The Life You Longed For (29 page)

“So why—”

“The mortality rates are awful.”

“But isn't it better—”

She met his eyes. “No,” she said gently. “No.”

The sense of hearing is the last sense to go, and so they read him his moon books.
“Look! There's a new moon tonight,” said Bobby. “I wonder what they did with the old one,” said Betty.
There was an ocean in Grace's chest, her breath like waves pulling her under.
“Well, it just so happens that my birthday's tomorrow,” said Bear. “Well, it just so happens that
my birthday's tomorrow, said Moon.
She thought as she had so often these past three years of how there are no muscles to help push air from lungs, how breathing out is simply a relaxing of the muscles used to breathe in. A matter of letting go.

 

“Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”

 

Kate was in the hallway, wearing jeans and a Villanova sweatshirt, her eyes swollen, skin blotchy from crying. As soon as Grace saw her, she faltered, turning back to Stephen and burying her face into his shoulder. “Make her go,” she whispered. Her throat hurt from the hours of talking and reading to Jack nonstop. At one point, someone had brought coffee but she had forgotten it until it was too cold.

“I'm not here for Child Protective Services.” Kate started crying. “I am so so sorry.”

“This isn't the time,” Stephen said.

“I know, I just…I never meant…”

Grace started crying and Stephen's arm tightened across her shoulders. “Please go,” she sobbed into his shoulder, though she was talking to Kate. “If you have a heart at all—at
all
, don't make us have to look at
you
or feel sorry for
you
.”

“Grace,” Stephen said.

“No!” Grace wailed. “Hasn't she done enough? Hasn't she—” She couldn't finish.

She heard Kate walking away, the squeak of tennis shoes over the tile floor, the ping of the elevator. When she looked up, the hallway was empty. In the playroom, early morning sunlight was just starting to fall over the bright yellow playhouse with the plastic flowers in the window box and the bright red shutters.

 

A child's funeral. An oxymoron.
Child's. Funeral.
And yet ten million children in the world die every year. Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger, three-fourths of them children. In the United States alone, 145,000 children and teens die each year. A baby dies every nineteen minutes. One out of every 139 children never makes it until his or her first birthday.

Still.

A child's funeral.

Stephen wore his Eeyore tie, and they served Jack's favorite foods: grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off and graham crackers and grapes. Chocolate milk. J candy. They played Elton John's “Rocket Man,” and Frank Sinatra's “Fly Me to the Moon.” It seemed the entire cardiology floor was there. Rebecca and Colin, Anju, the nurses, even one of the cleaning women. Kempley flew in from Charlotte. Jenn and Diane and all three boys were there. Bennett. Jeff and Mandy, Grace's grandfather. The security guard from the hospital. The judge.

P
erhaps grief enters our lives like a virus, most deadly when first encountered. After a while we become resistant; we adapt. And perhaps too, as it was with the mitochondria, we find that this grief has become a part of who we are.

“We die with the dying,” the poet T. S. Eliot wrote. A part of us is forever lost. Amputated. So we will learn to write with our left hand instead of our right, to move from a wheelchair to a car without the use of our legs. We will learn to laugh again, though the sound will be altered, and we will learn to love again, though never in the same way.

When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, a stratospheric cloud of sulfur dioxide circled the Earth within three weeks, leaving in its wake unusually brilliant sunsets and clouds the color of fire. Grief is like this, mythic and terrible, sorrow undoing the world so completely that even the clouds on the opposite ends of the Earth are altered.

No wonder incidents of agoraphobia arise after bereavements. Nothing holds us, nothing remains—not even the familiar sky—to anchor us to the lives we once led. The emptiness is unbearable, and every open space reminds us of what is gone. Is this also why we invent new ways to describe our grief, as if qualifying it is the same as containing it? Accumulated grief and disenfranchised grief, anticipatory grief, delayed grief, chronic grief. Still, there aren't enough words. Every grief as singular as a snowflake, no two ever exactly alike.

And what of all those other terms—still unknown—that exist the way the future does, there and not there all at once? The English language has over 450,000 commonly used words, but none can describe even the most basic of things: A woman who has lost a spouse is a widow, a child who has lost her parents is an orphan. But what do we call a mother who has lost her child?

What do we call a child who has lost her sibling?

The death of a child, wrote Dostoyevsky, is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God.

