The Angel in My Pocket

by Sukey Forbes

  I remember that night, after the Yeomans had talked with us, lying in bed and being able to hear Michael’s father in the kitchen talking about the death of his brothers. One had died of a brain tumor; the other had been killed in a fire at age eleven. Harry Senior had never talked about this kind of thing, so on some level it was very comforting for me to hear this opening up to sorrow among the family members down below. Hearing the sobs was more difficult.

  I turned to Michael and said, “I can’t imagine going through this without you.”

  He looked at me in the moonlight and said, “Me neither.”

  We made a pledge not to let this destroy us.

  • • •

  On the morning of Charlotte’s funeral I wanted to hide in bed. I remember lying there, asking Michael all the big questions that were torturing me. Where had she gone? Was she safe? Was she happy? I was trying to appropriate some of the solid structure of his belief system to shore up my own. He was my answer man. I needed a directive.

  I didn’t want to see anyone, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to see me. “How am I going to hold it together?” I kept asking. But that question kept alternating with “Why am I holding it together?” Either way, this was not the day to let it all hang out. This was a day to simply endure.

  It was only about eight a.m. when my dear friend Sarah arrived fresh from the red-eye from San Francisco. I had flown to her side three years earlier when her son Wyatt died. Now our roles were reversed.

  My mother greeted her, thanked her for coming, and immediately sent her upstairs to where we were sleeping.

  She knocked softly and said, “Sukey . . . it’s Sarah.” I jumped up to give her a hug. For a long time we simply held each other. Then, when I stepped back to look at her, I realized that, ever the conscientious therapist, she had a fistful of handouts on grief resources, local and national.

  “Don’t look at these now,” she said. “But you’ll need them later.”

  Sarah was wonderfully adaptable. She could help you scrub your sink, dash off to New York with you for theater or shopping on a moment’s notice, or enlighten you on the finer points of some obscure ballot proposition. She and I had met in Palo Alto and formed an immediate friendship. We were the same age and had gotten married the same year. But right now, she was the one person who could provide me with a road map based on personal experience.

  Michael stood to give her a hug, and his eyes filled with tears. “Ever since I’ve had kids I’ve been afraid of this happening,” he said. “Now it has. How am I going to go on?”

  “You just do,” she said.

  We talked briefly, but I knew I had to go down to greet the others who were arriving. As I came down the stairs I saw my father and his new wife. I looked toward my mother and silently pleaded, “Mum, help me,” and she took over.

  I didn’t mean to be callous, but I tend to take on other people’s issues whether they ask me to or not, and I had already spent years trying to love my father through his drinking problems, his divorce problems, his financial problems—all the problems he pretended not to have. That day I just didn’t have anything more to give.

  After a quick round of hugs, Sarah and I headed back upstairs to talk. She and I processed ideas and emotions very much the same way, and I related to the fact that right out of college she’d gone to medical school and become an internist only to please her parents. She’d told me about the day she found herself in the medical closet in the hospital musing about the possibilities of self-medicating, which was the day she realized it was time to begin thinking about the career she really wanted. Shortly thereafter she began her graduate studies in psychiatry.

  We’d always used each other as sounding boards without ever making judgments. I immediately launched into my questions about where Charlotte had gone and why I was having such trouble feeling my feelings. Then it struck me how many times we’d had similar talks during her own bereavement. I knew her to be a firm believer in the afterlife. Now I understood the feeling she’d expressed of a palpable, ongoing connection with her lost child.

  “What am I going to do?” I kept asking.

  She had already told me about how bereavement had made her a different person, altering her preferences, hobbies, even whom she chose as friends. Until her son died, Sarah had practiced psychiatry among our well-heeled community in San Francisco. After Wyatt’s death, she lost interest in helping patients whose main complaint seemed to be that they had too much time on their hands. She’d taken a job as a school counselor, working with troubled teens. She’d also pulled away from the social world we’d known. I remember her telling me about being at a charity ball and trying to make polite conversation when all she wanted to do when asked “How are you?” was blurt out “My son is dead.”

  When I asked her why I wasn’t falling apart, she reminded me of all the times she’d been like a zombie when we spent time together that first year.

  “We do what we can,” she said, “when we can.”

  I went on about the boy in the wheelchair, and about Charlotte’s distress at seeing him, and how maybe that was the life that had been in store for Charlotte with her musculoskeletal issues, and that maybe this was better. Clearly I was desperate for any rationalization that could help me make sense of what had happened.

  I told Sarah about Michael’s idea of being chosen, as well as my sense of premonition, and she smiled. Then she described how, at the time of her own bereavement, she’d felt that she, too, had been given “special knowledge,” that, maybe when she was born, God had whispered into her ear to tell her about her life this time around, and that one of the things she would experience would be the loss of a child. This resonated so powerfully with my own experience that I wondered: Do all parents simply dread the loss of a child so much that, when it happens, it seems to have been in the cards all along? And yet Michael was also furious. He had been dealt a bad hand. This was not in his cards.

  It was a short drive to the church. As I got out of the car, I noticed that the skies looked ominous, but maybe that was just a projection of my internal state. Either way, no one had thought to bring umbrellas, and now it looked like rain.

