by Sukey Forbes
I was greeting relatives, talking to children. But why was I not feeling the full weight of this? Why was I not falling apart? I was still an outsider in my own experience, drifting in and out of my body the way I had in the emergency room. The self-recrimination that I was “not doing this right” had settled in to stay, and the simple fact that I was alive seemed completely wrong.
I pulled Anne and Harry aside and said, “I can’t handle this.”
“No worries,” Anne said. “We’ll take care of everything.”
And so they did. Organ donation, cremation—we gave Anne power of attorney. She asked to have Charlotte’s body taken to Children’s Hospital, where she felt the postmortem could be more sophisticated. She also wanted muscle tissue to go to a researcher in Bethesda. We agreed to both proposals.
Though staunch Catholics themselves, Anne and Harry were adamant that the Jewish tradition was on to something and that we needed to have the service as soon as possible. But this put even more pressure on logistics.
We moved out to the picnic table near the forge, where we could keep an eye on the kitchen, keep an eye on the children playing in the yard, and see people arriving. And people continued to arrive all day. Several more of my classmates from Dana Hall showed up early. Then Michael’s sister, who had not set foot on an airplane since September 11, 2001, appeared with her two children. Michael’s California brother was en route, along with his wife and kids. People were taking red-eyes from as far away as Australia. It seemed superhuman for our friends to make it from one side of the planet to the other so quickly, but then everything seemed surreal and out of joint that morning. I was incredibly touched by the outpouring, and yet I’d never felt more alone, or had more difficulty with just the basic business of staying alive. My chest felt as if there were steel bands holding it in like a coopered barrel. I had to work at filling my lungs, making the simple process of breathing conscious and deliberate. My extremities seemed very remote, and higher cortical functioning was just not happening.
I needed some help to absorb the loss. Leaving Charlotte at the hospital had seemed like the right thing to do at the time but now being at the house without her seemed so wrong. I was clear that what we’d left behind at the hospital was just a shell, as if her soul had grown too large for its container. Yet I wondered if we should have insisted on bringing her home. Bathing her. Anointing her with oils and sitting with her for a while. We had taken care of our little Sweetie Pea’s every need for six and a half years plus the nine months she’d spent in the miracle of a baby’s creation growing inside of me. Now we were supposed to hand her off to strangers to prepare her body for its next phase. I had a strong sense that we should have been the ones doing this work. Other cultures past and present do a better job with this, and in hindsight I now recognize how important it is for the bereaved to tend to the dead body. Death has become so sanitized in the Western world. We leave the preparations to the “experts.” Bathing and tending to the body might have allowed the reality of the loss to wash over me. The tradition of anointing the body with oils made sense. Perhaps if I’d just gently caressed her body the way we always did during our bedtime snuggles or in quiet tender moments together, the experience would have seeped into my being and all of my senses. The rush of memories brought on by combing her hair, washing the arches of her dainty feet and the fingers of her small hands, dressing her, would have been a painful yet helpful transition. Instead she was yanked away. I let her go and I let someone else do that work. I saw no reason, at the time, to stay. But in hindsight I have a much deeper appreciation for what a gift it is to the bereaved to be more personally involved in preparing the body for burial or cremation or its final disposition. It gives the loss more of a chance to settle into the room. The souls still in this world need a bit more time to absorb the reality of death. I needed a more direct and physical experience with her body to allow myself to start to accept that she was gone. Instead, I was terribly, terribly stuck.
• • •
The best I could do was walk around like a zombie, signing for the endless floral arrangements being delivered to our door by one of the vans pulling up close to every ten minutes. It all seemed like a circus, or the Rose Bowl Parade. I felt guilty because I knew these flowers were all well intended, but I couldn’t help hating them for what they represented: My child was dead. An even greater source of guilt was the fact that I was not behaving the way Michael was, with more visible expressions of grief. I felt my face locked in a flat and tight-lipped grimace that twitched now and then in an effort to show more emotion, but it just would not come. I desperately wanted to let my complete misery overtake me and yet I just as desperately feared that once it got hold of me I would lose all control. Michael and I were each getting up and down, moving from place to place, uncomfortable in our own skin, but in contrast to my stoic reserve he would sob and wail, then sit quietly with his shoulders slumped and his head hung low. I had never seen him in such visible pain. I had never seen anyone in such pain, and it moved me to want to protect him. But if I could feel his pain, why couldn’t I feel my own?
For a while just after lunch I lost sight of him, and then a few minutes later he came to find me and said, “Come look at this.”
I followed him back behind the forge. He pointed up into a big maple tree.
“That’s my sign that Charlotte is okay,” he said.
It was a fierce-looking red-tailed hawk, staring back at us as if she owned the place.
“It’s been here all day,” he said.
He stepped away to bring Cabot and Beatrice over to see the bird, and I just stood there staring at it. I’d always been a believer in signs, but I wasn’t sure what the message was.
“Are you here for Charlotte?” I asked it out loud.
Michael came back with the kids and they joined me in watching the bird. My husband always had a very sensitive intuitive side, but he’d never lived his life that way. That’s what made the next thing he said all the more surprising.
