Charting the Unknown by Kim Petersen Read Free Book Online Page B

faster than slow motion.
    In the moment of realization that Bethany was gone, I swam in the miry sea of time and frantically searched for reverse, my lungs burning. If I could just get to last night, to yesterday, find the surface somehow so I could catch my breath. I opened my eyes wide, and through the murkiness, saw my life in relation to hers. Scenes flashed forward revealing all the moments I had dreamed of so clearly in my mind it was almost as if I lived them. Her first steps. Opening presents at Christmas. Blowing out candles on her birthdays. A scraped knee, scoring a goal in soccer, borrowing the car, blonde hair in a ponytail, shopping at the mall, walking down the aisle at her wedding. An older Bethany waving goodbye after dropping her kids off for me to babysit. All these stripped, like a Band-Aid, fast, unsympathetically, off my future.
    On a drippy, grey, November morning, a few days after Bethany's funeral, I sat on a black, wrought iron bench in the children's section of the cemetery and wondered how I never knew there was a children's section of a cemetery. The results of Bethany's autopsy had come in earlier that day. It was what the doctor suspected. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I was thinking how words like grief, torment, hopelessness and even acronyms like SIDS, could in one instant go from being words I talked about to words I owned. As if the librarian of life, sitting at her desk in some pillared hall filled with ancient volumes, opened the book of SIDS, picked up a large stamp, rolled it on a pad of red ink, and thumped it down. On the page were these words, “This volume: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is now the property of Kim Petersen… if found please return to…”
    From my bench, I looked out on a pastoral scene sprinkled with headstones and for some reason Karl Wallenda popped into my brain. While at the library weeks ago, I had read an article on this famous high wire circus performer. It took him years of practice to be a tightrope walker. He started when he was six. He believed tightrope walking to be serious business. You had to keep your wits about you when you were 30-40 feet up with no net below you. Perfect your sense of balance. Concentrate, he said.
    Through the wrought iron cemetery gates and beyond the large oak and maple trees now stripped of their leaves, I could see our small town square. People were hurrying across it from all directions. A man in a dark suit was talking on his cell phone, striding confidently across the cement sidewalk. This simple gesture was part of his fragile plan for the day. It was clear that he was unaware of his high wire routine. At any moment he might misstep and fall headlong. I had a frantic desire to wave and yell out at him, “Hey buddy! Watch out!”
    Circus music blared in my mind. Miraculously the businessman carried on across the street and disappeared into a Beemer. Shortly after, a small girl entered the same square. She skipped lackadaisically beside her mother. For the girl there were many distractions. She ran to gaze at the fountain. Walked along its sculpted edge, toe to heel. Grabbed her mother's hand and pointed at a nearby ice cream store. Both seemed to be oblivious of the fact that at any second, life as they knew it might cease to exist. Not far from them, an old woman sat on a concrete bench and fed some pigeons. I imagined the bench balancing precariously on two legs high above the circus ring.
    Everyone, I thought, is on high wires and completely unaware. The occasional person teetered off, arms waving, as the band played and the Master of Ceremonies cheerfully said, “Ladies and Gentleman for out next attraction…”
    Despite watching several family members fall to their death, Karl Wallenda had this to say, “Life is being on a highwire, everything else is just waiting.”
    Some years before, while hiking with friends near a lake in Colorado, I stepped in thick mud up to my shins and