To say the morning after my parents died was the worse moment in my life would be glaringly obvious. I had woken up earlier that morning on a hide-a-bed and my Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed arguing. Well, not really arguing, Aunt Mary Ann couldn’t believe what had happened and Uncle Ed was telling her it did – “I saw the blood,” I remember him saying. The kitchen light was on and Dave, Lee and I were on the hide-a-bed in the living room next to me. It was still dark outside.

I woke up later and it seemed like everyone else was already up. That never happens, I was always the first one up in our house. But we weren’t in our house, we were in Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. The TV was on but no one paying attention to it. In fact, no one was talking at all, the TV was just filling in the sound as a strange compensation for last night’s devastation.

There was a knock on the door and Aunt Mary Ann opened it. It was our Aunt Joyce. They hugged and cried. We cried again too. I remember the awful faces we made last night. Those awful faces people make when it twists up in gut-wrenching pain and tears. After a while, Aunt Joyce pulled away. It was always great when Mom would take us to go to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s. John and Jim always had the good toys. Unfortunately that how kids measure families – if they’ve got ‘the good toys’ or not. Mom would take us over there and Dave and I would play with John and Jim while Mom and Aunt Joyce would sit in the kitchen and drank their coffee. Aunt Joyce was always really nice. But not this morning, she had the same awful face we all did.

At some point, we were told to get our things together but we only had our coats. We had only been coming to Jeffery’s birthday party and he was only four. Since even Dawn was nine, we were really just coming over for cake and ice cream – Jeffery was too young to consider any of us would actually play with him. And it was just our family. No other cousins or aunts and uncles, just the Zilligens. The only things we had to get was our coats and hats – and gloves if we remembered them. It was February after all.

Dressed up to the walk to Aunt Joyce’s station wagon we waited in the hall. Aunt Joyce and Aunt Mary Ann hugged again and cried. We stood like zombies looking at the stairs leading the half floor up to the outside door. That is where it happened. The dim light in the hallway paled compared to the light outside, even though it was cloudy. Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment was the first one on the basement floor so it was just us and the stairs but it like the long dim hallway of some government building. I remember looking down that hall and thinking, “I don’t want to walk there.” I don’t know if all five us were staring at those stairs like I was but that was where it happened. That was the last place I saw my mom alive

I don’t think Aunt Joyce knew the situation we were literally facing as she shuffled us to the stairs, like a hen with her chicks. I don’t think she knew at the top of those stairs her sister laid the night before. I don’t think she knew when Dave and I came in from playing in the snow just before we were leaving Jeffery’s party, her sister was laying on the floor with Lee holding her head up. And that Dave and I had to step over her to get back into Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. Eventually, Hope and Aunt Mary Ann got Lee to leave Mom and come into the apartment as well. None of us wanted to climb those stairs because of what had happened last night. But Aunt Joyce didn’t know that so she nudged her little chicks up the stairs and out to in the snowy February parking lot.

I remember looking down at the carpeting where my mom had laid but I didn’t see any blood. But she didn’t die actually there, she had died at the hospital Aunt Mary Ann said. I looked at the other side of the landing, my dad’s glasses were no longer there – like they were last night.

I remember telling someone about how my parents died years later and telling them as I walked out that apartment that morning, as bad as that was, it was never going to get any worse. I understood that people in abusive situations have it harder because their situations are unending. But that was years later and as I write this, and relive this, I’ll admit that morning – was pretty fucking bad. Five newly minted orphans walking through where their mother laid dying not even twelve hours earlier.

I mark this as the lowest point in my life. It’s all up from here, right? But it sucked that now I knew the way to ‘here’ – my lowest point. ‘Here’, I would learn, was a room painted with tears and walls that were icy and black. I know there were walls because I found corners to wallow in. I could not tell if there was a floor or I couldn’t stand because my legs were too shaky to support me here. There was no ceiling, just blackness above you. You never flew, you could only fall – flailing for an unreachable edge or slope. I would also learn, now that I had found my way here, it would a place I would visit and dream about in the days, weeks and years to come. And over this time I would create well-worn paths and set up new and different paths to – ‘here’. Gratefully it is true what they say – time heals all wounds but the paths always remain. And while you end up just using the paths less and less – ‘here’ had become my Saudade.

Many years later, with the children my mom would never know, I had finally started reading the Narnia series to them. Lee had recommended the series when I was in college but I never took the time to actually read them. Now I used the excuse to of  ‘reading to the kids’ to read them for myself. As I started the series for the first time with Nate, it was in the first book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that I came across the following verse:

“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been – if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I had to stop reading to Nate and hid my silent tears from him. He was probably 7 or 8 at the time. I was barely able to read the words aloud. C.S. Lewis had captured the night my parents died. The only clarification I would add would be – it’s not that nothing would ever happen again, it was that nothing of significance would ever happen again. How could it?