“We were chosen by God to be Charlotte’s parents,” he said.
I was too astounded to respond. I simply looked at him, listening intently.
“I think she came here to get what she needed,” he added, “and then she had to move on.”
He then turned his red-rimmed eyes toward me, staring at me with an expression every bit as fierce as the hawk’s. “What she needed was a happy childhood.”
What he was saying was completely illogical, and yet it all made perfect sense to me . . . everything except the fact that this mystical observation was coming from my extremely rational and analytical husband. And yet, coming from him, this assessment of what was “really” going on took on added weight, as if to confirm my own premonition. I actually entertained that this had not come from him but rather he had been the medium for a message delivered from someone else. I had always put great faith in everything that Michael said. As incongruous as this was with his personality, this slightly cryptic, more than a little mystical pronouncement made perfect sense and resonated immediately with me.
• • •
One of my friends from school was a tech guru, and she took charge of hacking into our computers and sending out e-mails to everyone we knew, notifying them of Charlotte’s death. My cousins and my old friends represented more or less all the stages of my life, and thus they were able to access just about everyone who needed to know, which saved me many awkward phone calls and painful explanations later.
This same team sat down at the kitchen table with Anne and Harry and worked out prayer cards, programs, transportation, and caterers, even selecting which photographs to display at the service. Kim, Charlotte’s godmother, had grown up in Weston, so she found hotels for the out-of-towners, lined up babysitters, and took the lead on finding a church. Anne and Harry made the final choice, visiting each site, even “liberating” a hymnal to help in selecting music. In on
e afternoon they typed up the program, went to Staples to have the Mass card laminated, and found the funeral home to handle the cremation. Michael and I sat through one meeting in which the Catholics and the Unitarians worked out the readings and the hymns. My mother, who had always sung in choral groups, was vitally concerned about the music. There was some discussion over finding someone to play the bagpipes.
My only contribution to planning the memorial was to ask for the poem by Henry van Dyke, the one about the boat at full sail disappearing in the distance, then coming into sight on another shore. I had heard it read at a service not long before, and I loved the image of a ship and the idea that the departed was not traveling alone. I needed to know that Charlotte wasn’t lonely. That she wasn’t alone. I needed to know that she was feeling loved and celebrated and that she was being held in loving arms. As much as I was certain that death was not the end, I had no certainty at all about the kind of existence that came after.
Meanwhile, all the mundane details of life here and now persisted—providing meals for everyone, taking care of the kids—and at this moment these tasks seemed utterly overwhelming. Everybody pitched in, and if they couldn’t find a project on their own, they could go see Annie, who would give them one. Everyone seemed comforted by their busyness. I was comforted that I did not need to entertain or be a hostess, and yet I still couldn’t settle down and just “be.” This was my home, but I couldn’t find my place in it. I was not used to being the one needing comfort. I was ready to be a caretaker for the others, but that was utterly insane, given the magnitude of my own personal loss. I was untethered.
That’s when I noticed our neighbor Livingston watching us. A moment later he came loping over like a big, lovable dog and gave Michael and me each a big hug that was utterly without pretense. He had a wonderfully human combination of upbeat energy and, at the same time, an openness to life’s sadness. And yet, for me, there was an extra element of emotional safety in his not being family. He told me that I had to sit on the ground. I did, and it was the first time I felt . . . grounded.
Michael drifted off to take care of something, and Livingston and I sat on the grass by the stone wall in front of the forge. We talked about how Charlotte had so quickly fallen in love with his garden and his wife, Maggie, and Ajax, their golden retriever. They had a small pond in their yard with fairies and little secret corners and stepping-stones, and Charlotte had spent more time there than in our own yard, hopping around on the stones and throwing the ball for Ajax and admiring the fish in their pond.
“Maggie talked to the Kanebs,” Liv said. They were our neighbors from down the road, an older couple who were away for the summer. They were very private, but I remembered that when we’d first moved in, Mrs. Kaneb had come by with the most wonderful chocolate cake. “They offered their house for anyone who needs a place to stay,” he said. “Also the pool . . . for the kids. Keep them occupied.”
We went over in the afternoon, and for the next few days Cabot and Beatrice spent most of their time in that pool with their cousins and friends.
I was relieved to see them playing happily, seemingly unaffected by the enormity of the loss. I’m not sure either of them had a true understanding of what was going on, but how could they? I was an adult and I didn’t understand it at all.
Michael stayed to watch, but I slipped away and walked to the top of a nearby hill, where I sat on a bench. I could still see the house. While I wanted to be truly alone, I felt obligated to stay in touch—but at least I was far enough away that I could let down my guard and cry. Mother Nature had always been my space of healing and comfort. From my perch on the bench I looked down the hill at the large oak tree in the field and over the Kanebs’ home beyond. This was the same view of the sunset that I had wanted to hold in place just days before. Now I just stared blankly and let a few tears fall. They did not come easily, but it was a start. Nobody had told me that I couldn’t cry in view of the others, but nobody needed to tell me. In being stoic I was simply following through on forty years of conditioning.
