After dinner, I walked her to her car. “Kati, I’m so glad you came out here today,” I said. “It’s so good to see you.”
“Me too,” she said. “It felt really good to be back with the Vaudreys, just like . . . before.”
“You know, honey, it wasn’t just because of Katie that we loved having you around all the time. We love you. You have always been a welcome addition to our family—you’re like a daughter to Scott and me—and I hope it will stay that way, if that’s what you want too . . .”
Her eyes filled. “People have been warning me to stay away from you guys because I will only remind you of Katie and make you feel sad,” she said.
“What? Oh, honey, we feel just the opposite! Yes, it’s true you remind us of Katie—but it brings us joy, not sadness. I love those memories you two shared. We absolutely want you around!”
“Well, this is such a relief!” she said, laughing and wiping tears from her eyes. “A much better prospect for our future! I love you guys, too, and I absolutely want to stay part of your life.”
“Phew!” I said. “Glad we straightened that out!” I shuddered to think that this misunderstanding could have resulted in us losing our relationship with this remarkable young woman who had been such a great friend to our daughter.
“Can I tell you about that last night I was with Katie?” she asked.
“Yes, please.”
“It was late that last Thursday night, two days before her accident, and she had invited me over to your house to catch up. I hesitated because I had stuff to do early the next morning, but as usual, the girl talked me into coming, and I found myself making the thirty-minute drive out to your house. She had found a Starbucks that stayed open till eleven, and we got in my car and drove there. We ordered coffee and talked until closing. Then we drove back to your house and parked out front and kept talking. We dove into the dreams she’d been having. She told me she planned to go to counseling for them. We planned our upcoming year at APU, and we talked about where each of us needed to get better at life. I vented about all the confusing angles of living at home and how I want to connect more with my family. She told me—and I don’t even remember how we got on this topic—that she would certainly—of course—definitely be an organ donor. She tried to talk me into sleeping over for the thousandth time in the BCB [Katie’s bed, or the “Big Comfy Bed,” as her friends called it]. But I had plans early the next morning, so I held firm. We hugged goodnight. It was after one o’clock when I headed home, my heart full after such rich conversation.
“Then on Friday she invited me over to play Catan with you guys, but I didn’t feel like playing Catan, so I stayed home.” Her voice grew soft. “And this decision allowed me to keep Thursday—the holiness of it—the way it was. It is unfair to the rest of Katie’s friends how perfect of a last visit I got with her. And I am forever grateful.”
We hugged. “Thank you so much for sharing that night with me,” I said. “I’m so glad we talked—and I’m so glad we get to keep you!”
As she drove away that night, I was struck again by the many blessings that had come to our family by way of our middle daughter—of which Kati Harkin was one of the best.
The hot-pink petunias Katie had planted in my planters in May went crazy that summer, overflowing their pots, reminding me, “Katie was here!” But petunias are warm-weather flowers. They live their short lives with robust abandon, blooming day after day no matter the heat. But they cannot take the cold. They will die at the first frost.
As the autumn days grew shorter and the temperatures at night began to drop, I felt a looming dread. I knew the first Chicago freeze would soon hit, severing this vibrant, living connection to my daughter.
About mid-October, it happened. A heavy overnight rain turned to sleet. The temperature dropped. When I stepped outside the next morning to go to work, Katie’s petunias hung encased in a heavy blanket of ice, dead.
I drove to work as usual, but I couldn’t get the image of those ice-covered flowers out of my mind. I kept getting weepy at my desk. That afternoon Scott stopped by to say hi, and I told him about the flowers.
“Just call it a day, honey,” he said. “Go home. It’ll be the first day of work you’ve missed because of grief. Just go home and take a nap.”
I took his advice. I went home and lay down, but I couldn’t sleep.
Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. Two neighbor ladies stood outside—Lois from across the street and another woman I’d never met.
“Hello, September,” Lois said. “This is Kim. She lives three doors down.”
