Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  It never failed; whatever made us grouchy drew her attention, until we were forced to grit our teeth and endure it. It was a toddler’s natural response to fellow nuisances, and there seemed to be some mischief or wisdom behind it: she found the places in us that were small and pushed until we grew bigger. The returning fly felt like a practical joke and a reminder: When you are at your most uncomfortable, your most irritable and small-minded; when you feel gripped by the worst of your impulses, remember—I am still here.

  We hear the fly buzz for a full week, as guests come and go, as our apartment fills and empties with families and meals.

  * * *

  Extended family arrives that first evening—my aunt and cousins, my mother’s side. They come in together, bravely dry-eyed, and hug me tight without saying much. I imagine they all met beforehand and agreed: no crying in front of Jayson and Stacy. We have a dinner party of sorts. I keep records playing constantly: lighthearted stuff, driving beats and bright voices. The table fills with empty wine bottles. My Brooklyn neighbors chatter merrily with my Niagara Falls cousins; parents of Greta’s daycare friends joke with my mother. Jack is playing guitar again, and my father crouches at his feet like a small boy, the two of them harmonizing.

  Watching my father, I feel a surge of tenderness that is almost protective. He is a pure soul, in both his unthinking generosity and his heedless enthusiasms. He always senses the emotional temperature of the room—even if he isn’t quite sure what to do about it.

  “Your father keeps coming up to me and whispering things,” Stacy’s friend Liz reports to me, sinking next to me on the couch and following my eyes to him. “He follows me from room to room, tugging at my arm and saying something completely unintelligible. Any idea what that might be?”

  I shake my head wryly.

  * * *

  —

  Stacy and I had always yearned for just this sort of effortless unity—everyone we had ever known, laughing and chatting, the threads around our spindle. Everyone Greta ever loved is here right now. It would have been the greatest party of her life.

  I slip away and push open the door to Greta’s room. I sit on her orange-striped couch, murmuring quietly to her. I give her a roll call of everyone she’s missing. I promise to talk to her every day. I look around her room: her crib, stripped of her blankets and stuffed animals; her blue bookcase, covered in dollar-store stickers from an early-morning play session. I had just bought her the Frog and Toad books; she was too young for them still. I open my mouth again and then hesitate. Words sufficed when she was here to hear them, when every word was a pellet I deposited somewhere into that wondrous head, another penny in the bank. Here in the big empty room, they no longer serve me, or her.

  Our family departs reluctantly to stay in a hotel, leaving John to watch over us. He keeps a miserable vigil on the couch while Stacy and I sob in bed. Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell, a record that had come out recently, spins quietly in the living room. It is music about death and about family: “We’re all gonna die,” Stevens whispers repeatedly on one song. My head and my heart are blank spaces.

  Everything that happens to me in the next several days feels like rumor, supposition. Recalling it later is like trying to hack through bedrock—once lava cools and hardens, it just becomes the landscape.

  I know that I allow my decisions to be made, my plate to be filled, my path to be cleared. At the periphery of my awareness, I sense Liz and Anna planning a memorial service for us. My grief has knocked me over decisively, and there is some comfort in the world’s immediate and unanimous acknowledgment: I am like a big fallen tree being dotted with lichens and mushrooms.

  Stacy, meanwhile, is trying to decide which photos of Greta will be best to print and hang at the venue. Somehow, we have never printed a picture of Greta: just another project we put off because we were sure we had the time. She scrolls through hundreds, thousands of photos, laptop balanced on her legs, trying to settle on the spread. Are enough relatives pictured? Jayson’s aunt and uncle will be at the service, can someone find the photo of them with Greta? We always liked her in this dress—let’s find one of her wearing it.

  As she debates these minutiae with Liz sitting next to her on the couch, pulling nearby friends and cousins into the conversation, I catch myself glancing at her out of the corner of my eye with awe and concern. Does anyone else hear her screaming silently through this? I wonder.

