Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  I shush her frantically, waving my arms like I’m fanning a fire. No heads turn, but I feel the heat of interested eyes swiveling. Still grumbling, she follows me to the end of a crowded table, where we sit. A woman with a small Bible is at my elbow, raising bites of organic granola with sunflower seeds to her mouth as she reads.

  “I think they make it silent so no one has a riot about the goddamn coffee,” Stacy grumbles sotto voce as we walk out. We spend the following two mornings in the first-floor café, drinking strong coffee, scrolling through Facebook, and enjoying the company of our kind: the ambivalent, the uncertain, the dabblers.

  Sickeningly, it turns out I was right about the young couple: Kevin and Melissa, married seven years. They lost their youngest daughter, Callie, two years ago, when she was four years old. There was no accident, no sickness; she simply went to bed one night and never woke up. The autopsy revealed nothing. “When I came in the next morning, she was just gone,” Melissa says, shrugging almost apologetically.

  We are eating lunch together after the second day’s morning session, near a window that looks out onto fields. I understand her body language, the instinctive mea culpa for not being able to offer a more meaningful account. Kevin picks at a plate of quinoa and spinach, staring down at it. He smiles wanly in acknowledgment of the story’s inadequacy.

  “It was just so hard to explain to everyone—our family, the kids at her preschool,” Melissa says. “She wasn’t sick. Nothing happened to her. It’s already hard enough to explain to other kids when kids die. With Callie, there wasn’t even a reason. I just felt like the worst mom in the world.”

  “How did the other parents explain to their kids?” I ask. I remember Greta’s best friend, Eva, had looked at us with an almost religious fear: we ran into Eva and her mom on the street one day, about ten days after, and she hid behind her mother’s legs. “It’s OK, Eva, Greta’s in the sky now,” her mother said helplessly, trying and failing to extricate her. From behind her mother, Eva’s brown eyes pierced mine, accusatory and focused: her best friend was suddenly gone and we were still standing, and the only conclusion she could reach was that we had done something heinous to her.

  Stacy and I had walked back to our building in grim silence. We felt like monsters, Gorgons sent to terrify the fortunate. Behind us, I envisioned cars veering slowly into fire hydrants, flowers shriveling, store windows shattering, old ladies clutching their hearts and collapsing as their pacemakers malfunctioned in our wake.

  “Some of our friends stopped talking to us after a while,” Melissa acknowledges when we tell her this story. “It’s just too hard for them to imagine; it’s so hard for us to imagine. No one should have to imagine it. After a while, they were just too spooked to see us again.”

  “Yeah,” Stacy agrees. “It’s just too much for a lot of people. I don’t blame anyone for it. It’s too much for us, too.” Stacy and I don’t say it, but we both feel a rush of gratitude for our friend circle, which activated around us immediately. No one flinched when they looked us in the eyes, and all our loved ones seemed to know exactly what to say. No one left us alone, and almost no one overstayed their welcome. I sopped up all this love greedily, eagerly, like I was pressing a bread crust into a corner of a soup dish. Most days it was the only evidence I had of Greta’s life, that I had ever been her father.

  Melissa and Kevin are the first couple we’ve met who have lost a toddler, and there is a ghastly sort of relief in it. A pall of societal shame hovers over everyone in this club, the haunted inverse of new-parent meet-ups and mommy groups. Children who lose parents are orphans; bereaved spouses are widows. But what do you call parents who lose children? It seems telling to me there is no word in our language for our situation. It is unspeakable, and by extension, we are not supposed to exist.

  “It feels like I’m closeted and trying to figure out if someone I’m talking to is gay,” Stacy observes of the furtive effort to find community. While I grapple with anger, Stacy has grappled with loneliness: Where are the others? Stacy’s world-map coordinates consist entirely of trustworthy people, nodes of conversation, repositories of wisdom, sources of support. She seeks out and builds these social networks effortlessly, like a spider spins silk.

