Today, John speaks clearly and calmly, his feet spaced apart and his arms spread wide, as if to enfold us all.
“The things I saw in the hospital this week were some of the hardest, most painful and awful of my life,” he says. “But I will tell you I also saw some of the most amazing, the most loving, the most benevolent acts. They were things I could not have imagined, and they have left me humbled and awestruck. Stacy lying in the bed with Greta, cradling her broken child to her for as long as she still could. Immense acts of kindness from the hospital staff, who I expected to be colder, harder from their difficult environment. And finally the brave decision by Stacy and Jayson to pass on what they could from their daughter to save other young lives.”
He looks up from his notes, seeming to fix each of us with his gaze. “I stand with you today broken, filled with grief and sorrow. But I am so grateful for all of you, for your support to endure this. I don’t know how to get through this, but I know that we will, and that we will do it together.”
It is my turn to speak; I read a letter to Greta. I wrote it last night. “In the ultimate analysis, Stacy and I were the people who loved each other enough to bring Greta Greene into this world,” I say. “You were all the people who loved her, shaped her, and invited her into the world. How could we all not be overwhelmingly proud of that fact?”
After I finish, the room opens to anyone who may feel moved to contribute. There is a heavy silence, punctured by my friend Ben sharing a light story about Greta glaring at him and declaring, “You are not my daddy.” The floodgates open after that. Cousins speak; friends speak. Our friend Jenna, an English teacher, reads a remark from Isabel Allende on surviving the death of her adult daughter, Paula: “We learn to live with the sadness like a great, lovely companion, because it’s a soft sadness that softens the heart and makes you open to everything.”
Three of Greta’s daycare providers stand together and tell stories about her. “One day, Greta was playing next to a friend, and the friend passed gas,” says a woman named Toyana. “Greta looked at me and said, ‘Toyana, she burped in her butt!’ ” Stacy squeezes my hand and we both laugh. Greta was a connoisseur of bathroom humor.
As the ceremony goes on, I can sense the accumulated weight of our grief in the room and our power in sharing it. We are passing through some sort of magnificent, terrible threshold together. We are headed toward something; I don’t know where it is leading, but the incipient knowledge is like a ringing in my ears.
Stacy sits silent at my side. She is wearing a gorgeous peach-colored dress, sleeveless with large printed white flowers. She bought it the day we dropped Greta off with Susan, Greta’s last day.
I sneak glances at her and Susan occasionally, daughter and mother. I wonder if their proximity just now is hard for Stacy: Susan is currently more haunted spirit than human being, trapped inside an exquisite private hell that even I flinch from imagining. There is so much that needs to be said between them, so much that never can be.
I feel certain that Stacy will not—cannot—speak in these circumstances. It is her first time out of the apartment since we came home from the hospital. My mother, brother, and I planned speeches, but Stacy had intentionally not prepared one. Public speaking isn’t in her nature. Instead she burrows into projects. The photos, and the natural way they diffused attention, are more her style. She has encouraged people to take home photos they love—to help spread Greta’s spirit, she tells me.
And yet, just as Danny motions for us to wrap things up, Stacy stands, shakily. Her face is pale, but her eyes are blazing. Everything and everyone she has ever been in her life—daughter, sister, colleague, wife, mother—is visible to me. She is overwhelmingly beautiful in this moment.
“As many of you know, I’m not much of a public speaker,” she begins. The room laughs gently. She opens with a story about taking Greta to see Susan the day before the accident. She took their last day for granted, she says, and spent most of it grumpy and impatient. Greta was upset with her when she was upset. She regrets it now.
Then she starts to tell stories of Susan and Greta, of their relationship and their time together. As she speaks, it dawns on me what she is doing, maybe why she stood to speak: Stacy is publicly absolving her mother. I look at her in wonder, and it occurs to me again how little knowledge I have of the inner workings of her heart.
I sense now that she is summoning the version of the truth she needs—maybe the truth we all need, in order to survive—from deep within herself. The task feels Herculean, a boulder lifted overhead.
“Grandma Suz was one of her favorite people in the world,” Stacy says, turning to look at her mother directly. “We had been promising her she would come visit you all last week, and she was so excited. She wanted nothing more than to spend time with her Grandma Suz. She had the best day,” she finishes, her eyes filling and her voice breaking. She sits down, spent from effort.
* * *
When the service ends, fleets of cars take people to a pizzeria down the block from our apartment. Guests mill about, drinking beers, taking their glasses out to the sidewalk. My boss bullshits with my father about the Beach Boys, my coworkers grab my parents and hug them before introducing themselves. Everyone seems elated by the improbable grace of what has just happened. I am sitting in the back when my sister-in-law, Melissa, approaches me, her eyes shining with tears. “We weren’t so sure you would ever be able to navigate the big city,” she kids me tearily. “But look at this,” she says, and she waves a wondering hand around her, at all the friends and life around us.
After the party dies down, everyone resumes the vigil at our apartment. Some gather in the living room, some in the kitchen, picking over food. The afternoon light is saddening, draining the last of our euphoria with it.
