The Angel in My Pocket

by Sukey Forbes

  Even when I was feeling numb or struggling with overwhelming emotions, I could always see that it would get better somehow and that I’d eventually find some sort of higher ground. I would carry this loss and it wouldn’t break me. Maybe it would become a part of me, and, as Julian Barnes wrote in Flaubert’s Parrot, I would “come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into the sunshine and that swift rattling descent into the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.” I’d become strong at the broken places. I was definitely looking to find some kind of mastery over the devastation I’d been through, and determined not to be battered down. I was determined as well to make the most of whatever nuggets of wisdom I might gain through suffering, maybe even use them as mortar for rebuilding. Gaining wisdom and perspective was a compensation I would gladly do without if it meant having Charlotte back, but it’s what they call the gift of the loss.

  During this period it became obvious that my Saltonstall grandfather was entering his last days. Thanks to Margaret and Alexis, I’d become entirely comfortable with the idea of “crossing over,” and that was mostly because I was firm in the belief that you don’t really go very far. In Kübler-Ross’s terms, dying is only moving from one house to another, like a butterfly leaving a cocoon.

  In the spring of 2008, I spent hours upon hours and days upon days at my grandfather’s bedside, wanting to be there for him, but also enjoying his company immensely.

  “I saw Aunt Sue the other day,” Grampa Salt told me. This was my grandmother’s sister, who had predeceased my grandmother by seven years.

  “Really!” I said. “What was she doing?”

  He described how she’d come and visited and talked about people who were already on the other side. This sort of conversation happened routinely as he lingered through his last days.

  He was at Carleton-Willard Village, the care facility he had shared with my grandmother until her death three years earlier. His bed was surrounded by watercolors they had done while traveling after his retirement. His wall was a catalog of images that captured all their favorite places.

  We talked about memories with him on both sides of the family, and we spent a great deal of time talking about the log cabin that we all loved so much up in New Hampshire. The cabin wasn’t a private island, but for me there was the same elemental connection to the clan, and to a particular place. In the 1930s, my grandparents had gone in with some friends to purchase ten acres in Jackson, New Hampshire, and built two small log cabins on Black Mountain. Each of the cabins is roughly twenty feet by thirty feet with a ladder to a sleeping loft that takes up half the space. There are four windows and a door, a wood-burning stove, a long pine table in the center of the room with two long benches on either side, and then the perimeter of the room is beds that double as seating. There are two bookcases with odd items in them and a two-burner portable propane stove. There is no electricity and no running water. It was referred to as “the Palace” in our family.

  When I was a child we would all arrive en masse just after Christmas, Mum and her siblings with all of their children in tow, and there would be a scramble for beds. If there was snow we would have to wear snowshoes and/or shovel a walkway to the cabin from the road, which was about two hundred yards, to start our unloading. This would be after a three-hour car trip that would culminate with the children getting out and piling on the bumper of the rusted-out Volvo to provide traction for the last quarter mile of steep hill to our house. Extra traction, Yankee style.

  First thing in the morning, my grandfather would turn up at breakfast and announce that anyone who was ready in ten minutes to ski the first run down with him (we lived at the top of the bunny slope) would get their daily ski lift ticket paid for by him.

  The great thing about Black Mountain was that we never got lost and yet, as on Naushon, we had a sense of complete freedom. We would ski alone or in small groups all day. Often we would meet in the afternoon for a multigenerational slalom race. Uncle Jim always won, and I remember how the year my brother finally beat him there was a real sense of passing the torch. The bittersweet feeling of that day was palpable to me even as a blasé teenager.

  As a teen, of course, I was incredibly image conscious, and when I deigned to ski with my parents I was mortified by the way we all looked, decked out in “high Yankee,” which meant hand-me-down snow pants that were either two sizes too small or four sizes too large. My first several pairs of ski boots had been lace-ups, and my first pair of skis had been wooden with tips on both ends with clip-down bindings made by a relative and discovered by my mother in our basement.

  At Black Mountain the ski lifts closed down at three forty-five p.m. and anyone who had missed the last lift up had to hike up the mountain in ski boots with all of their ski gear. There was no phone at the Palace, and even if there had been we would never have dared call. Those long climbs home were exhausting and we made good and sure to not miss that last lift.

  At night we’d take turns stuffing newspaper and horsehair into the drafty spots where the freezing air blew in, listen to the mice scurrying about, then sleep in subzero sleeping bags with ice forming on the nails that held the roofing overhead. We would wake, if we were lucky, to a few remaining coals in the woodstove and a temperature in the cabin above thirty-five degrees. Bathroom trips to the outhouse in the middle of the night were to be avoided at all costs.

  That cabin was the opposite of Mansion House grandeur, yet I routinely meet people my parents’ age or older whose faces light up at the mention of it. It’s a bond that can be shared across four generations. It’s all about continuity and what’s really important in life. Simplicity. Love. Connectedness.

