Saving Graces (17 page)

“The notion of these projects is to do what Wade might have done had he been given a full lifetime. To inspire those people he might have inspired, to help those people to whom he might have given his hand, and to encourage those people who needed encouragement. Those here who knew Wade know that he would have inspired, and supported, and encouraged in his adult life, for he did those things in his young life. He knew that it was not always easy to do the right thing—but that in the end, the right thing served you best.

“We are blessed, John and I. It does not seem in our circumstances that we should be able to say that, but we do. We have been blessed by the presence among us of wonderful children. Some of them sit with us now, and we dearly love them, and some of them—wonderful children all—do not. Wade. Ben. Jackson. Betsy. This is not a moment to mourn their absence—although we each mourn, of course—it is a moment to celebrate their collective presence among us. They have not gone as long as we feel their presence in our lives, as long as we each listen for their voices within us, as long as we touch the things they touched, love the friends they loved, and, as we do here, do what they might have done.”

When I was through, Cate spoke, a single simple sentence, dedicating, on behalf of her brother, the bench and the Learning Lab. Sarah Bolton, a stunning friend of Wade’s with a voice even more lovely, came to the microphone for the closing. Without accompaniment, Sarah sang “Hymn of Promise” from the Methodist Hymnal, her clear young voice filling the tent and the front lawn. And while she did, Cate took her place behind her. Then other children rose from their seats and slowly worked their way to the stage, joining Cate, noiselessly forming a semicircle behind Sarah. Brad, who had been Wade’s friend so long he had his own toothbrush at our house. Cate’s best friend, Settle, who had been raised with Wade as the big brother in her life. The boys, Todd and Matt and Michael and John, Chas and Will, Tyler, Ryan, all of them. And the girls, Addie and Erin and Katherine, Maggie and Julia, all the others. Solemn friends, the young people whose handprints were in the wall of the comet. As the last verse rang across the long lawn—

In our end is our beginning; in our time, infinity;

In our doubt there is believing; in our life, eternity,

In our death, a resurrection; at the last, a victory,

Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see

all seventy children—healthy and strong—stood together. And my father wept inconsolably. I had tried to prepare him for what would happen, but as he did not see these children often, their promising faces were too much for him.

After the grown-ups dispersed to the Lab and the wall and back to work, the students from the high school were let out early. We had soda and ice cream treats for them and a popular local band playing, Sarah singing again. We gave out fifteen hundred treats, and they had to go for more. It was hard, and it was splendid.

When we came home, Cate had left a note about her whereabouts and her journal, which she allowed us to read. Her journal was more pained this time than I remembered it being. Her brother’s comfort with himself, which was so hard-won, seemed to her to be a part of his being, and she longed for it: the wide respect and popularity, the easy way he seemed to take it all in stride. I had to remind her of weekends he sat with us, when his friends, all older, all drivers, had forgotten to pick him up or assumed someone else would for a party or a concert, remind her of his disappointments and frustrations. I hadn’t any doubt of the end of Cate’s story, but it was natural that she should.

At church that Sunday, I missed him terribly. As soon as I sat down in our pew I knew I could not do it. I left and walked the blocks around the church until midway through the service, when John came and found me and we went on to the cemetery. Another family, whose pretty daughter Emily had died on the same stretch of road as Wade the previous spring break, were fixing a tire that had split when it caught a brick on the narrow roads in Oakwood. They had been up to visit Wade’s grave. My parents were at the grave, which was good, except that I did not want them to see my despair. We stayed on after they left. A woman came to put flowers at the grave of her mother and her brother, but she could not find them; she had forgotten where they were buried. It broke my heart for them, and it reminded me of our blessings. I could go home.

More happens in a cemetery than you might imagine. A man, maybe my age, but worn—as I was becoming—came one day wearing his work clothes and carrying his small dog in his arms. He came to visit his father’s grave in a section of the cemetery near Wade. He came more often than anyone else around us. Since I had already been to the cemetery earlier that day, I had left John alone at Wade’s grave to pray, and I walked, picking up some of the sticks that remained from a storm. The only tree in the man’s section of the cemetery had fallen in that storm, and it had fallen across the grave of his father. His pain and helplessness were overwhelming. I made a small bouquet from the flowers at Wade’s grave and took them to him. He usually brought something for the grave, but that day he was empty in every way. Sometimes we pressed on as if we were not weakened, and then we saw ourselves in someone else.

