by Sukey Forbes
I’d begun to feel recrimination in Michael’s eyes as well, as if he were saying, “You’re not going as low as I am. That must be because you didn’t love her enough.” So, of course, every conflict Charlotte and I had ever experienced came back to haunt me.
Charlotte had been my most difficult baby right from the start. She had colic, and she couldn’t sleep on her back or side; she slept only on her tummy or held in my arms, her face buried in my neck and her shoulders folded in like a bird mantling its wings. I’ve always taken pride in being upbeat, but her nature couldn’t have been more different. I could ask her, “What makes you happy?” And whereas you might expect a five-year-old to say, “Sunshine! Candy! A rainbow!” she would look at me quizzically and say, “I don’t know.”
She didn’t seem melancholy, just pessimistic, which was a real challenge for me, one that required a lot more parental imagination and energy. But her need for extra everything went hand in hand with fierce independence in thought and decision. She was born with an incisive wit and wisdom beyond her years that kept us laughing regularly with her offbeat comments. By the time she was two she had me fully sized up and could easily dress me down. As often as not, her riffing psychological assessments of me ended with an emphatic “and that’s your problem, Mummy.”
As much as I loved her, she wasn’t easy, but all I could do now was wonder how I could ever have complained or been critical. How could I have ever done anything but relish every moment, even the moments of wrangling with her at her most difficult? Was there just not enough feeling there? Was that why I was having such a hard time feeling my feelings? Now, as I lumbered through the woods, each time my foot hit the ground I felt physical confirmation that I was here on earth . . . and that she was somewhere else.
Back at the house our guests needed a project, and they soon focused on assembling the outdoor play set we’d purchased in Palo Alto when Cabot and Charlotte were very small. We had taken it with us when we moved to Santa Cruz, then transported it to Boston. This was a guy thing, perfect for Michael and his brothers, who’ve always been best able to relax and relate while working with power tools. As I watched all of the Bigham boys working together physically, I was struck again by the dearth of active ritual in the early stages of grief, the kind of tasks that might help us let go. Prior to the Civil War, Michael and his brothers and probably even young Cabot would have been hand-hewing Charlotte’s coffin. The physical act of that would have allowed for softer, more incremental steps toward acknowledgment of the grief. Had they made the coffin at home she would have been placed in it and then walked in a community procession of grief and support through the streets to her service and then final resting place. Before I came to experience grief firsthand, I used to view this sort of thing as very macabre. Now it took on a whole new meaning of caring and community. It allowed space for the reality of the loss to begin to take shape. Without the need to create the coffin, we were left with a void. Assembling the wooden family play structure seemed the best alternative and served at the very least to distract.
• • •
The other wives hung around to watch, but I retreated to the third floor of our house. This little garret had been selected by default as my office. There was no climate control, and only a narrow spiral afterthought of a staircase for access, but it was the only space in the house that was mine. I had my computer and files filled with family information and with personal projects, and I sat down at my desk and stared at my computer with no notion of what I was going to do except hide. Then my gaze fell upon the bulging scrapbooks I’d spent so many hours creating for the family and for each child. I’d even gone to Creative Memories workshops to get good at this sort of thing. But improving my skills had not added hours to my schedule, and so what I had, essentially, was selected piles of photographs, and announcements, postcards, brochures, and masses of kids’ drawings and school reports, along with the love letters that I wrote regularly to Michael, and to each child. I plunked myself down on the floor in my own version of being brought low by grief and sitting shivah.
I flipped through the nursery school art projects and the pictures of each of them beside the gingerbread house they’d made. I had a baby book for each of the three that recorded their first word, first step, and so on with all sorts of pictures and narratives. Then, from year two onward, the idea was to create a more free-form book for each of them.
Charlotte, six, on horseback.
Browsing through the piles, I realized that I was way ahead in organizing Charlotte’s photographs and mementos. Was this part of my eerie sense of foreknowledge? After all, she was the middle child, and yet I had carried her life all the way up to age five, assembling an archive that she had delighted in looking through. But why would I be so far ahead on hers? If I had assembled her scrapbooks as I looked back, it would have been a less authentic glimpse into her short life. The first four years of her life had been documented while they were happening, and I sat for a quiet moment in gratitude for that. I had to do my best with the final two and a half years.
With Charlotte in July 2004.
I knew that this was going to be painful, like pressing on a wound to make it bleed, but I threw myself into assembling all of the rest of Charlotte’s memorabilia and photos up to the present. If I truly was numb, living right now in a state of shock, then maybe this was the best time to do this work, before the full brunt of the pain hit me. But, plain and simple, it also gave me a task—something to do when I had no idea what to do. Should I be like the ancient Greeks and start reciting dirges, tear at my clothing, and beat my breasts? That fit with my gothic fears of utterly coming unglued, but it also seemed entirely out of character and therefore highly unlikely. For a while I just sat on the floor and stared blankly off at nothing in particular.
