The Angel in My Pocket

by Sukey Forbes

  Cabot was particularly upset and insisted on looking under the bandage. (Now, years later, he still teases me with an “eye bulging out” expression.) He also insisted on having a burial with a casket he made from an orange crate and a cross to mark the spot. Our other dog, Bandy, walked around lost for days, looking for her buddy, and we lived in fear that she would dig her up.

  We found another puppy right away, but this animal suffered such severe constipation that we had to give her repeated enemas. Eventually the vet said, “This dog’s not going to make it.” After much discussion, we sent her back and got another one, who—perhaps sensing the madness of our family—promptly ran away. The third dog was Pogo, a male, who agreed to stick around.

  As we entered our second autumn without Charlotte, everything was about home and hearth, about circling the wagons and trying to restore some semblance of domestic order. We spent a lot of time just huddled around the fire in our old forge, which was cozy and comforting. There was a lot of TV and bad food, but I tried not to berate myself. If my family lived on pizza and Cheetos for a few months, it wasn’t going to leave permanent scars.

  Even though I likely appeared a little less ragged around the edges, the second year was more difficult for me, just as Sarah had predicted, and I think part of the reason was that everyone else thought I was over the most intense period of grief, which gave me the space—when I wasn’t being observed so closely—to cry more easily. I could truly feel the emotions passing through my body, and sometimes even express them. Fortunately, setting aside the episode with the dog, I never went to the scary places I’d feared I might. Having adopted the view that when a loved one dies a part of their consciousness, their soul, and their ability to communicate remains allowed me to recalibrate a bit inside myself. Charlotte was gone from this world in the physical ways that we knew but in other ways she was still very much present. The black-and-white cleaving of her from our family was no longer there. The physical pieces that remain of Charlotte—the soft impressions of her toes in her sparkly pink shoes, her artwork on the walls, her inventive writing, her ashes—all have become place markers for her time here physically. I also see Charlotte in the identical green eyes of her father, the way her sister moves gracefully through a room even when hurried, and in her brother’s shared sense of the absurd. I find new evidence of Charlotte when Cabot confides that he quietly prays to his sister to help keep him safe (and win) before each of his kart races, then often feels her sitting on his shoulders as he drives around the track. And we all see her in the red-tailed hawks that consistently appear at family gatherings.

  This knowledge that she is not fully gone has allowed for more of a redefining of our relationship. I cannot call her on the phone, but our conversation can continue quietly. In moments of meditation I feel her comforting presence regularly and have found myself settling into our new dynamic with her as the spiritual guide or angel and me as the child or mortal in need of guidance. Knowing that she is still present has made me feel vastly less lonely, and it has brought a calmness and comfort to my soul that has not left me. It also has highlighted the long thread that connects us all from one life to the next. This has made me want to be a better person, wife, mother, friend, and human being. If our existence is a series of lives and incarnations where we continue to learn and grow, then we’re really in it for the long haul. If that’s the case, I really want to get it right.

  I came to realize that the most important thing going forward was to balance my bereavement for Charlotte with my attention to my surviving children. The one thing I could not do was to let that ongoing love be overshadowed by the sense of loss. Like most parents, I struggled with the balance of attention for each child. On any given day one might get more than the others but over the course of a week or month it should all equal out. I tried hard to keep that balance in my bereavement as well. I would try to not give Charlotte more attention than the others. It was obviously difficult and I doubt I was successful at the beginning, but I did try. My need to escape and be alone in nature continued to be a balancing act. I found myself taking every opportunity to hand the children off to willing caregivers so I could get away. I loathed myself for doing this and yet it was all I could do to survive. But the thought of being an absent mother to my surviving children caused me equal amounts of anguish. There were not easy answers, but at least I was beginning to feel human again, albeit deeply flawed.

  We were concerned that Cabot was becoming forgetful and not particularly attentive in class, but was he just a wiggly kid or a kid distracted by grief? When he took the usual age-appropriate standardized tests, he scored above average across the board, but he was off the charts in engineering-related skills such as drafting and spatial relationships. This jibed with his ability to lose himself in concentration whenever he wanted to build something with Legos. This was reassuring, but we were still sufficiently concerned that we gave him some private therapy. After all, he was older when Charlotte died, and the two of them had shared a really close relationship. He saw the therapist for a few months, playing games that encouraged him to talk about his feelings, and after a while he seemed to settle down.

  With Beatrice, our primary concern was that she seemed to feel obligated to remain small and adorable, as if her job was to cheer us up. She used to tell me that her name was Charlotte, or she’d say, “I want my name to be Charlotte.” Was she just trying on a playful fantasy the way any child might, or was there some underlying pathology? I couldn’t tell. I went out of my way to say, “No, we only want you to be Beatrice,” and we took her to a psychologist as well. The therapist seemed to think that the comments were just normal make-believe, so we just watched and waited, and in time the issue went away.

  When Charlotte’s eighth birthday came around in December, Beatrice told me through tears, “I don’t remember her.”

