Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  As long as your situation is unique, exceptional, there always remains the chance that things will revert back to “normal” if only you have the strength to endure it. “Haven’t we done this long enough?” Stacy sometimes says plaintively. “Can’t we have her back now?”

  Everyone tells us they are in awe of us. “I am in awe of your strength,” friends tell us. “You two are an inspiration.” I grow to hate the sound of these words, a steady drip from a faucet I want to yank shut with a wrench. “I feel like a coma patient being congratulated for not dying,” I tell Stacy.

  Even worse than this ever-present concern and attention is the looming threat that it might disappear. He seems to want everything to go back to normal, my friends and coworkers reasonably conclude from my behavior. I keep coming in to work. I keep social engagements. I text jokes to friends. I follow the news; I comment. I buy new clothes, nice ones, and new glasses. I sense myself sending a signal out into the world, determined and stubborn: I am not some broken man. But I am not sure I want anyone to believe me.

  On the one hand, coping with loss under a spotlight is intolerable. On the other hand, there is succor to be drawn from all that awe and care. I am playing hurt, after all. Some part of me wants that to go on forever: for the game to go on but remain solemnly rigged in my favor. The standing ovation, the hero’s welcome, the defensive line that dissolves when I approach it—I want it all to continue indefinitely. The idea that things will go back to normal—that I will be expected not only to keep on living but to gamely leap hurdles—tax season, crowded commutes, deadlines—makes me think about how the real pain isn’t in the leg being mangled. It’s in the way the bone sets.

  * * *

  By the second month, the overwhelming urge to die that I felt in the hospital subsides to an ache. My longing for death is now something I simply carry around with me, like hay fever. Raymond Carver once wrote, of a character in one of his stories, that he “understood that he was willing to be dead,” and that’s it. The flash, the drama, the moment of passage or transition, the cries of grief of my loved ones and family, the funeral—none of that intrigues me. I am simply interested in the state of being dead, the cessation of all further sensations and thoughts and experiences. That seems entirely reasonable to me, even pleasant, like leaning into a roaring fire and letting it wash away your senses.

  I deal with this suicidal despair the way you might endure a terrible pain in your side post-op: it is a necessary condition for the state I’m in. Nothing seems strange or even upsetting about this feeling; in fact, it is one of the most normal ones I have, and there is comfort in just how logical it is. It’s just one more thing that flares up when I am tired or stressed, a knot that tenses and then relaxes as I count breaths.

  Sometimes, at lunch hour, I will walk down to the pier near our workspace. There is a thinly populated, patchy field only a three-minute walk from the office. There is always a risk of running into other coworkers. But I treat this park like a sanctuary, and often I go and lie down on my back, just beneath a little sapling tree, and gaze up at the sky to weep. Other times I walk up to the sharp rocks just before the water, letting the breeze pound my face. It is easier there to come unwound, to holler into the water.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so angry,” I sob. “I look for you everywhere I go. You would have been talking so much. You were two years old when that chunk of brick hit you.”

  I look up and scream, “In the head! It hit you in the fucking head! It was still growing little hairs on it.” I blubber; I mewl. I yell at no one: “Why did you do this to us? Why did you do it to her? She was two years old. Why did you do it?”

  There is no one to talk to, no single person to blame. I listen to the waves pound. A breeze stirs my arm hairs. I cover my face with my hands and press hard. I hear the waves; I smell the pungent harbor. I breathe jaggedly until I breathe slowly. Then I turn around and walk back to the office and sit down at my computer and answer thirty emails.

  I am a bereaved father. My only child died when she was two. She was struck in the head by a brick that fell off a building. Sometimes I hear these sentences dancing across my mind to the sound of my typing. I wonder how many times I will have to say them for the rest of my life.

  “Yeah, sounds good,” I tell a writer who is filing late.

  “No update on that one,” I write to a publicist who is just circling back on this Nashville band: they’d obviously be thrilled if a review was happening; they are wondering if I’ve gotten around to giving it a spin yet.

  “I really think we should cover this one,” I write, hitting “forward” on an album stream to a few other editors sitting feet away from me.

  Greta was the victim of an accident. An accident happened. I have to learn to state this grievously unacceptable information over and over again. In every interaction, I am the messenger for a rip in the universe, a talisman that carries the message “All will not be well” with me into every new room. I am the reminder of the most unwelcome message in human history: Children—yours, mine—they don’t necessarily live.

  * * *

  I am working in a café across the street from a middle school. Bright, chatty, headstrong children regularly fill it in the hours just before school starts.

  “Wait—who forced whose hand into a pile of poo?” I hear a voice say, a female voice. I look up. A young woman has pushed open the door to the coffee shop, trailing two excitable boys with her, maybe eight and ten.

  “Sasha did—to Porter,” squeals one of the boys, pointing at the other. They collapse in fits of giggles.

  The woman smiles patiently, rolling her eyes for comic effect. “That’s disgusting, Sasha,” she said. “I bet your mother loved that.”

  She is a regular babysitter, maybe, or a younger aunt. She is in charge of them, at any rate, and from their body language they have spent countless hours in one another’s company.

