The Late Great Fourth

I remember quite vividly the first time I learned about death. I was four, and it was the Fourth of July. My mother’s family has, since before I was born, made an event of the Fourth. We use the holiday as an excuse for an annual family reunion. The older generations-- the ones who remember World War II, or the America of the 1950s-- still think of it in patriotic or historical terms, I think, but for those of us who are younger, for whom this is the only kind of Fourth we’ve ever known, we care much more about the event than what it stands for. For us, the holiday is about getting together with aunts and uncles and cousins, and eating and talking and blowing things up, and whether it’s in celebration of the Declaration of Independence or Guy Fawke’s Day is really irrelevant. Hell, it doesn’t even take place on the actual date most years; for us it’s the Fourth, not the 4th. It’s a thing, not a day. It’s usually one of my favorite times of the whole year.

The best thing about my family’s farm is the stars. In the cities, the light pollution is too great to really see them. You can make out the planets and a few of our brighter neighbors, but nothing like you can see in the country. Out there, on a clear night with the lights off, you can see stars you’d all but forgotten about. You can see the Milky Way splash across the sky, pick out the constellations as if they were drawn out for you, and you understand why man invented the gods. I remember sitting with my mother on my grandparent’s lawn in the summer night one Fourth of July, watching the fireworks in front of us and looking up at the sky overhead. This was 1986, the year I turned four, and the year Halley’s Comet made its most recent trip through our part of the Solar System. As we sat there, my mother told me about the comet, and how it was only visible every once in a great while. I couldn’t see it; maybe it was the light from the house, or from the fireworks, or maybe I was just a child and didn’t know what I was looking for. I asked her when it would be back, and she told me that it would be another 76 years before it came this way again. I asked if we would get to see it then, and she told me that I probably would, but she would not.

It’s possible, probable even, that I knew something of death before then, but that was the first time that death was really and truly real for me. I was crushed, heartbroken, to realize that my mother was going to die. I was a child, she was the most important person in the world to me, and no matter what I did or how much I wanted to stop it, someday she was going to grow old and die. She would never see the comet come round again. I cried, though I didn’t tell anyone why. Even now, 20 years later, with everything that’s happened since then, it still makes me sad to think about it. That hurt I felt as a child has never gone away.

(It’s just occurred to me: I wonder what impact that had on my faith. Despite coming from a deeply religious background, I was never deeply religious. Looking back, even as a child, before my struggles with depression, I never shared the conviction that my family does. I always felt alienated from their beliefs in a way; at best, I was just parroting what I’d been taught my whole life. Yet my brother, who was raised in the same environment, is a Christian. Is it possible that learning about death like I did, at an age when my religious beliefs were not fully formed, somehow kept me from ever being comfortable with Christianity, or the concept of God in general? Certainly I can remember questioning why God would make us die at all at a young age, just like many others have questioned why a just and loving deity would allow suffering or poverty. Maybe with my knowledge of death came seeds of doubt that ultimately prevented me from ever feeling the sort of personal connection to my faith that others had. Something to consider, certainly, if only for curiosity’s sake.)

Yesterday, July 1st, was this year’s Fourth. I’m 24 now, and that means that I can clearly remember two decades worth of these reunions. The exact details are blurry as I go farther back-- it’s hard to tell which year this happened, or that-- but it’s all there. In many ways, that single memory may be the most significant, but they all matter. Some of the happiest times of my life have been there on the farm, on that one day of the summer that seemed to last forever. I was driving back late last night, thinking about them all, and after a while, I just turned off the music and drove, remembering old times. It seems like a lifetime and it seems like no time at all, both at once. Memory is funny like that.

I was lying there again, like I have so many times before, watching the biggest of the fireworks go off, with those beautiful, beautiful stars in the background, and at times, I couldn’t tell which was which. From right underneath, some of those carefully crafted explosions look like tiny galaxies of stars, appearing and blinking out in moments. I was thinking how amazing that something so exquisite could be so deadly; one wrong move and someone could be seriously hurt. We’ve had near misses before. That’s what happens when you mix amateurs and gunpowder. I was thinking that there’s probably a lesson there, about the relation between beauty and danger, about risk, but I didn’t think about it for long. I was content to simply take it in.

There were times when I was younger when I imagined myself as one of those shells, exploding against a backdrop of stars. There were times when I imagined I was one of the stars themselves, a tiny pinprick of light in an unforgiving sea of black. It was like I had to hold on to the ground to keep from falling up.

I’m moving soon, leaving my home and my home state, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. And who’s to say but this might not have been the last Fourth for me? I hope not, but life is strange, and weird, and we can never tell what will happen next. I went there yesterday fully expecting that I wouldn’t be back a year later.

Twenty years is a nice, round number. If this was my last Fourth, it was a good one. If somehow I never find myself back there again, I’ll always have my memories, and that’s enough for anyone. Twenty years of staring up at that endless night sky. Twenty years’ worth of that one day of the summer that seemed to last forever.