Signs of Life

by Natalie Taylor

  Today Deedee comes over around six in the evening. When she gets here, Kai is sleeping. I hand him to her and head to the grocery store. When I get back, they are still sitting on the couch together. He is still sleeping. A few minutes after I walk in the door, he wakes up and starts to cry. Deedee immediately stands up, starts rocking him in a severe and abrupt manner, and says the following in a loud, alarmed tone. Keep in mind she is yelling this over a screaming baby.

  “Oh! Oh! Well what’s wrong? You were just so quiet and content the whole time your mom was gone! You were just as quiet as a mouse and now this! What’s wrong? You didn’t make a sound while Mom was gone, you were just perfect with Grandma and now this! What’s wrong?” Kai keeps crying. She realizes that heaving him up and down is not going to do the trick. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, not that, not that, don’t want that.” She puts him over her shoulder and starts patting him on the back. “Do you have gas? Is that what you have? A little gas? A little gas? Is that it? You were just so quiet and then all of the sudden, and then all of the sudden? You must have gas. Nat! Nat! He’s got a little gas! He must have a little gas because he was just fine and then this. So it must be gas! It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just a little gas. You must not be feeling well. Does your tummy hurt? Your tummy must hurt. Oh, does that tummy hurt!” After patting him and shushing him, he is still screaming. She then sits back down on the couch, now even more worried and anxious than before. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, are you wet? You must be wet, you must be a little wet. Are you wet? Is that why you’re so mad?” She undoes his onesie and checks his diaper. “Oh look! Oh, you’re wet! You’re wet! Well, that must be why you are so mad, you have a wet diaper! That’s it, just a wet diaper!” She picks him up and marches frantically to the nursery. She undoes his diaper; he is still screaming. His face is bright red. He is clearly very upset about something. Deedee picks up a plastic butterfly from his toy bin. The butterfly makes a clicking noise when its wings move. She puts the butterfly right over his face and starts clicking it incessantly. So now, Kai is screaming, Deedee is yelling over the scream, and the butterfly sounds like a New Year’s Eve noisemaker. She shouts, “Watch this while I change you! Watch this while I change you! Do you like the butterfly? Do you like the butterfly!” Obviously, it is not working. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, you don’t like the butterfly, okay, okay, okay, let’s get this wet diaper off. Let’s get this wet diaper off.” She changes him. He is still screaming.

  I calmly walk into the kitchen to get a pacifier. I walk into the room, because I feel bad for both of them, and I put my arms out. I hold Kai in my arms and I move toward the window where it’s a little cooler. I hold his pacifier in his mouth and gently start rocking him a little. A few minutes later he is quiet. Eventually, he falls asleep. Deedee stares at me through this entire process. I don’t say a word. Finally, she says, “A mother’s touch. He always knows his mother’s touch. He knows. He just knows. You can’t do anything when he knows his mother’s touch. What can you do when he wants his mother’s touch?”

  She sits down and wipes the sweat off her forehead.

  This moment makes me smile. It doesn’t make me bitter or angry or frustrated or any of those negative things that I typically associate with having in-laws and no husband. She is trying so hard, she’s trying hard to make Kai happy and to make me happy, and I hardly ever give her credit for that. I like this feeling of watching a situation unfold with my mother-in-law and son and not being completely saddened by it. I have no control over my in-laws, but I do have control over how I react to things or the degree to which I allow something to get to me. Lately I feel like I’ve been doing a better job at this. I need to keep track of these moments somehow, maybe start drawing tally marks on my wall just to remind myself that darkness doesn’t get to be here all the time.

