Oh, St. Joseph, do assist me by your powerful intercession, and obtain for me from your divine Son all spiritual blessings, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.
So that having engaged here below your heavenly power, I may offer my thanksgiving and homage to the most loving of Fathers.
Oh, St. Joseph, I never weary contemplating you and Jesus asleep in your arms; I dare not approach while He reposes near your heart.
Press Him in my name and kiss His fine head for me and ask Him to return the kiss when I draw my dying breath.
St. Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for me.
Sarah read the prayer twice, mysteriously thrilled by the bold promise that it would grant any wish of the petitioner. She of course knew that even this “magic” prayer would not give her back her Annie (or could it?), but she hoped that the prayer might be able to help her cope and possibly allow her to break through the surface of the dark, cold waters she had been drowning in since that unimaginably horrible morning in the baby’s room.
Sarah took a deep breath, put her legs up onto the window seat, and began to read the prayer again.
EATING
The first real food that Sarah ate after Annie’s death was an entire box of Entenmann’s cream-filled cupcakes and eleven popcorn rice cakes. She devoured this feast at ten A.M. the day after her visit to Dr. Sunderland and was immediately sick to her stomach. She spent the next two hours vomiting into a basin and sitting on the toilet with explosive diarrhea. She had initially tried kneeling in front of the toilet to vomit, but her bowels were so agitated and unpredictable that she knew that she would eventually make a disgusting mess all over the floor if she did not sit on the bowl and use a basin instead. The strangest thoughts kept running through Sarah’s mind during this agonizing two hours. She would suddenly and unexplainably get incredibly horny for a few minutes, noticing between intestinal spasms that her nipples were hard as bullets and that her vagina had lubricated; and then just as quickly, the sexual feelings would pass and she would be overcome with laughter and find herself trying to giggle between the deep and foul breaths she needed to take during the breaks from vomiting.
After she felt a little better, Sarah washed her face, brushed her teeth and used mouthwash, and went in and lay down on her childhood bed, where she immediately began counting the red lines in the wallpaper. Not the blue lines and not the yellow lines. The red lines. There were exactly one hundred and seventy-six red lines in the wallpaper in her childhood bedroom. After Sarah was confident that this number was precise (she assured herself of that by counting them twice), she began counting the blue lines. She decided to save the yellow lines for the following Tuesday.
A MESSAGE
Sarah had two unusual experiences on the second Sunday after Annie’s death.
The first occurred in Stop & Shop. Sarah was leaning against a shopping cart in the book department and browsing through a self-help book on how to handle trouble when she got an overwhelming and literally breathtaking sense of not only the presence of her deceased husband, but also the nearness of God.
Sarah had to put the book down and fight back tears, so overwhelmed was she by the power of this experience.
The second event, several hours later, took place at her parents’ home. Next to her father’s recliner in the living room was a small table: The TV Guide was on it, as well as a Bible, a pocket calendar, a small legal pad, a mug of pens and pencils, and a pile of magazines George was currently reading. On top of the stack of magazines, her father had placed a box of Kleenex.
Sarah fell asleep in this chair and was awakened by the magazines and the Kleenex box striking her left arm. The whole pile had fallen over, neatly cascading into a stairlike configuration, with the Kleenex box gently coming to rest on her left arm. There was absolutely no way this stack could have fallen over due to being misbalanced or crookedly placed. The stack of magazines was steady enough to place a full glass of any beverage on top of it and not have the liquid in the glass budge.
When the falling magazines awakened Sarah from her nap, she once again had an extremely powerful sense of being sent a message, the gist of which was, Don’t worry. We’re here for you.
GROUP
On the third Wednesday after Annie’s death, eight women of all shapes and sizes sat in a circle on brown folding chairs in a corner of the auditorium in the Jewish Community Center on Davenport Avenue. One of these eight was Sarah. The ninth chair was empty and was for the leader of the group, Dr. Catherine Connolly. Dr. Connolly arrived one minute before ten and walked completely around the group, introducing herself to each woman before she even took her coat off or sat down.