The new woman hugged me. “We heard about Katie’s death, and we are so sorry for your loss,” she said. “We want to do something for your family. My husband and I own a landscape company, and we want to plant a tree in your yard, something living to remember her by, season after season.”
Unbelievable! “What an incredible gift,” I said. “Thank you!”
“I don’t know why I didn’t come over sooner,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to stop by for months.”
“Actually, today was the perfect day,” I said, explaining about the frozen petunias. “‘Something living to remember her by . . .’ God’s timing, I’d say!” We hugged again and I thanked them both.
Three days later, a tall, stately red maple was planted along our drive. And today, as the seasons come and go, we are reminded not only of the daughter we lost but also of a tenderhearted God who shows His love through unsuspecting neighbors on frosty autumn afternoons.
The holidays were approaching—the hardest of the Awful Firsts. How would we acknowledge Katie’s absence? Is it okay to cry on a happy holiday? Is it okay to have fun when your daughter is gone? Scott and I set about planning how to navigate the conflicting styles of grief that were inevitable in a large family. At Thanksgiving, I hoped for a “moment,” some sort of shared remembrance of Katie with the kids. Scott was worried I would put expectations on them, prying uninvited into their still-raw spaces of grief. Some were more reticent to share than others. Or as Scott put it, “Some want to avoid, while others want a grief-o-rama.” (Any guesses which camp I fell into?)
Matt, Andrea, Bethany, and my parents flew into town for Thanksgiving weekend, which gave the house a nice fullness. The kids stepped up to take on the roles Katie had filled—namely table-setting artist and pie chef. We distracted ourselves with cooking and chatting and playing games, and then—when the turkey came out of the oven—with carving, gravy making, and the last-minute scurry of getting everything onto the table. When at last we sat down to our Thanksgiving dinner and joined hands for prayer, it hit. She was gone.
In the stillness, the gaping hole of Katie’s absence could no longer be ignored. We sat in the tension between being thankful—for so much—and being horrified that this was really our life.
Scott prayed. By “amen,” we were all wiping our eyes.
We got through dinner, and toward the end of the meal, Scott set down his fork.
“We’re all acutely feeling Katie’s absence at our table—and the pain this brings. But we’re also deeply grateful for so many things. Let’s go around the table twice this year: First, each of us can give a brief check-in with how we’re doing with our Katie stuff. And then let’s go around again and share what we are most thankful for this year.”
Yes! Scott had set the stage for each of us to open up to whatever degree we wanted.
For the next hour, we took turns reflecting on the pain of this year, and also on its beauty. We were rookies at this, but each of us was practicing the balance of holding our sorrow in one hand while embracing our joy in the other.
Christmas was the biggie of the Awful Firsts. For us, it’s always been a holiday rich in Vaudrey traditions—buying gifts and wrapping them prankishly, making fudge, baking pecan-pie squares, watching A Christmas Story, and taking an annual family photo in front of our freshly cut Christmas tree. Our celebration always culminated in a soulful Christmas Eve servic
e at church and a laughter-filled Christmas morning.
As the holiday approached, I didn’t try to fight the tide of grief swelling inside. I invited it in and kept low expectations for myself and our family. To shore up for each day, I stole a few moments in the mornings beneath the amber glow of the Christmas tree lights. Coffee cup in hand and Johnny Mathis singing “White Christmas” in the background, I basked in the stillness of dawn, taking small sips of my grief and extending myself toward God as best I could. My prayer was two words: Carry me.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, I had tackled decorating the Christmas tree, which for our family is a 3-D scrapbook of family memories. The kids and I had made ornaments together every year throughout their childhoods, and each of them always hung their own ornaments when we decorated the tree. The college kids would hang theirs once they arrived home after finals.
But Katie wasn’t coming home. I lifted her ornaments one by one from their boxes and hung them on our tree—her tiny hazelnut mouse in his walnut-shell bed, her macaroni angel, the wooden sled with the cheery Christmas penguin she had painted just last year, and the brass Christmas tree with the photo of Katie as a baby. Finally, I hung her sterling silver cradle, a gift from my parents on her very first Christmas. The emptiness of that cradle was illuminated by the warm glow of the tree lights, and I could just make out the inscription: “Katie, 2-4-1989.”
