by Rick Moody
At first, I resisted the singing and dancing and meditating 10:00 a.m. service, but like many church-related episodes of my life, contempt prior to investigation was followed by a significant warming to the service, especially to the drumming they often had at the end. Hazel really liked the drumming too. (And now she takes drum lessons.)
Hazel went from attending the services to occupying the day care space at Trinity during the church services, and then she went to both the service and the Sunday school classes, and during all of this, she was thriving in a way that was especially rewarding to me, her father. She made friends, and her exceptional enthusiasm for group activities, even the lesson-oriented Sunday school classes, made her much beloved of her teachers at Trinity. I feel that the decision to take my child to church is one of the best decisions I made as a father, and this despite the fact that I have many friends who look down on church. I remember once being at an event wherein a particularly serious priest (a woman priest) debated a physicist, and I remember the priest saying: “I have this feeling that you [the physicist] believe that if I were just a little less dumb, I wouldn’t believe these things I believe.” So often my feeling among my writing friends is exactly this thought, that if only I were less weak or a little less ignorant I wouldn’t believe in this nonsense.
Our story, however, proves the opposite, and concerns a period in which Hazel was still spending an hour or so in the day care part of Trinity, before going to Sunday school, after which I would pick her up in day care, and we would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home. She had a bunch of friends in day care, all of them the children of families who effectively spent most of the day at Trinity on Sunday and went back and forth between activities. I was very happy over a sequence of Sundays to find Hazel playing with a very diverse bunch of girls, with no burden of history, not yet, or not in any way that was immediately visible at all.
Among these pals in day care was a slightly older girl called Stella Gates. Stella was a really funny kid, with a mordant wit, an accepts-no-bunk sense of humor. Stella was capable of thinking things were very funny, but she was also skeptical, perhaps because as an African American girl she already knew a bit about race (more than Hazel, no doubt), had felt some of the sting, and was willing to put some of it aside in a church community, but not all. Hazel considered Stella her Sunday school best friend. I don’t know, in truth, if Stella would have said the same thing, as she was almost two years older than Hazel, and she was a popular kid around Trinity, but Hazel surely worshipped Stella, and looked for her each week. We ran into her most every Sunday, usually in the company of her grandmother, who was Caribbean and warm and lively. Stella and her grandmother were part of a large and vital black community that frequented our church and made it better by doing so, by participating vigorously in the politics of the parish, by reminding parishioners, those who didn’t think enough about race, how omnipresent it was for them.
So Hazel loved Stella, and loved spending time with Stella, playing on the little indoor playground in the day care wing of the Trinity parish house, while she waited for me to turn up after services or coffee hour. The church had a small indoor slide in its little indoor playground and some big soft tubes that the kids could crawl through, and there was always some new fanciful self-generated imaginative context in which the kids danced around these various furnishings.
A lot of stuff could go wrong in the hour or so of a church service, and on one occasion, for example, Hazel was off her game, or had otherwise expressed some low energy that was out of phase with her upbeat enthusiasm for life almost all of the time, and had subsequently thrown up on the carpet at church day care, while I was listening to the sermon and failing to pay attention to my phone, and I had managed to find my way back at the usual time to a church staff that was polite to a fault, considering my lateness. It was deeply mortifying.
But in the period I’m describing, in the fall of 2013, Hazel had started going to Sunday school itself, as opposed to just child care, after which she killed a little time in the day care playroom in the Trinity parish house with Stella and a few other kids, for a half hour or so, while I went to coffee hour after the service. It was a fine development, that she was actually going to Sunday school and meeting kids there, and still getting to play a bit afterward too.
On a particular Sunday in late November, I came back to find Hazel and Stella playing on the indoor slide in the playroom. It was some kind of fairy tale fantasy game, some bubbly froth of imaginative playacting, featuring princesses and princes, or the like. I surprised the two of them at this, and they screamed, and bolted. They made me try it a second time, surprising them. They screamed again, and so it went until, accidentally, because I surprised them rather too efficiently, Stella whacked herself on the edge of the slide, and was really mad at me for a second. It hurt, and she sort of brushed me off as I laid a hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. She looked at me in a frankly suspicious way for a second, and my heart was broken, in that way that children can sometimes do, so purely and unintentionally. Stella was fine, of course, and just sort of needed to rub her shoulder for a moment, and all was forgotten, but I felt like I had really let her down, when she was so kind to Hazel, and I sort of couldn’t let go of it. Maybe my apologies went on longer than they needed to.