  She buys them croissants, and they sit down at a table near me, the two boys picking at the pastries distractedly and jabbing each other. I have my headphones in, but there is no music in them, so their voices come through slightly muffled and aquatic. I can warm my hands on their little scene without being noticed. The other boy has apparently written a short story for school in which Prince has a cameo.

  “That’s amazing,” the young woman says, shaking her head in admiration. “Having Prince as a character in your short story is hilarious.”

  “Hopefully we’ll always be your favorite kids,” the boy says, and it’s clear they are hopelessly in love with her, as anyone would be. I want to be her, basking in their slipstream of unconditional affection.

  Behind them, I recognize a mother at a table whose child goes to Greta’s daycare—Lucy’s mom, maybe. She is meeting with a woman I don’t recognize. The woman is complaining idly to her about their child’s kindergarten teacher. “Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Deborah is amazing, Maddie loves her. I just wish there weren’t so many parties. There were three birthday parties this week, which means Maddie had cupcakes for lunch three days in a row. She basically has a sugar crash the minute I see her. But I don’t want to be the mom who banned cupcakes, you know?”

  I stare at them and am startled to discover I loathe them. The language they speak used to be my language, my everyday words. Now I have new everyday words—“skull surgery,” “brain trauma”—and they taste like volcanic ash in my mouth. I hate each and every one of them: their unexamined happiness, the unspeakable luxury they have to still worry about cupcakes. I wish monstrous things on them and their families.

  I am horrified by all this newly evident bile in my soul. It pours out of me now, a new waste product of my existence. I regard it with dismay like water pouring through a hole in a once-secure boat: no matter how hastily I bail, there is always more when I reach down.

  I leave the café and hurry to the train. Only when the doors open do
I realize, with dread, that I am stepping onto a train populated by small children. I steel myself and step in, feeling their disinterested gazes burn me.

  This is Brooklyn, spilling over with toddlers and happy families, and it has become intolerable. Children pass me everywhere, trailing echoes, babbling at me with their potential futures. Occasionally, I find myself making funny faces at one of them to see them giggle. I am at war with myself in these moments, taking furtive pleasure in their delighted responses while bracing myself for the inevitable question: “Do you have kids?”

  Stacy and I talk a lot about this question. In responding, she gauges the depth of the conversation she’s having, the likelihood she will ever speak to this person again. She will not tell the checkout clerk at the grocery store or the woman selling her hand cream that, yes, she did in fact have a child once, but she died in a freak accident a month or so ago. Oh, and should she insert her card here or swipe it?

  Stacy simply says no and leaves everyone unscathed and unimplicated. Me, I opt for the hard way every single time, with all the stricken faces and the “I’m so sorrys” this implies. I take guilty, grim satisfaction in being able to blamelessly detonate this grenade in the lives of strangers. It is a cruel and ungenerous leg sweep in response to a question born only of fellowship and human curiosity. “Yeah, I had a fucking kid. She died. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

  I go to a yoga class every day, feeling hot tears spread down my face during the resting meditation at the end of every class. But no matter how diligently I tunnel, I’m aware of just keeping my hands and head busy. Grief, on this level, is simply something that happens to you, a series of events that passes through you, like a birth. It is bigger and deeper than any single coherent thought. When you’re this hurt, this is what twiddling your thumbs looks like, I think.

  * * *

  Ever since the accident, I have avoided going to the park. The park was our place, Greta’s and mine—every tree, every leaf, every passing doggy belonged to the two of us. Even within my cocoon of shock, I am sure going there would pierce my defenses, flooding me the way my first trip outside did after she died.

  And then, one day, just as the summer light is beginning to change, I wake up with a familiar itch. I need to go running in the park. I poke at the impulse, trying to determine if it’s madness. But I feel different, stronger somehow. I change into shorts, tighten my sneakers, and queue up some propulsive, abrasive music on my phone.

  I step outside and feel only the warmth of the sun. I round the corner on the block that leads to the parade grounds, just outside the park’s southwest entrance. The street is wide, quiet, shaded. There is no one outside, no one to nod at, make eye contact with, step around.

  I enter the parade grounds and run past fields full of children, my eyes fixed straight ahead. To my left, a middle school football team is doing speed and endurance drills, dancing frantically on their toes and dropping down for push-ups. Two boys swing a bat lazily to my right, smacking a baseball into the same bulged-out spot on the chain-link. It hits the fence with a loud bong as I run past, but I do not flinch. I reach the edge of the park, tennis courts to my right.

  There at the park’s mouth, my heart stirs, and I feel a peculiar elation. I recognize her. Greta is somewhere nearby. I feel her energy, playfully expectant. Come find me, Daddy, she says. Tears spring and run freely down my face. I hear you, baby girl, I whisper. Daddy’s coming to get you.

