The Truth About Butterflies: A Memoir

by Nancy Stephan

  This daughter of mine who lived on the edge was afraid of being alone. I never would’ve guessed it. How could she fear something as precious as solitude? To fear being alone, in my opinion, is like fearing a tuft of cotton or berries on a vine. But her health had begun to decline, and uncertainty loomed larger than life. So whatever her reason for this fear, whether I understood it or not, I made certain that as long as I had breath in my body she’d never be left alone.

  The next day was Wednesday—41 days since Nicole and I last talked, eight days since she’d gone to hospice, five days since she’d died, two days since she’d been buried. I waited for the phone call or the knock at the door, the voice of some apologetic emissary to give me the good news, that there had been a terrible mistake, and Nicole was still alive. But there would be no such call, no knock at the door, no telegram; just long, lonely days spent remembering her voice and wondering how this could’ve happened, wondering what more I could’ve done to save the only precious thing in my life.

  The following week, I went back to work as planned. As the other employees came in, I greeted them as I would’ve any other morning. I wanted it to be like any other morning. I checked emails, returned phone calls, and sifted through the notes people had left on my desk. A few colleagues came into my office to share their condolences, but for the most part, the others followed my lead: laughing, talking shop, and acting as if nothing had happened. This worked wonderfully for a few hours. Then, without warning, the words unfolded in my brain: Nicole is dead! I was filled with an unrelenting terror, as if I’d just gotten the news for the first time, as if up until that moment she had been alive and well, and some shrouded messenger showed up and delivered this terrible news. To my horror, this messenger would continue to come unannounced, no matter when or where, and utter those words, and each time my world would rotate a little further off course.

  As I sat in my office, one of the professors dropped by to discuss some projects. We talked about demands and requirements like we did each semester, and as she turned to leave she looked back, her face twisted with discomfort, and said, “I’m so sorry about your daughter, but I just don’t know what to say or do.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” But the truth was, I didn’t know what to say or do either. I wanted someone to sit me down and explain to me what was happening, why my baby was dead, why it felt as though my heart and lungs were on the verge of collapse, and why I couldn’t sleep at night even though I was exhausted. Though I continued to work and tried to find some sense of normalcy, this feeling of displacement only increased over the coming weeks.

  One evening as I made my way home from work, I struggled through a torrential downpour. By the time I made it inside, I was drenched and cold. All I wanted was a hot shower and, for once, a good night’s sleep. As I walked into the house, I could feel the angst clawing its way from my belly to my throat the way it did every night. At work, surrounded by people and activity, I was sufficiently distracted, but once I was home, the images would pull themselves together to haunt me as soon as I would fall asleep.

  I peeled off my wet clothes and lay across the bed to rest a bit before taking a shower, but I had fallen into a deep sleep. When I awoke, it was well after midnight. The deluge continued, and I thought surely the whole city must be flooded by now. I stood in the hot shower and wept. The thunder was so violent that the house vibrated with each bolt.

  As I stood with the shower pouring over my head, it came to me very clearly that Nicole might not have been dead when they buried her. The more I thought about it, I was certain of it. Dr. Akwari hadn’t really listened long enough to be sure Nicole’s heart had stopped. There was no autopsy, no embalming, no way anyone could’ve been sure that she was dead. Images of her waking up and realizing that she’d been buried alive filled my brain.

  I jumped from the shower and wrapped a towel around myself. I needed to get to the cemetery, and I would need to call 911 because there was no way I could dig Nicole out on my own. I scrambled to find my cell phone. I put my coat on over the towel. In the distance, the rain had grown louder as if a window was open, but I realized that I’d left the shower running. I went into the bathroom and turned off the water, and this simple act of turning off the water gave me just enough pause to realize I was out of control.

