Stephen wore his Eeyore tie, and they served Jack’s favorite foods: grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and graham crackers and grapes. Chocolate milk. J candy. They played Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” and Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.” It seemed the entire cardiology floor was there. Rebecca and Colin, Anju, the nurses, even one of the cleaning women. Kempley flew in from Charlotte. Jenn and Diane and all three boys were there. Bennett. Jeff and Mandy, Grace’s grandfather. The security guard from the hospital. The judge.
Part V
Grief
Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.
—Helen Humphreys, Lost Garden
I honestly believe that people who never have children or who never love a child are doomed to a sort of foolishness because it can’t be described or explained, that love. I didn’t know anything before I had him, and I haven’t learned anything since I lost him. Everything that isn’t loving a child is just for show.
—Haven Kimmel, The Solace of Leaving Early
Twenty-Nine
Perhaps grief enters our lives like a virus, most deadly when first encountered. After a while we become resistant; we adapt. And perhaps too, as it was with the mitochondria, we find that this grief has become a part of who we are.
“We die with the dying,” the poet T. S. Eliot wrote. A part of us is forever lost. Amputated. So we will learn to write with our left hand instead of our right, to move from a wheelchair to a car without the use of our legs. We will learn to laugh again, though the sound will be altered, and we will learn to love again, though never in the same way.
When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, a stratospheric cloud of sulfur dioxide circled the Earth within three weeks, leaving in its wake unusually brilliant sunsets and clouds the color of fire. Grief is like this, mythic and terrible, sorrow undoing the world so completely that even the clouds on the opposite ends of the Earth are altered.
No wonder incidents of agoraphobia arise after bereavements. Nothing holds us, nothing remains—not even the familiar sky—to anchor us to the lives we once led. The emptiness is unbearable, and every open space reminds us of what is gone. Is this also why we invent new ways to describe our grief, as if qualifying it is the same as containing it? Accumulated grief and disenfranchised grief, anticipatory grief, delayed grief, chronic grief. Still, there aren’t enough words. Every grief as singular as a snowflake, no two ever exactly alike.
And what of all those other terms—still unknown—that exist the way the future does, there and not there all at once? The English language has over 450,000 commonly used words, but none can describe even the most basic of things: A woman who has lost a spouse is a widow, a child who has lost her parents is an orphan. But what do we call a mother who has lost her child?
What do we call a child who has lost her sibling?
The death of a child, wrote Dostoyevsky, is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.
Thirty
The opened suitcase lay across the bed like a metal heart. Stephen pulled a stack of T-shirts from the dresser drawer and set them into it. He had changed into a loose pair of khakies and a UMDF T-shirt. It had been his first day back to work. Only five days since…Five days. They felt like years.
Grace sat on the bed, a chalky taste in her mouth. She’d just finished tucking Erin in, rubbing her back for what seemed like hours while she cried herself to sleep, missing Jack. “I don’t know how to even begin to understand this,” Grace said to Stephen.
Stephen moved into the bathroom and began putting vitamin bottles into his shaving kit. “I don’t want to pretend that things will be okay, and that eventually, we’ll all get back to normal, and then wham! two or three months down the road, just when the kids are starting to heal a little, hit them with my leaving.” He came to stand in the doorway. She thought of how, in earthquakes, this was the supposedly the safest place to be. “It just seems cruel, Grace.”
“And this isn’t?”
“I don’t mean it to be.”
She looked at him incredulously. “We just…five days ago…we just…” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t get the words out. “Erin is terrified that they’re going to take her, you know. The last thing she needs is for you to disappear now too.”
“I won’t disappear,” he said gently. “And I know how this looks, and I’m sure it probably seems like the cruelest thing I could do right now, but I honestly—” His voice quavered, and he came and sat next to her on the bed. “I don’t know how else to do it, Grace.” His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot with tiredness and grief.
“Why do you have to do it at all?”
At first, he didn’t answer. They sat, side by side, hands useless in their laps. And then, “I can’t forgive you,” he said.
