THE HAUNTING OF SPRING

There is a month in the spring when, at least every other year, someone close to me suddenly drops dead.

It has become surreal, and I had a friend who even created Lornukkah—the eight days of my birthday—to give me an emotionally distracting tradition to look forward to in this mournful time. This time of year, and life in general, have been harder without her listening ear and ingenious ideas.

This spring, my cousin, Dad's only sister's youngest, an autistic son, took his own life.

As much as I miss him, my father, my grandmother, my nana, and my friends who have died during this macabre month that culminates in Easter and my birthday, I can only imagine what my aunt Connie Beth is going through to have already lost her father and then to have this annual time of genesis mean the death of her only sibling, her mother, and her youngest child.

Unlike my very LDS family, I do not see a corpse, feel an emptiness, and think oh, how I wish I were as lucky to graduate early. If there is an afterlife, and if death is a mere graduation to something great beyond, we celebrate it all wrong. In Lornaworld, black is a calming color, white blinding and painful. I would much prefer to be married in black and have funerals be reminiscent of the insides of LDS temples—and it seems more fitting.

Despite all of the other deaths I am reminded of at this time, it is that of my father that most haunts me...

Memories of my late father (aka Dr. Everett Gerald Larson, Brother Larson, Gary, E.G., or, if you were our auto mechanic whose kids we basically put through college, “Ev”) are both few and strange: few because he was single parent to five children, married to his religion, and had the time-consuming job of teacher; “late” not only because he has passed on but because he came with his own relative time dimension, as all great theoretical physicists should; and strange because raising myself in the orbit of a savant was never boring.

He was a genius, of that no single person had the slightest doubt, and physics equations were in his head at all times, seemingly even before he knew what the term meant (we're talking preschool years here) and definitely while both awake and asleep.

His mother said he was born at the age of 83, for he never acted like a child, never screamed or pouted to get his way, and never even quite played with other children in the traditional sense. Despite always being bright, he “flunked” kindergarten for being so small and shy that his mother held him back a grade for fear of bullies.

Despite later skipping a grade due to his genius, he said he must have kept flunking out since nearly sixty years later he was still at school. A joke, yes, but he never underestimated what a teacher could learn from his students.

His teenage “rebellious” streak was to escape the stifling lack of freedom to make any of his own decisions at home and strike out to go to college at MIT—far across the country from Denver and his strict parents.

He could have gone to Harvard, but that world of cut-throat politics was never what he saw college being about, while MIT is much more focused on what you know that whom you know.

He graduated in chemistry—and we had a basement full of explosive chemicals to prove it! Most of them were stored in glass jars in the same cupboard and a good earthquake would have make our house go up like a roman candle. I grew up thinking every home was complete with a darkroom/chemistry lab.

He came to Utah to work teaching theoretical physics at BYU, his parents moving here to be closer to him and have more of a say in his life.

He brought with him an immigrant from England he'd met at MIT—not a fellow student, nor would she ever be likely to take a single college course or understand even basic algebra with her 7^th grade education—but one of the young secretaries in the department. They had almost nothing beyond religion in common, but there weren't exactly a lot of fellow young-adult LDS in Boston in the 1950s.

It was an ultimatum from his father that brought my father to consider proposing to Maria. My grandpa asked Dad whether it was serious with this girl he'd been going out on dates with for the past several months and said to either think about marrying her or move on.

My father mentioned the conversation to her saying, “I'm thinking about marrying you.”

Now, as a theoretical physicist, this was accurate to the word, but Maria took it as a proposal, and he decided to go along with it. He gave her a family heirloom ring—which she despised greatly as being ugly and too small—and they had, what she later called, a honeymoon from Hell.

Bored at home, Mother wanted children to play with—wanted them badly. She thought his lack of physical affection, even kissing, was an LDS thing that would end at the altar—it did not. The bishop even turned his back to give them a little privacy for the temple ceremony, but all she got upon her “I do” was a peck on the cheek.