  Give anyone five minutes with Stacy, even the most private soul, and she will gently prod them open with the force of her genuine curiosity. Surface questions—“What do you do for a living?”—yield instantly to the richer stuff: what they think about their job, what else they might have done if they’d had the courage, the sorts of friends they wished they’d made, their thoughts on free will. She is charismatic in the purest sense: there is nothing sinister or needful lurking beneath it, no raw deal being struck. She simply wants to know about you.

  But building this particular group has eluded even Stacy. Some googling turns up support groups for women who have miscarried or for parents of deceased older kids—teenagers who have overdosed, died in a car accident, committed suicide, or died of cancer. But locating other young parents who have had their toddlers struck down, in all their babbling, rude health, is nearly impossible. We are vigilant about not succumbing to self-pity the way we are vigilant about flossing daily, and yet sometimes our situation practically begs it of us. Our inability to find a single family anywhere in our circumstances feels like just such an invitation. Sometimes I see self-pity running up to me like a neighborhood dog, flopping on its back and showing me its belly. Come on, indulge, it says.

  “I was grateful that there was at least no single person for us to blame, really,” Stacy says. “And that there was no…ambiguity about it. We didn’t have to make any really hard decisions. It was pretty clear-cut that she wasn’t going to survive.”

  “Having no one to blame was the hardest part about Callie,” Melissa says. “You doubt yourself. Even though there was nothing you did. You just can’t help it. I asked myself a million questions about the night before. Did I miss something? Were we not paying attention? But there was just nothing. It makes the anger…difficult.”

  “Yeah, I mean, who do we have to be angry at?” I wonder out loud. “It was a goddamn building that killed her. How can I be mad at a building?”

  “Jayson’s had a lot more of the anger,” Stacy says. “I’ve just had…I don’t know.” She flicks her eyes down, suddenly overwhelmed. I seek out Kevin’s eyes, wondering if the anger is a fundamentally male thing. Kevin meets my eyes, but his are glassy and inward. He has the air of the only non-English speaker in a group, marooned in a room of incomprehensible babble. All he can offer is a bland smile, a helpless sort of shrug.

  “We went back to work too soon,” Stacy says. “We kind of needed it at the time, but now we are really wishing we had more time away.”

  “Yeah, I remember all I wanted to do after Callie died was to go to India,” Melissa says. “If I could have, I would have just gone to an ashram for a year. It was hard, though, having an older kid. We had to take care of him, so we didn’t really get to process a lot of things. Nolan really needed us, and he was confused, too.”

  The evening before, we were asked to write letters to our loved ones, and Melissa and Stacy commiserate over the difficulty of the exercise. “It’s hard to know what to say to her,” says Stacy. “She talked a lot for a two-year-old, we were really lucky she was so verbal, but still, the things she liked were…noodles. Chocolate. She really liked Frozen.”

  “We were going to bring Callie to see Frozen,” Melissa remembers. “We watched the preview together on the computer. She died a few months before it came out.”

  “Oh god,” I say. “Did you ever see it?”

  “We did,” she says. “We went to the movies to see it that December, and I blubbered the whole way through.”

  * * *

  Keeping with our noncommittal, half-measures approach, we’ve chosen not to stay on Kripalu grounds, driving just another mile and a half down th
e road to a randomly chosen B&B. We’ve justified this decision by the exorbitant price of the private rooms there, but truthfully, we are just afraid of feeling trapped.

  Last night we lay next to each other on our floral four-poster bed in silence. We held our phones, and after a hesitant moment, we each began typing silently. Even typing “Greta” as an address, with a comma, brought with it a sharp pain. “Greta” has been an absence, the hole that sucked all the sound from our lives, and we have until now been mostly content to move under its woolly silence. To openly address her, to turn up the volume on that absence with no intermediaries or buffers, felt palpably dangerous, even illicit, like an exorcism.

  “Hi, sweetie,” I started. “Daddy and Mommy want to be OK for you, because you loved us happy. We are here because there are other people who are sad, too, who miss their mommy or their daddy or friend or brother or sister, or even their little boy or girl like you.”