T
he opened suitcase lay across the bed like a metal heart. Stephen pulled a stack of T-shirts from the dresser drawer and set them into it. He had changed into a loose pair of khakies and a UMDF T-shirt. It had been his first day back to work. Only five days since…
Five
days. They felt like years.

Grace sat on the bed, a chalky taste in her mouth. She'd just finished tucking Erin in, rubbing her back for what seemed like hours while she cried herself to sleep, missing Jack. “I don't know how to even begin to understand this,” Grace said to Stephen.

Stephen moved into the bathroom and began putting vitamin bottles into his shaving kit. “I don't want to pretend that things will be okay, and that eventually, we'll all get back to normal, and then wham! two or three months down the road, just when the kids are starting to heal a little, hit them with my leaving.” He came to stand in the doorway. She thought of how, in earthquakes, this was the supposedly the safest place to be. “It just seems cruel, Grace.”

“And this isn't?”

“I don't mean it to be.”

She looked at him incredulously. “We just…five days ago…we just…” She couldn't say it, couldn't get the words out. “Erin is terrified that they're going to take her, you know. The last thing she needs is for you to disappear now too.”

“I won't disappear,” he said gently. “And I know how this looks, and I'm sure it probably seems like the cruelest thing I could do right now, but I honestly—” His voice quavered, and he came and sat next to her on the bed. “I don't know how else to do it, Grace.” His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot with tiredness and grief.

“Why do you have to do it at all?”

At first, he didn't answer. They sat, side by side, hands useless in their laps. And then, “I can't forgive you,” he said.

She nodded. She wanted to feel shocked or devastated, but she had known that he would never forgive her, and if she had let herself think about it, she might have known he would move out too—that he would have to.

“I'll come for dinner a couple of times a week, if that's okay,” he said. “And I'll take the kids on weekends. I found a place near the office. It's already furnished.” His words landed soundlessly around her. The way snow falls, she thought, accumulating into something treacherous before you even realize it. “I know they say you shouldn't make any major decisions for a while, but this isn't rash, Grace.”

“When did you do this then? Start looking?”

“The day after court.”

She stared at him. “And you don't think your feelings will change? Eventually?”

He held her eyes for a long moment, then shook his head. “I don't think so.”

She nodded. Again. When she spoke, her voice was flat, something squashed deep inside her. “They say that eighty-five percent of couples whose children die don't make it.” She inhaled slowly. “I wanted us to be different, Stephen, I thought we would be.”

His face hardened. So did his voice. “We both know I'm not leaving because of Jack.”

She looked at him bleakly. “It's all connected, though.”

“Is it?” he asked. “I mean, what percentage of couples stay together after an affair?”

Plenty
, she wanted to tell him.
People forgive one another
. But she didn't answer, just stared helplessly past the open bathroom door. She felt as she had the night Jack died—knowing exactly what was happening and yet not really believing it either. “I know I screwed up,” she said finally, looking at Stephen. “And I will never
ever
stop being sorry for what I did to you or to—to—”
To Jack
, she wanted to say, but her voice only squeaked. She turned away from him, not wanting him to see her cry, not wanting to make it worse.

“Oh, Grace.” His voice softened. “This isn't a punishment.”

She turned back to look at him. “Why can't you just give me a chance then?” Her throat ached. “Please, Stephen. I'll go to counseling or we could both go, or—or,
I'll
leave, I'll stay at my mom's and—”

He put his hand on her knee. “Don't, baby.”

G
race sat with Erin at the round children's table in the fourth-grade science classroom where they met twice a week for sibling grief counseling. The room was filled with the sound of the kids coloring, their mothers or fathers or both sitting beside them, knees pressed to their chests in the small wooden chairs. The parents all had the same dark circles beneath their eyes, and they had all either lost weight—their clothes loose and billowy—or they'd gained weight, everything tight and constricting. Like people who lived in extreme environments of heat or cold—the Eskimos whose compact bodies were designed to conserve warmth; the Tutsi of Africa whose elongated body-type released heat to the surface more quickly—their physical shape was evidence of the struggle to adapt in a world that might otherwise have been intolerable.

Rarely did the parents look at one another. They couldn't. It was all they could do to acknowledge their children's grief, which was why they came here every Monday and Thursday afternoon. They'd all lost a child in the past year. It seemed impossible that any of them would recover. And so, like immigrant parents newly arrived in a foreign land, they placed their hopes in the children who survived.

