And adoptive parents don’t only claim babies.
A woman once came to our agency who wanted to adopt a much older child. She looked in a picture book of children who needed to be adopted, and she saw a teenage boy who really needed a family. He had some learning disabilities, he had some medical issues, but mostly he had had many disappointments in his life.
She liked him. She read his material. She asked if she could meet him.
We introduced them. They got along really well.
She visited with him a long time, until he felt comfortable enough to move into her house. They went to court, and she adopted him.
Two years later I happened to bump into her at a conference.
After we did the whole big hello, I said to her, “So how’s Larry?”
She said, “Oh,” and she reached into her giant pocketbook and pulled out one of those little plastic photo albums—the kind that new mothers and new grandmothers used to have before everybody put their pictures in a smartphone.
She said, “Look! Larry graduated from high school. Here’s his picture. And here he went to the prom—look at his tuxedo! And here he is in his uniform working at McDonald’s.”
And I realized this was a new mother who had claimed her baby. It didn’t matter that he was eighteen years old. He was her baby, and she was one happy woman.
So did I ever claim my baby that died, or did I remain forever disconnected? Of course I claimed him. Absolutely. I realized long, long ago that he is every bit as much my child as all the others.
And as far as that ridiculous question, Can you love a child you didn’t create as much as you love your blood child? I have an answer for that, too, now, and it’s really simple:
There’s no such thing as “as much as,” because love is not measurable. Our children—all our children—are claimed by us, and that’s it.
What’s ours is ours.
And that’s my last word.
* * *
MARIS BLECHNER is an adoptive and a birth parent, a licensed clinical social worker and educator, and a nationally respected trainer and speaker who has spent the last thirty-eight years working for the improvement of adoption and the child-welfare system. One of the founders of Family Focus, the parent-led multiservice adoption agency that she directed for twenty-six years, Maris relates proudly that she comes from the citizen-activist child-advocacy community and brings that neighborhood and personal family experience to her professional work. In addition to writing, providing training, and doing consulting, these days she also enjoys teaching as an adjunct at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College.
This story was told on June 24, 2015, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme of the evening was Tangled and Twisted. Director: Catherine Burns.
I know what happens after you die.
I take your family into a quiet room, with Kleenex, and then I say the word “dead.” Not “expired” (because you are a person, not milk), and not “passed on,” because families always want to believe that means I just transferred you to another hospital.
Dead.
I have to say it.
That’s basically all they taught us about how to deliver bad news in medical school. A one-hour lecture.
So we learned by watching our teaching physicians. We were their constant companions in this sort of theater of the bereaved, lurking in doorways and at bedsides and the hospital’s ER, waiting to see how soft they made their voices. When did they touch someone on the shoulder? How much medical jargon did they use before getting to the word “dead”?
When you train to become a doctor, they don’t really teach you about death. They teach you how to prevent it, how to fight it, how to say it, but not how to face it.
So on one of my first nights as a teaching physician in the emergency room, as we work on the body of a sixteen-year-old boy with eight bullet holes in his chest and abdomen, we are almost angry at his body for not responding to our efforts.
Is he breathing? Is he bleeding? Is his heart beating?
I go to the head of the bed, and I hook him up to a respirator that breathes for him.
We put tubes…everywhere. A large-bore IV goes into each arm, an even larger one into his groin, and through that we start pressure-bagging type-O-negative blood, trying to replace what he’s lost. I call for another unit of blood, but no matter how fast we work, we can’t work fast enough.
The monitor begins to sound this shrill insect whine meant to alert us that the patient is crashing, which we already know, so it feels less like a warning and more like a rebuke.
Then we lose his blood pressure and his pulse.
But he’s sixteen.
So I perform a trauma Hail Mary. I grab a ten-blade scalpel and make a deep incision from the nipple all the way down to the bed. I take the scissors and cut through the intercostal muscles. I take the rib spreaders, push them between the ribs, and crank his chest open.
There’s a giant gush of blood and then a moment of stillness, like the second after a lightning strike. Even his blood smells metallic, like ozone.
I reach my hands into his chest, and I put them around his still heart. I begin pumping it for him, feeling for damage. I slide my fingers down the length of his aorta, but it is so riddled with holes that the frayed pieces disintegrate in my hands.
The first time I had to be the one to break that news to a family, I was in my second year of residency. I remember I had to do it in the patient’s room, because his adult daughter refused to leave his bedside.
I said, “I’m sorry. He’s dead. We did everything we could.”
And then I was supposed to step out of the room, give her a few moments alone. But I was paralyzed, rooted to the spot by a sense of failure and loss. When I looked at the bed, I couldn’t stop imagining my own father lying in it.
My attending physician must have seen what was going on in my face, because she grabbed me by the arm and she dragged me outside.