The ride to Aunt Joyce’s house was as quiet at Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Ed’s apartment. I don’t remember the radio being on or anyone saying anything. The sound of the tires on the road did nothing to distract us. I’ve never asked Aunt Joyce about that trip. What was she thinking that morning? The tears had been shed, our backs hurt from sobbing but the morning had come anyways. And in the midst this quietest I’m sure we all had the same thought – so now what do we do?

We stayed with Aunt Joyce, Uncle Jack and John and Jim for a week. In that week my mom’s wake and funeral were arranged. I’m assuming someone went to our Gray house and got us more clothes to wear. We were there for half a week when I realized we were missing school. I guess your parents dying was an acceptable reason not to be in school.

I don’t remember too much about our day to day activities. I wasn’t involved with the arrangements for the wake and funeral arrangement, I don’t know if any of us were. I don’t remember leaving Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house anytime during that week except for the wake and the funeral. One thing I do remember was discovering their Hi-Fi and their collection of records. Among those records was Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits. The song I recognized was ‘Sink the Bismarck’. I didn’t know who Johnny Horton was but I like his first name. Mom called me Johnny – well, she used to.

We watched Family Classics on Channel Nine. I watched for the monster movies but they never really played any ‘monster movies’, the closest I could get was ‘War of the World’ or ‘Mysterious Island’. I remember watching the 1960 movie ‘Sink the Bismarck’ about the Allies mission to sink a Nazi battleship called The Bismarck. And one of my favorite parts was the song (that ironically, is not in the movie).

I played Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits to hear ‘Sink the Bismarck’ but discovered a bunch of other songs to distract me – “North to Alaska”, “Johnny Reb”, “When Its Springtime in Alaska”, “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Johnny Freedom”. Johnny Horton apparently enjoyed ‘Johnny’ as the characters of his songs, and that suited me just fine. Many of his songs were patriotic and uplifting. But the song that captured my melancholy was “All for the Love of a Girl.”

When I started writing these ‘Songs of My Life’ stories, this was the song I was dreading – and looking forward – to the most. It is the song that defines why I value music so much although I would never say “All for the Love of a Girl” defines me as a person, I find it much too sad. I learned that the lyrics of a song are left to the interpretation of the listener and we fill in our own meaning based on our circumstances, beliefs and values. And in that process, I believe, we gain a better understanding of who we are ourselves, how we see specific situations and circumstances. This song led me to that realization. And though it is about a man being in love, I used it to heal my heart during a tragic period in my life.

That Friday night, February 7, 1975, Mom took us to my cousin Jeffery’s birthday which was at Aunt Mary Ann’s and Uncle Ed’s – Jeffery’s grandparents. It had only been us at Jeffery’s party. Jeffery’s mom, my cousin Lynn, was not there (that’s a story unto itself). I think Aunt Mary Ann was hoping to distract Mom from her pending divorce from Dad. When it was time to leave, Dave and I asked Mom if we could go out and play in the snow fort we had seen when we had walked into the building and she let us go. While we were playing we heard what we thought were firecrackers. Dave was a few yards closer to the apartment building, so he went in and I followed him to the door a few moments later.

When I opened the door I saw Mom lying on the ground as Lee held her head. I saw Hope and Aunt Mary Ann yelling for me to get into the apartment as Dave was just ducking passed them into the door. I was really confused on what was happening. I stepped over Mom and looked to my left and saw Dad’s glasses lying on the ground. I was always amazed at how I knew they were Dad’s glasses. As out of place as they were, I knew they were his. I ran down the stairs and back into Aunt Mary and Uncle Ed’s apartment. Dave and Dawn were as confused as I was. Eventually, Lee too came into the apartment and Aunt Mary Ann closed the door.

From here things get a little blurry – the police were called and I remember standing in Jeffery’s room without the lights on. Dawn and Jeffery were in the room with me. Jeffery was saying “the woo-woo’s are coming, the woo-woo’s are coming,” pointing to the red and blue lights that were spinning around his walls and ceilings from the police lights flashing outside. Dawn was crying and telling him “yes, the woo woo’s are coming.” At some point, I was back in the living room and there were 2-4 cops in there talking to each other and Aunt Mary, Uncle Ed, Hope and Lee. At some point I was told Dad was dead, he had shot himself – suicide. For years I always pictured him shooting himself in his blue station wagon which I envisioned was in the apartment’s parking lot. My scene was always more dramatic – the cops were walking to the station wagon with guns drawn and as they approached, a flash of light in the front seat and blood would splatter on the driver’s side window. But Lee told me,  many years later, he shot mom three times but, not being prepared for the recoil, the second shot went into the ceiling before he shot Mom a second time. The fourth shot was to his head. We couldn’t see him laying in the second-floor hallway when we came in from the ground level.