Sarah tried to muster a smile when Dr. Connolly put her hand on her shoulder and said to her, “You must be Sarah,” but the best she could come up with was something that resembled an anemic grimace.
“Thank you all for coming today, ladies. This is the SIDS Support Group and I am Catherine Connolly. We all share something that none of us ever thought in our wildest nightmares that we would have to go through. We have all lost a baby to SIDS. My Brandon was seven months old when he died. I went in to wake him one morning and … well, you all know the rest of the story. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him and wonder about how his life would have turned out if he had lived. Would he have been a good student? What would have been the name of his first girlfriend? Would he have gotten married in a summer month, or a winter month? Would my first grandchild have been a boy or a girl? I still feel the pain, and the loss, and there are days when I cannot even get out of bed. This overwhelming grief is a big part of why I started this group. After the pain did not diminish over time, I realized that there were probably other mothers who were going through the exact same thing. I started this group as a way to try and help.”
Dr. Connolly reached down into her briefcase and pulled out a sheet of light-blue paper.
“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome,” she began, “or SIDS for short, was called crib death for a long time because that was where these poor babies died: in their own cribs, at home, in their sleep. An apparently normal infant with no known health problems would just die one night, and no one would be able to explain why. These babies were usually between two weeks and one year old when they died, and to this day we still don’t really know the underlying causes for SIDS. Oh, sure, the doctors at the hospital can tell you what killed our babies—it’s usually respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, or circulatory shutdown—but they can’t tell us why these apparently normal, healthy infants go into respiratory arrest, or experience circulatory failure. Seven thousand babies a year die of SIDS in the United States, and some of these babies have been found to have more immune cells in their lungs than healthy babies. Researchers are looking to this as a clue to the cause of SIDS. But they’re also questioning if SIDS babies die because they’re put to sleep on their stomachs, or if it’s because their mattresses were too soft, or even if it’s because their rooms were too hot. We still just do not know. And this dreadful inability of medical science to answer our questions and solve the mystery as to why our babies died makes closure impossible, and, unfortunately, makes these support groups necessary.”
A thin black woman in a blue dress named Claire raised her hand. Catherine nodded at her.
“How long ago did your son die, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“No, I don’t mind at all. Next Thursday, it will be exactly twenty-two years and seven months since my Brandon died.”
Sarah, who had spent the entire time that Dr. Connolly was talking counting the creases in her palm, looked up and stared at the psychologist. The phrase “twenty-two years and seven months” kept repeating in her mind like a surrealistic, depraved mantra that she could not escape.
For the next fifty-two minutes, Sarah did nothing but listen to that sick mantra and try to keep track of precisely how many creases there were in her left palm.
THE RETURN HOME
Almost one month after Annie�
�s death, Annie Bananny’s grandfather carried two big Filene’s shopping bags out to the driveway and put them down behind his car.
He opened the trunk and placed the bags inside, next to each other. The brown bags with the purple letters contained clothes that he and Anna had brought for Sarah from home, plus some brochures from a SIDS group Sarah had attended one meeting of, and a brand-new pink baby’s T-shirt with a bunny on it.
Dr. Sunderland and Dr. Connolly had both agreed that it was time for Sarah to return home. She couldn’t live with her parents for the rest of her life, and it was only postponing the inevitable by allowing her to stay. Of course, Anna and George would have allowed Sarah to move in with them permanently if she had wanted to, but her doctors felt that it would be best if she returned home and tried to regain some semblance of a normal life.
The ride home was terrible. Sarah was anxious and edgy and kept snapping at her mother, who was futilely trying to soothe and comfort her but only succeeded in aggravating Sarah.
