Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 7



It took me about a week before I could bring myself to look at Gretchen’s stuff. Sam had kindly taken the boxes out of my trunk and lined them up in our coat closet, where they’d be accessible but not visible.

On the first day I was feeling motivated, I pulled out the box full of printouts and dragged it into the living room, in front of the couch. I had a couple of hours before work and intended to dive in.

First, I grabbed a stack of manila folders, thick with printouts. I checked out the subject labels Gretchen had scribbled on them: Tammyland Three, Tammyland August, Patsy Cline, Tammyland Dolly Parts, Tammyland/Loretta, Endless Tammy.

Clearly drafts of Tammyland. Still, I opened Endless Tammy.





“Your Memory’s Finally Gone to Rest”

Woodlawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Nashville, Tennessee

I really came here to pay my respects. I dressed the part—black skirt and neatly ironed blue top—although I wonder if I’ve fooled anyone. I try to cut through the attached funeral home and am met by a somber, besuited gentleman at a desk who asks if he can help me—and to whom I blurt out the ridiculous response: “Um . . . yes. Can you please direct me to the crypt?”

After he points me toward the double white doors and tells me to take the elevator, I berate myself for not using the word mausoleum. That would have been the polite word, correct? I’m not experienced in these matters, as no one I know has ever been interred in one of these structures—only buried in a cemetery or cremated. Is it a southern thing? A celebrity thing? I’m not sure. Either way, this place feels sadder and less organic than a cemetery. As I walk through the third floor (where I know, from online research, Tammy lies), scanning for her name, I notice a strong, strange smell that reminds me of rusty pipes and stale dishwater. A series of misters blows perfume into the air, covering the odor momentarily.

By the time I reach Tammy’s name stretched across a marble panel, I regret that I’ve come here. I don’t know if this is respect at all, me here staring at the cards and letters and silk flowers of recent mourners, some of them clearly relatives and actual friends. I really didn’t come here to gawk, but how else would it look to someone who knew her? As long as I’ve known the nature of her death, I’ve found it very sad. It is, admittedly, an outsider’s sadness, however deeply I might think I feel it.

Tammy Wynette’s death came after years of medical problems and a reliance on painkillers on a Michael Jackson scale. Versed—a medicine usually used only in hospital settings as a presurgery anesthetic—was found in her body during her autopsy. By the time she died, her physical existence had long since passed from unhealthy to freakish and terrifying. The details could easily break your heart.

You could say she performed herself to death. She had medical problems by the time she was in her mid-twenties. She started taking Preludin in the sixties to help ease her debilitating stage fright. And as she became more famous, her medical problems (primarily intestinal problems and adhesions) worsened. She had to have an emergency hysterectomy after her last daughter was born. For years, she had countless abdominal surgeries followed by rushed returns to stage aided by painkillers to which she quickly became addicted. She needed the drugs to keep up the act and they eventually killed her, as everyone close to her knew they would.

Tammy was perhaps an easy candidate for both performance anxiety and addiction. You can see it in some of her early performances—an uncertainty in her posture and her facial expression, a desperate determination to present herself precisely and perfectly. Despite all of the neediness and emotional inconsistencies her biographies expose, she always appeared—or tried to appear—the dignified lady.

I’ve seen footage of her last Grand Ole Opry performance once, and will never watch it again. It made me cry. And not in the “Tear in My Beer” kind of way you’re supposed to cry when you listen to old country music—more in the “humanity is capable of such unbearable agony” sort that perhaps no art or music can capture. In this performance, she was fifty-four years old but she looks about eighty. By then, she was so thin and worn from the drugs that everyone in Nashville thought she had AIDS. She tells the audience she is “feelin’ wonderful” when she is so clearly, painfully not. Her black satin jacket is buttoned incorrectly. She seems confused, is hoarse and gasping for air, and can’t make it through “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.” The younger country star Lorrie Morgan comes from offstage to carry her through the song’s final lines. Tammy was, according to her friends and staff, unhooked from medical equipment just before she went onstage—and then rushed away in an ambulance immediately after the performance. This was apparently not an unusual sequence of events in her final years.