CHAPTER 8

RALEIGH, BREATHING AGAIN

A
FTER THE
WELL opened, John spent more time at his office. He agreed to represent a young girl who had been critically injured as the result of a defective pool drain. It was good for him, I knew, and the girl and her family surely needed him. We had been used to giving him up to the families he represented for however long he was needed. It helped that Cate and I had the WELL to absorb us. Cate would come over after school—the WELL is across the street from Broughton—to tutor older students in math, which, I have to say, they took pretty well considering she was a tiny freshman. These students who came to the WELL were strong; they just wanted a chance, and they grabbed the opportunity there. We set up hundreds of e-mail accounts in those first weeks. They started in right away making their own web pages. Seventy-five to a hundred students would come each day to use twenty-two computers, and Matt and I learned their names and what classes they were taking. We would meet their parents, and sometimes we stood in as their parents.
No, you can’t pull up websites with crude lyrics.
Or
Try this search engine for that assignment on rare diseases.
Crystal wrote well but got no encouragement, so I agreed to read her work and help her improve. I bothered her all fall until she applied to college. No one else was going to do it. And it wasn’t just Crystal. It was the Jeremiahs and Michaels and Pearls and Lakias. Just as the boys on the soccer teams John had coached had become mine, and just as the boys and the girls who gathered at our house had become mine, these children became mine, too. And since I’d started substitute-teaching, the circle of children grew larger and larger.

But they weren’t really our children, I had to remind myself. John and I sat one rainy day and wondered if this was what life would be now. A house once full of life was still quiet. A child who should be comforted was comforting us. And a child who should be applying to college was in the ground. Other people’s children were coming and going from our lives. We were investing ourselves in them, and that gave us pleasure. But where, we wondered, were we going to find real joy? We couldn’t pin the responsibility for creating joy entirely on Cate, although she’d certainly have tried to meet the challenge.

We asked ourselves, what gives us joy? Well, that was easy. Children gave us joy. Should we have more children? That would be wonderful, but I was forty-six. Could we? We went to my doctor, Shep, who sent us to a specialist, who after a round of tests said it would be tough, but we could try. We only needed the tiniest hope, and we had untapped hope to spare. So we decided, after we got Cate’s blessing, to do just that. Cate couldn’t have been more supportive, and we set out with an optimism we thought we might never feel again.

But the process was slow. Tests, appointments, procedures, failures. It was not until the week of Wade’s eighteenth birthday that the shots and medications and good fortune were translated into a pregnancy. I speak less of this not because it was unimportant. This pregnancy and the one to follow were two of the most important events of my life. I speak less of it because I did what others who wanted children did: I spent hours online looking at the faces of children who might be adopted. I read the online postings, almost as full of pain as anything on ASG, of women who had tried fertility treatments and failed to get pregnant. I heard the grief of women who had gotten pregnant and were unable to carry the pregnancy to term. It was heartbreaking. When John was in the Senate, a London newspaper contacted me. Did I want to do a piece for them showing them how older women can get pregnant? No, I said. The chances are so slim, and false hope is a bitter poison. People will have unreasonable hope, as I did, without me. But I could not encourage it, for I knew the cost of it when there was not a baby at the end of this difficult path. The paper should tell its readers to get pregnant younger, I said.