Ten, maybe fifteen of us sit on the floor in Greta’s room, me leaning against the blue bookcase. Light streams in through both windows. Jack, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, is once again playing guitar—it is something useful, something he can offer.
He strums softly, singing under his breath. Wilco songs, Gram Parsons songs—the soundtrack to his and Stacy’s childhood. Then, with a knowing, pained look in my direction, he starts playing the chords to “Between the Bars” by Elliott Smith. It is a dark song, but only if you pay attention to the words; its melody is soft and loping, and I sang a modified version of it to Greta every night, her head on my shoulder, as she gradually grew heavier and allowed herself to surrender to unconsciousness. Jack is playing it for me.
I sang it to Greta because “I’ll kiss you again / Between the bars” suggests a kiss through a crib as easily as two lovers separated by a jail cell, or drunkards pausing in their pub crawl. I thought of its final image—“People you’ve been before / That you don’t want around anymore / That push and shove and won’t bend to your will / I’ll keep them still”—as a promise I made to her that only I understood the meaning of. Whoever you want to become: I am only here to clear your path.
I strategically changed other lyrics as well—“stay up all night” became “sleep through the night”—but there is an unchanged lyric that haunts me now: “The potential you’ll be / That you’ll never see.” Sitting in my dead daughter’s bedroom, on the floor in front of her empty crib, they strike me as dreadful words to sing to a child, a curse laid on a life full of promise.
I close my eyes and begin to sing it: I can smell her. The tufty fuzz of her hair as it bristled against my ear; the reassuring weight of her bottom pressing down on my forearm, the softness of her diaper tangible through her pajama pants. My other hand on the sweatshirt she wore. When she was ready, truly ready, to be laid down in the crib, I could feel a subtle shift—her joints would loosen, her muscles softening. She became pliable, and as I would lean her over her mattress, her head would drop back and her legs would curl, like an itinerant aircraft docking at a space station.
The song ends, and I trail off. After a moment, Lesley softly says, because someone has to say something, “That was nice, Jayson.” I know it is the last time I will ever sing that song.
* * *
As the days inch forward, the tide of visitors recedes, a few at a time. John flies back to Colorado; my friend Anna leaves for Ohio. Our little village is loosening its tight grip on us, and sooner rather than later, Stacy and I will be alone.
My parents leave last. Hugging me, my mother finally allows herself to shatter completely, sobbing in my arms. I hold her close and feel her thinness, her smallness, so easy to overlook in the blare of her personality, and think, Here you are. We had once been so close, my mother and I. At some point during my adolescence, we had wrenched ourselves apart, and we had never really found our way back.
My mother pulls herself upright, her vulnerability already a distant memory. Having learned to be tough early, she’s never unlearned it: indomitable once more.
My father trails her mournfully, unable to look me in the eye for long. When I hug him good-bye, he grips me tightly, as if he is trying to hold me together. But I sense, when he lets go of me, he will be adrift. The two of them linger in the doorway, hesitant, but there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to be done. The door closes with a click. Stacy and I are left to whatever will become of our lives.
That night, we surprise ourselves, grabbing for each other on the couch and falling into an urgent, hungry kind of sex. We both weep; then we both crawl into bed, clasping hands and whispering, “Good night, Greta.” We slip beneath the glassy surface of a sleep that still contains no dreams. We sleep late. We sleep late every morning now.
Friends continue to bring us food over the next several days, and we eat, continuously, ravenously, everything that spills over our refrigerator shelves. We fill our senses with cold grapes, hot stew, toasted bagels overflowing with cream cheese—anything to drown out the new roaring silence in our apartment.
Stacy punctures that silence our second night alone, playing a video of Greta on her phone. I have resisted the videos, aware of the damage they could do, but hearing her little voice emerge from the tiny phone speaker, some part of me wants to stick a finger in the open wound, root around until I find a live nerve. I walk over to Stacy: “Play it again.”
In the video, Greta is wearing sweatpants but no shirt. It is at some jittery, monkeyish point right before bedtime, and she is singing “The Farmer in the Dell,” substituting her best friend’s name, Eva, for “farmer.” It sounds like “Eva and the day,” and it’s a version of the song she learned in her daycare in the mornings, during “circle time,” a way to welcome everyone to the morning.
I had completely forgotten about that song and the way she sang it, and that realization, coupled with the shock and devastation of seeing her moving and singing again, sends me sobbing to the floor. I wonder: What else have I already forgotten? What other songs did she sing?
I open my laptop and begin writing memories down frantically. I recall watching her learn how to crawl, one limb at a time, reaching one hand into the air as she tentatively moved her back legs. It took her ages—for an infant’s mental timeline, she must have felt like she had been learning to crawl for a thousand years. But her focus was quiet and unrelenting; she never whined or fussed. She simply learned. Meditative, curious, absorbed: How much closer am I now?
She loved to comfort. If I muttered about something, she’d walk up to me: “Daddy, what’s wrong wif you?” I would say, “Nothing, baby girl, Daddy’s just frustrated,” and she’d pat me on the shoulder and assure me, “It’s OK, Daddy.”
She was anything beautiful I ever found in myself or the world around me, in addition to all the things she was all on her own: stubborn, protective, mischievous, strong-willed, curious. She had a certain hardened-forehead way of determining exactly what was right for her; “You are a force of nature, baby girl,” Stacy told her, laughing, at ten months.