Sarah refused to allow her parents to come into the house with her. She had not been home since she had left the house that awful morning with the ambulance. She had been out of her parents’ house many times—to go to the store, to visit doctors, to walk the beach, to go to the bank—but she had not been able to return to her own house. George had been going over every day to get her mail, turn on the lights, pick up some clothes and a few other things Sarah needed, and make sure everything was all right. He had not gone into Annie’s room, except to close the door.
Sarah stood in the driveway and watched as her parents drove away. When they were out of her sight, she took a deep breath and turned to look at the house.
It looked the same.
The curtains were familiar; the black mailbox was familiar; the bushes needed trimming; the porch light was slightly crooked—everything looked the same.
Sarah picked up her bags and walked around the garage to the back door. This was the entrance she and David always used to enter the house.
She pulled on the screen door and propped it open with her hip, the way she always did, as she fumbled for the key to the doorknob. The hinge on the screen door made its old familiar screeching sound and, for what was probably the five thousandth time, Sarah made a mental note to spray some WD-40 on it.
She inserted the key, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.
She automatically reached around the jamb with her right hand and flipped on the overhead light.
Everything was the same. Except for one thing.
On the kitchen table was a seven-inch stack of mail. Sarah gasped when she saw the precariously balanced pile of letters. Tears flooded her eyes and she leaned back against the counter. She knew that her father had been taking in her mail and bringing it to her. But George had been compassionate in what he had allowed Sarah to see. Bills, magazines, junk mail. That was it. He had left the remainder of the mail on the kitchen table.
The seven-inch stack of letters (exactly one hundred and sixty-seven pieces of mail, Sarah would later count) were sympathy cards, spiritual bouquets, and personal notes of condolences. Eventually Sarah would open and read every one. It took her three weeks, but she ultimately wrote a personal thank-you note to every one of the one hundred and sixty-seven people who had written to her.
Today, however, Sarah walked right through the kitchen and directly into the living room. She sat on the sofa and, for the next hour and eleven minutes, stared at the color photo on the TV of her and David at their wedding, and the small framed photo of Annie, taken moments after her birth, that stood next to it. It was dark when she finally got up and went to the bathroom.
It was near midnight before Sarah finally got to bed. She had taken a hot shower, eaten some soup, and watched a couple of TV programs that she had never seen before.
She had not even looked at the door of Annie’s room as she walked the upstairs hallway.
When she finally did go to bed, she lay awake until four A.M.; counting sheep; counting shadows; counting pink T-shirts with bunnies on them; counting Beauty and the Beast sleepers; counting cardioresuscitation paddles; counting silent, sad women sitting in brown folding chairs; counting magazines in a stack; counting ambulances; counting Kleenex boxes; counting comets; counting pills; counting red lines; counting blue lines; counting (finally) yellow lines; counting prayers to St. Joseph; counting letters to Annie Bananny; counting baby bottles; counting rocks in the water; counting cerebral aneurysms; counting screams; counting cream-filled cupcakes; counting parking spaces; counting rice cakes; counting possibilities; counting days; counting years; counting fruitcakes; counting Christmas trees; and, of course, counting Christmases.
A VISION OF ANNIE
As Sarah lay in bed trying vainly to count away her pain, a vision unfolded in her mind.
Sarah inexplicably saw herself again standing in the baby’s room, still clutching the silent Annie to her breast, gasping in fear and trying desperately to pray her little Bananny back to life.
As Sarah lay under the light-blue comforter and watched this unspeakably horrible drama once again play itself out, she was astonished to see a sudden bright light envelop the body of her silent infant daughter. From the heart of the light, Sarah watched as a tall woman slowly appeared, and she had the unexpected thought that the young lady looked exactly like the actress Sandra Bullock.
But Sarah knew who the woman really was. This woman was the spirit of her Annie: Sarah was being blessed with a vision of her Annie grown into the woman Sarah knew she would never become. Sarah was now seeing the adult Annie, a miracle even more crushing to her by what Sarah knew to be the truth, that her Annie would never grow up and become the lanky, russet-haired beauty she now saw before her.