She said, “Don’t you ever do that again. Don’t you EVER pretend that grief belongs to you when it doesn’t. One day the person you love will be in that bed. But today you say you’re sorry, you mean it. Then you have to walk away.”
I look up from the sixteen-year-old boy and see that my own audience has formed. They wait to see what I will do next.
I realize that in front of me is a gaping hole, and the boy’s family will probably be here very soon, so I turn to the surgery resident, and I say, “Listen, you have to get this kid closed up as fast as you can.”
Not ten minutes go by when we hear the sound of a woman demanding to be let in.
We are not ready.
We are shoving tubes and gauze and surgical supplies into giant trash bags. Security is trying to keep her out, but she is a tsunamic force. We barely had this boy closed up and half covered with a sheet when I see her standing in the doorway.
Clearly his mother. And she goes absolutely quiet.
“I’m sorry. He’s dead. We did everything we could.”
She takes a running leap toward the body. The nurse at the head of the bed sees a large needle still attached to the sutures holding him together and plucks it off the table just before his mother lands on top of his body, trying to protect it with her own.
She starts keening. It’s a terrible sound.
I repeat, “I’m sorry. He’s dead. We did everything we could.”
She slides off his body. I see her touch the boy’s fingers to her mouth briefly before holding them against her cheek. I leave the room as soon as the social worker enters, motioning for everybody to follow me out.
I think, That’s what they can learn from watching me: how to walk away.
And without a moment’s break, I go to see the next patient. Because there are forty people in the waiting room who all want immediate attention, and they can’t know that I still feel the dead boy’s heart in my hands lik
e an anchor.
But I know that if I don’t put it down now, I might never remember that this loss doesn’t belong to me.
One day that grief will be mine. But not tonight.
* * *
BESS STILLMAN is an emergency physician, a wellness consultant, and a writer living in New York City. She is currently at work on a novel. You can find her at BessStillman.com, where you can listen to more of her stories, only some of which will make you cry.
This story was told on October 7, 2015, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme of the evening was Stop, Drop, and Roll. Director: Jenifer Hixson.
In 2008 I was one of those young people who became obsessed with Barack Obama.
I was a senior in college at the time, and after I graduated, I went out to Ohio and worked on his campaign. After the campaign I moved to Washington because, well, hope and change. And two years later the White House actually hired me. They hired me to write speeches.
People would hear about my new job, and they would say, “Wow, you must be really good.”
And I’d say, “I don’t know. I hope so.”
They thought I was pretending to be humble, but I was entirely sincere. It’s not that I thought I had no talent whatsoever; it’s just that I knew there are more than 300 million people in America. And some of them are babies. But a lot of them are adults. It just seemed unlikely that I was the best We the People could do.
So every day I walked through the gates of the White House absolutely sure somebody had made a mistake.
While this was going on, my friends and family were equally sure they now had direct access to the president of the United States.
Like, I’m sitting in my White House office and get a text from my sister that says, HOW COME THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY DOESN’T HAVE A MAILING ADDRESS?
Even in the best of circumstances, this is a disturbing question to get from a family member. But if you work in the White House, you want to know the answer to this kind of stuff, and I have no idea.
It was like that with everything. Suddenly everyone has a law that only I can get through Congress. Everybody has something wrong with Obamacare that I need to know about.
Mostly, everybody has the same question:
They all want to know “Have you met him yet? Have you met Obama yet?”
I’d say no, I haven’t met him yet. And I’d get this look, and it’s a look I soon learned means You may be twenty-four years old and working at the White House, but you’re still a disappointment to your family and friends.
And I have to say, I totally get it. Everybody thinks that the White House is either like the TV show The West Wing, where everyone’s hanging out with the president, or it’s like the TV show Scandal, where everyone’s having sex with the president. But if you’re looking for a Hollywood analogy, the White House is like the Death Star. There are thousands of people running around the hallways, and they’re all trying to make sure their little bit of the operation works well, and just because Darth Vader is the public face of the organization doesn’t mean that every stormtrooper gets personal one-on-one time.
So I try to explain this whole Death Star thing, and it doesn’t work—I still get that disappointed look.
Frankly, nobody’s more disappointed than I am. I mean, nobody wants me to meet the president more than I do.
There’s two reasons for this. The first is kind of corny, but it’s true: I moved to Washington because I thought, I don’t know what it is, but there must be something I can do for my country. I want to be the kind of person who makes the president of the United States just a little bit better at his job when I’m in the room.
The second reason is: I would really like Barack Obama and I to become best friends.
Now, I’m not saying every White House staffer imagined they would become buddies with the president, I’m just saying none of us ruled it out. You would hear these stories, you know, somebody got a fist bump in the hallway or someone else got invited to play cards on Air Force One. The moral was always the same: any moment could be the moment that changes your life forever.
