“None. I don’t want any death certificates. I know she’s dead,” I replied. Really. The last thing I needed was another reminder that my wife was never going to hold her baby.
“Mr. Logelin, you’ll need at least a few copies in order to settle her estate issues.”
Estate issues? I hadn’t even begun to think about her bank accounts, credit cards, and the countless other issues I was going to have to deal with over the next few weeks. This was most definitely not my area of expertise. Tom stepped in. “Matt, why don’t we order ten copies so you have extras, just in case you need them.” Once again, it was wonderful to have someone else make a decision for me. These were simple questions requiring simple answers, but to me, they were questions I never imagined I would have to answer. Especially not at age thirty.
When we headed back to the hospital, I went straight for Madeline. I saw her lying in her incubator and the tears immediately started to flow. But these tears were different from the ones I’d been crying for the past few days; these were tears of relief. Right then, watching Madeline’s little chest move up and down as she breathed, I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with any of this without her. Just two days old and she was already saving me in a way that none of my friends and family could.
Chapter 10
inside, where you
used to be,
though filled with
your things,
it’s as empty
as it was the
day we moved in.
Early Friday morning, I finally arrived back at my house. In the same way that I couldn’t let Liz spend a night alone when she was on bed rest, I couldn’t let Maddy be alone at the hospital, either, so I’d been sleeping at the attached hotel and planned to do so until she was ready to come home.
Behind me on the porch was a small army of friends and family there to support me as I entered our home for the first time since Liz died; I was not looking forward to this. I unlocked the door and rushed inside alone to deactivate the alarm. I walked through the kitchen and straight into our bedroom. It was exactly as it had been the day Liz was admitted to the hospital three weeks earlier.
While I scanned our bedroom, everyone gave me the space they thought I needed. There on Liz’s nightstand was a nearly empty water bottle, reminding me of all the times I gave her shit for her inability to finish one off. Next to it was a packet of her nausea medication, the foil sticking up from all but two of the pill slots, reminding me how difficult her pregnancy had been. Toward the back was her alarm clock, bringing me back to the day she had unplugged it to put an end to the awful interference buzzing it made when she received an e-mail on her BlackBerry. In the middle was the book of names we had pored over, where we found a name for our child.
At that moment, the last few lines of “I Remember Me” by the Silver Jews started playing in my head:
I remember her
And I remember him
I remember them
I remember then
I’m just rememberin’
I’m just rememberin’
Just rememberin’
I’m just rememberin’
The words repeated over and over again in my head as I rushed out of the room and into our office.
I sat down on the floor in front of my wall of music and began furiously grabbing CDs and records from the shelves. It probably was the last thing I should have been worried about then, but I had an overwhelming compulsion to gather songs for Liz’s funeral. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing all the usual depressing funeral music—“On Eagle’s Wings” and all the other bullshit songs that you’re supposed to play when someone dies. I was suddenly determined to create the greatest funeral playlist that there had ever been, and it was a more difficult task than I had imagined. Liz and I had way different tastes in music. She was into the kind of pop music that made me want to gag—you know, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, and anything else played over and over again on the local Top 40 radio station—while I listened to indie rock and jazz that rarely made it to commercial radio at all. I tried to think of the best way to honor her memory, but there was no way I was going to be responsible for turning her funeral into a dance party. Luckily, most of the music I listened to was rather mournful, so I couldn’t really go wrong with that. The only real requirement was that the songs meant something to both of us.
But the first song I wanted to add violated my only requirement, and was in fact hated by Liz because it was the one song I asked her to play if I died: “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” by Smog. The title alone indicates that it’s completely inappropriate for an actual funeral, but I always hoped that mine would have a few moments of laughter, and I thought Liz’s should be the same way. A.J. came into my office and sat down on the floor next to me, immediately joining me in scanning my music shelves. I didn’t tell him what I was up to, but he figured it out. He knew what an important part music played in my life, and he understood just how cathartic the playlist creation process would be for me.
Without looking at him I said, “Dude. The first song is gonna be ‘Dress Sexy at My Funeral.’”
A.J. shared my music taste, but had a better ear for the appropriate. “I don’t know about that,” he said, looking at me as if I’d truly lost my mind.
“Oh, come on. No one’s gonna be listening to the lyrics. You and I will be the only people who’ll know just how screwed up the song is.” I added it to the playlist and continued digging through mine and Liz’s musical past, running ideas past A.J., and listening to his suggestions.
He proposed “Une Année sans Lumiére” by Arcade Fire, “Last Tide” by Sun Kil Moon, “Falling Slowly” by the Frames, and a few others.
“I’ve got to include that Bee Gees song that Feist covered, you know, the one we played at our wedding? ‘Inside and Out.’ And ‘Tennessee’ by the Silver Jews. Oh. And anything off of In the Aeroplane over the Sea.” An hour later I had my playlist.