Tammy died one year after that performance. As I watch the footage, it’s surprising she even made it that long. Her final days and death are so horrifying I hesitate to draw a lesson from them.

There is something about a painful death that threatens so overwhelmingly to detract from our sum feelings about that person’s life.

It is difficult for me to think too hard about Tammy’s life without having it all point, ultimately, to such a sad and painful death. I think it is often that way when you know someone who has suffered so at the end. While, of course, I never knew Tammy, I do know what it is to carry that sort of weight for someone who’s gone too early, too tragically.

With Tammy, there is still her music. I can listen to “Till I Can Make It on My Own” and her version of “Gentle on My Mind” a few times and know she’s left something here besides pain—know that she accomplished something of great value, even if pain was inevitably mixed up in it.

Most people don’t leave any songs behind. Those of us left with the pain of an early death must be creative in hearing the other notes of that accompanying life—however soft, however low. You have to really listen for them. Train your ear to find them. Even if you have to strain. They might not be so loud and clear as Tammy Wynette’s songs. Even if you find it impossible to separate the life from the death. That’s simply your lot, having loved someone who died painfully—to endure that with each thought of her, for the sake of still hearing her echo.

This one hadn’t made it into the final Tammyland at all. Probably a good call. In Tammyland, Gretchen had touched on how Tammy Wynette died, but seemed to avoid focusing on it too much. Probably because it could easily bring down the generally spunky, optimistic tone of the book.

Apparently I’d stumbled upon Tammyland’s gloomier “deep cuts.” In a way, this piece felt more like the Gretchen I knew than the voice in Tammyland had.

When we were in college, she’d always had an obsession with the death penalty, and her senior thesis was about Karla Faye Tucker, a Texas woman who was executed for murder in the late nineties. The title was something like That’s Our Girl: Karla Faye Tucker and the American Media. I still remembered her sitting at her computer, typing, saying, A banana, a peach, and a garden salad. That was her last meal—can you believe that? Well, what a sweet, dainty little thing! Who eats salad when there’s no tomorrow? I mean, how about at least a brownie for the road?

Are you mentioning her last meal in your thesis? I’d asked her.

Are you kidding me? I’ve got a few pages about it.

I wondered then if she found the death penalty barbaric or just strangely, morbidly fascinating. I was never sure.

Now, as I began to reread the Tammy piece, an uneasy feeling came over me. It felt almost as if Gretchen could be writing about her own death.

I thought of Mrs. Waters’s words about Gretchen’s purse, and the bruises on her arm and tear in her sweater. How long had she lain there on the concrete, bleeding alone, before someone came and found her?

I couldn’t shake the image. I replaced the folder, put the box back in the coat closet, and took out my laptop. Googling “Gretchen Waters” and “accident,” I found some of the articles about her. They all basically resembled the one I’d read two days after her death. None of them mentioned the details Mrs. Waters had shared with me. One of them mentioned what she’d bought at the 7-Eleven: a Mountain Dew and a small bag of chips. Another lamented the poorly maintained public steps, which were steep and crumbling.

I read the articles again. So she’d made it down the stairs just fine, gone to the 7-Eleven, made her purchases, and then headed back up the stairs. So Gretchen had fallen backward? How often does one fall backward while walking up stairs? I wondered. Had she been drinking? She’d confessed to me that she hated readings, and that she often had a drink or two beforehand to make them more bearable. But that wouldn’t be enough to send her tumbling down a flight of stairs. Had she maybe forgotten something, then headed back down again?

More than one article mentioned that an autopsy was planned. Could one tell the direction she’d fallen from an autopsy? Her mother hadn’t mentioned the autopsy, and I certainly wouldn’t have asked. Part of me didn’t feel ready to think about it yet. But another part knew I wouldn’t be able to let go of Gretchen without knowing.

For now, I just pictured Gretchen in her final evening. Most young women, if they had any doubts about the safety of a neighborhood, would have gotten into their car right out of the library and driven home. Not Gretchen, though—no, she had a quirky cluelessness about her. Of course she went wandering across a dark, empty parking lot in an unfamiliar city, in search of junk food. Probably wearing her cute little camel coat and round-toe buckle shoes, looking a good decade younger than her thirty-two years.

I closed my computer and got ready for work.