The trouble with humans, he's decided, is that they have such good memories. Already, Susannah's dogs are wagging their tails as if nothing has happened, as if they aren't sad at all. He's pretty sure they don't wake at night wondering if God has forsaken them.
Barry Topham wakes early these days. In the dark room, he lies in bed and thinks about memory and chance and God. He thinks about how he used to be fooled by the odds. After Dan's accident he thought "We've had our hit. The other kids will be safe." As if tragedies were measured out, one to a family.
Like other couples who have lost a child, Barry and Trisha Topham are now slogging through the stages of grief, trying to reconcile their faith with what happened. Sometimes they talk about which tragedy is worse: what Barry calls Susannah's "outright death" or Dan's "virtual" one.
Three years ago, a yellow jacket stung Dan, then 28, and his allergic reaction left him severely brain damaged, in need of around-the-clock care. Susannah died this past Labor Day, hit by a car while riding her bike with her fiance on the highway between Kamas and Park City. She was 23.
It's like the story of Job, Barry and Trisha's friends have said. But the Tophams know they're not in Job's league. They know that in some places in the world parents are lucky not to lose every single child they love. Still, Barry says he can't help feeling bitter. It wasn't as if his children fell to an epidemic or some uncontrollable twist of fate, he says. Barry dwells on the human mistakes — the way a person can take someone's life through sheer inattentiveness.
"It's the unfulfilled promise of Susannah that haunts me," he says. She was so sweet and bright and hard-working. Never did anything just halfway.
"In over 25 years of teaching here at Utah, as well as at the universities of Virginia and Michigan, she is one of the four or five best students I have been privileged to teach," a professor wrote last year. After her obituary appeared in the paper, Barry and Trisha received dozens of letters, including one from a woman who had only seen Susannah a few times on the bus but was touched by her kindness.
Susannah was killed on a bright September day. She was riding in the emergency lane, on a stretch of road where she was visible for at least a mile. The sun was directly overhead. Perhaps the driver was daydreaming, or upset, or was putting a tape in her tape player. The Utah Highway Patrol and the Summit County District Attorney have not completed their investigation yet so the Tophams can only speculate — and raise their concerns about the way people take driving for granted. People drive while they eat, while they apply makeup and talk on their phones. On the way back from California recently, Barry and Trisha saw a woman driving and reading a book at the same time.
Barry has talked with his state legislator about sponsoring a bill to ban drivers from talking on phones while they drive.
This is Barry's way of coping, says Trisha.
The morning of the day Susannah died, before the Highway Patrol arrived with its bad news, Trisha and Dan were watching Star Trek on TV. It was the episode where Capt. Kirk is kidnapped and taken to a planet where nobody ever dies. The people on the planet needed Kirk's help because a planet where nobody dies can get awfully crowded.
Of course the benefits of death in the abstract and in the long run are pretty obvious. A particular young woman's death, a particular woman with a beautiful smile, is something else.
Still, says Trisha, you do have to think about the whole scheme of things. "God can't fix every bad thing that will happen or the world wouldn't work right."
And accidents just happen, says Trisha. "Time and chance happeneth to them all," says Barry, quoting from Ecclesiastes. Chance is the place where Barry and Trisha's beliefs converge. "I don't think a God I would believe in would be throwing miseries at us," says Barry.
Like most couples, though, they are not one grieving unit. Although they share the same sadness, they have to come to terms with their grief separately. "I'm always the optimist and Barry's the pessimist" — the old glass half empty or half full thing — says Trisha, and it is this world view or biochemistry or genetic legacy that has affected the way they cope, in their separate ways, with Susannah's death and Dan's disability. It colors, too, the comfort they receive from their religion.
"This too shall not pass," he says, turning a familiar, comforting phrase upside down.
Barry envies Trisha's sure faith.
"For some people it's more hope than faith," he says. That's just Barry's pessimism again, says Trisha. During the worst days of Dan's ordeal, their prayers were answered more than once, she says. "I can look at those things and can lean on them for strength. Barry tends to forget those things when he's unhappy. His mind goes to the thing that raises questions, instead of the thing that shores you up."
Dan's story began on a summer day in 1997, while he was sitting on the sofa in a condo the family had rented in McCall, Idaho. Good thing you're not allergic, his wife Cindy said as soon as the yellow jacket stung Dan's arm. Although Dan had had a severe reaction to a yellow jacket sting on a golf course five years earlier, he had been recently tested by an allergist — who told him he wasn't allergic at all. That was just a psychological reaction you had, the doctor said.
So, even though his dad suggested he get the bee sting kit out and inject himself with epinephrine, it didn't seem like a big emergency. The kit was in his golf bag, which was in his car. Dan walked out to the car, was stopped by a passer-by, talked to him politely, then fished through the golf bag. By the time he retrieved the kit, the allergic reaction and its cascading devastation had already started.