A.J. worked on extracting the files from the CDs and creating the perfect play order while I moved on to the next important task: culling through over twelve years of photos of Liz. I had a few favorites, but I wanted the funeral home to be wallpapered with pictures of her. I didn’t want her death to define her, or to be the only thing that people remembered about her. If they could see her smiling in front of Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal, or any of the other wondrous places we visited around the world, at the very least they’d feel confident that she lived an incredibly full life in her short thirty years on this planet. But I was looking at each photo hoping these memories would help remove from my brain that final image of Liz lying dead in her hospital bed.
The rest of my friends and family took care of the things I was unable to think about yet. Tom and Candee worked with some of Liz’s more astute and money-savvy friends to help set up a financial plan for me and to make a list of all of the things I would need to handle in the wake of her death. Sonja came up with the idea of creating a memorial fund to help us make up for Liz’s lost income, and she worked with my cousin Josh to get a bank account set up. My mom and stepmom helped clean up my house, and my dad, stepdad, brothers, and one of Liz’s uncles teamed up to tackle some long-neglected home improvement projects.
When A.J. and I finally emerged from the office, I walked into the kitchen to hear Candee talking to the Los Angeles Times about placing an obituary in the paper.
“Okay. We’ll get something to you within the hour.” Looking at me, Candee said, “Honey, would you like to write something for Lizzie’s obituary?”
Oh.
She went on. “I don’t want to put pressure on you, but they told me we have an hour to get something in order to make the deadline for the Friday newspaper.”
I glanced at her with the helpless look I’d been wearing since Tuesday. “I’m not sure I can right now.”
Sonja was standing nearby and offered to write it. “Take a look at it when I’m done and let me know what you think,�
� she said.
While Sonja put pen to paper to encapsulate Liz’s life in fewer than 220 words, I went outside and sat on the bottom stair of my front porch, staring at the houses on the hill in front of me. I breathed in the scent of the grapefruit blossoms in our yard and I did the math in my head. Madeline was born at 11:56 a.m., and Liz died the next day at 3:11 p.m. Twenty-seven hours. In twenty-seven hours I witnessed the only two things guaranteed to every single human being: birth and death. To experience the emotions associated with both events, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, in a little more than one day, well, it was ruinous.
I tried to shake away the tears as I sat there thinking about how close to perfect those twenty-seven hours were. Our love, our jobs, our travels, our house in Los Angeles, our fruit trees, and finally, our beautiful baby girl; these were the things we’d been working toward, and we had finally achieved them all the moment Madeline was born. Twenty-seven hours of pure happiness. I felt so fucking lucky to have had even that short amount of time, and I was positive that Liz died confident that we had achieved all we had set out to. But I couldn’t help thinking that we were robbed of a lifetime of true happiness. Twenty-seven hours wasn’t enough—but really, forever wouldn’t have been, either.
I jumped up and raced back up the steps and into my kitchen. I grabbed a pen and a notebook, and wrote the following:
life and death.
from the happiest moment of
our lives
to the saddest.
all
of it.
in a 27-hour period.
the pain is unbearable.
devastated
doesn’t describe
the
loss
we’re all feeling.
family and friends
from around the world
have
come to our home,
called.
e-mailed,
cried.
everyone died
a lot
when liz left us.
she
loved everyone
more than we can imagine.
she
left us
with the greatest gift she could
have.
a baby girl
who looks soooo much like
momma.
she’d be the first
to say it would all be
ok.
please try not to cry
(says the husband who can’t
stop).
instead
think of liz.
remember
that laugh.
that smile.
that love.
i know i will.
I tore the sheet of paper from the notebook, handed it to Sonja who accepted it with no reaction, and walked out of the room. I had never written anything like this before. Sure, I wrote term papers in college and graduate school, and I wrote a couple of record reviews for a music magazine, but I had never shared my feelings in such an explicitly personal way. Getting those words down left me with an incredible sense of peace. They would end up on the back of Liz’s funeral program.
That afternoon I found myself sitting back in the common room of the hospital’s hotel. Though not reserved for us, it had become our de facto property based on the sheer number of family and friends who camped out there in the days following Liz’s death. We had outgrown the waiting room in the maternity ward. Tables, countertops, and even portions of the floor were blanketed with fruit baskets, boxes of cold pizza, cookie platters, and all of the other offerings brought in by well-wishers hoping to keep my family and friends fed.
It had been three days since Liz died, and I still hadn’t eaten anything, despite everyone’s insistence. I was so sick of the questions about my food intake that I started lying to everyone who asked. No one seemed to understand that an empty stomach meant only dry heaves, and at this point I preferred dry heaves to the feeling of vomit burning through my throat and nostrils.