I hung her red stocking—with its wooly Christmas lamb on the front and its white fake-fur cuff along the top—in its usual place between Bethany’s stocking with the fluffy bunny and Sam’s stocking with the Christmas moose. On Christmas morning, it would hang empty when all the other stockings were packed with goodies. That wouldn’t do.
I devised a plan. With money we would normally have spent on Katie’s Christmas gifts, I went online and purchased gifts from World Vision’s Christmas catalog for kids in developing countries. I selected items Katie might have chosen—a bicycle for a girl in India to ride safely to school, a wheelchair for a child afflicted by polio in Mexico, warm clothing for children in Mongolia, school tuition for a girl in Africa, a small flock of chickens to provide eggs for a family in South America.
And for Katie’s uncle Greg, a department store gift card to buy bingo prizes for his group home. She would definitely approve.
Six gifts in all. I made certificates with descriptions of each gift, rolled them up into scrolls, and planned to sneak them into Katie’s stocking early Christmas morning.
What to do about the annual family photo in front of the Christmas tree? We’d taken this photo every year since Matt was a baby, and now twenty-four framed pictures lined our hallway. Would it be wrong to take the photo without Katie? Should we do something different this year? Should we skip the photo altogether? Scott and I consulted the kids.
“We’re still a family,” Matt said. “Take the photo. Plus Katie would not want to be the one responsible for wrecking the tradition.”
We took the photo, our lips smiling but our eyes unable to mask the pain. We did our best—with limited success—not to let our sorrow have the final say.
On Christmas morning before the kids awoke, Scott and I followed our usual routine: We started a pot of coffee, built a fire in the fireplace, made our traditional Christmas pastry—a peach flip—and set out a Santa gift for each kid, a tradition we’d kept going long past the age when they knew about Santa. I filled the stockings and slipped the six scrolls into Katie’s, which gave it a pleasing plumpness and left me feeling clever and satisfied.
Then, as we do every year, Scott took the stockings down from the mantel and placed them in front of each Santa gift—our way of marking which gift belonged to which person. But of course there was no Santa gift for Katie. Her stocking now hung all alone on the mantel, like the kid chosen last in PE or the person standing alone at the dance.
Neither Scott nor I had prepared for this sight. We stood there staring, and then we turned to each other, and we hugged and we cried.
“I just hate this,” he said at last. “I will never not hate it.”
“Yep. This is not how life should be.”
“Ever.”
“Ever.”
The kids were still asleep, so we took some time to be sad and to collect ourselves. I sat down to write. Scott sat in his rocking chair, eyes closed, rocking, rocking. Then he got his camera out of the hall closet and snapped a poignant photo of Katie’s stocking hanging there, all alone.
Our early morning moments for grieving worked. When the kids awoke, Scott and I were in good shape, and we all enjoyed a tender but beautiful Christmas morning.
After the kids had unpacked their stockings, I took Katie’s down from the mantel and handed out the scrolls inside. Each person opened theirs and read aloud what had been given on their sister’s behalf. It wasn’t a heavy ceremony, though a bit awkward to be sure. Still the kids went along with my stocking plan, and it gave us a moment to acknowledge our girl and give voice to her absence—but in a positive way that didn’t tank our morning. Another step forward.
And in Seattle that morning, in his nursing home room, my brother, Greg, opened the gift card given in Katie’s honor.
“You should have seen the proud look on his face,” my mom told me later on the phone. “He stopped everything and wheeled his way down the hall to find the social director and hand him the card. ‘Buy some good Bingo prizes with this,’ he had said. ‘It’s from my niece. She really loved me.’”
