Signs of Life (3 page)

Susie Daniels, one of my fellow teachers, lost her brother in a car accident when she was sixteen. She called and asked if she could take me to breakfast.
Thank God!
Maybe she can give me some answers. Or I want to call Dennis, another co-worker. He lost his sister in a plane crash.
He’ll
tell me how this works. But nobody does. They just shake their heads quietly and try not to cry.

I sit at a table at Caribou Coffee with Battersby and Jen. Battersby lost her mom in a car accident three years ago. She’s been giving me practical advice in all of these very strange situations.
Right before the first viewing, she told me that she was giving me an invisible stack of STFU cards, which stands for “shut the fuck up.” So when people come up to me and say, “How
are
you doing?” or “This was God’s plan” or “Why wasn’t he wearing a helmet?” I could politely smile and hand them an STFU card.

We sit and drink Caribou Coolers. We used to come here all the time in high school. During college when we would come home for breaks, we’d meet here and gossip and catch up on one another’s lives. Now they ask me questions about how I’m doing, but in a way that doesn’t merit an STFU card. Finally I ask Battersby, “What is this like? How long does this take?” She shrugs.

“Nat. It’s going to be different for you. You know I can’t tell you any of that.”

“How long was it before you started to feel okay again?” I ask her. I can tell she is hesitant to give me an answer.

“It took three years until the first thing I
didn’t
think about when I opened my eyes in the morning was, ‘My mom died.’ ”

Fuck
, I think to myself. Three years. Three years.

I sit on a very nice leather couch in Dr. Guriza’s office. She is a slender woman with short black hair. She sits in a big chair across from me.

“Okay, Natalie. Why don’t you start by just telling me what happened.”

I start to talk. I get through the first three words, and then my voice cracks and I start to cry.

“My husband, Josh.” I put my head in my hands and cry for a while, maybe a few minutes. I try to talk again, but my voice is very high. I tell her the story. Again, tears and snot everywhere.

•  •  •

It has been three weeks since Josh’s accident. I go see Dr. G. again.

“Tell me about Josh. What kind of person was he?”

“He was amazing. He was a real man. You know how there are not a lot of real men these days? He was a real man.” I go babbling on through my tears, telling her about how he would do everything—garden, cook, clean, play sports with me, read, joke, bike. He didn’t want anything more out of life than to be a dad. He was the best at everything.

“I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Ask anyone who knew him. He was the
best
at
every
thing.” I go on to tell her about his bike trip across the country to raise money for a charity, about how he had such good balance, about how he was a great driver, surfer, soccer player—anything. I cry. I cry and cry. She tells me that it is really important for me to go through these memories. I nod.
But sometimes
, I think to myself,
nothing is harder than remembering
. “You’re going to cherish these memories. You may not now, but you will.” I nod again, but I don’t really believe her.

I get home. Hales asks, “How was she?”

I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

“Do you think she can help you?”

I shrug again. “What do you mean,
help
? No, I don’t think she is going to help me. I think I’m just going to go and ball my eyes out and every now and then she’ll say something nice and insightful and that’ll be it.”

Hales nods.

In the state of Michigan there is a long-standing tradition of traveling to the northern part of the state when the weather gets warm. People camp, stay in cottages, rent condos or hotel rooms. Most northern lakeside cities are lined with lodging for out-of-towners. Most read
NO VACANCY
from Memorial Day weekend
until after Labor Day. We call it “going up north.” For my entire life, I have been going to Ludington, Michigan, for summer vacations. Ludington is a small town on the coast of Lake Michigan. My grandmother’s grandfather built our cottage in 1899. My grandparents don’t come up anymore, but this is the place we would see them every summer growing up. It is the most beautiful place on the planet in the summertime. It beats the Mediterranean, the beaches of Oahu, the coast of Saint-Tropez. Not that I’ve ever been to any of those places, but I don’t need to when I have Lake Michigan. And it’s not just the scenery that makes it great. We never turn on the television. We go for walks and talk to neighbors. The same people come up every summer; families have known one another for generations. We slow down and eat dinner after the sun goes down so it doesn’t interfere with lying on the beach. When I think about life up north I have an image of my mother shucking corn on the steps of the cottage in her bathing suit.

