Dictionary Entry, Bear: For the Girl Who Killed My Father
Bear, 1a. transitive verb: to accept or allow oneself to be subjected to. I couldn’t bear my mother’s screams the night we learned my father died. The 11:00pm news anchor announced the accident: a pedestrian (no name until the family could be identified) killed in the crosswalk in front of Sullivan University. It could be anyone, I told my mother, even though he was unnaturally late coming home.
1b. to assume, accept. It’s all the fault of the driver. The city bears no responsibility for this death, despite no lights in the crosswalk.
1c: to support the weight of somebody/something. The driver was a girl, nineteen. Her shoulders were too skinny to bear the weight of this tragedy, the police decided. No charges, despite the marijuana in her system.
1d: to show something; to carry something so it can be seen. The settlement bore her signature, shaky and young. Let’s not ruin her life, the lawyers said, as if that was what we wanted.
1e: to have a feeling, especially a negative feeling. We bore her no ill will, but we needed an acknowledgement that his life mattered.
1f: to not be suitable for something. Life without my father didn’t bear thinking about. A professor, he’d taught students the basics of mathematics and life. A minister, he’d cared for an aging congregation since he was nineteen himself.
1g: to have a particular name. My mother lived seven years without him, each year becoming more and more frail until she, too, died, saying he’d come to retrieve her. I am the last to bear his name.
1h: to carry somebody/something, especially while moving. Twenty years later, I can’t stop thinking about the girl who killed him, wondering whether she is a force of light or darkness in the world. Her common name kept me from googling her. One day a friend mentioned that her husband is a private investigator, and while she didn’t realize it, her comments come bearing a gift to me.
1i: to move, behave or act in a particular way. I bore myself with dignity in his office, but as soon as I left, I sat in my car and bawled, heaving sobs mixed with muffled shrieks I’d never let out before. I don’t want to contact her, I said; I just need to know she’s making a difference the way my father did.
1j: to give birth to a child. I can’t bear children of my own. Sometimes at night, after my husband has gone to sleep, I wonder if she has children, if she loves them with the fierce love my parents had for me. And I wonder if I want that for her.
1k: to produce flowers. Every time the detective calls me, he tells me to be patient. It takes time for these things to bear fruit.
2. Bear, intransitive verb, to go or turn in the direction mentioned. I’ve found her, he says in the voicemail. My hand trembles as I press the first few numbers to call him back: 859-555… I don’t finish the call, nor do I ever. When I glimpse him on the street, I bear right or left—any direction away from the truth.
Because the truth is I couldn’t bear it if she were an ordinary person, someone who hadn’t built wells in Ethiopia or volunteered to feed the homeless on Saturdays. I can’t stand to think of her life saved only to have her fritter it away.
I live with not knowing because there’s hope in it, hope that she might be something special.
3. Bear, to hold the truth of. I bear witness to his life, his death. In my writing, I channel my love for him, my ambivalence for her. I want to say I feel love for her, like the stories you hear about how the victim’s family (synonym: sufferers) goes to meet the perpetrator and offers forgiveness. But those stories aren’t mine.
4. Bear, idiom, to have a difficult problem that makes you worried or unhappy but that you have to deal with. I live with the fear that she’s forgotten, that she sleeps well at night, and that the anniversary (December 12th; 8:34pm) rolls around without her feeling even a twinge of guilt. It was all so long ago, she might say. I’ve moved on. This fear is my cross to bear.
5. Bear, idiom, to remember somebody/something; to remember or consider that. Though I’ve only seen her once, and the details of her appearance blur in my memory, I bear her in mind whenever I consider my father. I wish she could have heard his little-boy laugh, seen him give his last dollar to a stranger. And I wish, more than anything, I never had to think of her at all.
Elizabeth Burton lives in Western Kentucky on a farmette with two horses, three dogs, three cats, two birds, and one bewildered husband. She holds an MFA in fiction from Spalding University. Her work has appeared in Roanoke Review, Chautauqua, The Louisville Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Ellipsis Zine’s Three, The MacGuffin, formercactus, and genre2mag. Find her on Twitter @eburton_writes.