I remember, that day, taking Hazel down the main staircase from the day care room, down past the reception hall of 74 Trinity Place (it has since been demolished, to give way to a completely new building—under construction right now), where, as was not infrequently the case, there was a spread that day for some reception or other, a few tables covered with cellophaned and catered items, or perhaps some brought from home. They held coffee hour in that space, too, where I had often, in Jack Moody’s company, had some of those thoroughly awkward church conversations with relative strangers in which I realized how all the niceties of church simply covered up the naked discomfort of churchgoers, and how the longing for spiritual attainment, or grace, was an effect of the relative isolation of some of the most fervent parishioners. They really needed God’s help. As I did, too.
Hazel and I left, in due course, as we always did by noontime, and I got on the subway for Brooklyn, and it was only later that we heard what happened.
What we heard was that after we left—about a half hour later—Stella went into the reception hall, and ate some of the capacious buffet that was arrayed there, and then became violently ill, and went to the hospital.
The first rumble of these stories trickled out over the Trinity web presence, a group thread, with a request for prayers for Stella.
Because, as I’ve said already, I often assume that the worst outcome is impossible, for its infrequence, I didn’t believe any more about this prayer request than what it appeared to ask for: prayers. Maybe she’d gotten hurt at school, maybe her family was having some difficulty.
And: it’s true that I don’t believe in intercessory prayer, in the sense that while it appears that God, whatever God is, could conceivably remit the suffering of humans, God is more often, in my experience, a co-sufferer, a presence of sympathetic care while the worst and most unimaginable travails take place. (In my life, the suffering of my niece and nephew after my sister’s death, for example, was not remitted by God. My sister’s death was not forestalled by God. The incredible suffering of my parents after her death was not remitted, or commuted, or reduced in any way.) Experientially, that is, there are limits to what interventions God is willing to undertake. But as I have heard it said: God allows suffering to take place, and God is a participant in suffering, as indicated, if you believe in these things, in the sacrifice of his own son. So while I don’t believe that intercessory prayer can bring about a mitigation of suffering in all cases, I believe that intercessory prayer alters the perception of the observer, and creates conduits of relatedness among the community of the like-minded. Intercessory prayer creates community, and a sense of calm in the midst of urgency, at least some of th
e time. Which means that I prayed for Stella, just as they asked us to do.
Very quickly the news got worse. Within a day or two it circulated on- and offline that Stella was not just violently ill and in the hospital, but that Stella was in a coma. As the news got became more grave and more alarming, my own illusions of all the possibly miraculous outcomes became more effusive and baroque. She’s young! She’s strong! She’ll wake, and there won’t be any impairment or cognitive trouble, because she’s young and strong! Implicit in these fantasies of the unlikely was the sense, a very indelible sense, that I had just seen Stella. That we had played with her not a half an hour before she ate whatever fateful thing she ate in the reception hall. Hazel had just spent the morning with Stella, her very best friend at church, and there had been some real sense of warmth and connection, notwithstanding Stella’s being irritated with me however briefly.
And as the news got worse, and the apparent cause of the problems—nut allergies—grew clearer, and the lack of preparation in the community for the problems at hand became more unmistakable, there came the time when I was going to have to talk to Hazel about it. There are some kinds of bad news that are childproof, in the sense that they cannot and will not permeate a child’s protective membrane—the elderly are going to vanish eventually, pets are going to die at some point. Children can have a protective layer with these losses that are a feature of time and its scourge; they can weep over the loss of a grandparent, and move through that grief in a healthy way. But losing a valued friend, a coeval, a classmate, is not one of these childproof tragedies. As Hazel is very good at making friends but tends to keep the very close ones in a special and reserved place in her life, it could only seem a particularly difficult topic. I talked about it with her mother, my ex-wife, and we agreed to take it on, each of us, and to try to be judicious and nondramatic to the best of our abilities.
I was putting Hazel to bed in the little narrow bedroom she had when we lived in Park Slope, the one we had laboriously persuaded her to sleep in by herself, and sitting beside her bed while I said, “You know that Stella is very sick, right?”
To which she replied, “Mom said she is asleep but is having trouble waking up.”
And I told her that that was part of it, yes, but that it should not affect her own sleep, and I asked if she needed to talk about it more. And Hazel, in a sign of what I imagined was the very self-protective capability of the small child, simply changed the subject.
I changed it back long enough to say:
“If you’re worried, we can talk about it any time now. Just let me know. And I’ll check in.”
She didn’t want to belabor the subject, as she still doesn’t, four years later, with the heaviest conversations. She will bear down on things for a brief time, only to move on and come back later.
The story came to be at Trinity, yes, that Stella had an undiagnosed allergy, perhaps a peanut allergy not entirely understood, and she had eaten some nuts and had an episode of anaphylactic shock. It was just one of those horrible, unplanned-for calamities. But this was a house of worship, and people brought food, it was a thing they did, and it was not clear whether there was a policy in place as regards nuts. What was clear was that it was impossible to linger over the questions of blame or responsibility, among these legions of people who were praying for Stella, visiting her at the hospital, bringing meals to her family, and performing ministrations of a round-the-clock type. People were signing up online to help pray for her and all of the parents of other kids at Sunday school were feeling varieties of what I was feeling: shock, deep worry, and horror.