There is no comfort, says Barry, from the kinds of clichs people throw around at times like this. "It was God's will," or "only the good die young." What can you learn from a death like Susannah's or an accident like Dan's, he wants to know. That life can be an embittering experience? That he will now appreciate the safe return of his children even more than he did before?
"I think the meaning is what you make it," answers Trisha. "You can either become bitter or you can use the tragedy to become more compassionate."
In the days following Susannah's funeral, friends and acquaintances and even strangers sent the Tophams books — on faith, near-death-experiences, grieving, loss. One of the books was a parable about a woman who, grief-stricken and angry after the death of her son, goes to visit a holy man. Please give me back my son, she says.
"Bring me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow," the holy man says, "and we'll use it to drive the sorrow out of your life." So the woman goes from house to house, and at each one she listens to another sad story. I've had a tragedy, the woman thinks at each house, I can help these people. And, in this way, she travels from house to house throughout the land. She becomes so involved in ministering to other people's sorrow that — even without the magic of the mustard seed — her own sorrow is healed.
Two months after Susannah's death, Barry and Trisha attended a brown bag lecture at the University of Utah titled "The Upper Tigris Archaeological Research Project," presented by Prof. Bradley Parker. Susannah had been Parker's research assistant, and Parker dedicated the lecture, as well as an upcoming book, to her.
Susannah loved archaeology. Had she lived she would have undoubtedly been in the audience, listening to Parker and his graduate students talk about the dig in Turkey — the painstaking sifting and scraping as, little by little, the dirt gave way to a 2,200-year-old burial ground.
The students' slides showed the bones of a post-Hellenistic man and provided a mystery: why did the man's skull contain bones from his leg? Had animals dragged them there after he decomposed? Did another human find his body and put the bones there as part of a funeral rite?
These are interesting questions but seem, on that November afternoon, like substitutes for the real question — how did his wife or father or children live without him?
A couple of weeks later, Barry says he can't stop thinking about the song "MacArthur Park." He recites the lyrics about the cake left out in the rain, and then the ending: "After all the loves of my life, after all the loves of my life, I'll be thinking of you and wondering why."
"It was probably more about lost love," says Trisha.
In his grief, everything reminds Barry of Susannah. Maybe it would be better if humans didn't have such good memories, he says, thinking again of Susannah's black labs.
In this way, Dan is more like a black lab, or seems to be. Because his brain injury has affected his short-term memory, he doesn't seem to remember that Susannah is dead. Barry and Trisha have told him, of course. Several times, in fact, and each time it's like a new, raw wound. So the Tophams have stopped mentioning Susannah in Dan's presence.
The anoxic encephalopathy caused by the yellow jacket sting has left Dan with "locked-in syndrome," which makes him unable to express himself, or control his movements, and makes him unable, except on rare occasions, to verbalize any thoughts he may have. In the three years since the accident he has only asked for a drink of water once, has never asked about another person. "I think he's just floating most of the time," Trisha says.
Exactly how much Dan understands or knows or remembers or ruminates over isn't clear. He can mouth the words "Bush" and "Gore" if you ask him who ran for president. He can add and multiply and, if Trisha gives him four letters, he can unscramble them to make a word. Like many patients with brain injuries, he remembers the words to old songs. And the other night, watching M*A*S*H on TV, he suddenly whispered "Frank Burns."
Trisha's and Barry's days now are spent in tedious, quiet tasks: feeding and bathing Dan, watching TV with him, lying next to him at night in case his arms get twisted behind his head.
Trisha rarely leaves the house these days. Barry, a dermatologist, only works one day a week now, so that he can spend most of his time at home. One of Barry and Trisha's sons is on an LDS mission, but three of their other children live close and drop by often.
Barry knows he has much to be thankful for: four healthy children and their spouses, a comfortable life, good friends. He is happy to be putting the finishing touches on the Susannah Topham Memorial Scholarship Fund at the University of Utah, which will help provide financial help for students majoring in history, and he is hoping to raise money for it.
But even thankfulness is an effort. Thanksgiving was especially hard this year, he says. "I couldn't say the prayer. I had to have my brother-in-law say it."
Three months after Susannah's death, Barry lies in his dark bedroom and hears the questions that Job once heard, questions that stack faith up against unspeakable sadness and pain.
Soon he will get up and get dressed. He'll make breakfast and then help Trisha with Dan's shower. And later, after he has made it through another day, he will lie next to Dan.
Do you want to say your prayers, Dan, he'll ask, and Dan will say yes. "Heavenly father," he'll say, "bless our family to be healthy, safe and happy."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com