  I thought about these things as my grandfather lay dying, my mother and I sitting by his bedside and reading from the journals kept by his mother-in-law. She was a poet, and once a year she would write love letters to each of the children. There were long passages about my grandmother and her relationship with the young man who was now ninety-six and fading fast. He was utterly still, barely breathing, and many times I thought he might have slipped away. But then I’d watch the corners of his mouth twitch into a fond smile of remembrance.

  I’ve come to the conclusion that the soul knows when life is about to end, and it prepares. It’s as if life on earth is a school you have to go through in order to pass certain tests and learn special skills. As soon as you master the lessons you’re allowed to go home, to graduate. The greatest of these lessons is unconditional love.

  It was very important for my own process to be there to help my grandfather make his transition. His spirit was trapped in a body that had worn itself out after ninety-six years and I just couldn’t feel bereft about his passing.

  On another night, very near the end, my mother and her brother Jim and I were all sitting with my grandfather. We pulled out our cell phones and called his other two children: my aunt Sukey and my uncle Bob Junior. We dialed them in, put the phones on my grandfather’s chest, and then we sang campfire songs, sailor songs, and rounds. Everyone should be so lucky to die this way. This is what the experience of dying should be. It should not happen to a terrified child in an emergency room at the age of six.

  I could tell that, being the patriarch, Grampa Salt was worried about leaving his family behind, but in quiet moments I would whisper to him that it was okay. I just knew he was going to be reunited with his wife and all the people he loved. My experience within the last several years had given me assurance that he would be bathed in the white light and folded back into the arms of someone he loved. His passing would be hard for us, but wonderful for him.

  Having a child on the other side, I’d begun to look at deaths in the family as simply more loved ones gathering around Charlotte. I was actually comforted by the thought of him joining her. Now
she would get to hang out with Grancy and Grampa Salt.

  “You go find Charlotte and tell her I love her,” I told him, “and I love you, too.” It took me my whole life to be able to say “I love you” to my grandfather. Being able to comfortably tell him those words was a gift to me.

  He gave death a few touch-and-gos, and then he was gone.

  At the memorial service I thought about all the changes I’d been through on my own, with Margaret, and then through my ongoing work with Alexis, and how all of these underscored my sense of belonging to a tribe, as well as my sense of belonging in the natural world.

  In the eulogy I gave I described how connected I’d always felt to my grandfather when I was small, and how he used to take each grandchild out individually and plant a tree in his or her honor. And then I talked about the raspberries he grew and all the time we spent in his garden, eating raspberries until our bellies would hold no more. Over the years he’d given out cuttings so that each of us could have Grampa Salt’s raspberries in our yard.

  • • •

  In the third year, Michael and I began to wear our new identities as grieving parents in a more permanent way. If that’s what they mean by a “new normal,” then I guess this was it.

  I was able to look a bit more outside myself, which was particularly important where the children were concerned. I was trying to be more energetic, more creative, more there.

  One of the healthiest things we did during this period was to set up the Charlotte Saltonstall Bigham Fund. The idea was that, once each year, we would get together as a family, try to place ourselves in Charlotte’s shoes at whatever age she would have been, and then make contributions to causes we thought would have appealed to her. It was a way to keep Charlotte near and, as a family, to explore how she might have grown or evolved as a person. The motto was “Through the eyes of a child, making the world a better place.”

  Every fall we’d take the kids to a street fair for nonprofit organizations sponsored by the Boston Foundation. We’d let them see the presentations by the various groups; then we’d bring them home and say, “What do you think?” We really wanted Cabot and Beatrice to stay in touch with their sister, so we put a great deal of emphasis on their opinions.

  With their input, we decided to support Urban Improv, which visits local schools to perform vignettes typicial of the kinds of problems teens face every day, issues like abusive relationships or how to cope with the pressure to do drugs. Another group we helped was Artists for Humanity, which teaches painting and sculpture in inner-city classrooms. We also donated to the Max Warburg Courage Curriculum, a national curriculum and essay contest in the schools that Stephanie had set up in memory of her son.

  Stephanie also asked me to serve as one of the judges to read the essays by these kids from challenged backgrounds describing where they had found courage in their own lives. This was an incredibly inspiring, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” moment for me, challenging me to find my own form of courage. We may have given Stephanie’s foundation a little money, but by becoming involved, I was the one who received the gift.

  When it was time to raise more money for the Charlotte fund, I turned to several of my friends and said, “You know, we’ve sat through so many of our kids’ dance performances . . . Maybe we should make them sit and watch us.” So we created the Yummy Mummy Dance Troupe and began planning a tongue-in-cheek recital fund-raiser.

  Beatrice had been taking a hip-hop dance class at a local college, and we hired her teacher to try to whip us into shape. The mothers’ dancing ability varied from okay to really abysmal, so we offered a certain price point that would entitle contributors to not show up. You could also pay extra for a seat near the back. The cheap seats were right in front.

  This was the first publicly fun and yet poignant event we’d done related to Charlotte. It was our coming-out time—a big milestone. There was some frivolity—everyone wore temporary tattoos that read “Charlotte.” We even rented a mechanical bull for everyone to ride.

