Elaine Gantz Wright

creative nonfiction

Elliot Wright

The First Twelve Hours

Written by Elaine Gantz Wright

“E. Wright – Maj. Trauma, 08.05.18” is scrawled in black Sharpie across the shiny white plastic bag at the foot of the stairs. That’s where I dropped it when I got home from the hospital last night.

“Hi, are you the motorcycle, I mean, the mother?” said the slender blonde nurse at the ER desk as she adjusted her sparse ponytail. “Your son got cut off on an entrance ramp. “If it was real serious, they would have taken him to Parkland, a Level One Trauma Center,” she added as we walked through the extra-wide double doors.

“On his motorcycle?” He promised me he would never ride on highways. They told me he was in surgery. They told me he would be OK. I know I remember that right. I’m sure, but the memories are like fragments, sharp shards floating around in my mushy brain. I can’t seem to put them back together.

I knew he would be fine. No, not Elliot. I didn’t get to say goodbye.

A blinding ray of sunlight splintered through the dusty Venetian blinds I forgot to close last night, and I expected to see Rod Serling puffing his smoldering cigarette in the corner. He had to have something to do with this. It was the Twilight Zone; the eerie program we adored for decades had become my reality. There’s more evidence, as I do not even recognize the smoky-mauve living room in my partially furnished townhouse. Where am I? What is going on? Is this familiar? Hell, no.

“Oh my God.” That’s all I can say or think.

I blink and blink again as my lower lip begins to quiver. I must be in shock. That’s it. I can’t move, much less remember, anything, really. I choke on a breath, and tears flush out of my eyes like a broken dam. Where is the Kleenex? Why can’t I ever find the Kleenex? Liquid pours from my right nostril. Surely, it was all a bad dream, but why do I feel like my heart was extracted with a butter knife? What the hell is happening? I am usually the one who manages the crisis, the handler. But I’ve lost her, too.

I can’t feel my hands. My knees buckle, and I grab the stair railing to steady a dizzy rush and sit down on a step. Next to that white bag, all that remains of my brilliant 26-year-old son, Elliot. It repulses me, but I am desperate to find some trace of him. What day is it? I should call his boss. Where is his phone?

I dump the lifeless contents on the floor: his wallet; a pair of pristine Ray-Ban sunglasses; an expensive Japanese motorcycle jacket, armored with dense, protective panels that were marred only by a couple of grass stains on the right arm; a state-of-the-art helmet, as he called it, and a pair of well-worn black-leather lace-up boots. His shirt and jeans had not survived, as they were cut off in the trauma response; however, the unscathed condition of the remaining items belies their involvement in a brutal massacre. That’s what it was. The boots are just boots, after all, but they are Elliot’s boots—and they held his heartbeat just hours earlier.

I spy a hint of lime green inside the left boot and pull out a pair of unsoiled ankle socks that had been wadded up in a haphazard ball. Some harried ER nurse or technician had probably removed them hastily before pushing the gurney holding my oldest son’s terminally bludgeoned body down the stark white corridor to the operating room.

But I was not there.

They are turned inside out, but I can tell they are covered with tiny clubs that appear to be shamrocks, hearts, spades, and diamonds. I knew that pattern, as I had given Elliot that pair for luck on St. Patrick’s Day. I gasp and then channel a Cassandra-worthy wail, releasing the bellow of enough agony to fill the cavernous two-story room. I don’t want to disturb Ian, his sleeping brother, but the socks are just too much.

I lift the bright green fabric to my nose to catch just one last whiff of my son. There is a faint, earthy odor that I barely recognize in its raw, Elliot-bittersweetness. I pause to take it in. The memory hijacks me into another dimension, like a flashback in a tragic noir film. How he loved socks—an avid collector of the most eclectic colors, patterns, and prints. I smile without thinking, but the pain in my churning stomach causes the tears to stream with even more force. I can barely see. This is my life now. This suffocating angst.

He collected socks from Tokyo, Toronto, Lubbock, New York City, and Amazon.com. I suspect this sock obsession began with our “socks-picking ritual” every morning before daycare. I read that the best way to streamline decision-making in the morning was to offer two options—this or that, red or blue, long sleeves or short—as opposed to an open-ended question that would require too much pondering and conflict. Freshly divorced and managing the myriad pressures of primary custody, Elliot and Ian were seven and three years old, respectively. I strategically invested in jazzy socks. I recall those manic mornings when choosing between SpongeBob and Pokémon “sock options” was our biggest dilemma. I sigh again. Why am I thinking about socks? My oldest son is dead.

Elliot always had foot challenges. A couple of weeks ago, he mentioned needing to see a podiatrist for the third or fourth time to extract tiny pieces of glass he had stepped on after dropping a wine glass on his loft’s concrete floor. I also remember visiting the orthopedist when he was a teenager to have his painfully ingrown toenails surgically excised.