  The next day, Saturday, I have to go to a bridal shower. I need to leave by 2:30 p.m. It is now 12:27. I feed Kai lunch, clean up the kitchen, load the dishwasher, wash the bottles, pick up the living room, fold my laundry, start Kai’s laundry, make my bed, have a lengthy conversation with Deedee about Michelle Arman’s shower. (The one she attended yesterday afternoon. I say I don’t know who Michelle Arman is. She says, “Yes you do, from Elk Lake, J.R. and Tina’s daughter, Amanda’s little sister.” I have never met any of these people, but I say, “Oh right, Michelle, I remember!”) In addition she gives me a long dissertation about why Ashley will be in a bad mood today. I make and eat a plate of frozen lasagna. At 1:57 I say to Kai, “We have thirty-three minutes to make and clean up broccoli white bean soup [made with fresh broccoli] so we have dinner ready by the time I get back.” I am chopping the broccoli when Kai decides that he will not partake in cooking and would rather take a nap. I immediately turn the burner off and take a fifteen-minute pause to gracefully and calmly rock Kai to sleep. I then return to the kitchen (now with seventeen minutes left) to finish cooking the broccoli white bean soup and clean up the kitchen again. Keep in mind, all of these tasks (except for the last seventeen minutes, of course) are performed with a five-and-a-half-month-old baby, a rowdy five-and-a-half-month-old baby, in need of constant entertainment. Right now the blender is soaking in the sink, but other than that, the kitchen, along with the rest of the house, is spotless. Snap. (Oh, did I mention the broccoli white bean soup has 11 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, and 94 percent of your daily vitamin C?)

  Before I go to my room to get dressed, I call John Steinbeck. A stuffy secretary answers the phone.

  “Mr. Steinbeck’s office.”

  “Is Mr. Steinbeck available?”

  “One moment, please. I will transfer your call.” I know it will take her a while to transfer the call. It’s 1939 on her end. In the meantime, I cue up my iPod. He picks up the line.

  “This is Mr. Steinbeck.” I put the phone down next to the iPod. I push play. M. C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” comes out of the speakers. I saunter back to my room to get dressed before Kai wakes up.

  These small successes are somehow adding up somewhere. I’m making a small pile of positive moments. I’m slowly filling an empty bucket.

  • • •

  Kai and I clean up breakfast while we listen to the Valentine’s Day episode of This American Life. As usual I’m a little behind. The opening prologue is about falling in love. Ira (we’re on a first-name basis) and some psychologist talk about “the bolt of lightning,” which all of us know about. When you see someone or meet someone and you are instantly in love. The psychologist says that this feeling of infatuation can last as long as eighteen months and then the love changes into something different. Ira explains that this week’s This American Life will be bringing us stories about love after the bolt of lightning. I am so relieved. I knew I could count on This American Life to bring me a more realistic view of love.

  The first act of the show is a short story called “Letter to the Lady of the House,” by Richard Bausch. The story opens with a man writing a letter to his wife, Marie, after they’ve had an argument. They are both older, well into their seventies, and he explains that the relationship has been deteriorating for some time; after thirty years they have “grown tired” of each other. He says he almost left her that night, but instead he decided to drink whiskey and write her a letter.

  He tells Marie a story about his cousin Louise and her husband Charlie, about how when the narrator was younger, he had the opportunity to visit Louise and Charlie shortly after the two were married. It was in 1933, and even in the midst of a trying time the narrator reflects that despite their financial uncertainty and the growing doom that was sweeping over the nation, Louise and Charlie were happy simply to have each other.

  The narrator then goes on to say that over time things changed. Charlie ended up suffering from a nearly fatal accident at work, and Louise became his permanent caretaker. Louise later confessed to the narrator that she had grown to hate her husband. She said that ev
ery time he was near her, she was “overwhelmed with irritation, suffocation, and anxiety.” She tried to understand how marriage could do such a thing. How undying, powerful love can turn into such contempt.

  The narrator then writes to Marie that he brings up the story because upon Louise’s confession he thought it was still worth it because she and Charlie had a moment where they did adore each other. He had witnessed it. There was a time when they felt true love. He remembers hearing Louise’s confession and thinking, It must have been worth it for such loveliness. He goes on to tell his wife that even though they do not get along anymore, even though their marriage is “slowly eroding,” they have had wonderful times together, and if he had to go back knowing how he feels about his marriage now, he would still do it all over again, without a second thought. “All of it. Even the sorrow.” “Letter to the Lady of the House” is one of the most beautiful, well-written stories I have ever heard in my entire life.