Stella lingered on for about two weeks, as I remember it, from late November into December, and though I was newly wed, and newly initiated into grief in our own household, with pregnancy loss, somehow Stella’s descent into coma became a very centermost concern for myself and my family. I can remember sitting around the kitchen table with Laurel, outside of earshot of Hazel, utterly stricken, even shattered. With other parents, in the community of family and parenting, it is not hard to know the hope and joy that parents feel, and likewise the anxieties and worry and grieving that parents must undertake. And so it was not unusual in that time to see people from church, church professionals, with red eyes, broken up in trying to talk to us, the congregation, about what was happening. It was not unusual for parishioners to break down while talking to other parishioners, because we had rituals for death, fine and moving rituals, but the loss of a six-year-old is far, far worse.
It’s different when a six-year-old dies. And that was what happened next. Stella died. I wasn’t there, at the hospital, and I understood only what the community understood at large, that there came a point where the situation was not going to get better, and there wasn’t going to be a recovery of brain function, and so it became time for her to go over to the other side, to the eternal grief of her vital and loving extended family, and to the very deep pain of her church community.
And so I had to tell my daughter that her best church friend had died.
Death has been a frequent enough guest in my family that I have had some sense of it even during the intervals when it is not immediately present. There have been low-key deaths, and then there have been these violent, sudden, unsuspectable deaths (my uncle, in a plane crash, my sister to a heart defect), and the latter is like when the ocean unexpectedly washes in, when the floodwaters pour across the levy, and then recede, leaving some great effluxion of disorder that you have to sort through, item by painful item. Many things happen when the floodwaters recede. For example, as I have said, your certainties and preconceptions give out, and your ability to resist sieges of emotion fails, and every small thing—a pigeon dragging one of its legs, or a song that you long considered excessive and sentimental, a neon sign missing a letter—is perceptible as an aspect of some total poignancy of the world that you couldn’t have noticed before, didn’t notice before, and suddenly you have no defense.
This was exactly how I experienced the period of telling Hazel about Stella’s death, and then going to Stella’s memorial service. That all my adult systems for preventing the leakage of the world’s emotional complexity into my own person failed, and I was adrift in unalloyed loss.
At the memorial service, for example, which was at Trinity, and which was conducted by the Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones, an extremely inspired preacher and pastoral counselor, who with my cousin Jack had baptized Hazel, the expression of the loss of Stella was so utterly painful that even in the awaiting of the service people were weeping and hugging one another in the aisles, and trying to put into words what could not (even in this account) be properly expressed, the sudden overpowering undoing of this kind of passing. The Reverend Bozzuti-Jones, a large, kind, and loving presence of a man whose affability, serenity, and good humor is not routinely stoppered by the horrors of the day, was himself silenced, during his sermon, by the poignancy of the mass for the dead. If the goal of such a memorial service is to prepare the way for the congregation, so that in moving into and through the recognition of loss, and experiencing it, experiencing the details of grief, they can come back out again and go on with life, then Father Bozzuti-Jones somehow managed the purpose, the trajectory of the service; he briefly incarnated the loss, and hung it up on a scaffolding of Christian life, so that it wasn’t just a pointless thing that didn’t need to have happened. He managed a service that gave us a way to go on, to appreciate Stella in memory. Such is the reason for a faith community.
Thereafter, there were grief counseling sessions for the Sunday school families, and discussions. And Stella’s grandmother, even as we neared Christmas, came and gave out some toys to the kids who had played with Stella at Sunday school, or who knew her. I remember thinking the gesture was at once incredibly generous and so exquisitely painful as to be impossible to reckon with, her decision to come among us. Hazel accepted a toy, but all I could think of as I looked into the eyes of Stella’s grandmother was her unfathomable pain.
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nbsp; Hazel, in the aftermath of Stella’s death, began a spell of not sleeping very well. In fact, Hazel had a number of mild psychosomatic complaints that may have had a physical cause, but which were certainly exacerbated by her sensitivity, and these were all more florid in the immediate aftermath. She said she missed Stella. It kept coming up, as you can well imagine. And there was nothing entirely helpful to say about this, it seemed, but that we knew exactly what she felt, and that it was a way of trying to keep Stella here, to summon her up through longing, the shimmering of her. Hazel still says she misses Stella, and if I had known then that Stella was going to become a permanent and unforgettable fact of Hazel’s early childhood, I might have pursued further grief counseling for her then. And yet this is what life is, right? It’s composed of these momentous separations.