Hannah's Gift (14 page)

SOME OF THE PARENTS WERE ALREADY STANDING. SHAKING
with anticipation, I squeezed Claude’s hand. I had been looking forward to this evening for a long time.

“Hannah Catherine Martell,” the woman announced into the microphone. The sound of Hannah’s name bounced off the beamed ceiling of the church. Claude and I stood proudly, tears streaming down our cheeks, while another candle was lit on the altar. Every pair of eyes, even those in front, had turned to acknowledge us. These people didn’t have to know us personally to know where we had been; it was their story, too.

This was a different kind of graduation ceremony, a memorial service for bereaved parents hosted by a group called the Compassionate Friends. Claude and I had begun to attend their weekly meetings and, for the first time since Hannah’s death, found a place where we weren’t strange or special for having lost a child, where people weren’t afraid of our tears or anxious for us to “move on.” The weekly gatherings were also a way for Claude and me to give time
to each other while keeping Hannah’s memory alive. Sitting in the car afterward, no kids in sight, talking about our feelings, it was almost as if we were dating again.

In the past year, I had also begun to connect with other bereaved mothers whose children had died of cancer. One of the social workers at the hospital clinic where Hannah had been treated suggested that my experience might be able to help others. I had agreed to try. Now, fifteen of us gathered regularly in each other’s home. It was the only play group I knew of where the kids played while the mothers cried.

I no longer felt special or singled out for having lost a child. Where I had once believed that suffering was something that only happened to other people, I now knew that it was a part of me that had been there all along. I had learned to have compassion for myself, and now, recognizing suffering in others, I could have the same compassion for them.

As the roll call of names came to an end, a sanctuary full of family and friends began to clap, filling the space with a swell of love and respect for the parents who continued to stand. I couldn’t remember ever having felt more deeply honored. As everyone filed out and gathered for coffee in the adjoining meeting room, a few of us stood in a circle, talking about our kids.

I was in the middle of a story about Hannah when one of the other mothers broke in.

“Oh, my God,” she said.
“You’re the mother of the little girl with the red shoes!”

Her name was Barbara, she told us, and her daughter Erin was two years old when she died. She had been treated in the same hospital as Hannah, in the pediatric intensive care unit where Hannah had recovered from her surgeries.

“The residents and nurses there were so great,” Barbara said. “They treated Erin like she was a person in her own right. They always introduced themselves when they came into the room. And they paid attention to details that might seem silly to some people, but meant a lot to Erin—like letting her choose her own Band-Aids.”

Claude and I smiled at each other and squeezed each other’s hands.

Barbara continued. “The nurses told me that Erin reminded them of another little girl. They still thought about her all the time, they said, because she had changed the way they did a lot of things. They couldn’t tell me her name for privacy reasons, but they always referred to her as ‘the little girl with the red shoes.’”

Claude and I began to cry again, not from a place of sadness, but from a profound sense of pride and relief. It seemed that Hannah’s life was making a difference in the world, in the hearts and lives of people she loved, and in many others she never knew.

COMPASSION DOES NOT FEEL
sorry in the face of suffering; it knows that all suffering is its own. When we recognize this connection between us and everyone else, we know that we belong to each other; we do not suffer alone.

from needing to know
to letting go

Start walking …
your legs will get heavy and tired …
Then comes the moment
,
of feeling the wings you’ve grown
,
lifting …

—Rumi

“DO YOU EVER WONDER,’WHAT’S THE POINT?’” LAURAJANE
asked.

She was standing with her back to our living room window, the afternoon sun pouring in behind her. She could have been mistaken for a red-haloed angel except she looked too exasperated to be holy. The thing I had come to love about Laurajane more than anything else was the way she dived right in.

“I mean, really,” she continued, “what is God
thinking
? There
must
be a point. I can’t believe He’d go to all this trouble for nothing.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. These days, feeling stronger and more determined than ever to make something of myself and my life, I was ready to tackle the two questions that had wrapped themselves around my heart and refused to let go: Why had Hannah died? Where was she now? I felt impatient, as if I knew both too much and too little at once. While I was sure that Hannah had died for a reason, I didn’t know what it was. I also sensed that
she was somewhere; I just didn’t know where. It seemed that, no matter what I did, this was always where I ended up. I felt certain that if I could answer these two questions, everything else in my life would finally fall into place.

“I’m tired of wondering about the same things over and over again,” I said. “Why don’t we do something to try to figure it out?”

A week later, Laurajane and I met at my house with a few other women for the first gathering of what we eventually began to call our “Friday Morning Spiritual Group.” Together, we began a search for answers. Laurajane, who had for years been exploring other religious traditions as a way to deepen her understanding, served as our informal leader. At her suggestion, we started reading and discussing books on topics ranging from dream interpretation to psychic phenomena to the inherent wisdom in other religions. Where I once had met with friends to drink coffee and gossip, I was now drinking coffee and talking about reincarnation.

I felt as if I were a tiny bird, pecking from the inside of my shell, just about to hatch. I felt drastically different on the inside, while the exterior of my life still looked much the same as it had before Hannah got sick. After all I had been through, I felt frustrated that I had almost nothing to show for it. I longed for my outer life to be more passionate and spontaneous, to reflect the growing sense of freedom and boldness I was feeling inside. But I was also hesitant to make too many changes too soon. A sense of stability had only recently returned to my life; there was
something that felt comfortable and safe about the way things had always been.

Although I was hesitant to step fully into a new life, the books I was reading and the conversations I was having were opening something in me. I was learning a language for experiences I had lived through that had seemed, until now, beyond words. The part of me that had always felt like an outsider, different from most people I knew, felt less strange to me now. While I still felt a deep relationship to my Christian faith, I now felt free to experiment with other ways to express and experience my devotion. I began to keep a journal of my dreams, light candles, and burn incense, things I had done instinctively as a teenager but had abandoned years ago, as if I had to “grow up.”