She nodded. She wanted to feel shocked or devastated, but she had known that he would never forgive her, and if she had let herself think about it, she might have known he would move out too—that he would have to.
“I’ll come for dinner a couple of times a week, if that’s okay,” he said. “And I’ll take the kids on weekends. I found a place near the office. It’s already furnished.” His words landed soundlessly around her. The way snow falls, she thought, accumulating into something treacherous before you even realize it. “I know they say you shouldn’t make any major decisions for a while, but this isn’t rash, Grace.”
“When did you do this then? Start looking?”
“The day after court.”
She stared at him. “And you don’t think your feelings will change? Eventually?”
He held her eyes for a long moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
She nodded. Again. When she spoke, her voice was flat, something squashed deep inside her. “They say that eighty-five percent of couples whose children die don’t make it.” She inhaled slowly. “I wanted us to be different, Stephen, I thought we would be.”
His face hardened. So did his voice. “We both know I’m not leaving because of Jack.”
She looked at him bleakly. “It’s all connected, though.”
“Is it?” he asked. “I mean, what percentage of couples stay together after an affair?”
Plenty, she wanted to tell him. People forgive one another. But she didn’t answer, just stared helplessly past the open bathroom door. She felt as she had the night Jack died—knowing exactly what was happening and yet not really believing it either. “I know I screwed up,” she said finally, looking at Stephen. “And I will never ever stop being sorry for what I did to you or to—to—” To Jack, she wanted to say, but her voice only squeaked. She turned away from him, not wanting him to see her cry, not wanting to make it worse.
“Oh, Grace.” His voice softened. “This isn’t a punishment.”
She turned back to look at him. “Why can’t you just give me a chance then?” Her throat ached. “Please, Stephen. I’ll go to counseling or we could both go, or—or, I’ll leave, I’ll stay at my mom’s and—”
He put his hand on her knee. “Don’t, baby.”
Thirty-One
Grace sat with Erin at the round children’s table in the fourth-grade science classroom where they met twice a week for sibling grief counseling. The room was filled with the sound of the kids coloring, their mothers or fathers or both sitting beside them, knees pressed to their chests in the small wooden chairs. The parents all had the same dark circles beneath their eyes, and they had all either lost weight—their clothes loose and billowy—or they’d gained weight, everything tight and constricting. Like people who lived in extreme environments of heat or cold—the Eskimos whose compact bodies were designed to conserve warmth; the Tutsi of Africa whose elongated body-type released heat to the surface more quickly—their physical shape was evidence of the struggle to adapt in a world that might otherwise have been intolerable.
Rarely did the parents look at one another. They
couldn’t. It was all they could do to acknowledge their children’s grief, which was why they came here every Monday and Thursday afternoon. They’d all lost a child in the past year. It seemed impossible that any of them would recover. And so, like immigrant parents newly arrived in a foreign land, they placed their hopes in the children who survived.
Erin was drawing a picture of Jack racing a red car through the clouds. Below him, in a field full of flowers, she drew herself, huge blue tears dripping from her eyes.
Grace felt lost.
Leanne, the children’s grief expert, squatted next to Erin, one arm around the back of her chair. “You still get really sad when you think about Jack, don’t you?.”
Erin nodded without looking up from her picture.
“Jack looks pretty happy, though.” Leanne pointed to the red car. “I really like—” but before she could finish, Erin grabbed her blue crayon and scribbled over Jack.
“Erin, honey—” Grace leaned forward, then stopped herself. Their children had to go through this, Leanne had told the parents. The parents couldn’t protect them. It went against everything that Grace believed being a mother was.
“What’s wrong, Erin?” Leanne asked. “I thought that was a pretty neat picture.”
“Don’t say that!” Erin yelled.
“Hey, there,” Grace said. She combed Erin’s dark tangled hair with her fingers.
After a minute, Leanne said, “You’re pretty mad at Jack, huh?”
Erin shrugged. “It’s just a stupid picture. I didn’t like it.”