As Sarah continued to watch this dreadful drama, the older Annie smiled and gently placed an ethereal hand on her weeping mother’s shoulder. Annie said nothing, though, and soon the light surrounding her grew brighter and brighter, ultimately becoming a blue nimbus so blazing that Sarah had to shield her mind’s eye from the brilliance. Sarah then saw Annie once again smile and then begin to fade from view.
Just before Annie completely vanished into the light, Sarah sensed her daughter’s final thoughts: Oh, my land of rootless trees! Sarah heard in her mind as a soft whisper, Who would have ever thought there’d be orchids?
And then, finally, Sarah slept.
… OF AN EYE
Sarah opened her eyes and saw that the digital clock next to her bed read 6:15.
She had missed one of Annie’s feedings.
The baby monitor was silent, though, and Sarah was surprised that her four-month-old daughter had slept through her five o’clock feeding. Sarah figured that her darling Annie Bananny was just overtired because she had kept her up a little later than usual last night. Sarah’s parents had come by, and they could never stand having Annie taken away from them when they visited.
She hated to have to go in now and wake her from a sound sleep just to feed her, but if she waited much longer, she’d throw off her schedule for the whole day and she knew that Annie would be cranky and probably wouldn’t go down for her afternoon nap.
Sarah threw off the covers and swung her legs off the bed. Even though her husband, David, had been dead for a year, she still had not been able to use the whole bed for herself. She still slept on “her” side of the mattress; she still made the bed every day; and she still changed the sheets and pillowcases once a week. She knew it was bizarre to change the pillowcase on David’s pillow every week, but it somehow comforted her and so she indulged herself.
Sarah sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, stared at the carpet between her bare feet, wiggled her toes, and tried to wake up. Coffee. That was what she needed. Huge amounts of coffee. But first, she had to take care of Annie.
Sarah slid down the right half of her nightgown and squeezed her full, milk-laden breast. A drop of milk appeared at the end of the engorged nipple.
Sarah got out of be
d, slid her feet into slippers, and slipped on a heavy red robe. Scratching her ear, she padded down the hallway to Annie’s room. She could see through the window at the end of the hall that the sky had clouded over during the night and, as she neared the baby’s room, she could hear rain start to pelt the vinyl siding.
She passed the bathroom without going in. Sarah always waited until she checked on Annie before she allowed herself to use the bathroom. Her routine was to peek in the crib, stroke Annie Bananny a little to let her know she was there, whisper a few endearments to her, and then tell her she’d be right back. She would then go pee, get a soft towel from Annie’s shelf in the linen closet, and return to the baby’s room, where she would breast-feed her daughter in the padded oak rocker that her mother had given her as soon as she had heard that she was pregnant. Sarah still teased her mom that the furniture delivery truck was already in the driveway before she hung up the phone after telling her that she was expecting.
Sarah paused at the door to the baby’s room. An early gray light was just beginning to filter in through the white damask curtains, and she could see Annie’s small form in her crib.
Sarah walked over to the crib and bent over the side, hoping to see Annie’s eyes open so she wouldn’t have to wake her by jostling her or picking her up.
Annie’s eyes were still closed.
Sarah bent over and saw that Annie was not moving in her sleep but instead lying perfectly still, wrapped all the way to her neck in her pink Beauty and the Beast sleeper. Sarah’s heart began to race and she could feel a film of cold sweat break out on the back of her neck. She placed the back of her hand against Annie’s cheek and gasped when she felt how cool the skin was. Sarah let out an uncontrollable wail of terror, grabbed Annie’s small body with both hands, and pulled her roughly out of the crib.
“Annie!” she cried, as she stared into the baby’s face. “Annie! Wake up! Please! Wake up for Mommy!”
No response.
Outside, the wind picked up and the cold rain began to beat more heavily against the windows of the baby’s room.
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