  I sat on the side of the tub barefooted, wrapped in a towel and a coat, dripping from head to toe, and I prayed, “God, please help me!” I could feel myself slipping into a place I didn’t want to be, but in spite of my attempts to reason with myself, the urge to get in my car and drive to the cemetery was unrelenting. I needed something physical to focus on, so I dropped to my knees and started counting. I learned that night that I had 6217 mosaic tiles on my bathroom floor, 6242 on the second pass. I counted until I couldn’t count anymore, until my head was filled with numbers, and until the images of my daughter clawing her way out of a muddy grave began to wane. The next morning, I called the grief counselor.

  Chapter 7

  After Nicole died, the hospice grief counselor had called and left messages, but I had been reluctant to return her call. What would I tell her, that I was afraid to go to sleep at night because of nightmares and if it wasn’t the nightmares, I was startled awake by Nicole’s voice calling to me?

  Sometimes, Nicole’s voice was a soft call, and at other times it was a desperate call, the way she called when she had fallen or was having trouble breathing. Either way, I would spring from the bed and run to her room before realizing that she wasn’t there. I was learning to control it, though. When I heard her call me, I would bolt up out of a dead sleep but would stop short of getting out of bed. I would gather myself and lie back down, my heart pounding in the back of my throat.

  The nightmares had become more frequent, and I was afraid to go to sleep, so when I arrived home from work, I would shower and have dinner and then sit on the sofa with a blanket. I’d turn the volume up on the TV hoping the sounds would fill my head and prevent any nightmares from forming. This is how I’d grown accustomed to sleeping.

  I made an appointment with the counselor and left work early to visit her. It would be my first time returning to the hospice center since January 11, the day Nicole died. I was anxious and unsure if I could express myself coherently. On the long drive, I rehearsed what I would talk about but quickly began evaluating: If I say that, she’s going to think I’m crazy. By the time I arrived, I was no closer to knowing what to say than I was when I started.

  I walked in the front door and the receptionist called for the counselor. From her messages, I knew her name was Marlo, and from her accent I knew she was from New York or somewhere close. When I saw her walking toward me, I was at ease. She was my age, and her smile grew the closer she came. “Nancy, I’m so glad you made it.” I followed her into a small counseling room where she formally introduced herself and shared some of her background. Then she asked about me, how I was coping with Nicole’s death, what emotions I was feeling, what kind of support I had.

  I didn’t tell her about the nightmares or that I slept sitting in front of the TV to keep from having them. I didn’t tell her that when I dozed off, I could hear Nicole’s voice calling to me, and I didn’t tell her about the night of the storm. I did, however, talk for a solid two hours about everything else. I felt better afterwards but was reluctant to make another appointment. “I really think we should schedule another visit,” she said, but I was sure that continuing to meet was unnecessary. Instead, I offered to send her an email to let her know how I was doing.

  “You call me if you need me,” she said

  “I will.”

  I kept my word and emailed once every couple weeks to let her know how I was doing and to reiterate that I didn’t need to meet with her. In truth, I was plummeting. I was losing the battle for hope. Something in the universe had shifted, and I was dissolving. I was becoming lost to myself. Routines I had done every day were quickly becoming foreign. How do I turn on my windshie
ld wipers? Which key unlocks my front door? Where did I put my blood pressure medicine? What is my dad’s phone number? I've forgotten my doctor's name. That red light means STOP. I felt my life was over and that I’d never be happy again. I wished Nicole had taken me with her. I emailed Marlo routinely and told her that I was doing well.

  Weeks after my visit with Marlo, Dr. Akwari, who had been checking in on my progress, invited me to a formal dinner hosted by her church. It wasn’t the first time I had gone out since Nicole had died; Eunice and Cynthia had designated Fridays as Girls’ Night Out, Fernbank one night, The High another. We would meet up after work and head over to “Martinis & IMAX” to take in a jazz quartet or watch people Merengue and Tango. But this dinner was a formal affair, and I looked forward to dressing in my steppin-out clothes and doing something different. The event was everything I thought it would be.

