I wanted to run away, but with a sleeping baby in my arms, where the hell could I go? Exhausted, I opened the door to my bedroom. When I walked inside I was completely awestruck. It looked like our bedroom again. Since Liz had died, only the color of the walls had changed. They had been covered in a sponged-on yellow when we bought the house, giving them the appearance of having been pissed on. It really was like urine—that was Liz’s interpretation of the color. I vowed that when industriousness got the better of me I would paint the bedroom, because that was what Liz had wanted, and I may have been the first man to arrive at Home Depot with a pillowcase to match to a bucket of paint. But regardless of the color on the walls, the housekeeper had made the room look exactly like it had the day Liz went into the hospital. The books on the nightstand were perfectly lined up. The clock that used to blink 12:00 was plugged in and reset. The piles of clean clothes stacked against the dresser and the shirts hanging from the doorknobs were no longer visible. I’m not sure where there had been room to stash everything, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to open any closet doors to find out.
But more than any of these small details, seeing the made bed really put me over the edge. Since Liz died, I hadn’t made the bed at all. Yeah, I’d washed the sheets and done a half-assed job of putting them back on and throwing a comforter over them, but never the right way—never the way Liz would have done it. Now on the bed were the three big square pillows that matched the comforter, the ones she never let me use because, as she explained, they were for decoration only. They had been on the floor since Madeline had come home from the hospital. There, on Liz’s dresser, was the silver tray with peacocks on the handles that held seven bottles of perfume. Next to it was the black velvet jewelry stand that she had purchased in downtown Los Angeles, displaying her newest bracelets and necklaces. I stared at all these things until my eyes started to burn, then closed them tight and tried to remember what Liz smelled like and when she had last worn each piece of jewelry. I strained my mind, and it returned nothing.
All of a sudden, the room that had been a place of comfort became completely suffocating. Seeing everything set up and arranged how Liz had kept it sent me out in tears. I couldn’t be in there, and I absolutely couldn’t sleep in there that night. I put Madeline in her bassinet and lay down to sleep an arm’s length away on the couch. This would be our arrangement for the next several months.
Chapter 18
i can’t remember what
we did for our
anniversary last year.
the only other person
who would know
is no longer here
to jog my memory.
so how the fuck
do i figure this out?
The middle of August came, and with it my trip to Canada with Liz’s family. Our actual anniversary fell a few days in. That morning, we took Madeline to Sulphur Mountain, where she experienced her first gondola ride. The apprehensive look on her face made me think that she had inherited my fear of heights and thus enjoyed the experience about as much as I did (not at all). Before Liz’s death, I never would have voluntarily gotten into a box suspended high above the ground by a couple of wires, but when I looked up at the mountain that day, I heard Liz’s voice saying, Don’t be such a pussy. Roughly, that translated to: I’m not around anymore; you have to do the things with Madeline that I would have done.
So I scaled the mountain with my baby, and I actually felt pretty proud when we made it to the top—until I realized how frigid it was at those heights. Thanks to me, Madeline was completely underdressed: I had a hat to cover her ears and socks to cover her feet, but I hadn’t brought along any mittens—we didn’t even own any. Just as I started to worry that my daughter’s tiny fingers would get too cold and that the well-prepared parents nearby would judge us, I found a pair of socks in the diaper bag and placed them on her hands. Maddy started waving around happily, and I instantly felt better. It might not have been a pretty solution, but at least my kid was warm. And I had conquered one of my biggest fears thanks to her and to the memory of her mother’s urging, too.
Later that night I found myself at a dinner table in Banff, surrounded by Tom, Candee, and Deb, unable to say a word. I just sat there, Madeline in my arms, thinking about how Liz and I would have celebrated this occasion if she were still alive, and trying not to think about our wedding. It was at that moment that I realized I had no idea what the fuck we had done for our second anniversary. Our last anniversary together. I searched the deepest part of my brain, trying to find some hint of a memory that could help me recall what it was we had done the year before. Were we at the beach? Did we go out to dinner? Had we been on a trip? I couldn’t remember anything.
I stayed focused on keeping Madeline from pulling everything off of the table, and I didn’t manage more than a few bites of my steak. I was silent, staring down at the tablecloth while conversation flowed steadily around me. We toasted Deb for her law school accomplishments, but no one had mentioned Liz at all, or the fact that it was our anniversary. In our few days together in Banff, I was the only one who had so much as uttered Liz’s name, and each time the word floated off unacknowledged.
One way of dealing with death is to avoid discussing it altogether—it’s not uncommon. But seeing this reaction from Liz’s family surprised me, and it made me feel even more lonely and isolated. Worse was that I’d known these people for almost half my life—Tom and Candee were as much my parents as my own mom and dad. They didn’t have to change my diapers or pay for my education, but they had been there through so many of my challenges and successes. I wasn’t angry or even mildly upset about their silence; it just showed again how different the grieving process is for everyone, and I could recognize that much. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t make me sad. One of my great comforts since Liz’s death had been talking about her—I was afraid that if her name went unmentioned or the stories went untold, our memories of her would forever disappear, and so would she. And I felt like this possibility was already manifesting itself as I struggled to remember what we did for our second anniversary.
