied the loss and yet, there it was, my wonderful sister gone when I was twenty-six. Forty years later all I could say was, “I’m so sorry.”

This time there were two headstones, my parents a few feet behind, as if they were watching over her finally and while I cried my eyes out as the rain lashed down, the fact was it was comforting to see them together. It also felt like a better closure. My mother died just before Covid and the plans to have a funeral with all her favorite food and people were cancelled. Instead, there were black boxes with kind people, but the effect was numbing. Now I saw my parents together as always with the inscription, “Inseparable.”

Because Hurricane Ophelia decided to soak the entire Eastern seaboard, the reunion previously meant to be held inside occurred in the rather small house belonging to one of my former classmates. Imagine at least thirty-eight over-sixty humans in the two rooms available, almost no chairs, with ridiculous amounts of food. There we were, those of us who survived, talking and laughing and eating. We shared memories of seventh grade when we spent half the year in the National Guard Armory because our school wasn’t built, and the other half on the top floor of the high school. That year brought together all the separate elementary schools and we went feral, the adults helpless in the face of our preteen savagery.
The high school students refused to mount the stairs to our floor where we behaved like extras in a Mad Max movie.

At the reunion I mentioned a boy who told me in eighth grade math that he had just dropped a tab of acid, and someone said, “His father was a friend of Timothy Leary’s. I think he killed his mother.” This was a shock but not as much as a shock as the realization that I was not the only one in math class who had no idea what was going on. In my case it was a lack of ability to comprehend basic math, in his case it was drugs.

Being from New Jersey there was a list of classmates whose families were members of the Mafia, mobbed-up killers whose kids were mostly shy and sweet. None of them came. Someone claimed a local contractor was rumored to have allowed a body to be sealed into the foundations of his houses. Listing the known members of the Jersey Mafia became a source of pride. I listened as a classmate told a series of wrenching stories about her family, fights over custody, a cruel stepmother, losing touch with her father, a lost brother, and then she calmly said, “I have stage four cancer so I‘m doing everything now.”

Before I left, I looked at the faces of these people I had known so early in life before the major tragedies and triumphs but not before family secrets and hard times. They remembered me as bossy and smart and, I think, nice except for one woman who hated me in grade school, and I think still does. She hasn’t aged well. There were ghosts present, those who had died or disappeared but mainly there was love and forgiveness and an awareness we would not, as we once believed, live forever.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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