I lost myself in the photographs, browsing through the princess stories Charlotte had written in her own distinctive hand, with her own distinctive spelling. They made me cry the way you’d cry when you miss your child who was at school or camp. I simply didn’t have access to the deep, gut-wrenching tears that acknowledged, “I’ll never be with her again.” Each of the stories she’d written and carefully bound—no matter the subject matter—ended with the same single word all alone on the last page: “Love.” That was my Sweetie Pea.
One family member or another would check on me every now and then, but I must have made it clear that I wanted to be alone, because no one stayed. I organized all the recent items, then packed everything up to ship to Ann, my friend in California who had run the scrapbook workshops. I would ask her to put the final book together for me. I knew I couldn’t do it myself.
At the end of the day, when I came downstairs, I was pleased to see the completed structure and all the cousins playing on it. But then the realization hit me again. Charlotte wasn’t there. Where was she?
6
Naushon
We call a child who has lost her parents an orphan. An adult who loses a spouse is a widow or widower. Somehow there is no term for a parent who has lost a child, which may be because the experience was once so much the norm. Still, I don’t think frequency of occurrence would have made it any easier to endure for those earlier generations of parents.
Much has been written about how the poet Emerson was tortured by the loss of his beloved son Waldo, taken by scarlet fever at the age of six. Less has been said about the grieving of the boy’s mother, Lidian, who essentially took to her bed for the rest of her life, numbed by the drug of choice for nineteenth-century women, laudanum, also known as tincture of opium.
Today, even as people have easier access to their emotions, they keep their distance from the emotional reality of death, especially the death of small children. This means that a bereaved parent is treated either as a tragic figure or as a pariah. Suffering the death of a child seems almost like a curse, or freakishly bad luck, and for those who observe it, the loss bring
s their own vulnerability too close to home.
And yet society still seems willing to give the bereaved mother (fathers less so) a free pass. A mother who experiences this devastation could take to her bed and never emerge, and, opiates aside, I don’t think anyone would blame her. That kind of understanding is a gracious gesture, I suppose, but it does nothing to really help. Not if the objective is for the mother to work through the pain and go on living.
In those early weeks my gauge for where I was in the grieving process was how long it took each morning before I got the kicked-in-the-gut wake-up call of She’s Dead. Eventually, that neutral time of first awaking would move from milliseconds to minutes. But during the period when we were still sleeping on the air mattress, hearing the birds in the morning, and seeing the yellow room filled with dazzling light, I could hardly open my eyes before the rock-filled backpack dropped down onto my chest, the assigned weight I would carry around for the rest of the day.
Our house was still filled with flowers, which I’d loathed from the start. The longer they stayed, the more I found their fragrance cloying, like the smell of a disinfectant spray meant to hide something grotesque. And after that first horrible week, I hated watching them die, then having to throw them away—another acknowledgment that time was moving forward without my daughter.
A few days after the funeral, Charlotte’s ashes arrived, and my first thought was “I can’t believe this is all that’s left of you.” It wasn’t just that I was holding my daughter’s charred remains. It was the surreal notion that all that she had been—this huge, expansive soul, this beautiful spirit—could be reduced to fragments that would fit inside a pink cloisonné jar. My body ached and I had to hold on to something, but there was nothing to hold on to, so I just sat weeping and hugged the jar.
I knew in time I would need to go back into Charlotte’s bedroom. For months it would remain off-limits for me after dark, but one bright afternoon in September I forced myself to go in. The space had been designed as a sitting room for the master suite, and it was on the opposite side of the house from where we were sleeping. It had a high-peaked ceiling and, with big windows on two sides, the room was very airy. The walls were a pale blue. Charlotte’s bed was an “officer’s campaign” collapsible contraption made of iron that I’d picked up from some overpriced decorator in San Francisco just before she was born. It had four high posts that I’d outfitted with a canopy and curtains for her. Alongside her bed, the south window looked out over the forge. The window to the east looked down the winding road toward the big oak tree where I’d watched the sun go down the day she died.
On that first, tentative visit, I stood gazing at the stuffed animals on the pillows and I felt myself descending into the grief. I lay down on Charlotte’s bed as if I were going to dissolve into the covers, and then I heard a voice say to me, “You can’t do this now.”
Rationally, I know it was just a thought, but I experienced it very distinctly as hearing a voice. The voice of God? Charlotte’s voice? The voice of little green men from Mars? I don’t know, but I heard it, and it was a compelling directive. In that moment I was keenly aware of the sensation of a succession of doors sealing chambers inside of me. The sensation was so powerful I could almost feel the reverberations sent out as they slammed shut.
I got up and I moved over to the south-facing window, where I noticed a nose smudge and a child’s handprint on the glass. Charlotte must have been standing there looking out and holding her face up against the windowpane. Two nights before she died we’d sent her to her room for teasing her sister. I pictured her in that spot staring out at us in the yard while she did penance. My gut ached at the thought of her missing out on the few precious moments she had left. I put my hand on that spot as close as possible without touching it and put my cheek up against it the same way. I would not let anyone clean that window for years.