  At the conclusion of the story, I cry. So many of his words are in my brain. Even though I have had the hardest eight months of my life, even though I am living a life that is tragic and difficult, I would have done it all again to be with Josh for as long as I was. I’ve never written that or announced that or even thought about it until I heard this man’s story, but I am relieved that his story prompts this conclusion. Even knowing how much pain I am in at this moment, I would not trade my days with Josh for anything in the entire world.

  Part of my reaction is also because I will never get the chance to bicker with my seventy-year-old husband. I will never get to see Josh grow old and embrace old age. I will never get to know if my marriage would have lasted. But at the same time, my marriage is permanently frozen in time. I have the most wonderful memories with my husband and we were not together long enough to run into the mundaneness that most married couples encounter. We were still in the bolt of lightning phase when Josh died, which is the most tragic fact at times but also one that makes me feel better.

  In so many ways, Josh reminds me of Finny from John Knowles’s book A Separate Peace. I teach A Separate Peace in ninth-grade English. Finny, the idealistic teenager, dies at the end of the book. The first time I read A Separate Peace, before I even knew how it ended, I said to Mathews, “Doesn’t Finny remind you of Josh?” Finny is good at every sport. There is nothing he can’t play. When he walks, he walks with this athletic, confident swagger. He loves life, he jokes with his teachers, and he wears pink shirts. Josh wore pink shirts. Maggie’s dad even commented that Josh looked just like a Finny in one of the pictures of him at the funeral home, standing there with his handsome smile in his pink shirt. Leper Lepellier, another character, remarks, “Everything must evolve or else it will perish.” That’s why Finny dies. That is why Piggy from Lord of the Flies dies. These characters did not evolve. I’m not saying Josh died because he couldn’t evolve. I don’t think there was any sense in Josh’s death. But sometimes I think that he could never live to see our marriage deteriorate into bickering. He could never live to see his friends’ marriages deteriorate into bickering. He got to experience love in its purest, most wonderful form. Not everyone gets to do that.

  I wish I could say something more profound. I wish I could articulate this paradox of feeling tremendous sadness about my husband’s death at twenty-seven and at the exact same moment being thankful for the years we were together. But I can’t. I can’t think of the words, so I’m going to steal them from “Letter to the Lady of the House.” All I can say is that I too am grateful for such loveliness.

  april

  When the weather’s nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie’s grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don’t enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn’t too bad when the sun was out, but twice—twice—we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That’s what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner—everybody except Allie. I couldn’t stand it. I know it’s only his body and all that’s in the cemetery, and his soul’s in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn’t stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn’t there.

  —HOLDEN CAULFIELD IN J. D. SALINGER, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

  every day when I drive to work, I pass the cemetery where Josh’s ashes were placed. I haven’t been back to the cemetery since we placed the ashes there last June. I have no intention of visiting. I hardly ever get sad as I drive by. I am immune to cemeteries, or so I thought.

  But this morning I am driving to work and it’s pouring rain (it’s April in Michigan, which means it rains a lot) and Holden Caulfield just sort of walks into my brain, completely uninvited. Holden Caulfield is the narrator in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. We teach it in tenth-grade English. I taught it my first year at Berkley. Holden, a teenager, lost his little brother, Allie, to leukemia. I haven’t read The Catcher in the Rye in two years, but this one part comes right back to me when I see that cemetery in the midst of the gray April rain. There is a part where he talks about when it rains on Allie’s stomach.

  Now that it’s raining so often I think about Holden all the time. Annoyingly enough, I start to look at the cemetery more and more on my way to work. I have this weird feeling when I think about the rain scene in that book. I feel relieved that Josh’s remains were cremated so I never have to worry about the rain on his stomach.