  * * *

  I am grieving around our apartment like a man from an Old World painting—wailing, ripped garments, balled fists—but Stacy’s trauma is not as readily evident. Like any born empath, she considers her own feelings to be the third or fourth most interesting thing in the room. Her emotions, as a result, are private, wordless things, more sound and sensation than conscious thought. They escape her strict surveillance only in jagged bursts, under cover of convenient distractions: her outsized consternation at a plate of runny eggs, a malfunctioning dryer, a late bus.

  Sitting on the couch, sifting through Greta’s photos, her expression is so sharp and clear, her voice so calm, that a stranger would never know she’s a grieving mother, a figure so awful it’s almost primeval. But it’s a trick of the light, and only I see the gruesome scarring and open wounds covering her body.

  The issue consuming her at the moment is how to reconcile the two separate funeral guest lists: one of them for the service and one for the luncheon. Who is a service-only person? Who should be invited to the luncheon? The names swarm on a two-tabbed document in front of Stacy like microbes on a petri dish. Overwhelmed, she throws up her hands and cries helplessly, “This is the worst thing ever!”

  Liz, eyeing her, deadpans, “I don’t think so.”

  They both start giggling, high and manic.

  * * *

  We are huddled in the apartment one morning, somewhere in the middle of our makeshift shiva, when I stand up abruptly. I am drowning in the air of the apartment, surrounded by the couch and chairs Greta climbed on. “I think I’m going for a walk,” I announce. “I’d like us to have some more wine for dinner.”

  My family watches me, wary. “Are you sure you want to go by yourself?” Stacy asks.

  “I am, I think. Just a few bottles. I’ll take my phone.”

  I set off down the stairs, taking them two at a time in my relief.

  The minute I get outside, though, I sense the depth of my misjudgment. Everywhere I look, I am blinded by her. There is Greta, running up ahead of me to the corner, rounding at the fence to go to her friend Jacob’s house. There she is stomping gleefully through the patches of “dirty dirt” surrounding the trees on our street. Each sidewalk crack is one I recall rolling stroller wheels over while she slept, pressing down on the handle to keep it from bouncing her.

  I turn left at the first chance and realize this is the route to the park. Just a week ago we came this way while she hollered “The Wheels on the Bus.”

  I push tears away angrily with the heel of my palm, veering back onto the main street before realizing the playground is just up ahead. I feel like an escaped zoo animal stranded on a four-lane superhighway. The sun bears down on me like a klieg light.

  A hand touches my shoulder: “Jayson.” It is our neighbor Oren, the father of Greta’s friend Ayelet, who lives two floors above us in our building. The two were odd playmates—Ayelet is coltish and giggly, where Greta was sly and prone to sitting—but they shrieked with pleasure when they saw each other.

  My expression is an open wound I don’t have the presence of mind or time to rearrange into something more presentable, but he receives the look with an alert calm. “What are you doing, Jayson?” he asks, light and curious.

  “We needed more wine,” I mutter, gesturing up the block. “I was just going to go pick it up.”

  “More…wine,” Oren says slowly, processing the nature of my errand. “OK, well. How about I pick u
p a bottle for you? I can bring it back. What would you like?”

  I stare at him, dumb.

  “It really isn’t a problem at all. Why don’t you go back home? I can drop it off at your door.”

  I hesitate, then dig in my track pants for the twenties I’d brought before he shushes me, puts a hand on my shoulder, and steers me back. “Don’t worry about it,” he says.

  I call my therapist. “She’s everywhere I look!” I shriek, pressing my hand to my temple as if to keep a vein from bursting. I gaze up; the wind ripples through the trees. I can see every single leaf articulated on every single branch, fluttering. My therapist is talking; I focus on the voice in my phone.

  “You’re being flooded, Jayson,” she says calmly. “You should go home now, and you should stay there for a while. There will be a time to test your boundaries, but now is not that time. Go home.”