“Why not?” Leanne asked.
Erin squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head, tears slipping down her face. Grace tucked a strand of her daughter’s hair behind her ear. “Try to talk to Leanne, honey-bunny,” she said.
“I just want to go home,” Erin cried.
“I know, lovey, but we need to talk to Leanne first, so she can help us.”
Erin started sobbing, choking on her words. “He shouldn’t be happy,” she said. “I don’t know why I made him like that.” She laid her head on the table and sobbed.
“But I love that you made Jack happy,” Grace said. “I bet he probably is.”
“No!” Erin wailed, lifting her head. “He’s not. He can’t be.”
“Why not, Erin?” Leanne asked gently.
“If I—if I died I—I wouldn’t be happy. I would miss my brother.” The word was a small frozen twig; it broke in half beneath the weight of Erin’s grief.
Grace pulled her daughter against her. “Just because Jack is happy doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss us.” Her own voice faltered. “Of course he does.”
But she stared at Leanne helplessly. She understood how Erin felt. How was it possible for someone we love to be happy without us?
She held her child tight against her chest and kissed the back of her head and told her, “Jack thought you were the best sister in the world. Remember how he used to cheer when he saw you coming out of school?”
Erin nodded, sniffling.
Neither adult said anything for a minute. And then, “How about we go over to the anger circle?” Leanne asked. The anger circle was a space at the front of the room where the kids went to express their anger. They ripped up old magazines and crumpled the pages into tight little balls. They drew mad faces on balloons, then popped them. Sometimes they did mad dances or Leanne lined them up and let them take turns making their angriest noises into a tape recorder, which they then played back to their parents. Before long, the kids were laughing, and impossibly, miraculously, so were their parents.
All the kids were in the anger circle now, lying on the carpet. Leanne sat on the floor with the kids, her silver-threaded Indian-print skirt gathered around her legs. “Who can tell me about some of the people or things we get angry at?” she asked.
“I got mad at the doctors,” Josh whispered.
“Yeah, me too,” Todd said.
“Was it fair to get mad at them?” Leanne asked.
Todd shook his head no.
“But isn’t it the doctor’s job to make us better when we’re sick?” She glanced at Erin, who was staring at her shoes, then at Josh. “What do you think, bud?”
“My mom said the doctors tried their best,” he whispered.
“That’s what my mom said,” Seth explained. “But sometimes even when the doctors try as hard at they can, the person still dies. That’s what happened to my sister.”
“That’s right,” Leanne said. She glanced at the other kids. “What about the rest of you guys?” she said. “Did anyone else get mad?”
“I was mad at the driver who hit my brother,” Julie said.
“I was mad at God.”
“You can’t get mad at God!” Todd yelled.
“Well, I did!” Megan shouted. “I’m still mad!”
“I was mad at cancer,” another little girl interrupted. They were going around the circle now, taking turns.
“I was mad at my mom for not making my sister better.” Tears streamed down McKensie’s face.
Grace watched Erin, wondering what she would say. She was picking at the rubber sole of her shoe, her hair hanging over her face so that Grace couldn’t see her. “I didn’t get mad at anybody,” she said quietly when it was her turn. She looked up. “But my dad got really angry at my mom and said that it was her fault my brother died and he didn’t love her anymore. That’s why he moved out.”
Thirty-Two
Grace spoke softly: “My son, Jack—he was three, he died of a genetic disease thirty days ago tonight. The state had custody, and I—” She focused on her hands. “I wasn’t there until the very end.” Even as she took her turn, awkwardly introducing herself to the six women and four men who comprised the Mother’s Against Munchausen Accusations Support Group, Grace wasn’t sure why she had come.
Thirty days. One month. She couldn’t think of it like that. A month. It seemed too whole, too complete. She thought of how children’s ages were often measured in smaller increments—twelve months instead of one year, twenty-four months instead of two years, and she wondered if this came from the time when children often died at a young age and so their parents chose the larger number, the number with more weight—not two months but eight weeks—as if this could help anchor the child to the earth. Grace measured the time since Jack’s death in a similar way. It was incomprehensible that she would not mark each day, like one of those white crosses at Normandy. When you saw them all stretched out, row after endless row, the magnitude of the loss was impossible to ignore.
