“I feel like the brick hit me, too,” I mutter to Stacy. “It didn’t kill me all the way, and now there’s this voice inside of me that’s always screaming. I need this guy inside of me to stop screaming.”
* * *
We begin thinking about names, but all of our research feels haunted, a funhouse-mirror reminder of our first giddy go-round.
“Aurora is the name of a Roman goddess who turned tears to morning dew,” I offer.
Stacy winces.
“It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Aw-roh-ruh. Nice meaning, though.”
“Hope?” Stacy asks.
“Might be a lot to burden a kid with.”
“Yeah, maybe too literal,” Stacy concedes, adding thoughtfully, “I knew a nice woman named Hope in high school.”
“How about Renata? It means ‘reborn.’ ”
Stacy frowns: “ ‘Reborn’ is weird.”
Edith. Ida. Jesse. Owen. Rose?
“We can’t have a ‘Rose Greene.’ ”
“How about Francis?”
“I can’t tell if there’s something…smarmy about the name Francis,” says Stacy. I cannot rebut this, so on we go.
With fear and trauma still ringing so loudly in our ears, we can’t fully believe in the child growing in Stacy’s belly; it is a possibility on the horizon, a good thing that might pan out. That little white life-cloud on the sonogram is more like a sun: I can’t stare at it directly for too long. I talk to the cloud, imagine it shifting into a being. I imagine that I can hear its mind start to whir. It knows me, I think. I know, I whisper to it. Daddy will fix his heart. I know.
I try to meditate. I envision my crippling rage and pain as clouds passing over a constant sky; I imagine myself as a blood cell passing through an artery, just an agent of movement. I try, in other words, to pretend to be something other than human, maybe one of those stone Buddhas with the downcast eyes and smile playing across their lips. This is meant to be the look of perfect detachment and inner peace. It strikes me now as awfully smug.
I find sentences I hate in articles I read to escape. “Experts Predict Zika Mosquitoes Will Be in U.S. by Summer,” The New York Times announces, coupled with an illustration of a mosquito resembling an agent of mechanized warfare, its body filling with scarlet liquid. The article shows up in my Facebook feed just below a clip of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s speech for his win at the 2016 Grammys. “Sebastian, Daddy’s bringing home a Grammy for you,” he cries exuberantly. I regard him sourly, this beaming representative for a nation of parents and their safe, healthy, growing children.
Another one, this time from The New Yorker: a neuroscientist has demonstrated that “a pregnant woman’s experience of trauma and PTSD may affect her child’s development in the womb. And a study at the University of Zurich has shown that stress in a male mouse can alter the RNA in his sperm, causing depression and behavioral changes that persist in his progeny.” The mantra coursing beneath the surface haunts me: You are not the same. You are both damaged.
I watch a racist—an ignorant and malevolent man who believes in nothing—slowly rise to power. I watch people punching protesters at his rallies, and I note the year of his ascent. “Imagine all this happening today! In 2016!” I hear people say over and over again. No one can understand it—this simply can’t be happening. People aren’t this dumb or this cruel.
I keep my mouth shut mostly, but I think: Of course they are. Having my daughter die in such meaningless circumstances has permanently altered my sense of human possibility, it seems, changed my understanding of our potential and capability. We are a difficult, ungovernable species, forever staving off chaos with one hand and succumbing to it with the other. We aren’t here long enough to stop fighting death, to relax into our existence and gaze clearly. We thrash, mostly blindly, from one pole of oblivion to another. We are lucky if we truly notice three or five things in between. The rest is shouting, or being shouted at, or hiding underneath a blasted scrap from a raging storm.
* * *
It’s a boy. Our nurse helpfully points out the size of his testicles during the sonogram. They are swollen, we learn, by amniotic fluid. We both laugh about her remarks after, but it underlined our surprise, to be handed a new model of being. A boy. Our boy. We settle on the name Harrison, like George, the spiritual seeker of the Beatles, or Lou Harrison, the bearded composer and West Coast mystic. Or, Stacy adds, flashing me a sly look, like Harrison Ford.
