Before my hotel room’s phone rings with a wake-up call, I’m already conscious and exhausted. It took hours for me to fall asleep last night, as the euphoria of the Red Sox walk-off win hung in the air long after I returned to my hotel room and exchanged Facebook messages with the friend who’s gotten my mail this last month. She found a letter from my doctor, the envelope for which prominently features both “OPEN IMMEDIATELY” and “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL HEALTH INFORMATION” on the exterior. The former led her to believe it needed to be opened, but the latter scared her off. I suspected it was just a bill—I couldn’t think of any other reason why my doctor would be contacting me—and replied that it can wait until I return to Seattle.
I have no reason to believe I’m going to die before then.
Unless, of course, I do.
The date of my demise remains unknowable, but I do know that this journey, this chapter of my life, ends today. The time has come for me to leave my father’s city, reclaim my repaired car, and continue westward until I arrive back in my beloved Emerald City.
But first, I need to visit the man I’ll never find.
If the cemetery where my father was buried has an address, I don’t know what it is. I do know how to locate it on Google Maps, however, and from there, it’s easy enough to plug the nearest intersection into my GPS. The device directs me once more to Storrow Drive, and from there, north on I-93 to Wakefield.
A freshly-burned copy of Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity erupts from the SUV’s stereo as I cross the Charles River, and singer Jim Adkins screams as I continue on roads whose lane markings have worn off from a winter of ice plows and road salt. The other drivers seem to know where the lines should be, so I follow them in lieu of other guidance, which frees up some brainpower to focus on Adkins’ accusations. “You’re not bigger than this/Not better/Why can’t you learn?” he asks on the second track, “Lucky Denver Mint.”
Since the age of five, I have always known my dad’s death was bigger than me.
Pan Am 103 was attacked not because of the people on the plane, but because of politics. The bombing, as well as the things that came before and after, resulted from a particular kind of modern warfare between diplomats and dictators. The years since—everything I experienced—happened because of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush, and their particular stances towards Gaddafi, who acceded to a criminal trial and a financial settlement not because of justice or sincere regret, but rather, to get out of an oil embargo.
There was nothing my father could have done to avoid any of this, except for having not changed flights, and there was nothing I could have done to influence any of what came afterwards.
This was never about me.
This was never about any of the people whose lives it destroyed.
It’s a beautiful day in Wakefield—warm and sunny, especially for April—and the good weather coaxed the town’s residents outside. Pedestrians pack the sidewalks as I drive by, seemingly everyone in town taking their kids or dogs for walks to or from the lake.
Then again, it’s always a beautiful day in Wakefield, or so it seems from my limited experience with the town—this is the first visit I can remember at a time that doesn’t qualify as summer, but I imagine that the winters are just as horrid as people say.
A breeze wafts off the water as I park the car at the end of a gravel driveway, feet from the shore of Lake Quannapowitt. I climb out, grab a rock off the ground, and walk towards the cemetery gate, where a rusted padlock hangs on a rusted chain. For a moment, I worry that I will have to hop the fence as Maurice did years ago, but the lock isn’t shut, and so I easily remove the chain and open the gate.
Inside, I am alone.
My father’s grave is unspectacular: The headstone features his Hebrew name on top, with “SAUL M. ROSEN: BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER” and “BORN: NOV. 24, 1953, DIED DEC. 21, 1988” inscribed beneath. His 35 years and 28 days, distilled to four words1 and two dates.
We are never as important as we think.
I place the rock on top of his headstone, per Jewish tradition, and stand for a moment looking at the scene. Six feet beneath me lies all that remains of him, whatever that is, contained in a pine box from the small Scottish town where he died but never lived.
Across from my father’s headstone is my grandparents’: Simon and Ethel Rosen, beloved husband and father, March 19, 1909-June 21, 1982; beloved wife and mother, July 4, 1910-July 30, 1980. There is no mention of the things people still say about them, decades later—no references to Simon’s photographic talents and wit, nor of Ethel’s verbosity and kindness.
Beyond my grandparents, I spot a row of smaller graves, the final resting spots of children. Years ago, during a visit with my mother and sister, we speculated about those kids, wondering what killed some of them before they completed a single year of life.
I wander around the cemetery, taking in graves. Many of these people appear to have lived long, full lives, but others did not. Aaron Joseph, the infant son of Frank and Annie Marx, died August 6, 1890, aged three months. Ruben Weiskopf, died February 11, 1873, ten days old. Meyer Caro, died August 23, 1915, aged four years. Mildred Harriet, born May 18, 1889, died November 12, 1894. Bertha Cohn, 1854-1884, and her husband Gustaf, 1847-1927, who lived longer after his wife died than she did at all.
After less than five minutes inside the cemetery grounds, I depart, replacing the open lock on the rusted chain and walking back to the car.
I got nothing from coming here. I never have.
I would love to say that I’ll never return to this place, but I know that one day I will, when the time comes for my mother to occupy the plot she reserved beside my father. Death did them part, but it will reunite them, a second pair of Rosens, feet from the first.
One day, some time after that, I will cease to return. I’ll die, as will my sister. Maybe one or both of us will have children, but regardless, they will never have known their grandfather, as we did not know ours. Maybe they’ll visit their grandmother’s grave, paying some token tribute to their grandfather, as I did with mine.
One day, someone will come here, fifty or a hundred years from now, and look at the graves. They will notice Saul Rosen and wonder why he died at 35, what felled him at such a young age. The date of his death will mean nothing to that person—December 21, 1988 will be just another day. Syracuse will remember, but its scholars will not. Today, more than half the school’s students weren’t even born yet on that day. Soon, it’ll be all.
One day, this cemetery will fill up, and a generation or two or three after that, it will have few visitors, if any. Perhaps it will still be cared for, but it will not be cared about, the memories of all those buried here long since faded.
One day, it will be as if none of this happened. Perhaps the lake will expand, submerging these graves beneath its surface, upon which children will ice skate in the winter, oblivious to what lies below. Perhaps it won’t, and the memorial stones merely will fade and erode, until they might as well say nothing at all. The Pan Am and Libyan money will be spent or saved. Our children and grandchildren will go on to live the normal lives we never did.
One day, but not today.
Today, the memories of that day, of those people, live on in my mother, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic on her cruise. They live on in my sister, driving from Memphis to Nashville for a Dave Matthews Band concert. They live on in Los Angeles and Kalamazoo, in Washington and Syracuse, in New York and London and the small town of Lockerbie, which still tries to balance its duty to remember with its desire to forget. They live on in my car, which awaits me miles from the house to which my father never returned, and in my home, a 3,059 mile drive to the west, where a photograph of the two of us sits on a bookshelf, a Father’s Day frozen in time.
Today, as I insert the key in the ignition of my rental car, ready to begin the drive out of Wakefield, Pan Am 103 is not yet forgotten. As I prepare to leave the town where my father was both born and buried, I have only one task left on this grand journey, one last thing he never managed to do.
Today, as a jogger stops just in front of my rental car and tells a mother how beautiful her child looks, I press an icon on the touchscreen of my GPS, one I haven’t hit this whole trip. The device responds audibly that it should take roughly 46 hours to get to my final destination, but I expect it will take me much longer to get where I’m going.
Today, I am heading home.