Josh’s family follows this tradition also. Josh’s grandparents, Margaret and Ray, bought a small cottage on Elk Lake shortly after Josh was born. Elk Lake is a small inland lake, about eight miles long and two miles across. It is obviously not as large as Lake Michigan, but Elk Lake and its neighbor, Torch Lake, have this brilliant color to them. On sunny days in the middle of summer, you’d swear you were looking at the Caribbean. Once Josh and I were married, we split our Fourth of July time between Ludington and Elk Lake. We’d stay in Ludington to see the fireworks and then leave the next morning for Elk Lake. Deedee, Chris, and Ashley are at Elk Lake for the Fourth of July, but there’s no way I can go there. I don’t know if I can ever go there again. Everything in that cottage is Josh.

As we have done every single year since I can remember, my family and I head to Ludington for the Fourth of July this year.
Everyone goes. My mom and dad, Adam, Moo and Dubs, Hales, and me. Adam and I drive up together. Adam’s fiancée, Ellie, is in Los Angeles working out wedding plans. Adam and Ellie are getting married in two weeks in Aspen, Colorado.

The dogs, Louise and Bug, are with a dog trainer in another part of northern Michigan. The month before Josh’s accident, he and I had arranged for them to be sent to a trainer for four weeks. Josh had taken both dogs up north multiple times that spring. He took them fishing and out on walks on the local trails, which they obviously loved. As they had gotten older, keeping them close by was getting more difficult. I was getting increasingly frustrated with them on walks. We found a guy who trains dogs to walk off-leash and it just so happened that they were scheduled to be picked up shortly after Josh’s accident. It was so strange to see them before they left. I felt like they kept looking around me. Their eyes darted around my parents’ house as if to ask, “Where is he?” I am relieved I don’t have to worry about taking them with us or boarding them. I hardly feel equipped to take care of myself, let alone two animals.

The weather up north is beautiful, but even the beach and the water can only do so much. I wake up. I eat. Sometimes we go out for breakfast. I sit around the cottage. I walk. I try to read stupid magazines. I talk to my family about celebrity gossip. I laugh, I smile. But all of the time,
all
of the time, I am sad. Sad has taken up permanent residency in my body. I keep thinking about Richard Wright’s autobiography,
Black Boy
. There is one part where he describes growing up in Memphis and his mother doesn’t have enough money for food. He says, “I would wake to find hunger at my elbow, standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.” That’s me, only it’s not hunger.

We do manage to find things that prove to be therapeutic.
We constantly work on a puzzle. Halfway through the week we complete the Coca-Cola puzzle, which to Hales’s dismay was missing three pieces. After the Coca-Cola puzzle, we buy two new puzzles. The day before we leave we finish Lighthouses of the Great Lakes. Moo misses the inserting of the final piece of the lighthouse puzzle and is sorely disappointed.

We work on crossword puzzles on a daily basis. Every morning someone goes into town to get a
Detroit Free Press
or a
Ludington Daily News
. We work on the crossword, put it aside, and eventually, among the seven of us, it is complete by the end of the day.

Every day, every single day without fail, I go through a stack of pictures of Josh. There are probably twenty-five pictures in the stack. Most of them had been taken in the last two years, and there are several from a few summers ago. I go through the stack slowly. I look at each picture and I cry. I cry and sometimes I get a knot in my stomach because I have memorized the order of the pictures and I don’t want to see certain ones, but I look anyway. Like the one of us dancing at our wedding. We’re looking at each other. Just at each other and people are in the background smiling at us. I hate that picture. I hate it and I love it.

Once we get home from Ludington, we start preparing for Adam’s wedding in Colorado. Maggie, who had not originally planned on going, books a flight. I am happy she is coming with us, but I fear the entire trip.