Her days were like those crosses now.
She stared numbly at the worn beige carpet of this living room in some stranger’s house. “You think any school or church in the state would let us hold a support meeting on their premises?” Martha, the woman who was hosting the group had asked her over the phone when Grace called to find out where the meetings were held. That the location might be a problem hadn’t occurred to her, though of course, it made perfect sense. It didn’t matter if these women had been falsely accused. Why would anyone want to be associated with them?
The mental state of the Munchausen Mom is very much akin to the sociopathic mind-set. The only difference is that instead of killing for financial gain, the Munchausen Mom injures or kills for no real reason at all.
The man seated next to her was talking now, his voice barely audible, his eyes brimming. “My daughter, Lindsay, was taken by CPS two months ago,” he said, “and unless we admit to this thing…” He squeezed the hand of the round-faced woman sitting next to him, who was staring at her lap, twisting a Kleenex into shreds.
Without looking up, she said, “We thought that if we got a legal separation, the state would give Hal custody, but our lawyer thinks they might use that against me.”
“Oh, Candy,” Martha said.
Earlier, Grace had sat in her car a few houses away, trying to force herself to actually get out and walk up the flagstone path to the door of this small modular home, its tiny po
rch crowded with tricycles and plastic toys. In the side yard was a bright yellow slide and jungle gym, swings that moved ghostlike in the March breeze.
Across the street, a car door had slammed, and a man in a suit exited a black Mercedes, dropping his cell phone on the asphalt, the back breaking off, the battery flying beneath the tires. It was early evening, the sun just sinking below the tree line, bathing everything in a harsh pink light. A woman arrived, wearing running shorts despite the cold, ace bandages around both her knees. A few minutes later, an overweight woman with a run in the back of her pale stockings carried a tinfoil-covered plate of something up the path and handed it to whoever opened the door. Watching them, Grace felt a stab of recognition. The subconscious need to break things, to make the damage in their lives somehow visible: torn stockings, bandaged legs, broken cell phones. Like those indigenous cultures where people literally cut themselves to mark the loss of a child, the idea of remaining whole unbearable.
Thirty days.
Since Jack died, Grace too had become error-prone and clumsy, some part of her needing, perhaps, this outward proof that the world had been damaged. She shattered a glass while clearing the table, slipped last week getting out of the tub. She found herself tripping over rugs, stubbing her toe, bumping into furniture she had moved effortlessly around for years. Like Alice in Wonderland, she was suddenly too big or too small in this altered world. Nothing fit, nothing was the right size, the right shape, the right distance.
A couple pulled up in a beat-up station wagon with an empty child seat in the back and a “baby on board” sticker in the window. Grace felt her stomach tighten with recognition.
Jack’s child seat was still in Grace’s car.
Inside the cramped house, Grace immediately noticed the empty IV stand in the corner of the living room. She felt the blood drain from face. But then Martha—it must have been Martha—was walking towards her, hand outstretched. “Grace?” she asked. “I’m so glad you came.” She led Grace into the living room, already jammed with people chatting in groups of twos and threes. A green lawn chair, a white rocking chair that looked as if it belonged in a baby’s room, and two mismatched ladder-back chairs were mixed in with the rest of the living room furniture to form a tight circle. On the coffee table were stacks of papers listing Web sites of defense lawyers, names and addresses of congressmen and legislators involved in child abuse laws, the address for the Department of Health and Human Services, sample letters asking for congressional inquiries into child protection agencies. A fan of pastel-colored fact sheets listed Key Risks of Having Your Child Removed by the State, and The Social Worker at Your Door: Ten Hints to Help You Protect Your Children. Brochures from VOCAL: Victims of Child Abuse Laws, and the National Child Abuse Defense and Resource Center.
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