  Elated, I enter the park and immediately spot her; she is waiting for me, hiding behind the big tree in the clearing between the Vanderbilt playground and the duck pond. She appears from behind the tree with a flourish, giggling, just like in our old game: she would run out into the hallway from the bedroom where we had been playing, either naked or in her diaper, and cast me an impish look, asking, “Where’s Greta?” I would feign great perplexity, turning over small toys on the floor to see if she was under them, peeking behind the couch, clutching my head in mock terror. “Oh no, what have we done?” I would moan. “We’ve lost her!” She would laugh, run back in, and announce, “Greta came right back!”

  Standing in the park, staring at her, I make a strange and primal sound, deep and rich like a belly laugh, hard and sharp like a sob. You are here. You picked the park. Good choice, baby girl. Oblivious to the people around me, I run to her. She wiggles in anticipatory joy. Stooping down, I scoop her up under her soft armpits, her shoulder blades meeting at the pads of my fingers, and I lift her up into the sky. She is invisible to passersby—to them, there is nothing in the spot next to the tree where she stands laughing and clapping but a patch of grass, and there is nothing in my arms but air. But she is not here for them; she is here for me.

  She gazes down at me, her smile that turned crooked at the bottom like mine crumpling her wide-open face. I bend my arms and lower her face down to mine and kiss her, slowly. Then I set her back down in the grass.

  You stay here, OK? I say. Daddy’s going for a run, OK, sweetie pie?

  Oh yeah, OK! she says back.

  I turn around and begin running hard along the perimeter of the pond, where we had dipped her hand in the water, splashing and saying, “Here we go, ducks! Here we go!” As I pump my limbs, my hamstrings groan and then open; my body awakens. The playground recedes behind me, where I had pushed her on the swing while she sang, “Poopy, poopy, poopy poopy,” to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at the top of her lungs. “If my kid’s saying ‘poopy’ tonight,” the mother next to me deadpanned, “I’ll know where he picked it up.”

  As my chest swells like a bellows, I feel her presence filling up my heart, and with it comes a strange exhilaration that I have felt often in the weeks after her death. Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent. I feel like I’ve discovered an opening. I don’t know quite what’s behind it yet. But it is there. I open up into a sprint, liberated.

  I am treading ether, a new and unfamiliar kind of contact high. I have been raised secular by my parents, and I’ve never set foot in a church for more than an hour. But I will do anything for Greta, I am learning. And that includes becoming a mystic, so that I might still enjoy her company.

  When I reach the edge of the park again, I stop and feel a torrent of words flood me. I grope for my phone, blindly choosing the most recent document, a mess of to-dos and grocery lists. Underneath a reminder to pick up pita and above a confirmation number for a UPS delivery, I write, “There will be more light upon this earth for me.”

  Three

  kripalu

  I STAND IN FRONT OF PETER, our eyes locked, our hands clasped in prayer. “I see your grief; I acknowledge your pain,” he murmurs to me, his green eyes near frozen.

  “I see your grief; I acknowledge your pain,” I repeat back to him, struggling not to avert my eyes.

  Peter is taller than me, with hair buzzed to his scalp and a blue-collar diffidence I can smell. We met eleven seconds ago, thrown together by our grief-group leader, and before even shaking hands, we find ourselves engaging in an icebreaking exercise that feels like a blowtorch to the skin. I sense, without turning to look, that Stacy is somewhere behind me, writhing inwardly as she murmurs this mantra into the eyes of another stranger. As I meet Peter’s gaze, I can sense his surface terror at this disorienting public intimacy doing battle with something deeper: the softening grief that has propelled him through his reservations to a roomful of metal folding chairs and stricken strangers.

  The exercise ends. I drop Peter’s hands, he drops mine, and we behold each other for a brief moment. The icebreaking exercise worked: we have fight-or-flight hormones coursing through our systems, and we see each other more sharply, the way animals see rustling in the bushes right before they’re eaten.

  �
��If everybody could please take your seats again?” calls the seminar leader.

  I turn from Peter to Stacy, who stands behind me looking shaken. She inquires with her eyes and I answer with mine: Yes, I’m OK. That was fucked, but I’m OK. She nods slightly, agreeing. We both resume our spots in the two folding chairs in the last row nearest the door.

  We have chosen these seats strategically, in accordance with our one rule: if one of us feels uncomfortable or is seized by an emotion too unpleasant to get a grip on, we will nudge the other (we have a safe word) and leave. We are not “group” people by nature, a quality we passed on to Greta: when I once took her to a neighborhood sing-along, her little hand gripped my shoulder as the other kids ran up eagerly to the woman leading it, wiggling and clapping. I could hear her unspoken question: Daddy, what are all these people doing?

  It is November; Greta has been dead six months. I think of her discomfort as I glance around the room: What are we doing? There are about sixty of us here at the Kripalu Institute in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, about three hours north of New York City up the Taconic State Parkway. Some have lost older children—drug overdoses, suicides, car accidents—and some have lost spouses, mothers, fathers. We all share one thing in common: something happened to us that is supposed to only happen to other people. We have all been pushed here, jostled into position—by life, by circumstance, by scheduling, and, finally, by the seminar leader himself, who has moved us next to one another like schoolchildren. The grief has taken control of a number of things we once thought were ours.