I have heard his heartbeat again, a miraculous fact, a magic trick I thought unrepeatable. My own heart is painfully swollen, inflamed—I am full to bursting with pain, with joy, with regret, with anger, with bitterness, with wonder, with awe. He is invisible to me, but he is there.
I sense some sort of metaphysical authority shining his unforgiving flashlight in my panicked face. He hands me a summons with a terse flourish: OK, you’ve got twenty more weeks to get your shit together. He pauses meaningfully, finding my eyes from underneath the brim of his hat. You got that, Daddy? Get your shit together.
* * *
We are first-timers at a local grief group. A round-faced man with a jowly smile and a frizzy halo of hair greets us amiably. “I’m Alec,” he says unnecessarily, his name tag staring at us from his right breast pocket. I take his hand, and then he takes Stacy’s. As he does, he catches and holds us with his gaze. He has an effortless warmth, a comfort that seems forever at the surface, not something he has to turn on. I feel both of us lean toward him like heliotropic plants, open up slightly. This is what a support-group lifer feels like, I think. My mother’s first husband, after he went through AA, emitted a similar frequency.
Alec lost a sister, he informs us easily. “You guys are going to want to go around the corner to the main room,” he says, pointing us in the right direction.
We enter the main conference room, hanging back at the entrance for a moment to watch. There is a pleasant sort of shabbiness to everything—the pebbly-looking old rug; the fluorescent overhead light, which makes us all look pale and unhealthy; the table, at the far end, with the requisite grocery-store cookies, the two thermoses with coffee and tea. The long-term members are gathered in small circles, and you can read in their body language, like they were in their own kitchen, that they’d been doing this for years. They talk too quietly for me to hear what is being said, but their faces are open, warm, relaxed.
“Welcome,” a tall, lanky, middle-aged man says, looming suddenly in front of me. He, too, holds out his hand, which appears at the end of a very long, bony arm. “I’m so sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but I’m glad you came,” he says, his voice deep and thrumming like a cello. “My name is Jake. I lost my daughter Renee twelve years ago to cancer. She was twenty-four.”
The entire room constricts, and there is only Jake in front of me.
“I am so sorry to hear it, Jake,” I tell him, gripping his hand back and trying to block out everyone around him as I focus on his face. “My daughter, Greta, died ten months ago. She was two.” Jake’s hand remains loose, his eyes calm and sorrowful on mine.
“I’m sorry, Jayson,” he says, reading my name tag. He gestures to the room with his free hand. “You’ve come to a good place here.”
Stacy and I have been meaning to come to this group for some months. Our natural reticence kept us away, but we have been talking at home lately about our need to “integrate” our healing, our grief, into our daily lives. This is how we talk about our grief now: earnestly, like it is a school project of Greta’s she needs help with. Since learning the sex of our son, I have shared my vision of the traffic cop, handing me a court summons for the due date. Stacy admits she is also hearing the clock tick louder: “We have to make room for him while figuring out how to honor Greta,” she says sensibly. I do not know how she has figured this out so thoroughly, as usual, but I can only agree and be grateful. So we are here.
“Here,” for reasons I do not understand, is a Sunday-school classroom. Because this is our first meeting, we are to be kept apart from the others, many of whom have been coming to the meetings for decades. It’s as if our fresh pain might be contagious and we need to be quarantined. But this means that everywhere we look, we see the results of arts and crafts projects done by little hands. Surely there was another space available? I think as I crane my neck to look at two purple handprints, aged five.
Judy, the moderator, is coming to meet us. I look around at the other first-timers. I wonder what kind of dark energy we emit, if there is a thermal map for this kind of sadness—would we glow like a small city, this gathering of ten or twelve people in a back room?