  Concerned as we were about the children’s emotional health, we were even more anxious about the prospect of genetic illness. We had just received the DNA analysis of Charlotte’s tissue from the specialized lab, and the results were conclusive. Charlotte had suffered from an exceedingly rare anomaly that made her susceptible to nontriggered malignant hyperthermia. When the rest of the family’s test results came back, it turned out that Charlotte’s genetic error had been passed down on my side. I carried one of the genes, but several have to be in place to trigger the condition. While Cabot also carried one of the genes, Beatrice had not a trace. Even though my son’s chances of being affected were very slim, we began having him wear a MedicAlert bracelet.

  Of course, Michael shared my concern for Cabot, but his reaction to the role of genetic destiny in Charlotte’s death had a different cast to it. For a man who was an old-school provider and protector, losing a child had always weighed on him as a personal failure. Now, with conclusive evidence of a genetic error, he knew there was nothing he could have done, which seemed to lift some of his despair. Unfortunately, the anger he had been turning inward to fuel his depression didn’t disappear. He simply began to direct it outward.

  I had been through enough of the grieving process by now that I had made peace with it. I assumed that I was going to continue through certain fairly predictable stages, and that eventually I was going to be okay. This was huge for me in getting through each day and in trying to imagine a future. I had found comfort in Alexis’s telling me that my future—in fact, my purpose in life—was going to be about making other people comfortable with the kind of loss I’d suffered. The irony, of course, was that I seemed incapable of doing anything for the person I was closest to, and who needed to be comforted the most.

  I was no longer worried that Michael was going to kill himself or spiral completely out of control. He was working more, taking care of himself, and his clothes no longer looked like dark rags draped over a scarecrow.

  But seeing him emerge from the depression allowed something inside me to shift as well. I don’t remember becoming
more emotionally fragile, but I must have. I know I entered into a period of being a little bluer, a little less available. Getting dinner on the table was a Herculean task. Showing up at school functions required a performance worthy of Meryl Streep, as did making love and being a wife. My depression sapped all the enjoyment out of the things that should have been the pleasure at life’s core. I spent a good deal of time just going through the motions. Fake it till you make it. I was not a great faker.

  I remember my husband turning to me at one point and saying, basically, “Snap out of it!” But I couldn’t just snap out of it any more than he’d been able to. I was seriously depressed, but not so much that I couldn’t stand up for myself and let him have it.

  “It’s my turn,” I said.

  In his defense, he caught on immediately and cut me some slack, but it was only for a while. The truce didn’t last.

  During this period we went back to visit “the ranch” in Santa Cruz, and it was brutal. I hadn’t realized how much of California had crept into my being on a cellular level until I returned. We’d closed on the property just before Charlotte was born, and when I came home from the hospital with her this was the home we came to. It was the same when Beatrice was born. So all the sensory reminders of being a young mother of three came back to me, triggered first by the fog rolling in over the western hills as I arrived at the airport, and remembering how the arrival of that fog brought a rapid cooling and dampening, which had always meant it was time to find three small polar fleeces for bundling up the kids before nightfall.

  Just driving up the hill I came undone, because everywhere I turned there were memories of Charlotte: our pond, the grasses, the sweet peas, redwoods, wildflowers. They all brought me right back to our time as an intact family in Santa Cruz. When I smelled the Pacific, I remembered sitting in our living room looking out into the redwood grove as I nursed my ten-day-old baby. I smelled the jasmine and I recalled holding one of her hands as she took her first tentative steps, then stopped to steady herself on the trellis along our driveway, and I leaned in with her as she took in the perfume of the flowers for the first time. I felt the parching heat and looked out at the rolling hills turning brown and dotted with California oak trees and I began to hurt all over. With Naushon I had a forty-year relationship before Charlotte was born. I had never known this place without her. This is the California where we lived when it was all okay. This is where we were when life made sense and was fair and perfect. I had recalibrated and re-created my life in Boston, but here I had to struggle anew with the memory of Charlotte, who was not my spirit guide but my little girl in this lifetime, the physical flesh and blood that for six and a half years was my daughter. I wanted desperately for all of life to feel the way it used to feel: warm, cozy, safe, beautiful, carefree, but it still didn’t feel that way at all. I walked into her bedroom and my eyes immediately filled with tears. Trying to hold back the sobs, I walked outside to look for Michael. I found him talking to the caretaker and told him, “I cannot breathe. We have to leave right now.”

  • • •

  When we returned back east, I felt that it was very important for us to go to church. I did this out of some pretense that perhaps the religious structure would be good for all of us, but I was the one who had to drive the process, which made me the one who was running around the house Sunday morning saying, “Get dressed, comb your hair, tuck in your shirts.” And then I would weep through the entire service and count the minutes until I could take a walk in the woods behind our house. We went to St. John’s, the same church where we’d had Charlotte’s memorial, and though none of us ever acknowledged it, we always avoided the pews where we had sat that day. Michael didn’t want to be there, but I wanted to face it all, to go and face it and cry or at least try. I also secretly hoped that being in the church of his faith would awaken some sense of peace in him. This further self-punishing continued for more than a year, and despite all my tears I never once trusted that I was doing it right.