  Arriving home, I felt like I’d turned a corner and that things were going to be okay after all. I decided not to sleep in front of the TV, so I showered and climbed into bed. I thought back on the events of the evening and drifted off to the beautiful images of young Nigerian girls curtsying out of respect before their elders.

  When I opened my eyes, it was 5 a.m. the next morning; I had slept soundly through the night. I was elated as it had been more than two months since I’d slept in my bed. I drank a glass of water and then got back into bed. It was Sunday morning, and I wouldn’t need to be up until eight o’clock. Little did I know that when I drifted off, the mother of all nightmares would be waiting.

  I dreamed that Nicole was in the hospital. Though her room was on the main floor, it looked more like an attic. It was dark and dank. There was a vented window that was open to the alley outside, and we could see trash blowing by. I told Nicole that this couldn’t be healthy for her because she was already having breathing problems. I told her to get dressed, that we were going to ask for a different room.

  She put on her jeans and t-shirt, and we went out into the hall to find a nurse. Everyone was busy, and Nicole began to feel faint, so we turned around and headed back to the room. Because Nicole is so tall, I was having trouble holding her up, and I cried out for someone to help me, but no one even looked up.

  When we made it back to the room, she began to fall sideways onto the bed. As she began falling, she also began to disappear. I watched as her body grew fainter, and by the time she landed on the bed, she’d completely vanished. Only the clothes she was wearing remained in my hands.

  I called out to her, and she answered, “I’m right here, Mommy.” But I couldn’t see her, and I asked her if she could see me. She said no, but that she could hear me. I continued asking her where she was, and she kept saying, “I’m right here.” Then the communication shifted. I could hear her, but she couldn’t hear me. She was crying, “Mommy, can you hear me?” And though I was answering yes, she could no longer hear me and continued to call for me. Soon, her voice was gone altogether.

  I ran into the hallway and told the doctors and nurses that Nicole had disappeared, and I needed help finding her. No one moved. I pleaded, but it did no good. “Look, Nicole has probably run off somewhere, and we don’t have time for games.” I couldn’t tell them the truth, that she had vanished in my arms, because they wouldn’t have believed me.

  I ran outside and began looking around the premises. The sky was overcast. The building was a small two-story brick building that sat on a hill. I searched everywhere. I walked down to the bottom of the hill. There was on old weathered, wooden sign with “Thompson” painted in black letters; the sign was very old and the paint was peeling. Just adjacent to that sign was another hand-painted sign: “Welcome to the Low-lands.” I thought it strange that they referred to the area as low lands when it was on a hill. Anyway, it seemed I had been outside for at least a couple of hours, so I called inside to see if they had found Nicole. Whoever answered the phone said they had found her. I ran up the hill and back inside.

  Once there, no one seemed to know anything about my phone call; they all just looked at each other. “You haven’t even looked for her, have you?” I asked. One of the doctors became angry and said, “Nicole is hiding somewhere trying to make fools out of us.” I begged the doctor to believe me. Still reluctant to tell them that she had literally vanished right before my eyes, I simply told them that she wasn’t hiding or trying to make fools of them, but that she was missing and I needed help finding her. “We’re not doing it,” he said, and he sat back down to finish his work.

  I walked outside and used my cell phone to call for help. I didn’t want to call the police because if I had told them that Nicole vanished, they, too, wouldn’t have believed me. Instead, I called Eunice, but someone else answered her phone. I pulled the phone away from my ear to double check the number I had dialed, and it was indeed the correct number. I could still hear the woman saying, “Hello, is anyone there?” I returned to the call and told the lady that I needed help and that I was trying to call my friend. She said, “You’ve reached the right person.” So I told this lady everything that happened, exactly as it happened, and she said she was on her way, and that we would get to the bottom of it when she arrived.