My first chance at a life-changing moment came in November 2011, when I was asked to write the Thanksgiving video address. I will say up front that if the State of the Union is all the way on one end of the presidential speechwriting spectrum, “Happy Thanksgiving, America!” is kind of on the other. But as far as I was concerned, this was the most important set of words Barack Obama would ever say.
I threw myself into this. I wrote and I rewrote, and I made edits, and I made edits to the edits.
Finally the day of the taping came, and I went to the Diplomatic Reception Room, which is one of the most beautiful rooms in the White House. It has this wraparound mural of nineteenth-century American life. And the advice I always got about working in the White House was “You have to act like you’ve been there before.”
So I’m standing there, trying to act like I’ve been there before, and the woman behind the camera takes one look at me and goes, “This is your first time here, isn’t it?”
And I crack immediately.
I’m like, “Yes, I have never been here before, please help.”
She says, “Don’t worry.” Her name is Hope Hall, she films the president all the time, she’s going to take care of everything. All I have to do is wait.
So I wait, and I wait, and I wait and I wait and I wait, and just when I’m wondering, Is this whole thing a nightmare? Is it a practical joke?, somebody gets an e-mail on their BlackBerry, and they say, “Okay, he’s moving.”
There’s kind of a crackling in the air, and a minute later President Obama enters the room.
He’s standing up, so we all stand up.
He sits down, so we all sit down.
He looks at the camera to start taping when Hope stops him, and she says, “Actually, Mr. President, this is David. This is the first video he’s ever written for you.”
President Obama looks at me, and he says, “Oh. How’s it going, David?”
I had exactly one thought in that moment: I did not realize we were going to have to answer questions.
And I have literally no idea what I said after that.
I actually blacked out.
Like I went home for Thanksgiving, and my family was like, “So, have you met him yet?”
And I was like, “Yeah!”
And they were like, “What did he say?”
And I was like, “ ‘How’s it going?’ ”
And they were like, “What did you say?”
And I was like, “I don’t know. I blacked out.”
And I got that disappointed look…
Again, nobody is more disappointed than me. Because if I’m going to be the kind of person who makes the president a little bit better at his job when I’m in the room, I am going to have to deal with questions more complicated than “How’s it going?” And at the moment there’s no indication I can do it.
But I make a promise to myself. I say, If I ever get another shot at a life-changing moment, I am not going to let myself down.
And I didn’t know if it would ever happen for me, but in fact it happened just a couple weeks later. I was sitting in my office, and I got a phone call from the chief speechwriter at the time. His name was Jon Favreau.
He said, “Betty White is turning ninety years old, and NBC is doing this special where different famous people wish her a happy birthday in these thirty-second skits, and you’re pretty funny, and no one else wants to do it. Want to give it a shot?”
I said, “Absolutely.”
And again, I understand: State of the Union is over here, and “Happy birthday, Betty White!” is over there. But this was my Gettysburg Address.
We had one week to make it perfect. Jon and I started by coming up with a joke for the president. We were going to have him fill out a birthday card, an
d then while he was filling it out, you would hear his voice in a voice-over say:
“Dear Betty, you’re so young and full of life, I can’t believe you’re turning ninety…In fact, I don’t believe it. Please send a copy of your long-form birth certificate to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.”
We feel good about the joke, but we still need a birthday card. So I go to the CVS near the White House and I grab a card, but then right when I’m about to leave, I have a stroke of genius. We don’t actually need one birthday card, we need two identical birthday cards, because we have two different camera angles, and in that second camera angle we don’t want anyone to see that the president’s already filled his card out.
I’m thinking, Yes, this is how White House staffers are supposed to feel. I’ve saved the day!
So I get identical cards, and I ring it up, and I go back to my office, and I’m feeling really good.
The last thing we need is some way to end the video. What I come up with is we’re going to have the president put on headphones and then he’ll listen to the theme song from The Golden Girls, which is Betty White’s most popular show.
I find the perfect pair of headphones—they go over the ear, they’ll look great on camera. I listen to the Golden Girls theme song on repeat, just to get in the mood.
Finally on Friday I get the call. “Come on over.”
Here’s what they don’t tell you about having a meeting in the Oval Office: When you have a meeting in the Oval Office, you do not just walk into the Oval Office. You wait in this windowless chamber, which is a little like a doctor’s office, except instead of last year’s Marie Claire magazine they have priceless pieces of American art. And instead of a receptionist they have a man with a gun who, in a worst-case scenario, is legally obligated to kill you.
It turns out this little room is the perfect place to second-guess every life choice you have ever made.
So I’m sitting there with Hope Hall, the videographer, and I’m just thinking, Do I remember how to explain the joke? Do I have both of the birthday cards?
The Moth Presents Occasional Magic Page 8