  Sharing grief with a partner is complicated. I believe that, for Michael and me, grief changed our views of the world in rather opposite ways. Michael was angry at God. Charlotte’s death was unjust and wrong, so God had failed him. I watched as the husband I had always considered religiously devout seemed to turn his back on faith of any kind. The only thing we shared was the view that some higher power had determined that it was Charlotte’s time to die.

  We each had come into this grief carrying our own baggage. We used whatever tools we had in those bags to patch, rebuild, and pull ourselves together. We expressed our thoughts of feeling lonely and isolated to each other, but we became strangers. We were careful not to condemn each other, but we were both walking alone during a dark time. We remained loyal and true to each other, but we were slowly drifting apart. I interpreted Michael’s distance many times as disapproval and perhaps he felt the same about mine. His more classic and visible displays of anguish underscored my fears of inadequately expressing my own emotions.

  Increasingly, my sanctuary and my growth came through the daily practice of yoga and time spent in active movement outdoors. Many times I wanted to be angry at God, too, or to blame someone, and yet each day I found reassurance in the warmth I saw people showing to me and to each other, and it made it difficult for me to believe that God was entirely unjust. I took vicarious pleasure in other people’s joys, and the desire to bring joy back into my own life took stronger hold in me. Smiles crept back into my daily life and I found myself laughing more easily.

  On the other end of the spectrum, we also felt that we owed it to the kids to go to Disney World. The kids loved it. I, on the other hand, found it all terribly fake and contrived, and I was astounded by how much the contrivance ate at me. The music and the smells assaulted my senses, but mostly I just could not tolerate the insistent cheerfulness. Normally I’m an upbeat person, but I found myself wanting to kick each and every “Cast Member” who kept greeting us with “Have a magical day!” More obsequious elves. Ugh! Whenever they uttered that focus group–tested mantra, I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling back, “Don’t you tell me what kind of day to have!” I was in a bad way. The only thing that got me through it was seeing the smiles on my kids’ faces. That, and the adrenaline rush of the roller-coaster ride I shared with Cabot.

  Michael loved the manicured perfection and the way it was maintained and run as a business. Oddly enough, he seemed to find “The Happiest Place on Earth” perfectly calming, as if we were strolling around the lily ponds at Giverny. It was becoming increasingly clear that we were developing two fundamentally different approaches to living. He seemed perfectly content to accept the theme park illusions. I couldn’t help but see the electrical stations and trash receptacles behind the fences. And like Truman in The Truman Show, I never could accept that a painted scrim was actually the sky.

  We had already let go of the idea of having another baby, but now we also gave up on the notion of tearing down the house and rebuilding on the same site. I was exhausted just thinking about the logistics of finding a temporary home, then managing such a huge project with all the permitting and legal complexities. Then again, this was the address we’d just moved to when Charlotte died. There was a huge pall of sadness over the place, so maybe it was a better idea to move on.

  The solution we chose was to sell the house and buy another one just around the corner. The structure itself was somewhat institutional in appearance, which did not thrill me. But at least this house required only “cosmetic” remodeling, and Michael and I tended to agree on houses and design, so we thought redoing a place would be less stressful for us than for some couples.

  We were able to live in the house at the same time, and I found the investment of time and energy to be a welcome distraction. Managing the project, interacting with people, and developing relationships with suppliers allowed me to get out of my head and regain much-needed confidence. It also fed my creativity. F
or a while it even gave us the illusion that we were getting a fresh start.

  Afterward, everyone who saw how we’d transformed the place loved it, which gave me a boost that also became a professional springboard. People began asking me to consult on small design projects. I started a slightly eccentric, definitely eclectic business of finding antiques and other furnishings that I liked and passing them on to my friends. In retrospect, though, I see that the projects were also an emotional dodge to conceal the strains that were beginning to overtake the marriage.

  Trying to stay busy was constructive, as was trying to be creative. But I think my most fundamental need was still to be surrounded by all the life I could get. Messy, squirming—it didn’t matter. Just life.

  In March we took Cabot and Beatrice to Naushon for the lambing. We helped with the deliveries, counting the newborns and bottle-feeding them. It was nippy that time of year and Mansion House had no heating to speak of, so we stayed in a small cottage right in the center of the farm. The connection to the land and shepherding these new lives from womb to our world was life affirming and deeply tender, which was exactly what I needed. We all left rosy cheeked and full of life ourselves.

  That spring we allowed our dogs to breed, and soon three puppies joined the household.

  Shortly thereafter we added chickens. I ordered a dozen hatchlings through the mail, and they sent eighteen. The local postmaster called and left a message on our anwering machine: “Mrs. Bigham, you have a parcel that’s making a lot of noise.” I went over to pick them up, and for the next three weeks they lived under a heating lamp in the basement. I found them utterly enchanting and I watched them obsessively. These were healing moments for me. It was about not wallowing, but about being positive, about trying to create a future.