The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “You’re staying in school,” Will had growled. “Won’t have you quitting.” Neither he nor Bronwyn had attended college. “I’ve got all the company I need,” he’d said, stroking the top of the dog’s head.

  “Ebie’s great, Dad, but she’s as much burden as companion.”

  What Will could not bear was Gordie’s air of overripe consternation, the rawness of his helplessness. But he had a method, a means of delivering them both from these scary slicks. “What do you know about burdens?” he snorted.

  “I’m saying. She’s a dog.”

  “You think you’re that much better?” And Will made a mincing expression, tilting his head from side to side. It worked: Gordie shook his head and rolled his eyes. The pretense of irascibility never failed to bring them back to more familiar, less starkly terrifying ground.

  It was Gordie the dog had risen to greet just now, her ears having distinguished his particular footfall in the hallway outside their unit even before his key turned in the lock. She’d always been more Gordie’s than Will’s, never mind that they’d adopted her expressly to provide company for the elder Joiner when the younger went off to school. Oh, she was affectionate enough with Will, but anyone could see she considered herself Gordie’s dog, almost as though she knew what lay ahead: that Gordie would be the one, in the end, in need of company.

  He came in bearing a gallon of carrot and spirulina juice and several pharmacy bags containing Will’s prescription refills.

  “I’m not drinking that,” offered Will in the rote manner of an oft-repeated refrain.

  Gordie ignored this, setting his bags on the counter and crouching to greet the dog effusively. “Hel-lo, Ebie. That’s right, that’s right.” She bucked her head forward and licked her chops at him drippingly. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

  Will scoffed ostentatiously, on cue.

  This was how it had been ever since the diagnosis: a pretense of animosity had grown between them, a kind of ongoing, low-level dyspepsia. As surely as the disease itself, this new pattern of behavior divided present from past. Will didn’t regret it. The enormity of Gordie’s having given up school to be his caregiver—the enormity, for that matter, of his own imminent mortality—seemed to require such a charade.Will understood it not as an avoidance of true feeling, but as the most tenable means of expressing it. It translated, in a way he couldn’t begin to explain, into a high order of intimacy.

  “I’m going to you-know-what the pooch,” Gordie said.

  “Right.”Will picked up a bit of play dough and began to roll it between his palms.

  But Gordie, despite his declaration, remained where he was, palpably miserable, it seemed to Will. Ebie whined once, twice, then gave up and lay back down. Gordie said, “What are you working on?” and wandered over to the table.

  Will felt his son standing behind him, breathing, taking in the elements of the scene, piecing together what they must mean. Beneath the clumsy freight of his eyeglasses and oxygen tubes, Will felt his face grow hotter. He was blushing. Never before had he intended any of his dioramas to convey a message. Never before had he made one expressly for someone else. But that’s what this was: a little box of meaning, a memorandum, a wish. Another minute passed before Gordie next spoke, during which time Will continued, as nonchalantly as he was able, to shape the small cake. His fingers, however, were trembling.

  Gordie’s question came out shy, thimble-sized. “Can I help?”

  4.

  For a time she believed herself to be in love with the pediatric resident Dr. Abdulaziz. That this was irrational she knew full well, having interacted with him only a handful of times, all during the first twenty hours of her postpartum stay. But when was it love’s business to be rational?

  She lay in bed at home for the better part of a week after the baby’s birth and death, grateful for every tablet she’d been prescribed to dull the afterpains, grateful for every minute she managed to dispatch asleep rather than awake, above all grateful for her fantasies of Dr. Abdulaziz. Ricky held in her mind a picture of him: obsidian eyes; unkempt, rather swirly black hair; the faint shadow on his jaw which appeared darker with each subsequent visit he made to her room. As for his voice, she couldn’t quite replay it in her mind, couldn’t quite remember how it went, only that it had been beautiful, soft and deep, his syllables intricately worked, like something carved of ivory or sandalwood. She lay in bed imperfectly conjuring him; her effort, more than its result, was the companion that made the long hours endurable. Hours, at the beginning, were quite simply her foe: the entire future spread out before her like inhospitable terrain through which she must slog. So the flights of thought that delivered her into the calm, expansive arms of Dr. Abdulaziz, delivered her ruched brow to the smoothing stroke of his fingertips, her offered throat and wrists to his slow and mindful ardor, her anguished sobs to the consoling pressure of his mouth—her ability to entertain such fancies came as a welcome surprise, and she threw herself into them with willful abandon.