Josh had been looking forward to this trip for months. He was an avid outdoorsman, and Colorado is the doorway to everything he loved to do, and the most appealing part was that he could be with Chris. The two of them had talked endlessly about fishing outings, where they could go rafting, if Ads would want to rent inflatable kayaks, and then they both laughed about Ads
in an inflatable kayak. They were going to go biking and climbing and hiking. All of us were excited to be together for the week. Now, without Josh, this trip seems torturous.

On the other hand, I want to go because I will be with my family at all points of the day. I don’t have to worry about not sleeping with someone. All meals will be with big crowds of people. I am excited to go. I tell Dr. G. all of this. She listens and then initiates another topic.

“Natalie, let’s talk about your house.”

I sit there silently.

“You need to start going back there.”

I still sit silently. I don’t know what to say. I want to throw up.

“Maybe start with once a week. Then try to go more frequently.”
All right
, I think.
That’s enough, sister. Let’s not push it
.

I hate going to my house. Everything is horrible. The sound the door makes when it opens. The pictures. The food in the fridge. His car in the driveway. The smell. The smell is enough to kill me. But the worst is the nursery. The day before Josh died, the day before Father’s Day, Josh went with my mom and dad and his mom to Pottery Barn Kids. He bought a rug, a crib sheet set, a mobile, and baby towels. He had cleaned out our old office for the new nursery. He was going to redo it while I was in Miami and surprise me when I got home. Now in the old office, the walls are bare. There are wallpaper removal items in the middle of the room and all of the furniture is gone. Everything from Pottery Barn Kids is still in his car. He didn’t even get a chance to take it out of his car. Sometimes I forget that I didn’t just lose Josh, but I also lost my baby’s father. I walk into that empty nursery and something slams into me so hard it almost knocks me to the ground.

It has been over a month since his accident. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been frustrated by my lack of control
over my emotions. I feel like I have Tourette’s syndrome, only instead of swear words it’s hysterical tears. I go to Colorado. I look at the mountains and the trees and I think of Josh.

We are at the rehearsal. I am wearing a hat. I am standing there, silently, literally holding my breath on and off, trying not to burst into tears in the middle of the minister giving us directions. Ads’s friend Michael is doing one of the readings. Michael is from Texas and has a deep, slow voice with a rich southern accent. The minister says, “All right, Michael, go ahead and read your lines.” He starts in on 1 Corinthians. I feel like I am being tortured. It’s not the “love is patient, love is kind” part that gets me. Personally, I think that’s a little cliché. I know that it’s probably not right to call parts of the Bible cliché, but I just lost my husband and I’m six months pregnant so I’m okay with offending sacred texts. I’d tell it to God himself if he’d hear me. I’ve got quite a few offensive things to say to God actually, now that I think about it. But anyway, Michael starts in on the most beautiful and hurtful verses you could possibly pick. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

First, my left leg starts to shake, and then, sure enough, it’s like a drain opens up. Everyone feels awkward. Everyone stares at me. I pull myself together for the last ten minutes, and then once we’re dismissed, I leave immediately. I go for a walk. I find an isolated spot in the woods and cry.

The next day is the wedding at the top of Mount Aspen. It’s beautiful. I make it through the ceremony. Almost. Dubs gets up to speak. At the end of his speech, he says that Josh should be
standing up there with him. In my brain, I thank Dubs for saying this, then instantly curse Dubs for saying this. I wait for an appropriate time to find my mom and I tell her I am leaving. I speed-walk to the gondola, and then, for the
first
time since the accident, I completely
lose
it, lose it.

You know in the movies when people are screaming over a person who has just died, “No, God, why?
Why!
Why Jimmy? Why
now
?” and it’s very dramatic and intense? I always thought that outrageous reactions like that really did happen right after a person dies. But for me, it didn’t. Then, on July 28, 2007, less than an hour after my brother got married, I was alone in a gondola on Ajax Mountain screaming.

“You should be here!
You
should be here! Where the hell are you? You should be
here
!”