Erin was drawing a picture of Jack racing a red car through the clouds. Below him, in a field full of flowers, she drew herself, huge blue tears dripping from her eyes.

Grace felt lost.

Leanne, the children's grief expert, squatted next to Erin, one arm around the back of her chair. “You still get really sad when you think about Jack, don't you?.”

Erin nodded without looking up from her picture.

“Jack looks pretty happy, though.” Leanne pointed to the red car. “I really like—” but before she could finish, Erin grabbed her blue crayon and scribbled over Jack.

“Erin, honey—” Grace leaned forward, then stopped herself. Their children had to go through this, Leanne had told the parents. The parents couldn't protect them. It went against everything that Grace believed being a mother was.

“What's wrong, Erin?” Leanne asked. “I thought that was a pretty neat picture.”

“Don't say that!” Erin yelled.

“Hey, there,” Grace said. She combed Erin's dark tangled hair with her fingers.

After a minute, Leanne said, “You're pretty mad at Jack, huh?”

Erin shrugged. “It's just a stupid picture. I didn't like it.”

“Why not?” Leanne asked.

Erin squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head, tears slipping down her face. Grace tucked a strand of her daughter's hair behind her ear. “Try to talk to Leanne, honey-bunny,” she said.

“I just want to go home,” Erin cried.

“I know, lovey, but we need to talk to Leanne first, so she can help us.”

Erin started sobbing, choking on her words. “He shouldn't be happy,” she said. “I don't know why I made him like that.” She laid her head on the table and sobbed.

“But I love that you made Jack happy,” Grace said. “I bet he probably is.”

“No!” Erin wailed, lifting her head. “He's not. He can't be.”

“Why not, Erin?” Leanne asked gently.

“If I—if I died I—I wouldn't be happy. I would miss my brother.” The word was a small frozen twig; it broke in half beneath the weight of Erin's grief.

Grace pulled her daughter against her. “Just because Jack is happy doesn't mean he doesn't miss us.” Her own voice faltered. “Of course he does.”

But she stared at Leanne helplessly. She understood how Erin felt. How was it possible for someone we love to be happy without us?

She held her child tight against her chest and kissed the back of her head and told her, “Jack thought you were the best sister in the world. Remember how he used to cheer when he saw you coming out of school?”

Erin nodded, sniffling.

Neither adult said anything for a minute. And then, “How about we go over to the anger circle?” Leanne asked. The anger circle was a space at the front of the room where the kids went to express their anger. They ripped up old magazines and crumpled the pages into tight little balls. They drew mad faces on balloons, then popped them. Sometimes they did mad dances or Leanne lined them up and let them take turns making their angriest noises into a tape recorder, which they then played back to their parents. Before long, the kids were laughing, and impossibly, miraculously, so were their parents.

All the kids were in the anger circle now, lying on the carpet. Leanne sat on the floor with the kids, her silver-threaded Indian-print skirt gathered around her legs. “Who can tell me about some of the people or things we get angry at?” she asked.

“I got mad at the doctors,” Josh whispered.

“Yeah, me too,” Todd said.

“Was it fair to get mad at them?” Leanne asked.

Todd shook his head no.

“But isn't it the doctor's job to make us better when we're sick?” She glanced at Erin, who was staring at her shoes, then at Josh. “What do you think, bud?”

“My mom said the doctors tried their best,” he whispered.

“That's what my mom said,” Seth explained. “But sometimes even when the doctors try as hard at they can, the person still dies. That's what happened to my sister.”

“That's right,” Leanne said. She glanced at the other kids. “What about the rest of you guys?” she said. “Did anyone else get mad?”

“I was mad at the driver who hit my brother,” Julie said.

“I was mad at God.”

“You can't get mad at God!” Todd yelled.

“Well, I did!” Megan shouted. “I'm still mad!”

“I was mad at cancer,” another little girl interrupted. They were going around the circle now, taking turns.

“I was mad at my mom for not making my sister better.” Tears streamed down McKensie's face.

Grace watched Erin, wondering what she would say. She was picking at the rubber sole of her shoe, her hair hanging over her face so that Grace couldn't see her. “I didn't get mad at anybody,” she said quietly when it was her turn. She looked up. “But my dad got really angry at my mom and said that it was her fault my brother died and he didn't love her anymore. That's why he moved out.”