I'll See You Again

by Jackie Hance

  Kasey and Emma. Both crying. I couldn’t stop either of them. In my tired, hurting, befuddled postpartum state, I didn’t even know which of my children I was hearing. The first cries of Kasey seemed as poignant and terrible as the last cries of Emma.

  On that first night home, Kasey slept several hours at a stretch, but I stayed up, wanting to be at her side if she woke and started whimpering again. By the next morning, I was exhausted and shaken to the core.

  “Why did we do this?” I asked Warren as I sat cross-legged on the bed and rocked back and forth. “What were we thinking bringing this baby into the world? We were fine before.”

  “We weren’t fine before, Jackie.”

  “Yes, we were.”

  “We were getting through each day, but we weren’t dealing with life. Kasey is going to make us start living again.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I think so,” Warrren said, though his voice faltered with uncertainty.

  Quite possibly, the very concept of living again had us both paralyzed with fear. Kasey was like a spotlight shining on all we had lost. Before this, we—and particularly Warren—had been able to sustain days of denial, putting the misery aside and just going about daily life. Work, eat, watch TV, go to bed. Don’t think, don’t feel. But now Warren had to come home from work and help me take care of the baby. He had to be a father in real life, not just in memory.

  For the last two years, I had been a mother to three girls who weren’t here. I would never stop being their mother. But now I had another daughter whose needs were more urgent.

  Warren called Isabelle to say that he didn’t know what we had been thinking, but we really did need help, after all. Just as she had after the accident, she made a schedule for people to sleep over so I could get some rest and support. During the day, the house was already packed with people stopping by. I had no confidence in myself and was almost scared to touch my baby. I watched other people take care of her and love her.

  I can’t do that, I thought. Let them do it.

  • • •

  Kasey’s fussy time seemed to be in the evening, between six and eight o’clock, when she was tired but not yet ready to go to sleep. She’d cry unless someone held her. Gina and Sal from across the street came by one evening, and when Sal held her, she immediately calmed down. Maybe that’s what Kasey needed—a strong, confident cop to hold her, rather than a tremulous mother. I stood back and watched as my friends kissed her and hugged her and handled her effortlessly. Would that ever be me? Being a mom had seemed so natural to me once, and now I could barely remember what to do. I felt awkward around the baby, stiff and unsure of how to behave.

  For three days straight, I didn’t eat or sleep, and I sobbed far more than Kasey did. By Tuesday, I looked gray and could barely move. I’d never felt worse in my life. I’d lost the fifteen pounds I’d gained in pregnancy plus another seven or so on top of that. I couldn’t swallow, and even I could see that I was thin as a rail. Warren kept urging me to eat, but I felt like my throat had closed up and nothing could possibly get through. Karen came to take me back to the doctor.

  “This must be what death feels like,” I told her, almost too exhausted to get to the car.

  Dr. Rothstein ran some tests and quickly discovered that I was anemic, which could partly explain why I felt so bad. She gave me a prescription to treat the iron deficiency, along with a warning: “If you don’t start eating, I’m going to have to put you in the hospital,” she said, after examining me.

  She sent me to my psychiatrist, who put me on Prozac and clonazepam and said it wasn’t a surprise that postpartum depression had hit me hard. I felt like I had been plummeted right back to the weeks after the accident, that nightmarish time when I felt total devastation twenty-four hours a day. Although I hadn’t realized it, I had gotten so much better since then, being back in that condition was a shock. As had happened the very first night at home, hearing Kasey cry plunged me into some anomalous form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Like a soldier coming home from war who hears a car backfire and experiences the horrors of war all over again, I heard Kasey whimper and relived again and again the last conversation I ever had with Emma.

  I found myself afraid to be alone with the baby. I imagined getting so unnerved by her cries that I would just walk out the front door and leave her. It didn’t require Sigmund Freud to interpret that as an emotional metaphor for the guilt I felt about Emma, Alyson, and Katie. I had abandoned them when they needed me. I hadn’t taken care of them. Nothing could relieve me of my secret shame. If I stopped to think about it, I understood that the car accident was an inexplicable incident, a one-in-a-million or -billion or -trillion occurrence that nobody could have foreseen. How different for Kasey, whose little cries foretold only that she needed a simple diaper change, a bottle, or to be gently and lovingly rocked.

  I could do all that. I just didn’t know it yet.

  “Why can’t God make this easy?” I asked Isabelle.

  “What do you want God to do?”

  “Make her a good baby.”

  “She is a good baby!” Isabelle exclaimed.

  In fact, after that first long night, Kasey fussed less than most babies, and everyone marveled at her pretty features and easy temperament. Instead of feeling maternal pride, I shuddered at my disloyalty to her sisters.

  Alyson was a happy baby, too. Has everyone forgotten her? Is it only about Kasey now?

  After seeing Dr. Rothstein, I tried to get myself to eat, but I had less success with sleep. Each night I stayed awake, wandering around my room, wondering what I had done. Even if friends had stayed in the house to help, I listened for every peep from Kasey and rushed in. Sleep deprivation can cause confusion, hallucinations, and depression, and while international courts have disagreed on whether it’s a form of torture, all agree that it is cruel and degrading.