By the end of the main course, I really just wanted to be alone with my baby. I loved Liz’s family dearly and I knew that they loved me, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to mourn together, and I needed that to heal. Especially today. When dessert was served, I grabbed Madeline, presumably for a diaper change, and left for a walk around the hotel where the restaurant was. I sat down in a big leather chair in the middle of the lobby and gave up keeping my shit together. What a scene: a bearded man alone with a baby, crying like a little bitch in the lobby of one of the nicest hotels in Canada. I let myself sit there for ten minutes, and then returned to the table without a word.
After dinner, we all drove together back toward our condo. I was still feeling restless. While we waited for a traffic light in the center of town to turn green, I said quickly to no one in particular, “Would you mind taking care of Madeline for a bit?”
They were kind of caught off guard, and without any fanfare or hesitation, I thanked them and hopped out of the car, striding alone toward the bars I had been thinking about all evening.
The place I walked into had horrible live music, but I needed booze to dull my senses more than I needed to be a music snob. I sat down at a table near a window, far away from the few people who were inside. Minutes later a waitress stood over me, listing off a bunch of Canadian beers from memory. The last one she mentioned caught my attention: Kokanee. Liz and I drank that crap on a retreat we took to Whistler with the first company she worked for. I ordered it along with a shot of whiskey.
The waitress returned with my drinks and placed them in front of me silently. I threw back the shot and quickly downed the beer. I put my hand up like I was in third grade, eager to call out the answer to the math problem on the blackboard. She came back and I said, “Same thing, please.” Soon I had a glass in both hands, and soon both were empty again. Up went my hand; over came the dr
inks. This continued for four more rounds.
As I drank, I sat passing judgment on the guitar player with the awful voice and the asshole businessmen trying so hard to pick up women at the bar. Everyone there seemed so happy and carefree. Fuck them, I thought. I’m in pain, real pain. The kind of pain no one would wish upon anyone else. That night, sitting alone at that table and getting more and more drunk, I wanted every single person in the bar to know my heartache.
A while later, the waitress approached me to see if I needed anything. My slurring made her persist when I tried to brush her off. “Are you alone?” she asked.
Well, that’s a complicated question, I thought. “I’m in town with my in-laws and my baby,” I said.
“And what about your wife?”
“My wife died,” I said.
After months of being asked that very question, I had discovered that people reacted differently depending on how I worded my answer. When I said she passed away, I got a very sympathetic reaction and the person I was talking to generally asked more questions about my life. When I said she died, well, that was a conversation ender, every single time. The waitress didn’t bother me again. I sat there with my thoughts, taking in the shitty music and observing the scene until the bar closed.
When I finally left, I walked for what seemed like hours, eventually arriving at our condo. I went inside and headed straight to my room, where I found Candee curled up in my bed with a sleeping Madeline in her pink pajamas with the white polka dots. Without a word, Candee gave me a hug and went upstairs. I sat down at the edge of the bed and looked back toward my best girl. This was not how our life was supposed to be, but this was not how I should be dealing with it, either.
I hadn’t had this much to drink since my last trip to Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party, and I knew it could never and would never happen again. I crawled into bed, kissing Madeline twice on one cheek: once for what is, and once for what could have been.
Already jet-setters, a few days after we got back to LA, Maddy and I flew to New York City to visit a friend of mine.
We had a room booked at the Waldorf Astoria, the same hotel where Liz and I had stayed on our way to Greece to celebrate the beginning of our marriage. It was just another stop on the list of places that I wanted to visit—to revisit—with Madeline. The doors were still ornate and the entryway was still grand, but just three years later, she was gone, and I was here with our daughter, just the two of us. Madeline was nestled against my chest in a Baby Bjorn, and I held her hand as the bellhop opened the door and led us up the staircase.
The memories flooded back with such force that without Maddy’s little fingers in mine, I might have drowned. I had held her mother’s hand when we walked up the very same staircase on the first night of our honeymoon. We weren’t giddy, though—we were stressed. We were to stay in New York for fewer than twelve hours before our next flight, and the airline had lost our luggage. Since Liz was such a frequent business traveler, we were spending a night in one of the world’s fanciest hotels for free, but because our bags were missing we didn’t get to enjoy the massively excessive three-room suite. Liz was teary, worried about arriving in Greece without all of the clothes she had purchased specifically for our honeymoon. I spent the night alternating between consoling my new bride and calmly arguing with customer service agents in the hopes of finding some sort of resolution.
After more than a few hours of this, Liz went to sleep, but I continued working the phones until I found a sympathetic ear on the other end. Instead of granting us the usual policy-mandated few hundred bucks for lost luggage, the agent told us to go out the next morning and have a shopping spree, courtesy of the airline. We could each spend one thousand dollars, and as long as we sent him the receipts, he would personally see to it that we were reimbursed.