  She arrived very quickly. She was a Black lady, and she looked official, but she wasn’t someone I knew. She asked to go inside and see the room where it happened. I took her inside and into the room. She covered her mouth and nose with a cloth because the air quality in the room was so bad. We walked into the hallway. “This isn’t good,” she said. She asked a few more questions and looked around a bit more. The hospital staff didn’t seem at all concerned that this stranger was snooping and asking questions. The lady said we should drive around the entire area to see if we could find anything.

  Though I don’t remember having a car up to that point, we got into my car, and I began driving away from the building. I told the lady how the doctors wouldn’t help because they didn’t believe me. She listened attentively. She didn’t strike me as having any expert knowledge in what was going on, but she was the only one who listened and tried to help me.

  Less than a mile away from the building, I got a text on my cell phone: We found her. “Come see.” I was filled with relief as I showed the message to the lady. I said to her, “See how they put ‘Come see,’ in quotation marks? Maybe Nicole was hiding after all, and now they’re going to rub it in my face.”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “We’ll just get her and go.”

  As we approached the building, we could see the doctors and nurses gathered outside but facing away from us and toward an alcove in the building. We couldn’t see what was in the alcove until we got closer. The lady began to scream, “Oh my God!” I kept saying, “That’s not Nicole,” but it only took seconds for me to realize that it was her, hanging by her neck. She was dressed only in a hospital gown that looked like a tent on her thin body. There was absolutely no movement, just her head bowed and her limp body dangling against the red brick.

  My mouth was open to scream, but I couldn’t muster a single peep. There was nothing left in me, as if the breath had been vacuumed out of my body, and without regard for my passenger, I pushed the gas pedal to the floor and aimed the car for the brick wall. With any luck, I would be thrown through the windshield, and it would be over quickly. The closer the car came to the building, the better I was able to see the horrible images of my daughter. At that instant, the screams finally came, and I bolted up in bed, wet with sweat, screaming at the top of my voice.

  Images of Nicole’s dangling body were all I could see for hours after I awoke, and I was unable to calm the panic that filled my chest. I thought about calling the counselor, but it was Sunday. I immediately dressed and left the house; I drove around, I sat in the park, I went to the office, but nothing eased the dread. Out of options, I called Marlo. Without letting on that I was in trouble, I asked if I could meet with her the next day. She paused momentarily before saying, “No ma’am, you’ll meet with me today.” I was a
pologetic but grateful.

  Within the hour, we met at a local bistro. I explained that I’d had a horrible nightmare that was too gruesome even to recount. “It’s okay,” she said. “You talk about whatever you want for as long as it takes you to feel okay.” So we sat out on the patio and talked for hours until the sun began to sink below the treetops.

  “How long will it take for me to get better?” I asked her.

  “You keep asking me that as if you want me to give you a time frame.”

  That’s exactly what I wanted, some kind of grief chart that said in three months, the tears will stop; in eight months, the gut-wrenching pain will cease; in a year’s time, the sun will shine again. I needed a diagram wherewith to measure my progress, something to assure me that I wasn’t going crazy, but Marlo said there is no normal grief. “It is what it is, and there’s no wrong way to do it.”

  “Can you give me a time frame?”

  “I wish it were that simple, but it doesn’t work that way. And what do you mean by better?”

  “When will I stop crying?”

  “Never, your child is dead.”

  I told Marlo that I was moving out of the house. I had been thinking about it and had mentioned it to her once before, but I’d decided that it was time. She tried to discourage me saying that it was unwise to make major life changes while in a state of grief. Regardless, the house held nothing but bad memories.

  I had moved into the small bungalow to save money for Nicole’s transplant. The gentleman that rented to me had done so at a mere pittance. The place was impeccable, and he handled the maintenance like clockwork. Once when I arrived home from work in the dead of winter to find the heat not working, I called him and left a message. He returned my call from whatever sandy beach he was vacationing on, and within two hours a heating and air truck pulled into my driveway. Each year when I renewed my lease, my rent stayed the same. “How’s that little one gettin’ along?” He’d always ask.