As I heard Hope and/or Lee told the story that night, they (Mom, Hope, Lee and Dawn) were walking with Mom up the stairs to leave the apartment building. Dave and I were already outside playing in the snow. Dad was waiting for Mom on the second floor at the top of the stairs (it was only a two-floor apartment building). Dad said, “Goodbye, Virginia” and shot Mom three times. He apparently threw his glasses down the stairs and stepped away and shot himself in the head.

Aunt Mary went with my Mom to the hospital and left us with Uncle Ed and the cops. We were crying when we heard Dad was dead. The police finished up their reports but there really anything else for them to do. This tragedy was not going beyond our family so the police work would be minimum. But there was still one more scene that had to be played out.

By the time Aunt Mary Ann came back the cops were gone, at least they were no longer in the apartment and their flashing lights outside were turned off. When she opened her door the five of us gathered around her. She had been crying and wore that God-awful face. I remember Hope asking, “Is she…, is she….?” but she couldn’t actually say the words. Despite not actually asking the question, Aunt Mary Ann answered her anyways by shaking her head yes. Mom had died.

I would say at this point the room started spinning. But it wasn’t just a feeling, the room was literally spinning. It was spinning because I was falling to the ground and that was what I was seeing. I think that’s why I have always thought of that moment as a free-fall. A cold icy fall into nothing – I would later understand it as an abyss.

When the new round of tears had subsided, I would find I had I landed in C.S. Lewis’ quietness. The tears had been shed, the reality faced, the pain was large and twisted, a lump in my throat kept my breath away and my back hurt from the heavy sobs. And yes – then – it was very, very quiet.

That was the story I had just lived through that led me to Johnny Horton the following evening. The Johnny Horton song, “All for the Love of a Girl,” had sad lyrics and Johnny Horton’s voice sounded heartbreaking to me. It was a perfect match for my pain. The song starts out:

Well today I’m so weary, today I’m so blue
Sad and broken hearted and it’s all because of you
Life was so sweet dear, life was a song
Now you’ve gone and left me, oh where do I belong

I was certainly sad and broken-hearted. ‘All because of you’ pointed to Dad and what he had done. ‘You’ve gone and left me’ was Mom, but obviously not by her choice. And that left ‘where do I belong’ staring me in the face; that ominous ‘now what?’ The song then goes into the chorus:

And it’s all for the love of a dear little girl
All for the love that sets your heart in a whirl
I’m a man who’d give his life and the joys of this world
All for the love of a girl

I know it is my interpretation is different from the song’s intent. This tragic event was all due to Dad’s love for Mom, as I interpreted Johnny Horton’s lyrics. “I’m a man who’d give his life and the joys of this world. All for the love of a girl” That is how I saw this tragedy – it was the only way I could see this. Weeks and months and years later, when the pain was bubbling over on how selfish my father had been, and the circumstance we found ourselves in, I would find comfort in ‘all for the love of a girl.’

Some people have wondered how I could not hate my father for what he had done. I can honestly say ‘hate’ never really entered my thought process – outside of hating the situation that I, and my brothers and sisters, now found ourselves in, but there was never specific hate for my father. There were so many other things I was going through and would go through, over the months and years ahead.

And Mom would become my angel, my sense of purity. The song plays her as a girl – young and innocent. While the physical and emotional loss of her was the most painful part, over time I realized what I really lost from her was her strength, which I know she had; that and her independence. She was the victim and she would never recover from that state. My twelve-year-old perspective of her was frozen. I would never again see her flaws. I could not get angry with her or see how stupid she was. I could never see if she was petty or arrogant. This just enhanced her purity, but over time it made her less real – and that was the real tragedy – the loss of reality. Mom became this vision of goodness and innocence.

Keep in mind, she was twisted into a twelve-year-old’s mind, who was laying on the floor next to a Hi-Fi, trying to make sense of his last 24 hours. Dad was also wrapped up there as well. The word “Disbelief”‘ spun in wide elliptical orbits. And “It’s Not Real” bounced with an erratic rhythm. And “It’s A Dream” swung in and out of view.  Unfortunately, it was not a dream and was very much real. And “Why?” I still struggle for that answer.

Over the week we stayed with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack I would continue to listen to Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits side two. We went to Mom’s wake but only Hope and Lee went to Dad’s. Somewhere within the adult decision hierarchy of my Mom’s family, it was deemed that Dave, Dawn and I were too young to go to Dad’s wake. Mom’s wake was held at Oehler funeral home north of downtown Des Plaines where we lived.