  I hang up the phone, drained and numb.

  Five steps from my front door, I spot them: two women sitting in a parked car across the street, eating something out of a bag. They see me and stop eating. I slow my walk, feeling a pit form. In addition to the forbidding note plastered on our door, an email has gone around our building, urging neighbors to keep silent in the face of the press. Gazing at the women in the car, I am suddenly impatient with all this protection. I stop and lock eyes with the woman in the passenger seat.

  Her eyes widen in surprise and then turn quizzical: Should we? I wave her over with agitation: Yes, yes, come on, let’s do this. They are suddenly all business, the bag abandoned and recorders grabbed and doors opened in simultaneous awkward haste. I watch them gather themselves, set their facial expressions, and cross the street.

  The shorter woman has soft, pained eyes, and she holds her recorder far from her body, as if it were unclean. “Whatever you want to say to us,” she says. “Whether it’s ‘leave me alone’ or something more. We can also leave if you want us to.” I wonder if she has been waiting for someone to give her permission to go away all day.

  “Thank you,” I say. I fight back a sense of foolishness. “I have a statement on my phone, I’d just like to read it.” I pull my phone out and notice that my hand is trembling. I look down studiously and read: “This is a devastating loss. We are deeply grateful to the PICU team at Weill Cornell for their efforts on her behalf.” I pause, take a deep, jagged breath. “My family requests the basic dignity of privacy and space as we grieve. Thank you.” I look up at them and try to control my face, which I can feel twitching.

  “How is your wife?” one of them asks. “How is the grandmother?”

  I back away, suddenly aware of the sun in my eyes, the passersby on the street. “I…I’m just going to go back upstairs to my family,” I say. They are still talking. I say thank you again over my shoulder and push open the door.

  Two hours later, the story appears: I am described as “shattered,” and in the headline I am “pleading” for privacy. I shut my laptop with grim satisfaction; I have handled something.

  * * *

  Greta’s service takes place on Saturday, six days after the accident, at a Quaker school. The meetinghouse is spacious and light, with cream walls. Downstairs, hundreds of photos of Greta are strung up on clotheslines, the result of Stacy’s labors. Croissants and danishes, cut-up fruit and coffee. Upstairs, there is a single framed picture in the middle of the room, next to a bouquet of flowers. My mother took it, and we all agree it captures Greta perfectly: she smiles up at the camera, mischievous, from beneath the canopy of a tree. It looks like the sort of place we hope she’s in now.

  I’m wearing the tan suit I got married in, a steel-blue shirt underneath. I struggled getting dressed, trying on two shirts and taking them off. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going for—how do you dress for your daughter’s funeral?—but I knew I didn’t want to look like I needed help.

  Now, watching mourners and extended family stream into the schoolhouse, I feel oddly at ease. I have lived in a world with my dead daughter in it for 144 hours, and it feels like my duty to shepherd these shocked faces into the new reality.

  It is gruesome and unimaginable, what we are doing, and yet there is something beautiful in it, too. Standing in the entryway, like a rock in a river, I greet friends I haven’t seen in years, coworkers, and acquaintances, all surging forward to embrace me. I have the queer sensation that I am attending my own funeral. Now I know exactly what people will say, I think. They are saying it to me now.

  We have no religion, Stacy and I. When it comes to spiritual matters we are cultural freeloaders, picking off other people’s plates. For our wedding vows, we adapted language from the ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract. Neither of us is Jewish: my father left behind his Jewish upbringing with his other youthful unhappinesses, and Susan was a fierce atheist in a largely Christian Virginia suburb during Stacy’s childhood. Their ranch house was catty-corner from an evangelical church, and Susan would arm Stacy with directives before playdates with the church-attending children: “OK, this time, ask them about Adam and Eve’s two sons. Where did their wives come from?” In high school, Stacy sported the Darwin fish in her rear windshield, a small defiance cheered by Susan.