  Tears muddled my vision. I glanced over and saw Stacy crying silently as well, her eyes red and cheeks pink. I turned back to my phone and felt a pain in the hollow of my bones. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second to eject the tears rolling down my cheeks and puddling at my collar. Then I continued.

  “Oh, sweetie pie,” I wrote. “We miss you every day. We miss you every morning when you don’t wake us up and every night when we don’t get to kiss you good night.” The memories snowballed; I began tapping faster, and my letter became simply a moan, a long list of things we didn’t do together anymore: play with blocks on the floor, point at pictures in books. After a few sentences, I felt I was talking to myself, to my self-pity and my loneliness, which had filled the shape left by her absence. Before I could even stop to look, I was staring at five paragraphs. My last sentence was simple: “I remember how it felt to be parents.”

  When we were done, we switched phones. Stacy’s was two paragraphs long. “Sometimes I’m afraid to address you, sweetie, and I don’t know why,” it said at one point. “It’s so hard not having you here, knowing all the things we never got to experience with you, left wondering who you would have become.” It ended, heartbreakingly, with “I miss you every day, Greta. I’m sorry.” I caught my breath slightly at this: “I’m sorry.”

  I snuck a look at Stacy’s face out of the corner of my eye: Did she live, silently, with blame? I wondered about this. Stacy was Greta’s mother long before I was Greta’s father. She carried Greta, talked to her under her breath as she swam inside her. The two of them understood each other on a level that surpassed language.

  I flashed back on Greta’s birth for a moment, the indescribable and awe-inspiring teamwork between them that I witnessed. As Greta was crowning, she was facedown. Each push brought her small, mottled purple head briefly into view, more internal organ than person. Then she receded, a movement from nothingness into fullness and back again. “Her heart rate is gorgeous,” our midwife, Rita, informed us, monitoring with a handheld device and a matter-of-fact tone.

  Stacy’s hand clutched my hair, a fistful, as each contraction hit. She opened up from socialized moans and deep breaths into primitive stuff: guttural screaming, the sound of your genetic inheritance claiming control.

  The next contraction arrived, Stacy’s hand re-clenched the clump of hair it held, my skull went numb-tingling hot, and Greta’s head resurfaced, hanging there. Then, so surreal that I never once quite believe it after I see it, I watched it rotate, 180 degrees, so she was facing up; I could confirm it was happening only by watching the tiny bits of hair on her head as a reference point. I lay back on my side to be even with Stacy’s face to tell her what had happened; with her eyes closed, concentrating somewhere deeper than all of us, she smiled. Then her eyebrows knitted again, and she whispered loudly, fiercely, “She’s coming.” Then there was another push, maybe two, before Stacy reached down in between her legs and pulled Greta up.

  “Hi, beautiful,” Stacy breathed to her, grey and shaky. Greta, wailing, promptly pooped all over her mother’s chest, covering both of them in tarry-black meconium that her small feet swiped through feebly like a bird trapped in an oil slick.

  Behind us, I heard Rita’s voice losing some of its loose California sunniness: “Mom is bleeding a little bit,” she said. There was a medical bustle I didn’t watch, a clink of some instruments I didn’t see. Greta’s arms were in a T shape, doing the primitive, helpless shake of all new humans. Stacy patted her, whispering, “Shh, shh.” At one point, I glanced down at Rita, to see what she was doing, and I still have a vivid, dreamlike memory of her: she is wearing a headlamp, and in her left gloved hand she holds a needle, pulling one long clear thread up from somewhere inside Stacy I don’t care to observe.

  As she lost blood, Stacy’s arms started to shake a little harder, so Greta, still wailing, was passed off to me. I placed her tiny body on my left shoulder and sang “Between the Bars” into her ear to her for the first time; her crying broke up and then subsided.