  Many of the women wore pink in honor of Charlotte. Even some of the men wore pink shirts. I wore a navy blue dress and, in honor of Charlotte, the red patent leather high heels from my closet that she had loved. We were still standing out front when a caravan of Subarus and Volvos pulled up, stopped, and began to disgorge dozens of my relatives in a sea of Forbes plaid. I had forgotten that a beloved cousin had died of a brain tumor earlier in the summer, and his service had been planned for this same day many weeks before.

  Many of the Forbes men wore kilts; others limited the family tartan to their necktie. Many of the Forbes women wore it in Scottish tradition as a shoulder-to-hip sash. An outsider might have seen it as another of those peculiar WASP folkways, but to me it felt like a warm family embrace. They were showing the flag, sharing the secret handshake.

  Sarah and the children and I went in and waited in a side room with the rest of the immediate family.

  I leaned over and told her, “I’m still afraid I’m going to lose it.”

  She squeezed my hand and said, “I don’t think you will, but if you do, everyone will understand.”

  When we stepped into the sanctuary and took our places, I found myself seated directly in front of my father. I couldn’t avoid him any longer, so I turned and gave him a big hug and was saddened to feel him so diminished, aged by all his troubles well beyond his years.

  The music began, and I turned to look at the crucifix with its tortured and bleeding Christ. There was nothing subtle about the Catholic iconography, so very different from the austerity of my childhood religion. I’d always yearned for the drama of those representations, and the majesty of the gold and the stained glass. As a child, I had gone to Latin Mass with my Catholic friends
, and I loved losing myself in the ritual. At this moment, I could have used that sort of transport. At least there was a portrait of Mary to draw my attention away from my own pain. I had stared at hundreds of Madonnas in Italy during a junior year abroad, and I’d been inspired by the womanly strength of the Pietà, wondering how the weight of her son must have felt in her arms as she held him one last time. My arms now ached with the phantom pain amputees often report after losing limbs. Now at my own child’s funeral, I found communion with this other grieving mother.

  A hymn I recognized brought me out of my reverie, and it was a Protestant stalwart: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” This was followed by the first reading, Isaiah 25:8: “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces . . .” But what are we to make of this comforting God, given that it’s the same God who allows such terrible things to happen?

  A young woman with a beautiful voice sang “Shepherd Me, O God,” which is Psalm 23 put to music. Then Anne’s father read from the Book of Revelation. This was followed by a Gospel reading for the kids, and then the Catholic prayers and the liturgy.

  I thought about my sisters sitting beside me. Just a year or two earlier Heidi had suffered a major scare with melanoma. And Laura had been going through four years of hell, worrying about her son Dawson, the same age as Cabot, who suffered from acute lymphocytic leukemia. Watching my nephew suffer through chemo, and my sister with him, I had felt so guilty that I was the one being spared. I had also been better able to access the anguish over his illness than I was able to access my own anguish for now.

  “How do you get through it?” I’d asked her.

  “I don’t have a choice,” she’d said.

  Father Tom began his homily, but my mind was tuning in and out. Some of the imagery was comforting, some of it far too abstract for someone as prone to questioning as I was. But then Beth got up and began to read the poem by Henry van Dyke I’d requested, and I hung on every word:

  I am standing upon the seashore.

  A ship at my side spreads her white

  sails to the morning breeze

  and starts for the blue ocean.

  She is an object of beauty and strength.

  I stand and watch her until at length

  she hangs like a speck of white cloud

  just where the sea and sky come

  to mingle with each other.

  Then someone at my side says, “There, she is gone!”

  “Gone where?”

  Gone from my sight. That is all.

  She is just as large in mast and hull

  and spar as she was when she left my side

  and she is just as able to bear her

  load of living freight to her destined port.

  Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

  And just at the moment when someone

  at my side says, “There, she is gone!”

  There are other eyes watching her coming,

  and other voices ready to take up the glad

  shout: “Here she comes!”

  After the reading, Father Tom stood to offer the Sacrament, but this was an even greater moment of alienation for me. The Catholic Church invites all, but it allows only those baptized in the church to participate in Communion.

  Then, just as he raised his arms, a huge lightning bolt flashed, followed by a clap of thunder so close by that I felt it in my chest. For some reason the momentary lapse into the natural world was comforting to me. Was the Old Testament God of Wrath just showing off? Were the heavens opening up to rain down tears in sympathy? Or were we in some sort of Mel Brooks movie? For the briefest of moments I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a half smile. But almost as quickly as the smile came I was jerked back into my painful reality. This was no occasion for smiles.

  A deluge began to pound on the roof, and once again I thought of Charlotte, standing on the porch of Mansion House and letting the storm’s water stream down on her face.

  Rain or no, we still stepped outside to release helium-filled balloons as planned. Each one carried a message of love for Charlotte, written out by some loved one at the service, as well as her prayer card. For the next couple of weeks we received calls of condolence from strangers all over the area who’d had one of these packages descend into their yard and had been moved to reach out to us.