When I shared my enthusiasm with Claude, he wasn’t impressed.

“You and those friends of yours are just a bunch of crazy weirdos,” he said. He was only half-joking.

Although a part of me believed he might be right, I wasn’t about to give up the search. Like a parched desert pilgrim who had caught the scent of a leafy oasis in the distance, there was no stopping me now.

THE CHRISTMAS PARTY AT CLAUDE’S OFFICE WAS FINALLY
winding down. Everyone had enjoyed cookies, punch, and square dancing in the cafeteria, and waited in a long line to visit with Mrs. Claus and Santa. It was late; many families had already gone home. The hall was empty as we walked to the elevator. I was carrying Maddy, while Will chased Margaret in circles around Claude and me.

From the other end of the hall, a woman and a young girl began walking toward us. As they got closer, Claude recognized the woman as one of his coworkers. We stopped to introduce ourselves and then all of us, including the woman and her daughter, stepped into the elevator. As the doors slid shut, the woman glanced around.

“Aren’t you missing one?” she asked.

Claude looked at Will, Margaret, and Madelaine, and then at me.

“No,” he said, turning to the woman. “What do you mean?”

“That’s curious,” the woman said, her brows knitted,
“I’m
sure
when I first saw you in the hallway, you had four children with you, not three.”

Claude and I looked at each other, both wondering the same thing. I wanted more than anything to believe this was a visitation from Hannah, but I was afraid to look at it too closely. Even a breath of doubt might disturb such a fragile connection.

I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY AND PARKED. LEAVING THE
girls buckled into their car seats so they couldn’t wander off, I began to unload the flats of impatiens and pansies from the back of the car. It was spring. The same buttonwood trees that had unfurled their nubs of green while Hannah was alive were doing it again. Now it was Margaret and Madelaine, instead of Hannah, who loved to visit the pond, feed the ducks, and wave to the giant magnolia tree. I felt as if I were ascending a spiral staircase where the view kept returning, but each time my own perspective had changed.

As I finished unloading the flowers, I brushed the soil off my hands and then noticed that someone had hung a large plastic bag around the handle of our front door. Probably some hand-me-down clothes for the girls, I thought. I picked the bag up and peeked inside. I was wrong. Inside was a note and what looked like a rolled-up piece of wool. I read the note first.

Dear Mrs. Martell
,

This rug is for you. It is from your daughter Hannah. Please do not think I am strange. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Although you and I have never met, I heard about Hannah when one of my daughters attended Meadow Flower preschool. A few years ago, I learned the art of rug weaving, and decided to make a rug for each of my four girls. When I first started this rug, I had believed it was for one of them. It wasn’t long before I realized I was wrong. Every moment I spent with it, I found myself thinking about Hannah. In some way I cannot explain, I knew Hannah wanted me to weave this rug for you as a message from her. In the past year, as the two of us worked on this rug together, Hannah has changed the way I feel about life after death. I am no longer afraid. I feel blessed. Hannah loves you very much. Thank you for being her mother.

Love
,

Joann

As I unrolled the rug, I felt my wondering mind unravel. The background of the rug was the exact, unusual shade of teal as the carpet in our house. There, in the middle of it, a barefoot, blond-haired angel hung suspended in a starry sky. In her hands she clasped a large, pink rose—Rose, the name Hannah had chosen for Margaret’s middle name.

Standing in the driveway, I began to cry. This, I knew in my heart,
was
a message from Hannah, and I loved that she had dropped it into the middle of a “nothing special” day.

MARGARET HAD TURNED THREE OVER THE SUMMER. SHE
and Madelaine, like two rhesus monkeys, were always together; everywhere Margaret went, Madelaine went, too. These days they were asking a lot of questions about their big sister, Hannah. It was time, I decided, to show them the box of Hannah’s special things. I had just pulled it out from under the bed when the phone rang.

“Wait a second, girls. I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Okay, Mommy,” they replied.

I should have known better. I raced downstairs and picked up the phone. It was the mother of one of the boys from Will’s basketball team, calling with directions to this evening’s game. I wrote the directions down, and then asked her about the end-of-season pizza party we were planning for the team. As the two of us talked, I lost track of time. Suddenly I remembered that Margaret and Madelaine were waiting for me. I had just said good-bye when I heard the girls coming down the stairs.

“Don’t I look beautiful, Mommy?” Maddy said.

“And me too, Mommy,” Margaret chimed in.

I hung up the phone and turned.

Maddy was wearing Hannah’s pink-flowered robe j’s. The nightgown was so long on her that she had to hike it up around her waist to keep from tripping. She stuck one foot out toward me.

“Look, Mommy, they fit just perfect,” she said. Sure enough, Hannah’s red shoes were on her feet.

“I helped Maddy buckle them,” Margaret said proudly.

I turned to Margaret. I had been so distracted by Maddy’s getup that I hadn’t noticed hers. Every inch of exposed skin, from her head to her toes, was covered with Hannah’s Band-Aid collection. The two of them stood there, grinning at me.

I hadn’t realized until now that I had been holding my breath since Hannah died; afraid that my memories of her would vanish if I wasn’t able to preserve the magic in these special things. Now that the spell had been broken, I knew there was a lot more life in those Band-Aids, robe j’s, and red shoes yet to be lived. I had to let Hannah’s memories out of the box, and I had to let myself out, too. Looking at Margaret and Madelaine beaming at me, I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or burst into tears.

“You two look gorgeous,” I said finally, kneeling and opening my arms. As the two of them fell giggling into my lap, I added, “And Hannah would think so, too.”