  She tried, and failed, in those early days, to summon gratitude for her husband, for her living children, for her own life and health, for spring itself: the just-now-unpuckering forsythia, the way the ground yielded underfoot, the high-stepping return of mildness to the air. She tried, with partial success, summoning gratitude for the fact that she had carried her baby to term and had a live birth, that she’d shared fifty-seven hours in the world with him, that he’d drawn his last breath from the nest of her own arms.

  But once he’d left her arms the force of her grief gouged her. She’d had no inkling it would be like this: not simply lonelymaking, but corrosive. She was filled with hatred. Some of it for herself.

  She had never told John what transpired at her routine five-month sonogram.

  “Anencephaly,” the radiologist had said. Her hair a blond knob at her nape. “You could choose to terminate now. Most do.”

  Most do.Those words followed Ricky home from the medical complex, rode with her in the car, slipped into the house, climbed with her into bed, taunting, suggestive. They were two nasty things, two wicked sticks that rubbed together over and over in her mind. Until, after a hundred repetitions, suddenly they were not. They blazed into focus. How had she missed it? Most do. And those two words galvanized her, provided her with focus, with intention: to do the single thing, in the midst of crushing, unbearable helplessness, that was within her power. She would not be most. Her child would not be most. They would defy most. But only in secrecy could they prevail. This much was clear—she could not risk telling John. He would want her to terminate. She could see it just so: the way his eyes would go, the way his lips would tighten in the darkness of his beard, the way he’d take it like a man, quickly and all at once. He would want her to react the same way, would want to spare her the drawing out of pain. He would say it was her decision, would claim to support her either way. And no he would not pressure, not bully her—except that he would, with his worried gaze alone: silent, imploring, following her around the room, around the house, studying her. Weighing, beseeching. For four months. She could not risk trusting him to agree to such pain.

  From here it was a quick leap to deciding there was no one she could tell. Everyone would want to spare her in the same way. She would be forced to explain, to argue, to justify her choice.The thought exhausted her. All the familiar faces—those of her family, her coworkers, the parents of her children’s friends, the cashiers in the supermarket who recognized her after all these years and clucked so nicely over her burgeoning belly—took on in her mind the placid countenance of the radiologist with her preternaturally sleek bun. Who even knew what she’d looked like? Her features had been erased in Ricky’s memory; all that lingered was a kind of bland veneer, a plaster mask. And Ricky had a horror of this face, this smooth sameness, which she saw everywhere, animating everyone she encountered: the embodiment of malevolent dispassion.

  She’d drawn a line that December afternoon, that bitter day when she came h
ome and went straight to bed. She fooled herself that it was a gentling sleep and not a narcosis brought on by rage. On one side of the line stood Ricky and her baby; on the other side, the uncomprehending world. Ricky did not perceive her rage. She saw only the fault of an arbitrary universe. Of the diagnosis she said nothing. That evening, she shared with John and the children the sonogram (this one, ironically, less of an abstract weather map than the others had been; you could make out the profile clearly: the dear funny bump of the nose, smaller hillocks of lips and chin), and if she seemed unusually quiet, it was easy enough to blame it on the fatigue of pregnancy; and if, over the ensuing days and weeks, John noticed an alteration in her, she encouraged the assumption that it was only womanly, hormonal.