The wake was a surreal affair and what I remember most was Mom not looking right in her coffin. I would learn many years later the process and the role of the mortician. Well, whoever was Mom’s mortician did not do a good job, she didn’t look like Mom. Her cheeks were too puffy and her makeup didn’t look right. This just added to the surreal event and added to my denial of what had happened. Despite Mom not looking right, the wake offered closure. I wished I would have had that with Dad. Years later I would ‘see’ Dad in a crowd of people but after many years of these ‘glimpses’, I realized I was seeing someone that looked like Dad, specifically the picture of Dad from my parent’s bedroom. I always wonder if I had these ‘glimpses’ due to my lack of closure with Dad’s death.

There were a lot of people at my Mom’s wake. I recognized aunts, uncles and cousins and the occasional church members from Messiah Lutheran. I remember a couple of my friends from school coming to Mom’s wake. At some point, we went down to the basement of the funeral home and of course like typical kids, they wanted to know what happened so I told them. It wasn’t a secret. They asked why my dad would do that and my only answer was “because he didn’t want to get a divorce”.

The next morning was Mom’s funeral. It was held at our church Messiah Lutheran in Park Ridge where my parents had been custodians and weekly we attended church and Sunday School. I don’t remember actually going to the church, but I remember it being very crowded when we got there. As the service started, my brothers and sisters were led to the front pews that had been reserved for us. I remember seeing my sixth-grade teacher Mr. Kreneck and my fifth-grade teacher Ms. Hoag singing to the opening hymn as we walked in. A coffin was centered at the front of the church – Mom’s coffin. The service had begun and again the surrealism of our situation cast the front of the church in a washed out, dreamlike state, like poorly developed film. So many times I had wandered in that sanctuary – up by the altar and the pulpit. But today I sat in the front row looking up at Pastor Keays with Mom’s coffin to his right.

Of course, we were crying as he talked about everything Mom and Dad had done around the church. Though honestly, I can’t say I remember him actually talking about Dad. At some point in his sermon he brought up the flowers Mom would plant around the church sidewalks and that we would always remember her by the flowers she planted. It was at this moment our crying turned to weeping and we had to be escorted out of the service.

Many times I would go with Mom to pick up the annuals she would plant at church. While Mom picked out her flats of annuals for that year’s plantings, I would wander into the greenhouses to where the cactuses were until it was time to go. The station wagon or the VW bus would smell like fresh dirt and marigolds if that’s what she was planting. I remember her picking out alyssum, ageratum and pansies too. We would go to church and mom would spend the afternoon planting. And now Pastor Keays was using that memory of mine to memorialize Mom – and that brought a watershed of pain and again renewed my loss.

We ended up in a limousine that followed the hearse to the cemetery. I remember thinking – the first time I get to ride in a limousine wasn’t my prom, wasn’t my wedding or even a trip to the airport – it was to the cemetery to bury Mom. But again, kids like shiny things and I forgot the purpose of our trip. Soon Dave and I began exploring the expanse of the limo’s backseat and discovering this newfound luxury. It was crazy but I didn’t even know where Mom was going to be buried, I had heard Memory Garden but I had no clue to where that was.

The limo took us from Messiah to Memory Gardens, which turned out to be in Arlington Heights. A seven-mile trip with a mile worth of cars following us. Despite the sun, as we stood by the open grave and it was cold – it was still February. Mom’s coffin was brought over from the hearse and laid in front of us. Pastor Keays said more words that make us cry. But the crying got worse when he stopped and the coffin was lowered into the ground. This horrible trip that started with a walk up a short flight of stairs was beginning to end. We cried and we stood looking down at a box that held Mom. At some point, we were pushed back into the limo or one of the aunt or uncle’s cars. And Mom was gone.

We had lunch at Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house. Their small house was crowded and eventually us kids, at least Dave, Dawn and I, escaped to play in the driveway – despite the cold. Again, in the midst of a game of tag, I was shaken with the realization that we’re playing at our Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray’s house after we just buried our mother. My father was also dead. It wasn’t right. We should never play again. We should never laugh again. The world should stop. But it didn’t – and neither did we.

We spent the rest of the week at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house. There was now nothing to do – except figuring out what to with five new orphans. I spent more time laying on the floor next to the Hi-Fi listening to Johnny Horton. It had been a horrible week – in fact, the worst of my life. I had now established a new low point, firmly marked. A place I could feel sorry for myself. Decorated with tears and sporting the latest in morbid realities. I knew the way to ‘here’ and I now had a song to accompany me. It explained everything because it really was – all for the love of a girl.