“Cut straight across,” I would tell him—but he always recoiled and followed the curve.

Being a single boy-mom is not for the faint of heart.

These green socks somehow bridge my now and forever, but my world had no more shape. I’m hanging on to the edge of a reality that I could not fathom. I can’t let go. My phone’s ding startles me back to the present.

Messages and condolences from a universe of Facebook friends, near and far, shiver inside my phone, but I just can’t read them yet. I had to tell someone last night. After Ian went to bed, I told social media, still so alone and unmoored. My poor Ian. How would we manage this horror? Together. Would he return to Purdue for his senior year next week? We lost Elliot, but that meant we lost our lives as we knew them, too.

I look at my phone, and a message from George Dalzell catches my eye. He is an old theater pal from my college days at Northwestern. He must have seen my post, but we haven’t spoken for almost 30 years. Why would he be messaging me? Wait. He is a legitimate spiritual medium and psychiatrist living in Pittsburgh.

“Elliot has something to say to you,” George typed in his instant message. “He’s coming through.”

Oh my God. I am flustered but type, “What?” I knew George, but I am incredulous. Could this be happening? Now? I had always been open to non-traditional spiritual paths and quantum connections—and the Twilight Zone marathon on the Syfy network every New Year’s Day. My barely conscious self is willing—captivated by the possibility, but I wonder about the timing.

“He is saying something about green; look for green or lime-green shoes. Something about feet and green . . .”

There is no way George would have known this detail at this very moment. I feel a chill down my spine. Though I had posted news of Elliot’s passing on social media, I never mentioned any clothing or the color of his footwear. I hadn’t even discovered them at the time. He has never met Elliot. As the quintessential techie, Elliot had sworn off Facebook.

“It’s a ridiculous time suck,” he asserted. “And I don’t want to give Mark Zuckerberg all my data.” There was so much he knew.

Still, this is all I have, so I’m staying in the game.

“It wasn’t karma. It wasn’t fate,” he types in the message box. “That means it wasn’t mechanical failure or user error,” Elliot is saying, “Pissed. F’ed up. Something went wrong.”

I can’t believe what I am reading.

“He wants you to know he is OK,” George typed. “He is saying... ‘Word. It is all good here. I am fine here.’” I gulped. That even sounded like Elliot. He loved to say, “Word.”

“I want to know more. What the hell happened?”

“That’s all I got,” George types. “He wanted to get this message to you. I will send you my book on connecting with loved ones in the afterlife. It’s called Messages: Evidence for Life After Death, dedicated to my late partner, who passed away in an accident. Gotta go.”

“But George, George . . . I want to know more. Can you talk? I can call you.”

“We’ll talk soon. I need to get to the airport,” George writes.

“OK. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

I wonder if I will ever know what happened or why. Was there another driver on the ramp who caused him to swerve dangerously? Was he cut off? Was he caught up in a manic episode? God, was it intentional? Did he get distracted, looking off into the sunny, blue sky? Did he misjudge the tight turn on the 90-degree ramp? The questions run in a constant loop, a Mobius strip. There are just too many questions.

It’s hard to process this random intervention from George, one of the most flamboyant personalities I have ever encountered. Why did Elliot choose George? It makes sense and doesn’t.

I also heard my late mother’s voice in my head: “Elaine, I think your best talent is your ability to untangle things — figuring things out and making things work,” my eccentric artist-mother, Ann, said as she puffed her extra-long Max cigarette. “You can get the knots out of just about anything—necklaces, threads, chains, yarn… anything.”

She was right. That’s always been my job—since I was a little girl. It’s what I do.

I learned to tug at every link of a tightly knotted gold-plated chain with the finest silk needle, trying relentlessly to identify the one strand or gap that would release the tangle and let the wadded-up chain fall free. I wish I didn’t need that needle now. I wish I knew how to loosen the constricting knots of pain and grief. I wish I had insisted Elliot come over for dinner that night. I wish it wasn’t true. I wish he were still alive. I wish they could have saved him. I wish. I wish. But there is no such needle. There is no untangling this intractable, forever-knot. Would I ever know how to be in the world again, in this horrible dystopian zone?

I clinch the green socks.

Elaine Gantz Wright is a writer, editor, content creator, and sometime actor in Dallas, Texas. A divorced mother of two brilliant boys, one gone too soon at 26, she writes to find her way through the world and to help others feel less alone on their journeys of unfathomable loss. Follow her work on Grief Matters on Substack and ElaineGantzWright.com. She is a published essayist and poet in The Spirituality of Grief by Fran Tilton Shelton and House of Comfort and House of Faith from Retreat House Press. Find her essays on grief, love, and the unexplainable at TheArtistLives.org and FaithandGrief.org, as well as literary magazines, Forevermore and Months to Years in spring 2026.

Drawing of Elliot by his brother, Ian Wright

Elliot Everett Wright Tsundoku Fund

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