  All the while the baby grew. With every new movement, so did her hope. She visualized his brain developing from bud to half-blown to full-blown rose: a flower in a time-lapse display, completing itself. The intricate bones of his skull meeting all around; the architecture of flesh and skin, all of it forming, all of it beautifully realized. Between months five and nine stretch sixteen weeks, a long time, she reasoned, time enough to make up for lost time. Ricky the quant, good at math and all things rational and all things rationalizing, told herself these fairy tales, willed herself to believe in them, to adopt their skewed logic. Within this logic her dissembling was justified, for she let herself believe that secrecy was her part of the compact, the price she’d bargained for the baby’s life. And if, when John bent to kiss her now, she had a tendency to turn and give him the side of her face, and if when he lifted her sweater to place his hand on her naked belly she gently pulled it back down and remembered she’d left something in the other room, these were only small rebuffs, tiny deceptions, part of a greater good, which was hope.

  Not until the end of the ninth month did she deliver the sad news. He cried. She held him. He was sitting on the foot of the bed and she, standing before him, stroked his curly head. Even then she lied. She told him the doctor had only just spotted the flaw. And she made up odds. She felt compelled to—and this part couldn’t really be called a lie—because by this point she’d come to believe there had to be a chance, however slim, of survival, whether because of medical anomaly or misdiagnosis. The figure that came from her lips was seventeen percent. He might look it up, might research it on his own and dispute her, but then she could claim to have found it on the Internet—anything could be found on the Internet—and anyway, she knew he would not. He would take her at her word. So: a seventeen percent chance, she said, that the baby would be born with enough of his brain to survive.

  Why did she invent this? Why further complicate the lie, and why, in particular, frame it so? Enough of his brain to survive. Ricky thought of it as a way of softening the blow, but was it possible she meant to test him, too? And if so, was she hoping his reaction would justify what she’d done? Or was it just the opposite, was she hoping his reaction would prove her wrong?

  She waited, her hands still lingering about his face, while John grew silent, digesting this, and then, looking up with reddened eyes, he’d asked: “But how compromised would he be?”

  And Ricky, though she touched his shoulder once before letting her hands return to her sides, realized, coldly, that she had been right not to tell.With this question he identified himself as belonging definitively and abhorrently to most. Until that moment he had, in his enforced innocence, remained in the realm of ally, of friend: she’d been able to conceive of her secrecy—her dishonesty—as a means of protecting him. But now as he held her around the wide waist and heaved a sob, his head resting on the ledge of their imperfect child, she felt herself recoil, felt herself fill with a frightening dispassion of her own, as though she, in a final heartless twist, had become the radiologist with the flaxen bun.

  This coldness toward John settled in her like conviction. She did not question it. Recklessly, she welcomed it: a kind of armor. She discarded her fantasy that the doctors had made a mistake, gave up meditating on the image of a fully blossomed rose. The coldness saw her through the last week of pregnancy, through the final, futile humiliations of the Cervidil, the Pitocin, the epidural, the pushing. Then the baby came and the baby breathed. For fifty-seven hours she held him in her arms; for fifty-seven hours the ice inside her abated. She and he hung suspended in time, and it was, if not a reprieve, then a respite. And then he died and the ice clamped on more solid than before, and when she looked at her children she had to hide the fact that she felt nothing, and when she looked at her husband she did not bother to hide it. She lay, in those early days home from the hospital, on their queen-sized bed, wishing she were sick, wishing she were dying, wishing for cancer, an aneurysm, an earthquake, a gun. Looking blankly, for hours at a time, at the horrid trees, river, bridge, sky.

  On the third morning she found herself remembering bits of the Robert Louis Stevenson poem her mother used to recite whenever Ricky had been kept home from school with a cold or flu. “When I was sick and lay a-bed, / I had two pillows at my head, / And all my toys beside me lay / To keep me busy all the day.” How sweet the experience of being bedridden when she was small.Yes, there was the achy head, the bilious stomach, the scratchy throat. But there was also the certainty that all would be well and right again in a day or two or three. And in the meantime, the luxuries! Pajamas all day, endless paper and crayons. Her parents’ doting; the special snacks they brought as she regained her health: miniature portions arranged like delicacies, for maximal tempting, on the prettiest plates; the treat of having her father sit next to the bed reading out loud or telling from memory his favorite stories by I. L. Peretz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem; her mother administering an alcohol rub while reciting the poems of her childhood. “I was the giant great and still / That sits upon the pillow-hill, / And sees about him, dale and plain, / The pleasant land of counterpane.”