And so we did just that. We had less than an hour to complete our shopping spree before we were supposed to head back to the airport to catch our flight to Athens, so we went to Macy’s, where we each bought a new suitcase and hurriedly filled them with as many items as we could.
Before we checked in for our next flight at JFK, we stopped by to check the lost luggage area just in case ours had surfaced. Sure enough, sitting in a corner were our two suitcases. While we waited for our flight to board, I called my contact at the airline to tell him that we had found our luggage.
“That’s great news!”
“We’ll return all of the stuff we just bought when we get back from Greece.”
“No, keep it. You deserve it after everything you’ve been through. Consider it a wedding gift from the airline.”
When I relayed the story to Liz, she smiled.
“Not a bad way to start our honeymoon, eh?” I said, smiling back at her.
“It’s as perfect as I could have imagined it.”
But this time at the Waldorf, things were a lot less perfect. After we got everything into our room, I transferred Madeline to her stroller and headed down to the restaurant on the ground floor for a little late dinner after our long flight. All eyes in the bar fixed upon me as I wheeled in my sleeping child and parked her stroller against the wall. I sat in a chair next to her and pulled out a book to keep me company.
The waitress came over to me a few minutes later. “What can I get for you?” she asked, a gray-haired woman probably in her late fifties. As I pondered the menu, she said, “Cute kid. Where’s her mother?”
Come on. It was the fifth time that day that someone asked where her mother was. Was it that unnatural for a man to be out in the world, alone with a four-and-a-half-month-old baby? Maybe. I tried to think about the last time I noticed a father traveling alone with a child as young as Madeline, and couldn’t remember ever seeing it. And then I put myself in the shoes of the waitress, and realized the scene was probably pretty odd—a scruffy-looking dad and his baby girl, hanging out in a hotel bar in New York City well after midnight on a Friday. But still, I couldn’t bring myself to be polite.
“She died the day after our baby was born.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry. What are you drinking? It’s on the house.”
“I’ll take a glass of water.”
The waitress returned a few minutes later with a water and a scotch, even though I hadn’t asked for it. I drank the water and ordered some French fries.
Madeline was still asleep as I pushed her stroller through the lobby and into the elevator. When we got back to the room, I picked her up and gently placed her in the crib the hotel had provided. She stirred a bit, but then settled in. I picked up my book and continued reading, but I only made it through a couple of pages before Madeline interrupted me. She was awake, and she wouldn’t go back to sleep unless she knew I was nearby. I took her out of the crib, and brought her to the king-sized bed in the middle of the room. I laid her there on her back and sat down next to her, rubbing her stomach until she fell asleep.
A while later, settled back in my chair, I heard her make a noise and I looked up from my book. Madeline was on her stomach, her face buried in the comforter. I immediately jumped from the chair and rolled her onto her back. I was tired, but I was sure that I hadn’t put her on her stomach. I was equally sure that she couldn’t have just rolled over on her own.
There’s no way, I thought. I sat back down in the chair, my eyes now fixed on my daughter. In less than a minute, she was on her stomach again, letting out the same muffled cry. It was confirmed: my child had rolled over.
I crawled onto the bed and rolled her onto her back once again. I sat there next to her, smiling through the tears gathering in my eyes. This was major. But my heart broke to think that Liz had missed it. She would never see her daughter walk, her first day of school, or her prom. But at the same time, I had to rejoice: our baby had made her first move toward growing up. She gained some freedom—and I lost a lot of mine. No longer could Maddy be left unattended on the couch while I ran into the kitchen to make her a bottle; no longer could I leave her on her changing table while I ran
to the bathroom to wash her crap from my hands.
Soon enough our child would be crawling, walking, running, dating, and having children of her own. It was beautiful. I was devastated that Liz wasn’t there to see it, but I was so fucking proud of how far the two of us had come together. Against all odds, Madeline was thriving, and I, well, I was getting there. And I finally believed myself when I said we were going to be okay.
Part III
Chapter 19
i couldn’t help but think
that i’m happy to have
what we have,
but
we’re totally and completely
incomplete without
liz.
i wish this weren’t happening.
It was the first day without her, the first week without her, the first month without her, the first anniversary without her. When these dates approached, I found myself tiptoeing toward them, terrified that when I opened my eyes on the dreaded day, I might completely disintegrate.
Now it was Liz’s birthday. The first one without her.
I wished I could say it was the first time I was not going to celebrate her birthday with her, but that would have been a lie. On her last birthday on this earth, I was in India on a business trip instead of at home with my pregnant wife. When I found out that the trip was necessary, integral, urgent, all of those words that make us drop everything Personal for those marked Business, I told Liz immediately. I was apologetic, and she was disappointed. But she was supportive, as always.
Two Kisses for Maddy Page 16