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.
Fragility
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.
Dreamweaver
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.
Exhale
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, M
ommy,” 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.”
Given
I COULDN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF IT. STANDING IN FRONT OF Monet’s masterpiece in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized that his bold whips of paint had captured the moment when a vase of sunflowers on a crimson cloth is all you need from God.
The next day I bought a small set of acrylic paints, a few brushes, a stretched canvas, and a how-to book. I spread sheets of newspaper over the dining room table, filled a small bowl with water, dabbed small buttons of paint on a paper plate, and began to mix the colors. I took my time, letting each step lead me.
I started sketching, light gray pencil on white canvas, and watched a sturdy wood cabin settle into a valley of rolling hills, surrounded by a mountain of trees. Gradually a stream emerged, its white water spilling over rocks in the bend, then slowing to deep, cool eddies where it swung past the house. I built a tiny well, complete with an oak dipping bucket, and added a well-worn flower-edged path that led to the cabin’s back door.
I touched the first stroke of paint to the canvas tentatively, then got bolder with each subsequent one. The colors on the tip of the brush swallowed the pencil drawing, leaving me to trust, not my plan, but the vision that had inspired it. The more patience I had with the process, the more it had to teach. I learned that a leaf is a mosaic of light and green, that a roof of cedar shakes offers hairline cracks of gold to the afternoon sun. Even mistakes were transformed on the canvas: When too much blue was accidentally mixed into the yellow, mossy shadows I hadn’t known were there emerged around the rocks in the stream.
As I painted, I felt completely alive, filled with a sense of joy that was not oriented to time or place. I remembered watching Hannah as she set the table for the tea party, and knew that I had finally accepted her invitation to participate fully in my life. It was the quality of presence and attention that I brought to what I was doing, not the activity itself, that made it what it was.
Two months later, I signed my name in the bottom right corner and leaned the canvas against the window above the kitchen sink. I watched Claude through the window, pushing Margaret and Madelaine on the swings. As the girls squealed with delight, soaring in and out of a warm patch of sun, I remembered my fingerpainting afternoon with Hannah. I could almost see the drips of red, blue, yellow, and green winking at me from the grass.
Gratitude
I WAS A BLOCK AWAY FROM THE TRAFFIC LIGHT, AND IT WAS red. I was late and didn’t want to slow down. Just before I lifted my foot off the accelerator, the light turned green.
“Thank you,” I breathed.
These days, tired of trying to figure it all out, I had stopped praying “please, please, please” and had started saying “thank you, thank you, thank you” instead. Beginning with the obvious blessings in my life—my kids, my friends, my health, the effort Claude and I were putting into our marriage—once I started, I found that I couldn’t stop. The more I looked, the more I found. Soon I was thanking everything: trees for their shade, sweaters for their comfort, dogs for their fur.
Gratitude had begun to transform the way I saw and experienced my life. Because of it, I could see that each moment contained something to be thankful for, even if it was simply the gift of another breath. I was reminded of Hannah and the way she had harvested kernels of joy almost everywhere she looked. This practice of being present with what was happening was far more than an exercise in positive thinking; it was a return to the deep stillness she had shared with me.
Within that stillness, I began to realize an even more awesome thing. No single moment stood on its own; each was a combination of all those that came before and all those that would come after. There was a pattern, an intelligence, in the way they were woven together that seemed to suggest that I was not living my life; my life was living me.
Sea Change
I WALKED ALONG THE EDGE OF THE WATER, SAVORING THE sliding crunch under my feet. I loved the ocean, and I felt humbled by its expanse and relentlessness.
I was filled with a sense, both frightening and exhilarating, that everything in my life needed to change. In the years since Hannah’s death, I had wriggled out of the claustrophobic expectations I had once had for myself. Now I longed to have a clearer sense of purpose, to live a life that included more of me.