We sit around in awkward silence, unsure if we are allowed to speak to one another yet. After a minute, Judy walks in, sits down, brushes off her pant legs briskly, and fixes us with a practiced “no bullshit” stare.
“Someone just told me I am too aggressive,” she announces by way of introduction. She shrugs theatrically, her eyelids low: “Ask me if I care.”
I can feel myself drawing inward, shielding my vital organs from her. I don’t want to be in a room with her right now, with Stacy and my son and the memories of my daughter.
Judy introduces herself. Her daughter died twenty years ago, and she has been a moderator for many years. “What happened to us is different from other kinds of loss,” she says. “It just is. Everyone else thinks they can help you, but the truth is there is no one on Earth that understands the way we feel. People are going to try to comfort you; they probably have already tried. But there are no words for this path, and no one who hasn’t experienced this kind of loss will be able to say anything to help. We have experienced the worst affliction that can happen in a lifetime, and no one understands how we feel.”
She stops and takes in the room, determining if we have soaked up her point. She nods imperceptibly, moving forward.
“For years after, all I felt was anger—such anger,” she says, shaking her head slightly. “I wrote pages and pages of nothing but anger and despair, the things I felt. And then, when it was all out of me”—here she mimics washing her hands of it—“I locked it in a drawer. I never wanted to see or read any of it again.
“When I found this place, I started to learn that maybe all the things that were going on in my head weren’t so crazy after all,” she continues. “Maybe there were some other people who felt like this, too. This is a safe place for people like us, where we can be together. Now, why don’t we start by going around the room, and each of you share what brought you here today?”
Counterclockwise around the room, our mute mourners break their silence one at a time. Ann, whose forty-year-old son collapsed and died of a seizure, midsentence, right in front of her. Lydia, the woman across from me, who lost her teenage son to a drug overdose. Today was Tuesday; he had died the previous Thursday. I gaze at her in wonder, at her presence of mind to be here. She sits tranquil, quiet. Her eyes are soft and watery, but she does not cry. She is flanked by two friends, who seem to be ready to steady her should her composure wobble. She tells her story simply and gracefully, and the circle moves on.
The circle lands on Stacy before it lands on me, so she clears her throat softly. “Well, we are here because our daughter, Greta, died about ten months ago, when she was two years old,” she begins. “There was…some falling masonry…”
I squeeze my hands between my thighs in empathy; the story is still such a hard one to tell, mostly because no one seems to understand it. Stacy picks up the thread again, plowing ahead.
“She was sitting on a bench in front of a building on the Upper West Side with my mom, when a piece of the windowsill fell. She never woke up; they did surgery to reduce the swelling in her brain but it was too late. It was such a freakish accident, so random. Sometimes it’s hard to—”
Judy, to our surprise, cuts in here, interrupting Stacy midsentence. “You see? You see? Chaos! It’s pure chaos. The world is a shooting gallery, and we all got hit.”
Eyes wide, I glance over at Stacy, who looks stricken. Do you think she was supposed to cut you off telling your story? Is a group leader supposed to do that? I sense Stacy, feeling rebuked, receding back into the wall. I try to take a breath and unclench my jaw and find it only clenches tighter. I count backward in my head from ten and lose it at seven, and the circle continues to my right.
The couple next to us looks to be a few years younger. Their son emerged stillborn; there had been no warning signs. The husband just holds his wife’s hand, silent.
I look at Judy for guidance, only to find that she, alarmingly, is choking up. “You know, your story is really one that gets to me,” she says.
I get angrier, and I have an ominous foreboding I will soon say something I will regret. Is she comparing our stories? Is a group moderator supposed to do that?
“There’s something about being robbed of your future”—I stifle a gasp, and I feel Stacy stiffen at my side—“that is particularly terrible.” My sense of certainty grows—I am about to be angry in a very inappropriate setting and in a very small room. Then she actually says it: “At least everyone else here got to have a relationship with their child and got to know them.”
