by Abby Provencher
Leave it to Dorothy Hazen to die on the same day as Jesus.
About a week before her health took a turn, my Playwriting class started writing our One-Act plays. Our first assignment was to brainstorm four or five different storylines; I faked this. I had decided on mine a few weeks before.
It was a day in February. I remember nothing of it aside from grabbing a blank notecard from my desk drawer, doodling a school chair, writing “The Empty Chair” over it, and sticking it onto my corkboard.
Over time, I decided the chair belonged to an elementary school child, Oliver, who had passed away young. The play took place nine or so years after Oliver’s death, and it was about his family, friends and school fumbling around and running over one another as they tried to grieve properly. The empty chair—which the school kept empty after Oliver’s death—remained empty all throughout the play as a visual of his absence.
As I wrote, I tried to imagine how the boy’s siblings would feel about seeing their brother’s old, empty school chair. I tried to imagine how they would feel to see his empty spaces all around their home. An empty spot at the kitchen table. An empty bedroom. An empty living room seat.
I tried to imagine how the emptiness would feel and sound.
I finally heard the silence on the day my grandmother died. I was already driving home to New Jersey for Easter weekend the morning she left. My mom and I went to the nursing home where she’d been living to pack up her clothes. She didn’t have much left: a few sweaters, three or so pairs of pants and a handful of knickknacks. Her bed was stripped, but I had rarely seen her in the bed, so I pushed past this. I started pulling things out of drawers, but I told myself that I was tidying up. I looked at her empty wheelchair, and I heard the silence. I kept staring, and her absence thumped through my whole body like a stereo with the bass turned all the way up.
But the wheelchair had only been her seat for the two and half years after her stroke. Really, it was her seat at my kitchen table that would be empty. It was a booth at her favorite diner, Andy’s Corner, that would be empty. It was her green wicker chair that she would never again fill.
If there was one thing Dorothy Hazen was recognizable by, it was her green wicker folding chair. She would pull it out of the trunk of her car, use as a cane on her walk from the parking lot to the soccer field/baseball stands/tennis court, and sit in it as she cheered unendingly for her grandchildren. She often yelled our names at moments that we were not playing. Even with her glasses on, it was difficult for her to distinguish people more than ten or so feet away, so she developed a system of clapping for anyone with one or two resembling features to her grandchildren—just in case.
At the wake, my mom set up Grandma’s green wicker chair next to the casket. She hung my grandmother’s tan jacket on the back of it, hooked her cane over the armrest and sat her purse on the seat alongside a menu from Andy’s.
“That’s perfect,” a friend’s mom said to me later that night. “When I think of your grandma, I always think of that chair.”
She was right. The green wicker chair resembled her better than the body that lay a few feet away from it. It looked more like her than she did for her last two and half years, during which her mind drifted as her dementia got increasingly worse, though she held onto life for the sake of staying with her family. It looked like the grandmother who wanted to go out in a blizzard to get me a birthday card. Like the mother who always offered to share her applesauce with anyone who wanted a bite. Like the woman who loved enough to rival God.
Four days after she died, I reviewed a scene with my Playwriting workshop group in which Oliver’s sister worries that Oliver’s death holds no grand significance. Her living brother tells her it’s important to remember Oliver, even when it’s tiring. He tells her people want to listen, even if it doesn’t seem like it.
Three days later, Grandma’s funeral service was an hour or so long. “It always feels too short,” my dad told me. “You can never have a service long enough to remember everything you want to about a person. But you do what you can.”
Six days after my grandmother’s funeral, Oliver’s sister told her student body that Oliver deserved better than her or any speech she could give. A police officer told the students that a memory or two is all you need.
You want more than a memory or two, of course. I fear time will fade the picture of her in my mind, but I’ve also seen that time also gives space for images to develop.
I thought that time would be a conveyor belt leading me away from her, but it’s more like a pathway around a sculpture in an art museum. With every step, I see something I did not before. My vision and understanding of the sculpture expands even though I cannot cross the velvet ropes to get a closer look.
Even now, as I think of her chair folded up in my garage at home, I see it and I see her and I think of Oliver and I think of how my characters were showing me how to grieve before I knew I was going to.
Abby Provencher is a Junior English major from North Jersey (and proud of it). She’s the third funniest person in her family— though her family would say she’s fourth— but also embraces the side of her that enjoys listening to Bon Iver and Mumford on a rainy day. She uses dance as a still-creative balance to the amount of sitting writing requires and dreams of doing anything that allows her to tell stories.