About this time, there was an interesting post on ASG by a sixteen-year-old girl who was born after the death of her brother. Her parents told her very little about Stevie; they did not want to talk about him. Did she even really lose a brother? she wondered.
Dee
, I wrote,
You did in fact lose a brother, and for that I am very sorry. And, from your description, you lost a chance to know him and also a chance to know of him. That is no one’s fault, for the treatment of grief has changed. None of us can speak for your parents; none of us can say whether talking of Stevie with them now will bring them disproportionate pain or will bring them solace that you are interested in knowing your brother as well as you can. I can tell you that one of the things that naturally occurs to a parent who has lost a child is the desire to rebuild their family and reintroduce joy into their lives. No one who has lost a child really believes they can replace the child they buried. A child can bring joy, but the grief is always there. You said that you felt unhappy with yourself, but that is not fair. You are responsible for the joy and you are not responsible for the grief. The fact that you felt this burden, however, is edifying to those here. You have probably helped some parents who intend to have additional children think about issues that they might have neglected, and for that, I thank you.
Those thanks were personal. Dee provoked me to read about something called replacement child syndrome, when an after-born child feels responsible for replacing the dead child. John and I decided that one way to let a child know that he or she was not replacing a lost child—and no one could—was to have more than one child. If we could.

While we were adjusting to our lives without Wade and praying for more children, we clung, too, to the things we had always done together. Cate and I went to Quail Ridge, our bookstore. I was looking at the new Southern fiction, and she was looking for books from her freshman list to read. She came back to me holding Mark Helprin’s
A Winter’s Tale
. Mark Helprin was no older than thirty-three when he wrote “The Schreuderspitze,” a short story of grief and redemption that only an old man should have been able to write. “It’s long,” she said, “but my teacher said it was good. Can I get it?” I asked if she was sure she wasn’t supposed to get Shakespeare’s
A Winter’s Tale
. She said she had read a little of this while standing there, and this is what she wanted. When we got home, she did start instead with
Death of a Salesman,
considerably more manageable in size and bearing the endorsement of Wade. I got the Helprin first. Mark Helprin had also written the foreword to my friend Gordon Livingston’s book,
Only Spring,
a book and a foreword to which I turned often. “The cruelties of the world are often associated with sin, but this cruelty was visited solely by nature, which, by nature, is itself without sin,” Helprin wrote of Lucas’ death. “What kind of God would allow the world He created to act so coldly upon the most innocent and vulnerable…? The answer is a God who, in ravishing you, eviscerates your faith and trust in him while at the same time leaving you with nothing but the hope that He exists and will in another world extend to you the missing pieces in His puzzle of mercy.” Yes, I would read the Helprin first.

The words of Mark Helprin touched precisely the weakness in my online family—our differing views of a God who did not prevent the deaths of our children. Those differences, our religious differences, tore at ASG and at grief-parents, at the wretched souls seeking solace from one another, and for a time there was no solace there.

Most of the groups’ active participants were Christian, as I am, but among our number there were differences of belief and hope concerning whether God would or could protect our children, concerning so many things about their eternal condition. And there were also plenty of active participants, and presumably some silent ones too, who weren’t Christian, some who were surely hurt by well-meaning mourners who celebrated—who needed desperately to celebrate—that their family’s particular religious practices were their children’s passport to heaven. From any distance—and understand we had none—it is easy to understand how difficult this issue would be. Christians, non-Christians, doubters, all hurting just as much, all wanting just as much, all hoping just as much for a reunion somehow, did not want to hear that their child might not have followed the right set of rules. Some people, people of sensitivity and integrity, spoke their hearts and unwittingly stabbed other parents at the same time. Others fought back, and what had been a place of solace was now a place of war. People about whom I cared were in palpable pain. It was too cruel, for absolutely everyone.

My God was a benevolent and humble God, I knew that, and I couldn’t accept, still cannot accept, that He would deny glory to those children who lived by his creed but had not learned His name. I had grown up watching the grace and forgiveness of the dance teacher Toshiko, and I knew my God would smile on her. It was fine to share Biblical passages and spiritual experiences. We all wished we had even more of those to share. We just had to be careful not to hurt others by suggesting that the children outside this experience were also outside God’s grace.

