With an endless stream of people coming to cry with us, the hospital converted one of the maternity waiting rooms into a grieving room. I spent that evening lying on the floor, staring at a room full of mostly silent friends and family, everyone waiting for someone to say the right thing. But there was no right thing to say. There was simply no way to sugarcoat this situation: it just fucking sucked, but I was the only one willing to acknowledge that.
When anyone did finally speak up, I didn’t hear a word. I was so deep in my own head that I may as well have been left alone in that room to talk to the walls. But I couldn’t tell anyone that things were going to be all right, that I was going to get through this, that I would survive without Liz. And I didn’t need to tell them how much I loved her, or how much I was going to miss her, because they all knew that. I just kept repeating the same thoughts: What the fuck am I gonna do without her? She was my life. I can’t go on without her.
Sitting there, I felt that dying might be the only way to truly take away the pain, but I knew that suicide would never be an option. I just couldn’t leave Madeline alone. The thought of our child as an orphan turned my stomach, and I hated myself for even thinking something so selfish. Besides, Liz would fucking kill me if I did something like that. Just hours after my wife had died, I became determined to make Madeline my reason for living. She would be my source of hope and happiness in every bleak moment I encountered. She would be the one to pull me out of the dark moments I knew I’d inevitably face. She would be my constant reminder of Liz, and no matter what happened during the coming days, weeks, months, and years, I would rely on her to make sure I was happy so I could be the best father possible for her.
After everyone but my mom and Liz’s parents left the hospital that night, I realized just how alone I was. Our friends were headed home with their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands, their boyfriends, all probably saying they same thing: I love you, and I’m so glad that it wasn’t us. Me? I had no idea what to do, nowhere to go. There was no possible way I could go back to our house. Not tonight. In fact, I felt then that I might never be able to step through our front door again. I headed to the attached hotel with my mom.
I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. In one arm I clutched the red travel pillow that Liz had carried with her almost everywhere. In the other, her favorite pink pashmina, a gift I had picked up for her on one of my trips to India. Though I thought I had no tears left, they once again started to flow as I brought the pillow and the shawl up to my face, taking in her scent. Her perfume was so deeply embedded in both objects, I swore I wouldn’t let them go until I’d sniffed every last bit of her from them. It was remarkable how the smell filled me with hope—hope that I’d be able to sleep through the night, hope that there’d be a dream during which Liz was still alive in my mind. I ached for just one moment in which this wasn’t my reality. As I drifted off, I hoped I’d wake up the next morning realizing that this had all been an awful nightmare. Sleep was an escape. Plus I was so fucking exhausted that I couldn’t have kept my eyes open even if I’d wanted to.
Sometime around 2:00 a.m., I woke up to my phone ringing.
“Is this Mr. Logelin?”
“Yeah. Who is this?”
It was a woman from an organ donation organization. “Mr. Logelin, we’re so sorry to hear about your loss. We’d like to talk to you about organ and tissue donation.”
This was not how I wanted to wake up: not only was I robbed of that one hopeful dream, but it was by a woman looking to exploit my worst nightmare for someone else’s gain. It was an awful thing to think, and I knew it then, but I couldn’t help it. I was a little out of my mind.
“How soon does this need to be done?” I asked.
“Procurement needs to take place within twenty-four hours,” she replied.
Twenty-four hours? “Ma’am. My wife hasn’t even been dead twelve hours. Is there any way we can talk about this in the morning?”
“Sure. We’ll call you back at nine a.m.”
I was pissed off and hung up the phone. “Twenty-four hours?” I asked out loud, waking my mom.
“What, honey?”
“Nothing, Mom. Go back to sleep.”
I understood the time sensitivity, but all I could think about was the lack of sensitivity shown to me. A more spiteful person would have told them to fuck off, but as I tried to get back to sleep, I thought about what Liz would want in this situation. We had never talked about organ donation, but she had a donor sticker on her driver’s license and had encouraged me to place one on mine as well. I knew what I had to do, and before I passed out again, I took a little comfort in knowing that Liz’s death might actually help others live.
My phone rang again the next morning at nine o’clock on the dot, and I knew who it was. To spare Liz’s parents the pain of having to listen to one side of the negotiation for their daughter’s organs and tissue, I excused myself from the breakfast table and took the call in the lobby of the hospital.
I slumped down in a chair near the information desk and started answering the woman’s questions. No, Liz didn’t have any tattoos. Yes, we had traveled extensively, including to countries with plenty of blood-borne illnesses and mad cow disease. No, she was not an intravenous drug user. Yes, we’d had unprotected sex in the last year, pointing out the fact that she died the day after giving birth. No, she didn’t have hepatitis, AIDS, or any other diseases. Yes, I’d be willing to donate any organs or tissue deemed usable. With each question and subsequent answer came another wave of nausea. This was exactly why I wasn’t eating.