In her room there were built-in bookcases with cabinets below that we’d turned into closets. The shelves were lined with animals and dolls, and pottery and artwork she’d done at school. There were also framed black-and-white photographs of each of the children. On the floor was a horse corral the size of a dollhouse. It was all so perfect. Too perfect. We’d only just moved in and she hadn’t even had time to get it messy.
Desperate to occupy my mind, and ever the frugal Yankee, I began to organize her clothes and wrap them up, with hand-me-downs in mind. Her baby blanket, the towels with her name, her favorite pink sweater, the pineapple dress she wore around her waist like a long gypsy skirt. On one of the shelves was a pair of sparkly, sequined Mary Janes, and inside of them I could see the small dark depressions of her individual toes where the material had conformed to her foot. I put these on my dresser. Everything else I stored in a box, which I methodically labeled for future use, “Charlotte. Age six to eight.”
In the weeks ahead, whenever I was especially sad, I would go up and rummage through that box. One afternoon I clutched the pink sweater to my face and I almost fell over. I’d never thought that Charlotte had a distinctive smell until I recognized it. It was the smell of fresh air. But there was also the slight sweetness of newly mown hay, and maybe a hint of sea spray. It occurred to me that the last time she’d worn this sweater was on Naushon. This was the scent of a child who’d been running around and getting sweaty beneath a layer of sunscreen. Next thing I knew my knees had given out and I was on the floor sobbing, without inhibition, without the least bit of self-consciousness. The crying, of course, was an incredibly welcome physical release, but the mere fact that I was able to cry was every bit as powerful. “I can do this,” I thought. “I’m human after all.”
From then on I cried every day. I put the sweater in a ziplock bag, and each afternoon I’d go up and open it and sniff it, and for a long time it smelled like her. With so much opening and closing, though, the smell began to fade. After a while it just smelled like a plastic bag.
Michael and I continued to need pills in order to sleep; I found everything more miserable in the dark hours between midnight and four a.m. Images of Charlotte’s last hours and the internal dialogue of my personal failings as a mother, wife, caretaker would make falling back asleep impossible and the sleep deprivation would make it all worse the next day as well. I took Ambien to avoid being awake at that time, but there are limits to how much of that stuff one can take.
One morning I found my husband sitting in the living room staring off into space. I had to get the kids off to school, but when I came back a half hour later he hadn’t moved.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He seemed catatonic.
I decided to stay there with him, sitting quietly. After a while I asked again, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated, but it was clear he couldn’t get out of the chair. “Something’s not right.”
• • •
That same night I was awakened by the most horrible sound out on the porch. I found my husband outside in his pajamas screaming in a shrill, keening way that seemed completely out of char-acter. I could see him lit in profile by the light coming from inside the house. I sat down on the stone steps, hugged my knees, and wrapped my nightgown tightly around my legs. He was roiling in such anger that I was scared to go too near, but I was also worried about him. Then, as I watched, he picked up one of the huge granite planters sitting by the door and hurled it across the lawn. My gothic nightmare of derangement was coming true—only it wasn’t happening to me. It was Michael who was headed down the Charlotte Brontë path, and there wasn’t room for both of us. Rather than turning me into the mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre, grief was turning Michael into the brooding Rochester.
Maybe his Catholic faith was too abstract, or his idea of heaven and the afterlife too distant, to provide anything more than momentary comfort. When scientists ask people to describe their concept of God, most respondents come up with some va
gue projection of themselves, only with supernatural powers. That same inchoate drive to extend the ego permeates so many attempts to prolong life, or defeat death. Some people leave instructions for their head to be removed and stored in liquid nitrogen in hopes of physical resurrection. Technical types talk about downloading the full contents of human brains onto hard drives that—theoretically—could last forever. But does a record of all your experiences, combined with every factoid that ever registered in your frontal lobes, constitute you? I don’t think so.
In those early days I began to search for books that might encourage me, or even guide me through this period of intense question, doubt, and misery. Most of what I read was that life was going to be forever changed (a pretty obvious insight, that one), but that if I was really lucky, at some point in the distant future I might find a “new normal.” The implication was that the best I could hope for was to go on living, but in an attenuated sort of way. And then, eventually, I’d be dead, too, so no worries.
That’s not what I wanted. I was determined to embrace my grief and devastation fully, and then to come out fully on the other side. But at this point in time, the priority was to hold the family together. If anyone was going to do it, for now it looked as though it was going to have to be me.
Michael’s parents had stayed on to look after us. They were retired, with time on their hands, but they were also genuinely worried about us, and they certainly wanted to help, especially with the kids. We had just moved into this new house and there were a million small errands to run, especially with back-to-school shopping upon us, so it was quite a comfort to have them around, though neither is the kind of person you can sit down with and have a good cry. Then again, I had the opposite problem. I had the feeling that they might be judging me for not being emotional enough. After all, their son was crying all the time.