  A few hours later, the blood all over the bed was removed in one lump, sheets and pads and all, and dumped in a large biohazard bucket in the corner of our room. A nurse placed a clear bassinet next to our bed and swaddled Greta with the expertise of soldiers folding a flag at an army funeral, placing her inside. The second she left to let us sleep, we scooped Greta out quietly, placing her in the bed between us. We watched as her birdlike breastbone rose and fell. Stacy gazed at her in fond recognition. She said it again, her face radiant, transformed by a smile: “Hi, beautiful.” These two, I realized, knew each other. They had passed through life’s messiest trial, working and breathing together.

  Did Stacy, as Greta’s original caretaker, the body that carried Greta’s body, carry some original-sin sense of guilt? I remembered talking to Elizabeth months after her daughter, Clara, was born, as she fought through the fog of postpartum depression: “It’s like seeing someone hold one of my internal organs, or my left arm,” she commented of seeing others hold Clara. It is common enough for parents of children who die to say that “a piece” of them has died, but reading Stacy’s note, I thought again how literal it was for her, how figurative for me. “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  At lunch with Kevin and Melissa, I glance at them and I wonder which of them is carrying their letters. I wonder if only Melissa wrote one, or if she put pen to paper and found that she couldn’t say a word. Maybe Kevin pounded away on his phone’s keyboard, screaming soundlessly in perfect ten-point font. I take a sip of hot herbal tea and cradle the mug, thinking how strange it is that we are four adults out to lunch, each of us with a letter to our dead child somewhere on our person.

  We walk back from the cafeteria to the studio together, Stacy and Melissa up ahead chatting and Kevin and I hanging back together, mostly silent. When we take our seats, I catch sight of Stacy’s eyes, and I spot something new in them: a light, however wan. When Stacy is sad, her eyes turn murky, like steely harbor water at night. Now it is as if someone has dropped a pin light into that water, something that sank and disappeared fast but not before sending a faint signal to the surface.

  * * *

  “I hope you all had a nice break,” David Kessler says to us when everyone has settled in for our afternoon session. “If you remember, yesterday at the end of our session I asked you to write a letter to your loved one. Did we all write the letter?”

  There is a general murmur of assent.

  “Does everyone here have their letter? OK, great, why don’t you get those out now?”

  I look around the room, which is suddenly abuzz with rustling and digging. Sitting in front of us, I see Melissa gripping the edges of a sheet of yellow legal paper she has produced from her bag and unfolded. Her entire body is taut, and the edges of her fingers are white. I catch sight of red pen scrawl on it and avert my eyes before any of the letters resolve themselves into words. I feel unclean for even glancing at it.

  “Wh
o would like to read theirs?” Kessler asks.

  Stacy jabs me slightly with her elbow; she knows I quietly burn for this sort of visibility, need it. I tend to stand up straighter in the spotlight, where she shrinks from it instinctively; she spent the majority of our wedding reception in a state of near-total panic, unable to join a group without producing an uproar.

  I raise my hand, slowly, as if I am still debating the action as it happens. Kessler’s eyes alight on me, and I feel the room’s energy shift with him. He is a master communicator and controller of the room, so practiced at corralling and directing the emotions of a group of brokenhearted people that there doesn’t seem to be anything high-stakes about the work at all. “Yes, you right there,” he calls. “Why don’t you read us what you wrote? First, tell us a little bit about who the letter is to.”

  I clear my throat.

  “It is to our daughter,” I say, my voice emerging a little squeaky and then dropping too deep.

  “I’m sorry,” Kessler says, keeping his eyes locked on mine. I feel a bit like I have taken hostages somewhere and Kessler has been dispatched to talk me down. I sense everyone glancing at me and at Stacy. I focus my eyes, already burning, on my phone and begin to read.

  When I hit the middle of the letter—“We have a picture of your mama holding you, wearing her sun hat and sitting on a tree stump. I feel like you got to have eight good days with your family where you knew what life could be, how much fun you and your daddy were going to have together, and then you were taken from us”—I start to hear small noises of grief, small murmurs and “ohs” and tissues rasping out of cheap boxes.