  Ricky upon the pillow-hill five days after the baby’s death saw about her the barren plain of bedclothes, the unpleasant coverlet rumpled and askew, the spiteful blankets and twisted, tormented sheets. The old towel she’d spread out under her hips to protect the sheets bunched up beneath her. Her lochia still flowed red, her perineum was still swollen, her breasts hard with milk, her husband at work, her children at school, her baby in ashes.They’d had him cremated. No doll-sized coffin, thank you. No lamb-topped gravestone in a leafy cemetery where passersby might pause and read aloud the dates, do the math, sigh: “Only three days, how sad,” and go on with their pretty strolls.

  Somewhere there was a box—a volunteer at the hospital had prepared it for them—containing the baby’s hat and onesie, his socks and receiving blanket, a lock of hair from the base of his head (lucky, someone had commented, he’d been born with any), a few photographs, his footprints on a card. The meanness of these relics revolted her. John had put the box away somewhere. Ricky didn’t care to think about that now.

  She didn’t care to think about John now, for that matter, or Paul or Biscuit, either. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t want to think about them, it was that she couldn’t manage to care. On some level she knew that must be very bad. When she thought of them they seemed oddly abstract. They were like the paper dolls of her childhood, iconic figures of HUSBAND, SON, DAUGHTER, each adorned in the appropriate costume, arms akimbo, expressions fixed.

  But: Dr. Abdulaziz. Of him alone could she think these days and be brought to softness, be returned to a state in which her old, unruined self seemed to have breath left in her. She dreamed up scenarios of going back to the hospital, roaming the building until she encountered him on the ward, or in the lobby, or in the elevator—“chancing” upon him and exchanging a wordless look, which would be filled with mutual sorrow and understanding. Her fantasies, in which she received not only his succor but also his passion, his desire, moved her to shed small, hot tears. She licked those that rolled by the side of her mouth and tasted salt.

  When the pain medication ran out at the end of the week, Ricky rose f
rom her bed without wishing for more. She no longer needed the tablets for her physical symptoms, and no longer wanted them to mute her emotions. Her emotions seemed perhaps too muted already. Paul and Biscuit had come into her room various times over the past several days, Paul bringing supper to her on a tray and doing his homework on the rug; Biscuit sitting on the edge of the bed to have her hair braided after her bath. That their exchanges were skeletal (“What’s sixteen times seventy-four?” “Tell Daddy he didn’t get all the cream rinse out”). Ricky didn’t find herself noticing until afterward, and then with only the most far-off flicker of regret. The vast, spearmint distance she felt between herself and everyone—everything—else was almost, she imagined, what royals must feel, and forevermore Ricky would link mourning with royalty, and royalty with mourning; for the rest of her days, the words king and queen would remind her of deep sorrow.

  Sorrow, anyway, she could admit. Mourning. Not anger. She—who had made one grievous error in failing to recognize her anger back in January—made a second in consciously disavowing it now. She told herself that to be angry over the baby’s fatal condition would imply the belief that it was unfair, which would in turn imply that she believed she and her child deserved a better outcome than they had gotten. An insupportable claim, in light of all the different varieties and magnitudes of tragedy that people faced on earth. Given how relatively fortunate, how unmarred by suffering, her life had been up till now, given how much others suffered by comparison, the loss of this one baby, in peacetime, to natural causes, when she had two healthy children at home—this tragedy, compared with those of countless others, was small. She resolved not to feel anger. It was nothing she was entitled to, and she would not commit the disgrace of grasping at it.