I watched as nurses and doctors walked through the lobby on their way to whatever part of the hospital they worked in; I was paying special attention to the female employees. I kept thinking, I need to marry her. This wasn’t about needing a second income, love, or sex. And it certainly wasn’t about replacing Liz. It was a reaction to my fear of raising a premature baby on my own, and my inability to be a good dad—and now mom, too—to my daughter. It wasn’t really even about me; I was convinced that Madeline needed a woman in her life as soon as possible so she didn’t grow up with only the parental influence of her derelict father. In my estimation, my mind was worth roughly half of what Liz’s was. Shit. Madeline has one quarter of a parent.
The bad thing about the Internet is that word travels fast. So fast, in fact, that the day after Liz died, my phone didn’t stop ringing, and the red light on my BlackBerry blinked almost constantly. Of course, the great thing about the Internet is that word travels fast, which meant my support system was suddenly enormous and stretched across the globe. I heard from high school friends I hadn’t spoken to in twelve years telling me they remembered meeting Liz once and how they never forgot her smile. My friends from college contacted me, all shocked, in disbelief that someone as lively and vivacious as Liz could be dead. Biraj called from South Korea in tears, unable to say anything. My graduate school roommate listened to me cry into the phone for at least thirty minutes. Family members I hadn’t heard from since the previous Christmas called to share memories of Liz. I heard from colleagues and friends in India and the Philippines, most of whom had never met Liz, calling and writing to tell me that they remembered the way my face lit up when I talked about her.
Standing outside the hospital, the sunshine of a beautiful Southern California morning unable to divert my attention from the darkest moment of my life, I talked on the phone to one of my oldest friends, Alex. I’d known Alex since he was the new kid in our third-grade classroom. We had the low-maintenance kind of friendship that was sustained by a call or an e-mail once or twice a year. I hadn’t even gotten around to telling him that Liz was pregnant, so I was more than surprised to hear from him. He told me that he was away on business, but that he would catch a flight to Los Angeles as soon as he possibly could. I hadn’t even considered that my friends from out of town would come to Liz’s funeral. “I’m not even sure when or where the funeral is going to be, but I guess on Saturday? That’s
the day that funerals usually happen, right?” Neither of us really knew; we were too young to have ever thought about such things. Well, at least Alex was. I had aged over forty years in fewer than twenty-four hours.
As we continued to talk, a taxi pulled into the driveway of the hospital, stopping right in front of me. The door opened, and there was my best friend, A.J., and his wife, Sonja. I hung up with Alex and started crying all over again. They had been on a ski vacation in Colorado with A.J.’s family, and I hadn’t spoken to them since Madeline’s birth. I hadn’t expected people to show up, but if anyone was going to, it would be A.J. and Sonja. I had gone to high school with both of them, and they were one of the few couples Liz and I knew who had been together longer than we had. I was in their wedding, and A.J. was in ours. They were the kind of couple other couples envied but didn’t hate. And they were by far the nicest, kindest human beings in the world.
One night in the hospital, Liz had said to me, “I know we agreed that we don’t want to baptize Madeline, but I really like the idea of her having godparents. Can A.J. and Sonja be Madeline’s ‘not-godparents’? You know, in case we die in a car crash or something, I’d want them to take care of Madeline.” I thought about this conversation as I reached out to A.J., hugging him for what would normally have been an uncomfortable amount of time, weeping into his black fleece ski vest.
“What are you guys doing here?” I said, asking the dumbest question of the day. “You’re supposed to be on vacation!” I needed them, and they knew it, so they came to me as fast as they could, even though I hadn’t asked them to do so. I wiped the tears from my eyes, threw my arm around A.J.’s shoulder and said, “Come on. Let’s go see the most goddamn beautiful baby in the world.”
This scene played out multiple times over the next few days. Liz’s sister, Deb, flew in from San Francisco, and her expression was something I hope I never see again. My dad and his wife came from their vacation in Florida, both still thinking that this was some awful joke we were playing on them. My brothers David and Nick; my stepbrother, Adam; my stepfather, Rodney; my cousin Josh; one of my college roommates, Nate; Liz’s family; and her friends from high school and college—people streamed in from around the country, all coming to cry with our families and me.
Each time someone else arrived at the hospital, I promptly took him or her to the window of the NICU to catch a glimpse of Madeline. At one point I arrived to find Madeline’s bassinette moved up against the window. The nurse told me she was drawing such a crowd that they wanted to move her to where everyone could see her. Liz would have loved the idea of her daughter being the star of the NICU, but I found it a bit awkward to be sitting in a chair, holding my baby and crying while our friends and family watched from the other side of the glass. Even more awkward was watching their lips move and not being able to make out the words. I was pretty sure I knew exactly what they were saying to one another, though. That poor son of a bitch. How is he gonna do this without Liz? I’m so glad it wasn’t my husband/wife.