  But we found the ketubah to be a hearteningly practical document, full of good language about how to live well together. We even stepped on a glass to conclude the ceremony, but mindful that the crunch might resound painfully in my father’s ears, I sat down and wrote out some language carefully couching it as something nonreligious, a piece of symbolism we were claiming for our own. In the closing lines of our vows, we made a promise to each other that washes back up now with eerie prescience: “I know we will face difficulties we cannot foresee, but I have faith we will confront them together and never lose sight of each other.”

  Now that Greta is dead, we find ourselves once again reaching for the traditions of others. A college girlfriend of mine was raised Quaker, and I was always intrigued by her descriptions of the ceremony, in which participants rise to speak only when the spirit moves them.

  “Man, isn’t that weird?” I asked. “What do you do during the silences? Do you just stare at your hands the whole time?”

  “You just sit,” my girlfriend said. “It’s not weird.”

  We discovered the ceremony’s power at a friend’s wedding, two years before Greta was born. Stacy and I took seats near the front of the room, both anxious. Neither of us was accustomed to the idea of letting silences go unfilled, and we were taking bets on who would be first between us to stand up and blurt out something horrifying.

  Thankfully, others knew their way around this dance, and as they rose, spoke, and slowly seated themselves, the room’s silence began to feel hypnotic. Friends, family, and teachers told stories, shared memories, drew laughs—a natural harmony emerged, like overtones shimmering from a plucked string. Stacy and I caught each other’s eye in wonder. I even rose to say something, moved only by inspiration. I don’t recall a word, but I can still feel the warmth that flooded me upon sitting down.

  At Greta’s memorial, Stacy and I sit in the front row at the center of the room. From here, the seating radiates outward in all directions, enclosing us.

  There is a rustle, the sound of a roomful of people becoming aware of a holdup: we can’t begin without Susan. The only way into the room is up a flight of stairs—no elevator or ramp—and with her injured legs, she can’t climb them. As we sit in the meeting room, Susan is forced to climb into an archaic motorized chair running up the bannister, one that groans when it switches on. We wait inside, the hum from the stairs faintly audible, and I am glad for Susan’s sake and mine that we aren’t witnessing her awkward ascent. After a long minute, she appears at the back entrance, limping and trying to slide into her seat next to Stacy while escaping notice. I feel her suppress a groan as she settles.

  Danny takes his spot in front of the assemblage. He was Stacy’s profe
ssor at New England Conservatory, which means he knew her before I did. When we were dating, he was the first father figure of hers I met, and I felt his keenly appraising eye when we shook hands. He was a natural choice for our master of ceremonies, the kind of person who speaks in expansive, generous paragraphs without seeming to try.

  “What I see when I look around today is a system,” he says. “And I see that system activating today. It is our duty to surround these two generous and wonderful people with all the love we have.”

  My mother stands to speak first, and I realize with some astonishment how still and quiet she is. Normally, she never stops moving, striding where others merely walk and leaving the air quivering behind her.

  She looks heartbreakingly cut down to size; her cheeks are hollowed out and she stands rigid with the effort of keeping her composure. Her granddaughter’s death seems to have altered the weight of gravity on her frame. “Greta radiated charisma,” she says, reading from a small handwritten sheet of ruled paper. “She had a mysterious glint in her eye—you always wanted to know what she was thinking. She lit up a room just by walking into it, and everyone wanted to be near her, to simply be where she was. I want to remember all the joy she brought whenever I think of her, because she would not want us to be sad.”

  My brother goes next, and I sense he is also holding himself together out of pure will. They are steely people, John and my mother—task executioners, people who get things done. In the past four days, John has flown back to Colorado to move into a new house, a move he put on hold when I called him from the emergency room. He returned with his wife and two kids on the day of the funeral. He wrote his speech on the plane. Giving John a task is like hitching a sled to a mountain dog: he throws every muscle and sinew into it gratefully, as if the performance relieves some primal pressure of his existence.