She was uncomfortable with crowds, as was I. The only exception was family: with family, there could never be too much. One of the last things she’d do before finally surrendering to sleep was to recite a roll call into the dark of all the people she loved.
How could we have failed this little person so completely?
* * *
Greta’s body is released from the medical examiner and delivered to a funeral home in Midtown Manhattan. Joe, a shaky and discomfited man with gold cuff links, sits across from us at his walnut desk on top of bloodred carpeting. This is where she is.
Someone from the funeral home—someone who wasn’t Joe—told us on the phone that if we wished to say good-bye to her body before it was incinerated, we could do so. Joe is deeply disturbed by this and makes no attempt to hide it. Her body was compromised, he tells us. Organs had been removed. She was small to begin with. Her body stayed at the medical examiner’s office for a week for the autopsy. There wasn’t, he makes clear, much of her left to say good-bye to.
My stomach balls in disgust as Joe’s eyes offer a wet approximation of sympathy. “Look, I don’t know who told you you could see her,” he says. “But you have to trust me: you don’t want to see her. It’s best you remember her the way she was.”
* * *
Two weeks after coming home, we go back to work. The timing is absurd, barbaric. But when you are in shock, just about any activity seems perfectly reasonable. Our respective bosses assure us we can take all the time we need, but we feel an instinctive urge to plow headlong into groups of people, to be handed projects.
Stacy’s job has an extra complication: she left the music industry four years ago, went back to school, and is now a dietitian and lactation consultant working for WIC, a program providing care for the children of low-income parents. Each morning, she faces an endless tide of newborns and toddlers Greta’s age. She never tells any of these new mothers about Greta. I do not understand her ability to handle infants, to kneel and talk to other people’s toddlers, day after day, after watching our daughter be wheeled away—it is beyond my comprehension.
It is also somewhat beyond hers, she admits. The most sense she can make of it: “I mean, a baby never makes you feel bad. It’s impossible to feel bad around a baby.” I am stunned, but I also can’t argue with her.
There is something comforting in the blankness of the bureaucracy, she says. She checks boxes, reminds everyone to eat fruits and vegetables. She counsels new parents through the overwhelming predicaments of newborn life, losing herself in the all-consuming nature of their problems: How often should my baby breastfeed? How many wet diapers should she have on day six? How will we get through the next twenty-four hours? In this way she is able to sublimate her own grief, or even forget it for a few hours. Only when she’s in the car does she cry and cry.
Occasionally she will look up from her desk and find herself staring at a boy or girl with Greta’s birthday. It hurts, but she also welcomes the chance to speak to someone from Greta’s little tribe.
I return to my editor position at Pitchfork, a website where I’ve freelanced for years. Like Stacy, I am new, only three months in. On my first day, I sit on the subway feeling bruised all over, like I might burst into tears if someone poked me. People at my office wince when they see me; they treat me with extraordinary kindness and care, but I feel them suppressing shudders behind my back.
I am ice-skating along the surface of my shock, and nothing I do seems unusual or beyond the pale. No one expects anything from me. I come to work, or I don’t. I slip in and out of the office, disappearing halfway through the day if I need to with nothing but a text to a coworker. It is a tremendous and scary freedom.
I learn something hidden and unpleasant about my chosen profession in these weeks. Yes, listening to music can be life affirming, a conduit to your deepest emotions. It can also be simply noise, a horse blanket blotting out sensation.
T
here is one album, by two young women in L.A. who call themselves Girlpool, that pierces the ice. It is campfire music, two guitar chords hinted at by fingers and lyrics about the dawning realizations of youth, the ones that feel like sunrise on your entire brain. I keep one song close, called “I Like That You Can See It.” I try to hold this thought in front of me.
My second full week back, I go out at night. A singer-songwriter named Mitski is playing a tiny stage. She overwhelms it completely, feet planted far apart, hair tossed back, eyes burning into individual members of her audience. I stand near the back behind my coworker Jenn, who booked the show. Mitski closes with what is then her signature anthem, a feedback-soaked rock song that climaxes with the line “I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be / I wanna be what my body wants me to be.” I am exhilarated even as I realize in that moment that Greta will never have a profound moment of self-expression like Mitski’s or live a life like Jenn’s, full of art and possibility.
* * *
Apart from brief moments like these, time passes mostly soundlessly. There are days when I am confused, panicked, like I’ve woken up in a dark room with unfamiliar contours: What is it? What is it that feels so awful? Then I calm down and I remember: Oh yes, I am in hell. The thought places me in time and space, like a dot dropped on a map. Once I am armed with this knowledge, my eyes clear, my walk straightens, my breathing slows.
Having exited the blaze of grief standing upright, we now find ourselves flattened by its drudgery. We go to work every day and then discuss the problems we tackled at a different restaurant every night, over food we barely taste. We drink wine, but not too much. We watch a few hours of one show or another, then go to bed, then sleep past 8:00 a.m. every day. We do not scream at anyone. Neither of us gets sick.
Once More We Saw Stars Page 6