On Thursday afternoon, I went with Liz’s parents, my mom and stepdad, my dad and stepmom, and Anya to a funeral home a few miles from the hospital. I’d driven up and down the street it was on thousands of times, but I’d never noticed it before. I didn’t know how this particular place had been chosen, and frankly, I didn’t give a shit. We walked inside and were greeted by a tall old man who introduced himself as the funeral director. No introductions were really necessary—I mean, he had the appearance of every funeral director I’d ever seen on TV, and the look in my eyes must have been the one he’d seen on ten thousand other widowers.
He led us into a room with a huge wooden table outfitted with tissue boxes and bottles of water. It reminded me of the hatchet rooms set up at my office when employees were laid off. He seated himself at the head and delivered us a well-prepared message about how sorry he was and how death is part of life, even when it happens at such a young age. Then his speech took an abrupt turn: “So, are we looking at caskets or are we looking at urns?” I appreciated his ability to get down to business, but I couldn’t help feeling a little repulsed by the question. My wife had been dead fewer than two days, and here was a guy treating the question of how to deal with her remains with the kind of attitude usually reserved for determining what type of breakfast meat to have with one’s eggs. But this choice wasn’t as easy as saying, “Bacon, of course.” In our more than twelve years together, Liz and I had never talked about what should be done if one of us were to die, and we were too young even to begin thinking about drafting a will that would have answered the question for me. I looked around the table, searching the faces of everyone in the room. Their teary eyes were staring back, waiting for my response.
But I didn’t know how to make these choices. Liz handled the tough decisions in our life. And before that, my parents had made them for me. I didn’t know if I should even be the one to answer the question at all. Maybe it should be up to the people who birthed and raised her? I peered up at them once again, and still their faces told me that I had to decide.
I was transported back to our 2004 trip to Kathmandu. During a break in Biraj’s wedding festivities, he suggested we visit Pashupatinath, the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal. A tour guide led us around the grounds, finally stopping on a bridge overlooking the Bagmati River. He pointed to the smoke rising from the banks of the river, the smoke that we had been breathing in. “If you look closely, you will see funeral pyres and cremations taking place down below,” he told us. Our faces instantly went from inquisitive to disgusted, and we did our best to stop inhaling the smoke that was all around us. The sight and smell of a body on fire was too much to deal with, so our tour ended there.
Then I thought about when I was in Kathmandu in 2006, this time by myself. I was compelled to go back to Pashupatinath, and to sit on the banks of the Bagmati River, watching the entire cremation ceremony. I witnessed body after body, each wrapped in white linen, brought to the cremation ghats on stretchers made of bamboo, then put onto the ground while a series of rituals were performed. The bodies were then placed on the funeral pyre, covered with wood, and lit while a man with a big stick stoked the fire. I watched as the wood and body were transformed into ash, and finally pushed into the river, thus bringing to an end the physical body. That day I realized that it was not the burning body or the smoke that rose from it that had alarmed us on that first trip; it was that we feared our own mortality. And to me, someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, as I sat there on the banks of the Bagmati River that day in 2006, finally came some peace with the idea of death.
This insight was a huge contrast to the mostly Catholic funerals I had attended growing up. I found a funeral with an open casket to be a bit macabre, and always felt that burial didn’t bring about any sense of finality. But cremation—the process of actually destroying the physical being once the brain stopped working and the heart stopped beating—well, that seemed like the only way to really say good-bye.
“We’re looking at urns.” It wasn’t my answer that surprised me as much as it was the certainty with which I stated it. I looked around the room once more, waiting for someone to object. No one did. The funeral director stood up and led us to a hallway in the back of the funeral home where a bunch of urns were lined up on shelves along the wall. I quickly scanned them, finding every single one unacceptable. There was no way in hell I was going to place Liz’s ashes into an urn with an image of an American flag and a crying bald eagle.
As I searched the wall for at least one possible option, the funeral director, perhaps sensing my disapproval, started talking again. “You don’t necessarily need an urn. You can also have her remains stored inside a plastic bag and then placed inside a cardboard box.”
I had no idea what to say. He continued, “And you can either come pick her up, or we can mail her to your house.” I was stunned. I was completely unprepared for this.
“Uh… no. I am not picking her up, and there is no way in hell y
ou’re mailing her to my house. Are there any other options?” He gave me some speech about state law prohibiting funeral homes from holding remains after some predetermined amount of time.
I was becoming visibly agitated. I was still in shock. Was I really standing here making funeral plans for Liz? My mom noticed my growing unease and stepped in. “Matt, I’ll make a few phone calls and see if my funeral director friend in Minnesota can hold on to her until you’re ready to make a decision.” I was sick of making choices, and was desperate for someone to do so for me. I was so thankful to have help at that moment—it was exactly what I needed.
We all headed back into the front room so I could sign the necessary paperwork and make the rest of the arrangements. We agreed that the service would be held in the chapel at the funeral home on Saturday in order to give as many people as possible the opportunity to attend. I insisted that religion be left out because I wanted the focus to remain on Liz, rather than on the not-shared belief that God had taken her to a better place.
I thought the questions were over until the funeral director asked how many death certificates I wanted.
Two Kisses for Maddy Page 8