Dead Man's Brew

Among the things I found after John died were 24 cans of Rainier beer in an outside pocket of his hockey bag. Yes, it was a massive bag – a goalie bag, though John didn’t play goal. 

I got rid of most of his stuff pretty efficiently when he died, some of it with unabashed glee. The boxes of old magazines he carted through each move, fraying 1986 copies of Mother Jones and Utne Reader he was always going to get to. I brought 17 boxes to paper recycling. I doled skis and jackets to friends and family. I gave away his skates. But something stopped me from giving away the hockey bag, and I’m pretty sure it was the beer. 

It’s a bit ironic given that I don’t even drink beer. I think I realized that case of beer stuffed in his hockey bag and smuggled into the rink was quintessential John. He was never one to travel light, a habit that continually irked me. But who was the hero at Happy Camp, three days into a Chilkoot Trail backpack trip, when he pulled out a complete copy of the Sunday New York Times? Who was the hero when he pulled tennis balls out of his pockets and clown suits out of a vintage briefcase he hauled around and ice skates for all out of seemingly nowhere? He always had the toys, the gear, the magic. 

I had to concede the brilliance of his movable hoarding. Maybe that’s why I held onto the beer. Or maybe I realized that at some point I’d need it for beer-battered halibut or an undiscriminating guest. Whatever the reason, I left the beer and the stinking hockey bag in the basement. And sure enough, when a month or so later I needed a beer while cooking, I ran down and grabbed a can, thanking John for his foresight. 

People often assume holidays are the hardest, or milestones like birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, it’s the small things, things no one else would notice or understand, that make your breath catch. When one day, a year or two after he died, I grabbed the last beer, when I felt around the gaping pouch and found no more cold smooth cans, my fingers scratched the finality of death. How to explain that the anniversary of his death passed dry-eyed, but I wept in a dark basement over an empty pocket of a black canvas hockey bag? 

A few weeks later as I pushed my cart through Costco, something steered me into the alcohol section. I had to ask where the Rainier was. When I got home, I carried the case into the basement, retrieved the hockey bag, and loaded 24 beers into that pocket, one by one. “Don’t laugh,” I said to no one as I laughed. I told myself it was just the practical, logical place for them – it had become a habit to look there for beer. But how to explain the small comfort, the thin slice of joy this little joke with myself brought? Putting beer in a dead man’s hockey bag was a quiet, private act of guerilla warfare. I staked a small claim to absurdity, claimed my own definitions of grief and memory. 

About six months after John died, Rosie came into my room one night panic-stricken. “I don’t remember Daddy!” she screamed. “I forget what he looked like! Mommy, I’m forgetting him!” Whereas the night of his death she was quiet, dumbfounded, this second loss overcame her as a tidal wave of grief. She sobbed, inconsolable, terrorized by absence, the slipperiness of memory. 

We lose the dead over and over. The Rainer runs out, stories become warped and wizened until we wonder what was real. Memories become wispy and disconnected, like the last phrases of a dying language. Time moves us toward healing, but it distances us from the living breathing realness of the person. It can feel like a zero-sum game: we are mired in tragedy or we forget. And forgetting is its own tragedy. 

A few years ago I fumigated the hockey bag and brought it to Second Wind Sports. I haven’t made beer-battered halibut in a long time, and anyone who wants beer knows to bring it with them. I hope whoever got the bag still uses it. I don’t mind that they probably don’t know the freight it carried. Life is ephemeral. Eventually we reach a détente, a workable compromise between carrying the weight of the past and traveling light. 

This post is dedicated to a friend suffering incalculable, acute grief. Wishing you a path to peace. 

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