I used to read gothic novels as a girl, and the image kept coming back to me of the deranged woman in a white cotton nightgown out in a rainstorm, shrieking and clawing the ground. To me, anything less than that seemed like an appalling failure to respond to what had happened. I kept wondering, “When am I going to fall off the cliff? When’s it going to hit?”
And yet, even as I was feeling this chilling isolation and deep, deep discomfort, I also felt Charlotte’s presence. I felt as though she were carrying me, or that I was somehow cloaked in her essence, wearing her like a blanket.
After I came back down the hill, and after the adults had returned from the pool to our house, I began drifting from room to room, asking everyone I encountered where Charlotte was. Had she reincarnated? Was she in purgatory? Was she in heaven? What was heaven? I was talking like the madwoman in some avant-garde play. I was having an existential crisis, trying to wrap my head around the loss. If I couldn’t feel my way through, maybe I could think my way through.
I envied my in-laws’ certainty about heaven, as well as their reliance on ritual, the comfort in prayers that were perfectly scripted and available for every occasion, mantras that kept the mind from wandering off too far into the weeds. During those first few days, Catholicism made perfect sense to me, and the more didactic and doctrinaire the better. My friends who had been raised Catholic or Jewish seemed to have an enviably solid architecture of belief, whereas we hearty Unitarians were supposed to stand alone before our God (or whatever else was up there) and figure it out for ourselves, Transcendentalist style. Confronting the cosmos head-on, with Emersonian self-reliance, alone and (supposedly) unafraid, was just something our parents assumed we would know how to do, like coming onto a mooring under sail. I was left to find my own words of comfort—except I didn’t have any. I had only questions.
The church we chose for the service was just around the corner from us, where Kim had attended services as a child. She’d even been married there, and I remember the priest from when I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. His name was Father Tom Powers, and the next day he came over to help us survey the boundaries of this new territory we were entering.
With Anne and Harry as moral support, Father Tom sat us down and told us to make sure that we paid attention to any opportunities for happiness or joy or positive thoughts. He reminded us that staying steeped in pain was debilitating, and that the body could handle only so much grief before it broke down.
“It’s okay to have moments when you feel okay,” he said. “In fact, it’s necessary.”
“Great,” I thought. “I’ll let you know as soon as I’m tempted to feel okay.”
It seemed crazy to me for anyone to suggest that we would ever feel anything other than deep and soul-searing pain. Somewhere deep down inside of me, though, his comments registered, and I would make use of them later. I knew I still had work to do in going down. Then I could worry about working my way back up.
Father Tom also told us that one of the challenges of bereavement is that we could not always rely on each other for support, because those brief windows when the sorrow seemed less burdensome would very likely not occur at the same time for each of us. We had to learn to respect where the other partner was at all times. When one of us was feeling better, we would have to work hard to not bring the other down, or to not try to force the other into the place of relief we’d found. He also reminded us that, with the death of a child, the failure rate for marriages rises to upward of 80 percent. But between Michael’s Catholicism and my abandonment issues, divorce seemed an unlikely option. What seemed far more likely was simply going insane, even if we had to take turns.
Our children were the physical manifestation of our love and our devotion to each other. No one else in the world could ever represent such a deep bond for either of us. And yet I knew this was going to be tough.
When I confid
ed in my mother that I was worried about our marriage, she asked me, “Do you want to talk to Jen and Tim?”
She meant the Yurmans, Jen and Tim, friends of the family who were therapists—a more Unitarian solution—and who had done a lot of work with grieving couples.
“Of course,” I said. And it was an indication of my anxiety that I couldn’t wait for them to arrive.
Mum got in touch with them and they came over, and the four of us sat outside on an old granite slab next to the forge. I can still remember the feel of the rough-surfaced granite stone in the shade of that hot day as we talked. Jen handed me rather tentatively a small ceramic angel just as we sat down. She did not say much about it other than it had caught her eye as she left her house to come visit and she thought I should have it. I was touched by the gesture and not sure how to respond. An angel? What was that about?
Tom had known both of my parents since their prep school days, and he and my dad had been great buddies at Milton Academy and at Harvard, so it was easy for me to relate to them. Obviously they were from the same world, but I’d also always admired the dash of Big Sur that they seemed to inflect into our L.L.Bean environment. As a child, I’d always thought of them as the “hippest” of my parents’ contemporaries, and Tom was a big, strapping guy, a champion ski racer, not the type of therapist who wore his “sensitivity” on his sleeve. And yet their strongest credential in my book was that they had managed what looked like a very solid marriage for over fifty years.
Like any couple after fourteen years together, Michael and I had our issues, but those ordinary stresses and strains now seemed trivial in the face of what had just happened. Still, the Yeomans made it very clear that the loss of a child would be a challenge to the relationship. There would be alienation from each other and, as a couple, alienation from other couples. And yet they offered us hope. They said that with the right tools and with the right mind-set, and with enough love, we might just make it through.