One bright spot from that first Christmas deserves some backstory. Tember was still having a rough time sleeping at night—even in Katie’s big bed. The piles of spent Kleenex on her nightstand each morning had continued unabated. Bethany, too, had been struggling to sleep since Katie’s death. Her roommates had gotten her a kitten to help her sleep at night—and it had worked.
Tember had wanted a cat for years. But Scott is not a cat person. (“If a cat pees in the house, we’ll have to burn the whole house down to get rid of the smell.”) Never one to miss an opportunity, Tember saw a glimmer of hope in her long-standing quest for a cat. She began dropping strategic hints. She’d bat her big brown eyes at her dad and say, “If only I had a cat like Bethany’s to keep me company in bed at night . . .”
Well, shoot. Scott knew he was sunk. He loved Tember more than he hated cats. So on Christmas morning, ol’ softy Santa gave Tember a tiny grey kitten of her very own—“to comfort you at night,” he smirked.
Lo and behold, it worked. Felipé “Phil” the cat fell in love with Tember from day one, and he snuggled up around her neck in bed each night. The Kleenex piles disappeared. For Tember and Bethany, a cat turned out to be just the trick.
38
A FEW WEEKS INTO THE NEW YEAR, I dreamed about Katie. My dreams of her were growing increasingly rare, so I was thankful for the scene that unfolded in my mind as I slept.
Katie showed up at my bedroom door. She’d been granted a day pass from heaven to spend with me! And she wanted to spend it working on a piece of interactive art together—a black wooden board with a pillow built into the middle of it.
“The pillow is for people to punch, to help them express painful emotions,” she explained. “It’s not good to leave your feelings bottled up, Mom.”
As we sat together on my bedroom floor stuffing the pillow, large clumps of my hair began falling out and landing on my lap.
I felt embarrassed. “It’s just from the grief,” I said.
“It’s all right, Mom,” she said. “We can use it for the pillow! Your hair will help soften the blow for people.” She scooped up the clumps of my hair and pushed them into the pillow, and I was glad she thought they could be helpful.
“What is it like in heaven?” I asked. “Can you see us down here?”
“Yes,” she said. “There is a panel, sort of like a trapdoor, that we can pull open and look down into if we want to.” She said this hesitantly, as though she didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but why would anyone from heaven want to look do
wn?
Then I awoke. How sweet it was to be “with” Katie! The dream had been so vivid that I gave my hair a tug to be sure it was just a dream, but nothing fell out.
Katie’s twentieth birthday rolled around a couple of weeks later, on February 4—another Awful First I had been dreading. I had planned some events to remember our girl: a grief date with Kaye for lunch and then Katie’s favorite birthday meal (tater tot casserole) for dinner with the kids, and afterward Katie’s birthday dessert of choice, my homemade chocolate cheesecake.
But all through the day, I kept thinking about the dream. Is there really a trapdoor in heaven? Is she peeking down at me? What is her heavenly birthday like? Does it involve chocolate cheesecake? How I wished I could open that door and peer into heaven just to see her one more time.
A month or so after my lost hair/trapdoor dream, I discovered something that really triggered my “weird meter.” When I put my hair into a ponytail one morning, the elastic holder easily looped three times around my hair. Normally, I can barely loop it twice because my hair is thick. Bizarre. I pulled out the ponytail holder, parted my hair on the opposite side, and looked in the mirror. Lo and behold, hundreds of new baby hairs were sticking out all over my head, each about a half-inch long, creating a halo effect, like a baby chick. Unbelievable! I’ve actually lost a ton of hair! Not in clumps like in the dream, but a little at a time, undetected. And now it was starting to grow back. The grief had taken its toll—in ways I hadn’t even noticed.
Grief took a physical toll in other ways as well. Early on, Scott and I both lost a lot of weight. (It eventually came back, of course!) We also developed deep indentations in our thumbnails. I’d heard that this could result from severe trauma. It took months for these indentations to grow out—and then wave after wave of new indentations would follow as the aftershocks of our trauma continued. We both bear ridges on our thumbnails to this day.
Colors of Goodbye Page 22