  And I was doing it to myself. This was way beyond the normal weariness any new mom feels, which I had experienced three times before. Unlike when the girls were infants, with Kasey, I didn’t sleep when she slept. I didn’t sleep at all.

  At the end of the week after I saw the doctor, a miracle happened. Kasey slept for five hours one night, and I did, too.

  I woke up the next morning feeling like a new person. I looked at my baby in the morning light and touched her soft sweet cheek.

  I picked her up from her crib, and even as I held her, I felt a strange sense of dislocation. Was my previous life a dream? This baby was real, a tangible, sweet-smelling presence in my arms. But how did she get here? How did I end up in this spot? Trying to put the pieces of my life together was like attempting to solve a jigsaw puzzle that had extra pieces in the box.

  A sad mother whose three daughters have died.

  A hopeful mother who has a new baby.

  Could both of those women be me?

  In some ways, it had been easier to be sad every day and let myself think only of a tomorrow when I would see Emma, Alyson, and Katie again. Warren was right—I hadn’t been living, I had just been biding time. Now I had to be here—in the moment—for Kasey.

  As I started to get some physical strength back, I felt stupid having people sleep over and ended Isabelle’s schedule. I could take care of Kasey. But my mental picture of desertion continued to terrify me. One night Warren stayed at a Jets game that went very late and I roamed alone through our dark and quiet house. Kasey slept comfortably in her crib. I suddenly had visions that I would walk out the door and abandon her, leave and not come back. Frightened of my own thoughts, I called Denine to come and be with me.

  The escape fantasy scared me—until I started mentioning it aloud. And then nearly every woman who heard it gave me a knowing smile.

  “Come on, Jackie, stop thinking you’re so special,” teased one of my friends, a devoted mother of three. “There are times we’d all like to walk out of our own lives and start again.”

  I looked at her in shock. “Really?”

  “R
eally,” she said. “I think it’s part of being a parent. Or maybe just part of being married.”

  Her nonchalance gave me a new perspective. I thought of Warren’s mom, who hadn’t just thought about leaving her children—she’d actually done it. Maybe when life got too hard, it was easier to run than stick it out. But there was something heroic about facing down difficulty and pain and uncertainty and standing firm, no matter what.

  “I’m going to be here for you,” I whispered to Kasey. “I’m not going anywhere. But you know that you have three sisters, don’t you?”

  I sat down in her room, where all four girls’ names were written on the wall. I rocked Kasey and looked at the pictures of her sisters.

  Maybe we didn’t have too many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. For the first time I realized that maybe we had the right number—and I could figure out how to put them together for a beautiful picture after all.

  Twenty-seven

  At my six-week checkup, the doctor said she’d clear me to start running again the next time I saw her. I whooped with delight. Running meant getting back to life. After that, everything else would fall into place. It had to. Her news gave me a greater surge of excitement than any Prozac prescription could possibly provide.

  My next appointment with her was scheduled for a Monday, but patience has never been one of my virtues. On Saturday, I called Bernadette to ask if she’d come for a first run with me.

  “Aren’t you supposed to wait?” she asked.

  “The doctor’s going to give me a clean bill of health in two days,” I said cavalierly. “Let’s go today.”

  For the first time in months, I put on my black running pants, black-and-purple jacket, and a purple knit cap. Bernadette came by in an almost matching outfit, but sporting a white knit cap against the late November chill. We grinned and took off down the street. I felt a little shakier than usual and after about a mile, Berne called out, “Jackie, are you okay? Should we stop?”

  I shook my head and kept going. With every step, I was starting to feel better. We went for about three miles, and I got home feeling like the world was good again. If I could run, I could take care of Kasey. I could clear my head and move forward.

  Now that I was running and feeling healthier, my spirits started recovering, too. One Sunday night, I turned on the TV to Oprah’s Lifeclass. I’ve always been a sucker for inspirational uplift, and as Oprah talked about overcoming adversity, I sat bolt upright. Over the last couple of years, I had come to understand that tragedy—of all kinds—struck more people than I could have imagined. The absolute aloneness I felt after that July day, the sense that I was the only one whose life had slid off a cozy path, had disappeared.

  While I was pregnant with Kasey, I got the courage to write a magazine article about the girls and the accident. As soon as it appeared, I started getting letters and emails from people all over the country who wanted to share their own anguish with me—sickness, death, loss. The old adage that “misery loves company” sounds cynical, but maybe it’s about the natural instinct to share experiences and find comfort in those who have survived worse than you.

  There is so much pain in the world; maybe one thing I could do was to help people know they weren’t alone. When I heard about a terrible car accident on the nearby Meadowbrook Parkway that killed three college-age kids, I understood the devastation the parents must be feeling. I wanted to tell them the pain would get better, even if they couldn’t possibly believe it. I brought flowers to the parents who lost a son and went to the wake of the two girls also taken in that accident. All three were killed driving together to their summer jobs as counselors at a camp for the disabled.

  Great kids, just like mine.

  Meaningless loss, just like mine.