  I’ve never liked associating Josh with a cemetery. I’m not exactly sure what I think about the afterlife, but I’m certain he’s not sitting in some plot at the corner of Twelve Mile Road and Woodward Avenue across the street from Uncle Andy’s Pizza. Instead I tell myself his spirit is off racing around doing a million different things. I picture him snowboarding down the Andes Mountains or juggling a soccer ball barefoot on the beaches of Fiji. Every now and then he goes back to the cemetery to check in on people—other souls who feel like they don’t know where to go so they stay in the cemetery. He meets some older man named Al who passed away from old age and really misses his grandchildren. First, Josh sits and listens and goes through Al’s pictures with him. Then Josh says, “Hey Al, have you ever been fly-fishing in Mongolia?” Josh lends Al one of his Arc’teryx raincoats and his best Orvis rod and they’re off.

  This is how I think most of the time, but now that Holden Caulfield is in my head, I think differently. Usually I feel like my husband is too good to be cooped up in a lousy cemetery. Lousy—that’s a total Holden Caulfield word. Maybe Josh is there. Maybe the bodies do turn gray and the ashes turn to dust and it is as sad and useless as I fear it to be.

  I sign up for a grief group through my church. I shouldn’t say I signed up. Technically, I was invited to join. For some reason saying I signed up makes me sound like I’m desperate. I may be desperate, but for some reason I need you to know I was invited. I got a letter in the mail explaining that the group was for people who had lost a spouse. We would meet every Wednesday in the month of April for an hour and a half. I only work Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, so I can make it, but I have a baby, so I can’t make it.

  I don’t know what motivates me to call the church, but I do. For some reason, I want to go to this group. I don’t see Dr. G. very often anymore and this seems like a place I can go to sort of check on myself. My single moms’ group is great for the camaraderie of raising a child alone, but I need a place to share my grief again. I think it will be good for me to talk about things out loud instead of just mulling stuff over in my head. I want to talk to other amputees and hear about how their lives are with one arm. Fortunately, a volunteer from the church agrees to come in and entertain Kai in the toddler room while I attend the group.

  The group meets
in a large room. There are four couches in a square shape and one armchair. I am the last one to arrive. I am shocked that everyone is so prompt. As I sit down and look around, I see why. It’s a bit of an older crowd. This is a huge mistake, I think to myself.

  There are six people besides me. Two female ministers lead the group, Lynne and Mary. Lynne and Mary both have short hair and soft voices. Lynne holds a clipboard on her lap. Mary opens the meeting by welcoming everyone. She explains the schedule, the parameters of the group, its intentions, and so on. She says that we’ll start this week by introducing ourselves and telling our story.

  Jack goes first. He sits in the armchair. He has white hair and large square glasses. He is easily in his seventies, maybe his eighties. He recently lost his wife, Carol; she was eighty years old. She had quite the life, he tells us. She served as a nurse in World War II. She had a bout of hepatitis when she got out, almost died, but made it. She went on to be a mom, then a grandmother. After retiring, she wrote two children’s books. Jack says he has been fine since her death. It was expected. He basically joined the group to give him something to do.

  Debbie looks like she is in her late forties. She is an attractive woman with brown hair and a nicely put together outfit. She holds a tissue tightly in her hand. Her husband worked as a minister and actually consoled a lot of people through grief. He was always concerned about the war in Iraq because he was such a peaceful man. He worried a lot about how many lives were being lost and how many families were feeling the effects of it. She says he would have done anything for anyone. “A true Good Samaritan.”

  The night he died he went off to play basketball, just like he did every Sunday night, and collapsed in the middle of the game. No one did anything. There was a defibrillator machine on site and no one went to get it. No one tried CPR. It took EMS fifteen minutes to get there and by that time his heart had stopped beating completely. Some random guy called her and said her husband had been rushed to the ER. She went, thinking he had broken a bone, and when she got there, they put her in a room by herself. She sat there until the doctor came in, looking very scared, and said, “Tell me about your husband’s health.” She explained he was in excellent shape and exercised on a regular basis. The doctor stuttered something about his heart and then said to her, “And we just couldn’t revive him.” That’s how she found out her husband was dead. She was by herself until one of her friends called her cell phone. Debbie dabs her eyes with her tissue, but she doesn’t cry. Both of Debbie’s kids are in college. Debbie and her husband were looking forward to traveling or just taking it easy. Two days prior to his accident, he had filed for his retirement.