“Not when she was two years old,” I mumble, just loud enough for half the room to hear me.
Judy, however, does not. The discussion churns ahead, oblivious to my smoldering. There is another woman from the main group, a lifer, who has been brought in to help guide us in addition to Judy. Her name is Carolyn. Judy turns to Carolyn now: “Carolyn, tell me about Jordan.”
Carolyn makes a florid gesture of helplessness with her left hand, waving it limply in the sky like a silent-movie damsel. Then the hand falls, forgotten, to her lap, while her other comes up unconsciously to rest at a chunky piece of costume jewelry at her neck.
“What is there to say?” she asks. She stares hungrily at the spot just in front of her, as if her son might materialize and help her find words. “He was…everything. He was endlessly creative; he was fierce; he was hilariously funny. He was…” Carolyn glances quickly up to the foam tiles in the ceiling. “He was pure light.
“I am surrounded by his things now, in my house,” she adds, still looking up. “I have many people telling me to get rid of some of it, but he was just so creative…he made so many things, paintings and sculpture and textile. How could I ever get rid of any of it? I am comfortable living with the pieces of my Jordan.”
Carolyn looks down and scans the room, her face darkening slightly. “Jordan’s wife has remarried.” Her face is sour. “She has a new family. She doesn’t understand why I want to live with all of her dead husband’s things.” She enunciates the last word with a bite of accusation. “She seems to have moved on.”
She glowers at this, then turns plaintive. “Everyone expects me to move on at some point,” she says sadly, appealing to us. “I don’t want to move on. Why would I? I’ve never understood why people think that. Sometimes I ask them, ‘Why should I move on?’ They never have an answer for me.”
Here she lapses into silence again, her hand still resting on her necklace. I wonder if Jordan made it.
“We are, all of us here, on the other side of a great wall,” she concludes. “Everyone else is over there. We can hear them, and they can hear us, but we can never join them again.”
“I know what you mean about the wall,” I say hesitantly, breaking my silence. “But I don’t want to live on this side of it forever. I’m really scared of being stuck over here. My therapist reassures me I’m not stuck, but I feel like I’ve been cycling through the same two stages of grief, over and over—some kind of acceptance and then this blinding anger, back and forth.”
“That’s a common misconception,” chimes in the woman to Lydia’s left, speaking for the first time. “The stages of grief aren’t linear. Ju
st because you’re angry again doesn’t mean you’ve somehow gone backward.”
I nod absently as I take a tissue. Lydia’s friend seems versed in the language of therapy sessions.
“The stages!” Judy shrieks. “God help me with the stages.” She regards Lydia’s friend coolly, eyes narrowing: “You’re a therapist, aren’t you?”
The woman nods, her composure unruffled. Judy looks satisfied at the unmasking.
“I thought so,” she says. “You know, normally we have a rule, we say no professionals are allowed”—she pounces on the word “professionals” to make the scare quotes absolutely, fingernails-on-blackboard unmistakable—“at our meetings.” She leans forward a little more, as if conspiratorial: “Since you are her friend and you are accompanying her, though, we’ll make an exception.”
Her posture and tone resemble a mob boss softening up a mark—I like you, Eddie—just before snuffing him out. Stacy and I stare at each other for a moment: Was this really happening?
“So you are a therapist then,” pipes in Carolyn. “Maybe you can answer a question for me, about this ‘acceptance’ business. Why would I want to ‘accept’ my son’s death?”
“It’s not about accepting his death so much as learning to live with it and accepting it as reality,” Lydia’s friend replies, her therapist game face on. “No one asks you to accept that it is somehow OK.”
“Well, how is that acceptance then?” demands Judy. Her elbows are on her knees now, chin jutting. She and Carolyn have identified the intruder, and I feel them circling her like antibodies. “I refuse to accept what happened to my child. I will not accept it until the day I die. I accept that it happened…”
Once More We Saw Stars Page 14