Although Claude and I were still trying to save our marriage, our love, as real and unstable as shifting sand, was eroding beneath our feet. Both of us were desperately unhappy with the way things were but couldn’t agree on what we needed to do to change them. I still couldn’t imagine myself without Claude; divorce seemed like a faraway option. While I felt desperate to let go of the things in my life that were no longer working, I was terrified of losing everything that still mattered to me.
Sitting down on the edge of a dune, I leaned back into its curve. I closed my eyes and listened to the pounding of my heart over the crash of the waves on the beach. I inhaled the stiff wind and licked my lips, tasting the salt on my tongue. I lay quietly, letting the immensity envelop me. I felt small, infinitely small, and yet fully embraced, held. I could feel the tide of my life sucking me away from my old ideas about who I was supposed to be. I longed to surrender to it, but first I needed to be certain that wherever it was going to take me, Hannah would be there, too.
I heard the squawk of a gull just above me. I opened my eyes and sat up.
Shading my eyes with my hand, I squinted into the brightness of the afternoon sun. The brown mottled form with its expanse of white wing swooped and dived toward me. As he dipped and juked, the bird’s brown beaded eyes never left mine. He landed on the sand a few feet in front of me. The two of us quietly studied each other. At first glance, he looked like a thousand other seagulls, but as I continued to stare at him, I noticed that his belly was whiter than most, only the tips of his wing feathers were dipped in brown, and his right leg was slightly mangled. He winked one eye and then ruffled his feathers. I realized, as I looked at him, that he was as common and singular as me.
I knew then that the same mystery that hung the moon, turned the earth, and replenished the sea had given life to Hannah, made this seagull and me; it was the source of everything, arising and falling away, constantly changing and forever unchanged. Whatever I did, wherever Hannah was, the two of us were forever part of each other. It wasn’t just a poetic fantasy, designed to comfort me; it was the truth.
I could give up trying to figure everything out. There was no single, right answer to the questions I was asking; their uncertainty, fullness, and mystery simply had to be lived.
Harvest
MARGARET AND MADELAINE WERE STRAPPED INTO THEIR CAR seats in the back. Will was in the front next to me. I lifted my foot from th
e accelerator as the car ahead slowed to make a left turn.
“Mommy, look!” Maddy cried excitedly, pointing her finger and wiggling in her seat. “That’s where Hannah and I played in heaven before I was born!”
She was pointing to Hannah’s favorite house, the light pink one with dark pink trim.
I had no idea how she knew, and didn’t need to, either. I received it simply as a gift from Hannah’s life, evidence of the unfathomable mystery that lives in all things.
Looking back, I realized that through the last year of Hannah’s life and in the three and a half years since her death, my faith had been patiently ripening. It was in this single, exquisite moment that it finally released its hold on the uppermost branch and dropped, plump and juicy, into my lap.
Dance
THE PINK-FROSTED CAKE WITH ITS CLUSTER OF WHITE candles sat in the middle of the breakfast table. Today was Hannah’s eighth birthday, and we would be celebrating just as we had every year since the day of the red convertible. Before they left for work and school, Claude and Will had blown up three bags of balloons, which were now hanging in bright bunches alongside the tissue paper streamers that swooped from each corner of the room. Margaret and Madelaine had been happy to “help” by unwinding miles of cellophane tape from the dispenser, but when I stopped to load the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, they began to jump up and down, begging me to hurry. Hannah’s birthday wasn’t the only special thing about today; it was also Margaret’s and Madelaine’s first day of ballet.
I had known what this day would look like ever since I dreamed of being the mother of a little girl. My daughter, like the others in her class, would wear a light pink leotard and light pink tights. She would carry her light pink ballet slippers to class in a black patent leather case. Her hair would be swept into a neat ponytail, fastened with a pink satin bow. In my dream, the other moms and I smile proudly, and they all look pretty much like me. We wear tailored slacks, crisp cotton shirts, leather flats, gold watches, bracelets, and earrings. Our hair is pulled back into sleek barrettes; our younger children, the babies in their strollers, are clean, burped, and sleeping.
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