  The storm continued to rage, and we went back inside for a reception in the basement of the church. I saw my husband talking to guests, milling about with three-year-old Beatrice clutched in his arms like a security blanket. There were fluorescent lights in the suspended ceiling, and wherever Michael went, the electrical fixtures snapped and popped and went dark over his head.

  Sarah took a late flight back to California that night, and we dosed ourselves with Ambien and Valium once again, fearful of waking in those grim hours well before dawn when our troubles seemed endless and our sorrows inconsolable.

  • • •

  The rain continued into the day, but otherwise it was deafeningly quiet. Most of our other guests had left or were leaving. This was a busy time of year with school about to begin, and people needed to get back to their lives. We were left with the immediate family, which, given that my husband was one of six and I was one of four and we’d produced a combined total of twenty grandchildren, was still quite a large contingent, but not nearly enough to consume all the food that was on hand. We wound up sending dishes to the Salvation Army and flowers to hospitals and nursing homes.

  Having held on through the service, I greeted this day with a sense of relief. Now I could let it all hang out . . . if only I could let it all hang out. Michael was even more vacant than he had been the day before. At times it seemed as if he could barely stand up, and he moved like someone who was ill. I did my best to comfort him, but I was vacant and empty myself, confused and still a little threatened by his displays of grief, which were so dramatic compared to my own numbness. There was a growing tension between wanting to comfort my surviving children and embrace them in a present and loving way and also wanting with every fiber of my being to escape to the woods alone. In nature there has always been a comfort to the natural order—brutal as it can be. The enormity, vastness, abundance, frailty, audacity, cruelty, diversity, mysticism, raw beauty, and divine wisdom are incredibly reassuring. It is humbling. She cries out to us, “I am here for the long haul, whether or not you are. You are not that important.” Somehow that knowledge of being a small piece of an awesome and connected world that was here many, many eons before us and will be here many, many eons after was reassuring to me. I know some people try in vain to tame nature. I love its raw beauty and the sheer fact that while often predictable it is not tamable. The innate chaos of nature comforts me. I have always found it especially alluring when faced with coming to grips with life and death. Life and death in their most pure form occur daily in nature. It is all around us, as is the miracle of regeneration. Growing up with four seasons was a constant reminder to me of the wondrous cycles of Mother Nature and how each was dependent upon the other.

  I took my morning cup of tea out to the forge and sat there on the sofa and began to weep. It was chilly for August, and I was trying to feel Charlotte’s warmth wrapped around me, but instead I experienced an excruciating wave of pain. The sky darkened—another late summer squall coming through—and then another bolt of lightning hit the lamppost just a few feet away, causing every hair on my body to stand on end. The pain dissipated, just like the clouds. I sat there, staring off into the wet green, and as the sky began to clear a doe walked by with a little fawn, just a few feet away from me. They both stopped in midstep, perfectly framed by the window, but not in the abrupt way that flight animals often freeze, then turned in tandem to stare at me. It was as if they were making eye contact with me, a mother and her young child walking together peacefully. I wanted to believe that
it was a sign, like the rainbow after the storm.

  Okay, here was a moment of comfort, yet I was still torn because I wanted to go with the sorrow, to really feel it, but every time I started going down, something like the doe and the fawn would catch me and pull me back up. Was Charlotte trying to protect me from the pain? I was touched, but at the same time I knew I couldn’t remain insulated if I ever wanted to get through it. To get through it, I first had to really get down into it.

  Later that day I ventured out into the woods, calling Charlotte’s name louder and louder as if she were lost and I needed to find her. I walked along in a daze, and then I got that kicked-in-the-gut realization once more that she really was gone. I sat on a log and wailed. I repeated the process several times. Walk. Kick. Sit. Wail. My mind kept ruminating, obsessing about little mysteries like her fixation on the dead mouse and the boy in the wheelchair. And then there were the odd things she’d said over the years that were out of context. Things like, “I miss my real family.” What the hell did that mean? This haunted me, especially in the sense of my own feeling that losing her had been somehow predetermined. Sometimes I felt that all of us, including Charlotte, had been merely playing roles that we might have worked out in heaven, saying, “Well, this time, you be the mother and I’ll be the child,” as if we’d been through this a million times before, each time exploring the different permutations of human relationship.

  I realized that this perception of mine was a little nutty, and then the image came back to me of that madwoman crawling around on the lawn naked, pulling the grass up with her teeth, screaming, “Why, why, why?” I continued the scenario with the nice people from McLean coming to put me away in a padded room in a building paid for by one of my nutty ancestors. I was terrified of that happening, but at the same time was still convinced that any reaction short of utter, raving lunacy meant that I was doing it wrong. The internal monologue that informed much of my first year had begun. “If you loved her more, you would feel more.” “You were overwhelmed with three children under six and you must be secretly relieved.” “You are an awful mother. Just look at you—cold as ice. No feelings.” The more time that passed and the less I was able to dig deep into the pain, the more strength I gave to that internal voice. It would be just a matter of time, I feared, before people saw me for what I truly was: a monster. Some terrible ugly beast incapable of human emotion, masquerading as a decent woman and going through the motions.