Half-Life of a Secret by Emily Strasser

Author:Emily Strasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813197210
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky

12

TALKING

After learning about Nannie’s death, I began to think again, uneasily, about the conversation I’d had with D. H., the one in which he insisted that George had committed suicide. At that time, I took my father’s reassurance that George had died of a heart attack, and that D. H. was losing his memory, as permission to leave it be. But having learned about Nannie’s death, I now knew how entire families could fall silent, could swallow the thing that could not be said.

By now, D. H. was further into Alzheimer’s. He knew who I was, sometimes, and remembered George, but when I sat with him, he repeated the same stories twice, three times, within twenty minutes.

I needed something more definitive. I needed to know how my grandfather died because I needed to know when I’d hit bottom—not the despair kind of bottom, but the solid ground kind. I needed to know what I was walking on.

Though I was queasy about it, I went looking. I could not call up George’s death certificate on Ancestry.com, the way I did for Nannie, because he died too recently. The Tennessee Office of Vital Records retains death certificates for fifty years before releasing them for public access. Before this time, the office will verify information contained in their records, excluding cause of death, to any requestor. The significance of this detail would not previously have occurred to me: fifty years is the amount of time the government is willing to protect a dead man’s secrets.

Before the passage of fifty years, only immediate family members, or affiliated attorneys, can obtain information on cause of death. Which was all to say, I couldn’t just peek into the matter on my own and tuck it away again.

I tried not to think too much about what it meant for me to ask my father for his help. He did not seem surprised or worried. Maybe it was the doctor in him; he valued science, a disinterested process of inquiry, the need for evidence. He requested a copy of George’s death certificate. When it arrived at my childhood home in Atlanta, he scanned it and emailed me. He must have read it, but he did not tell me what he found.

It took me moments of scanning down, past the perfunctory details, neatly typed—George Albert Strasser; died January 9, 1984; age 65; white; American; male—until finally, at the bottom of the document in a box with the tiny words “death was caused by,” I found in loopy cursive the words “cardiopulmonary arrest.”

I had avoided calling Nellie for a long time. As George’s youngest, left at home after her siblings had gone to college, she was the witness, the Tookie of the next generation. She had battled her own demons. If inheritance includes biology and circumstance, Nellie bore the brunt of both. By the time I became interested in George, she’d been sober for years, but during my childhood, it wasn’t always so. I’d learned a certain carefulness, a fear of upsetting the balance.

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