I sat there on the floor, working with our friends and family to sort through the five hundred plus photos of Liz that I’d printed, arranging them thematically on the photo boards to be displayed at her funeral. There was one with photos of the Goodmans; one with photos of her extended family; two with photos of her friends; three with photos of the two of us; and one with random images of Liz all by herself. Most of us found comfort in revisiting the moments captured in the photos, but Candee and Deb couldn’t bear to see the images, so instead they sequestered themselves in their room. Just a few days removed from the worst day of our lives, we were all reeling, but Liz’s death was hitting us differently; witnessing Candee’s and Deb’s reactions in this situation indicated to me that we weren’t all going to deal with Liz’s death in the same way.
I was still in a haze, but I knew that I couldn’t lock myself in a room, nor could I be alone—I had to be around people. Though surrounded by those I loved, I found myself watching everyone somberly search the corners of our room for anything but the eye contact of another human being. The whole scene made me feel as though I was going insane, so I left the room in search of something that I knew would make me smile. I went to see my daughter several times that night, sometimes between feedings. Even asleep, she was the best distraction there was.
Chapter 11
i’m not standing here,
at the front of
this room,
looking out at
these people,
trying to think of
something to say.
no.
i’m standing on a mountain in the himalayas.
i’m taking in the beauty of the taj mahal.
i’m staring into the ocean near santorini.
i’m floating through space.
and you,
you are here with me.
I never really imagined my life without Liz, and we had both assumed that I’d die first. My triglycerides were dangerously high. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t sleep. I ate nothing but red meat and candy, and I’d been known to overindulge when it came to booze. If you’d been around us long enough, you would have heard Liz lecture me about my diet at least a thousand times: “You have to be healthy; you want to be around to see our kids grow up, don’t you?” I always promised I’d eat better tomorrow, figuring I had years to turn my act around. People don’t die until they’re at least eighty years old, right? After all, I was eighteen or twenty-five or thirty. Whatever. I felt young.
But Liz was the picture of health.
“Why the fuck am I the one still alive?” I asked out loud, as Alex stood behind me, looking over my head and into the mirror, trying to get my pink tie with the white polka dots to lie just right.
Adjusting the Windsor knot and creating the perfect dimple below it, he said, “The question I have for you is, how the hell did you make it through thirty years of life without learning how to tie a fucking tie?”
“Shut up, asshole. It’s one of my proudest accomplishments. Not too many people my age can say such a thing.”
He rolled his eyes and nodded in agreement. It was only the second time I was wearing this tie; the first had been my wedding day. The suit I had on—the only suit I’d ever owned—had been purchased specifically for our rehearsal dinner. Now, fewer than three years after that night in August, I was headed to Liz’s funeral in it.
We arrived at the funeral home about an hour before the service, and as we approached the door, I saw at least forty flower displays lined up outside the place. Inside, there had to be ten thousand dollars’ worth of flowers and plants—this must be why obituaries often say in lieu of flowers, I thought. We all looked around in amazement, our eyes finally settling on a display just to the left of the entrance that was so immense it rendered us motionless. Written on the ivory-colored ribbon woven through it were the words From your friends at Blush.
Confusion settled in and everyone’s brows furrowed, but I star
ted laughing and answered their unspoken question: “Blush is the salon where Liz got her hair done.” She would have been so happy to see that.
Just as I’d hoped, the photo boards lined the hallway outside of the chapel, showing off a smiling Liz enjoying life to the fullest. There were a couple of hidden gems in the mix, pictures I’d chosen specifically to give people a good laugh. There was one of her standing next to the measuring stick at a ride at Disneyland, the implication being that she had just managed to meet the height requirement to go on it; one of her reliving an exasperated moment she’d had in North India when the temperatures reached 118 degrees; and one of her standing next to a clown-shaped garbage can at the Minnesota state fair, mimicking the open mouth it used to collect everyone’s trash.
I walked into the chapel with A.J. and was immediately assaulted by the sounds of “On Eagle’s Wings.” “Fucking hell. We need to get this music turned off before I kill someone.”
I found a man in a suit I didn’t recognize and figured he must be one of the sons referenced on the sign outside of the funeral home. “Hey. I have a couple of CDs with music I want to have playing during the service. Can you take us to your sound system?” A few minutes later I was humming along to “Dress Sexy at My Funeral.”
People started to stream in, stopping to share a hug and their condolences with every familiar face they encountered. I mostly ignored them, waving from time to time as I paced, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to say at my wife’s funeral. I had decided that two of Liz’s uncles would emcee the event, and that I would do the bulk of the speaking—that is, if I could find the words. There would be no prayers and no Bible verses while I was at the podium, just stories, but I hadn’t really thought about how I was going to pull it off. I’d always been terrified of public speaking; I sort of possessed the confidence of a twelve-year-old girl in the early stages of puberty when standing in front of a crowd. This felt different, though.
Two Kisses for Maddy Page 9