  Michael was the only one to speak, and he did a lovely job. He was very composed, expressing himself with clarity and a soft bit of humor, as if he were presenting at a business conference. I was proud of him, because I knew that, even though I’m a ham and not a bad public speaker, I never could have done what he did.

  The dads from Michael’s initial therapy group had continued to get together, and he helped turn their casual association into a national organization called Fathers Forever, committed to helping men through the grieving process. This desire for service to others came from a genuinely good place, and in fact I was envious of his ability to see outside himself in grief and to extend his concerns to the community. In this instance, as in every other, his preferred way of helping others was through mentorship.

  It was about this time that we added the pièce de résistance to our new house. It was a mural we’d commissioned a friend to paint that ran the entire length of the front hall ceiling from north to south, re-creating the exact configuration of the constellations in the sky over Palo Alto, California, on December 23, 1997, the night Charlotte was born. (We’d checked with the U.S. Geological Survey to get the data.) This was our way of bringing our absent daughter into our new home. We added other symbols that had meaning for us: the hawk that had come to us just after she’d died, barn swallows, and even a few gophers for Charlotte the “critter catcher,” who had always enjoyed setting and emptying the gopher traps with Michael. We also had the signs of the zodiac for each member of the family.

  I felt I was finally coming out of the darkness. But the stronger I felt, the more it seemed to me that Michael was determined to hold me back. I had begun to smile more and was really feeling the life coming back into me, and yet at times it seemed as if my husband just could not stand to see me happy. More and more I found myself bristling against his persistent small insults.

  What I came to realize was that, as I was emerging from the shadows of grief, I was also emerging from his shadow—the kind that’s often cast by a very dominant successful man, and with whom I had been unconsciously colluding. This came out in uncomfortable ways—with belittling remarks to me, such as, “That’s sloppy thinking.” More often, his hostility was more subtle—little things like “forgetting” to return my calls or making sarcastic remarks to me and, upon hearing that they had hurt my feelings, telling me that I was oversensitive and he had been teasing.

  Our marriage was under definite strain, and I know I played my part, too. I failed to fully accept his process. I did not embrace his vulnerability, and I pushed it away because it was too threatening to me. I was afraid that it might expose me too much. In hindsight, I admire his ability to allow himself to fall into that deep crevasse without any hint of knowing when or if he would emerge. I was too fearful to do that, afraid that I might never come back.

  What if I came unglued? What would the children do without their mother to care for them? How would we function as a family? Worst of all, I was mortified at the thought of my loved ones abandoning me if I truly spoke from my core and said, “Help. I need you.” In that I was very much like my father.

  When Michael seemed to turn on me, I was afraid he would pull me to that scary place but not be there to help me out of it. I knew that what little was left of me would crumble in that circumstance. I emotionally checked out on him and I’m ashamed of that, and filled with regret for what that must have done to him. Yet the growing tension in our marriage increased my need to protect myself from the new wounds.

  Perhaps some of the anger he directed toward me came from a feeling that I was emotionally bailing out on him. But as is so often the case with a relationship, any analysis becomes a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. All I know is that after a while we both failed each other in our inability to be together lovingly and without judgment.

  Our two years in Santa Cruz, as well as our relocation to Boston, had been a
bout Michael’s reorganizing his work life to make more time for the family. He made what he considered a noble gesture, done something he considered a sacrifice for home and hearth, and then almost immediately his child died. I think this is how the feeling of such an intense betrayal by God crept into his grieving. He blamed God, but what I wondered was, did he blame me? His emergence from depression came on the heels of Charlotte’s test results, but then so did his conspicuous anger. And there was no denying it—the genetic error had been on my side of the family.

  In reality, I don’t think Michael ever really gave up his desire to be at the top of his field, such that his devotion to family created a tug-of-war inside of him. He worked hard to be present, to be hands-on with the kids, but at any moment he would retreat into his spreadsheets. Michael had always had a challenge integrating head and heart, and Excel had been his way of getting his head around anything, including his emotions. Now he took that approach to his grief.

  There were still times when he could be connected and kind, of course, and when he was “on” he was at his feisty and charismatic best. We would all bask in his glow and laugh endlessly at his limericks and funny jokes. But the droughts between our good times, when we were relaxed and connected, became more and more protracted. The good times, and the good behavior, seemed mostly reserved for when others were around.

  I really loved Michael. He had always been my first priority and more times than I care to remember I had even put him before the children. Committed to working through these challenges and back to our solid marriage, I could only hope that his remoteness was a reaction to grief. The only thing I knew for certain was that I couldn’t win. I got the message from him that, when I was feeling numb, it was because I didn’t love Charlotte enough. When I was depressed, he told me to snap out of it. When I was being strong and upbeat, he seemed to resent it terribly. After a while, I couldn’t help feeling that he just didn’t want me around. But I was determined not to have a divorce be part of Charlotte’s legacy.