As the debate went on, the community we desperately needed was becoming a battlefield, and in spite of ourselves it was falling apart, with no sense of the promise of support, tomorrow or the next day or next year, from a precious family that we knew understood something of our grief and our love. When Debbi turned out to be a paid Catholic bereavement counselor and was asked to quit posting sectarian requirements for the eternal life of our children, it was the small rock that started an ugly avalanche. There were many defections of people who could not endure the pain of this kind of debate. Not wishing to add our frustration to the messy public forum, Gordon and I wrote privately to each other every night about the plain constant shape of our grief:
The day was bad enough,
I wrote him after following a particularly contentious exchange,
and the weather good enough to justify two trips to the cemetery today. That will be my measure for a crummy day now: a two-cemetery-visit day.

I was desperate. I needed this place. I wrote to everyone involved in the discussion privately, and I spent whole days and nights typing letter after letter to each of the participants. To Cheryl, a Jehovah’s Witness, I wrote,
You do not need to defend your faith to me. I respect your faith. Am I remembering right that your son Keith loved Isaiah? I have been thinking about the God of Isaiah today, thinking that God demanded loyalty and promised blessings in return. And thinking also what that God promised for those who did not follow him. It is harsh, Cheryl, you know it is. How cruel it would be to quote some portions of Isaiah to those of different faiths, to those who pray daily for the eternal protection of the souls of their children, but do not pray to the God in Isaiah?
I thanked Debbie, who wrote privately but never posted, for her support, and I stated the problem bluntly,
I was simply asking that someone think about the Jewish man before they order pork for everyone’s plate
. To Lois,
The tremendous strength of your own faith is not a measure; I wish it were. The vulnerability of our community is the measure. Yet here, of all places, you say we are on our own.

I hope you will not unsubscribe,
I wrote to Maribeth.
Even in our worst moments, we are strong because we are connected. Next week and next month we will need each other. Not just you needing us, we will need you. When someone leaves, I do not think of just the adult leaving, I think also of the memory of the child leaving our midst. I would miss Gregory
. To Donna I wrote,
I think you and I have some special gifts. Our boys, who both died in automobile accidents in which the passenger walked away, left wonderful writings defining their views of life, their hopes and expectations. You have shared Charlie’s wonderful poem “The Future,” I remember. I remember thinking how like Wade’s prose writings they were. Having these gifts does not make us better, but it makes us stronger, more able to weather the worst of times. And then there are people like Marge, whose son killed himself at sixteen. Her frailty is written in the few posts she makes. It is almost as if she cannot get the words to the page. It is easier for us. It is impossible, I know, but it is easier. And those gifts, like the gift of faith, place on us a special burden, to be gentle with those without the gifts, without the tributes, without the strength of unbridled faith
.

This story would not be accurate if it seemed I had been roundly persuasive and that all was well when I spoke. It was not. But in the end, the differences were bridged, the community salvaged. Publicly, with great relief, I wrote,
Our children lived for minutes, or for decades, or not at all on this earth. We stand here, a group of parents who dearly loved their children, loved them so much that we need support from places like this just to move through the days that we must now live without them. A thousand foolish things separate us, yet we somehow manage to ignore those things that might have, in the halcyon days before, have kept us from one another. And now we stand together. We are like the web of a spider, each strand fragile and vulnerable, yet somehow strengthened by our connections to one another. The whole is still unwieldy, and it must still be treated gently. I asked only for tenderness. I ask for it still.

This is not about whether we should use a grave blanket or how often we visit the cemetery: this is about the eternal condition, about the souls of our children. It is cruel to assume that we can state our views on this of all issues and if it strikes at the core of another parent, if it hurts them in their consideration of their chances for heavenly reunion, well, they always have the delete key.

Among us are the weak. Weak and weary, hoping and desperate. Trodden by death and despair, they need acceptance on the most important spiritual issues from you who have offered your hands and your ears when they worried over less consequential things. For me, this discussion is not about religion. It is about grace. It is about looking at my son’s face, at the blush in his cheek and the few freckles that remained. It is reading his words and finding, I hope, the charity, humility, loyalty, and love that might be the requisites of any heaven. I close no doors that might lead him to eternal protection, that might lead me one day to his side. And I honestly believe that if we are not enlightened by the death of our children to the frailty of man, we will never be enlightened. And if we do not respond with compassion to that frailty, we have failed a very easy test
.