  As I listened to Oprah, I understood that everyone grapples with their own demons. Misfortune, devastation, and sadness are, unfortunately, more the norm than the exception. Whatever the degree of loss, you have to fight back, find your own happiness despite it all.

  At least I was taking baby steps in the right direction. No longer did I wake up every morning angry to be alive. For the last two years, I had told myself every day that my only purpose was to be with my daughters, and if they were gone, I should die, too. Now, with Kasey, I made a new choice. To live.

  Kasey deserved the same happy childhood that I had tried to give her sisters. When they were little, I consciously put aside my own problems—anxiety, bulimia, uncertainty—to be the joyous, confident, giving mother they deserved. Now my problems felt a lot more dramatic. But the conclusion was the same.

  If I was going to live, I might as well make the most of it. For all of us.

  • • •

  Before the accident, living a comfy life in a nice town surrounded by happy friends and family, I thought that “disaster” meant Emma’s not getting the part she wanted in a play. Looking back, I don’t understand why I ever wasted one single moment being unhappy or depressed.

  The unyielding despair I had experienced since the accident was understandable, of course—but what purpose did it serve anyone? Though I had managed to crawl out of the caverns of complete misery, I could still feel gloom emanating from my soul.

  I listened to Oprah for a while more, then called Jeannine, knowing she wouldn’t hem and haw if I posed a direct question.

  “Is it hard being my friend?” I asked her. “Do I project negative energy?”

  “You’re dark a lot,” she admitted.

  Dark. Well, I couldn’t disagree with that. But I didn’t want to be dark anymore. I wanted to be a force of light instead. I wanted Kasey to feel only positive energy from her mother.

  “Am I one of those people who sucks all the energy out of a room?” I asked, using Oprah’s lingo.

  “No,” Jeanne said without hesitating. “You’ve had a very bad time. But we still feel the positive person there underneath.”

  “Oprah says we should get rid of the people in our lives who suck out the positive energy,” I reported.

  “I’m not getting rid of you,” Jeannine said with a little laugh.

  “Well, I’m going to try to get rid of the negativity in myself,” I promised her.

  A few mornings later, I put my new attitude to the test. Warren came into the kitchen while I was feeding the baby, and I could tell immediately that something was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t slept well or he’d had one of those middle-of-the-night attacks of grief that struck like lightning and burned just as deep.

  As often happened, his despair came out as belligerence.

  “You’re starting to look anorectic,” he said, standing over me with arms crossed in front of his chest.

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying not to be put off by his stern demeanor. “I’m feeling good.”

  “You promised that once you started running again you’d eat more.”

  “I have plenty of power bars and yogurt to sustain me,” I said.

  “That’s not enough,” he said fervently.

  “Oh no? How did you become the expert?” I asked, starting to get irritated. “Maybe you should be eating better and exercising more yourself.”

  “You need strength to take care of the baby,” he said, trying to provoke me. And it worked. Despite my plan to be a source of positivity and light, it was hard to break old habits.

  “I am taking care of her. In fact, I’m the only one of us taking care of her,” I said. Our back-and-forth continued, and in a pattern we had repeated too many times now, the silly tiff blew up into a full-fledged fight.

  At some point, I walked out to put Kasey down in her baby seat. I didn’t want her—even at two months old—to hear us fighting.

  “Let’s end this argument,” Warren said when I came back into the room.

  “Fine,” I said, giving positivity my first conscious try.

  “Fine?” He looked at me incredulously. He often asked to “end it” when our fights got out of control, and I never agreed. I usually had at least one more thin
g I had to say. But not this time.

  “Yes. Let’s end it,” I said.

  “That’s it?” he asked, sounding surprised—or disappointed.

  “Yup. You want to end it, let’s end it.”

  Warren went off to work, and instead of calling him as I often did after we fought to cry, complain, or attack, I just put the disagreement aside and went about my day. I had a babysitter coming for part of the morning, which meant I had two hours free, just for me. I wanted to use the time to feel good, not waste it in anger and arguments.

  Warren must have been stunned not to hear from me because as I roamed through Target, contentedly shopping, my cell phone rang.

  “I want to talk about this morning,” Warren said.

  “What about it?” I asked, pushing my cart through the housewares aisle and wondering what we might need.

  “Why did you end the fight?” he asked.

  “You said you wanted to end it, so we did.”

  “But you never agree. So what happened this time?”

  I sighed, slightly exasperated. “Warren, you must be joking. I’m in Target. Are you really calling me here to ask why we’re not fighting?”

  “I just want to know what was different about this morning,” he said.

  “I have two hours without the baby. Some rare free time for myself. I’m trying to use it productively. Fighting isn’t productive.”

  I could hear his incredulity through the phone. “So that’s it?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “And I love you.”

  The truth is that I couldn’t really explain what had made today different. Maybe just thinking about positive energy had given me some. Letting go of anger felt a lot better than holding on to it.

  Sometimes our marriage felt like a seesaw—when one of us was up, the other was down. We never seemed to be in the same place at the same time. And maybe that was good. When I hit bottom, Warren had stayed strong to pull me off the ground. But now that I seemed tougher and more determined, Warren could give in to his own disquiet.