For One More Day

T H I S IS A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY and, as there is a ghost involved, you might call it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

Maybe it's like my old man said: You can be a mama's boy or a daddy's boy, but you can't be both. So you cling to the one you think you might lose.

She wasn't easy on me, don't get me wrong. She smacked me. She scolded me. She punished me. But she loved me. She really did. She loved me falling off a swing set. She loved me stepping on her floors with muddy shoes. She loved me through vomit and snot and bloody knees. She loved me coming and going, at my worst and at my best

She had a bottomless well of love for me.

But there was never, not for a moment, a question of trust between us.

We held each other like that, just briefly. But I cannot put into words the comfort I drew from that moment. I can only say that, as I speak to you now, I still yearn for it.

I ran away. In that manner, I suppose, my father and I were sadly parallel.

In baseball, a player can tell when he's holding his own bat and when he's holding someone else's. Which is how I felt with that shovel in my hands. It was someone else's. It did not belong to me. It belonged to a son who didn't lie to his mother. It belonged to a son whose last words to her were not in anger. It belonged to a son who hadn't raced off to satisfy the latest whim of his distant old man, who, in keeping the record intact, was absent from this family gathering, having decided, "It's better if I'm not there, I don't want to upset anybody. "

That son would have stayed that weekend, sleeping with his wife in the guest room, having Sunday brunch with the family. That son would have been there when his mother collapsed. That son might have saved her.

But that son was not around.

This son swallowed, and did what he was told: He shoveled dirt onto the coffin. It landed with a messy spread, afew gravelly pieces making noise against the polished wood. And even though it was her idea, I heard my mother's voice saying, "Oh, Charley. How could you?"

"Your mom ... She died."

I HOPE YOU never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of you head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.

"You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up."

I could spend a lot of time talking about my life after baseball. But that pretty much says it.