Comfort

by Ann Hood

  That summer, I taught writing at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. The minister there gave a series of morning sermons on the landscape of grief. His own wife had died young, and that loss sent him on a spiritual journey away from the familiar church and city he had known. Changing from minister to teacher, moving from Nashville to Indianapolis, traveling to far-flung places, had all been part of his journey of grief. When the sermon ended, I made an appointment to talk with him.

  That afternoon, in the hot study of the Victorian house where he was staying, I told him about losing Grace. I told him how ministers and priests and rabbis had only been able to offer platitudes, instead of answers, or even comfort. Then I said out loud the horrible thing I had been thinking for months now. “I don’t believe in God anymore,” I said. Dan nodded. He understood. It’s difficult to believe in something that doesn’t make sense anymore, he told me.

  When he stood, I realized my hour was up. Although I knew he wouldn’t make hollow promises about time healing as he ushered me to the door, I still felt the familiar anger rising in me. Who had taught these religious people, I wondered, that a mother’s heart could be healed in sixty minutes. But Dan surprised me. “Well,” he said, “you’re stuck with me now. Here’s my e-mail address, my home phone, my cell phone. Contact me anytime. Day or night.”

  Surprised and grateful, I left that room feeling spiritually validated. I could hate God. I could not believe in Him at all. Why should I put myself through the motions of going to church when I felt betrayed by it? There were so many things I had stopped doing to avoid the horrible pain they brought. I never drove down the tree-lined street where Grace’s school sat or the block behind Brown University where she took ballet class. When I passed the Children’s Hospital where she died, I kept my eyes focused on the highway ahead, never glancing to my right. I didn’t go to Old Navy or open the Hanna Andersson catalogues that seemed to slide through my mail slot with an alarming frequency. If I could avoid all of this, then why should I go to church ever again?

  No sooner had that first autumn with Grace arrived with its onslaught of back-to-school clothes and lunch boxes and promise than Grace’s birthday came. I drank too much rosé and ate her favorite foods of sliced cucumbers and shells with butter and parmesan. Birthdays, back to school, and the horrible promise of Thanksgiving and Christmas right around the corner. How was I going to get through it all?

  Then, one Sunday morning, Lorne said he wanted us all to go to church. I wanted to flat out refuse. But so desperate was I for help, so desperate to make our little broken family whole again, that I went despite my discomfort. As we slid into our usual pew, a family of three now instead of four, I felt everyone’s pity pouring over us. It wasn’t pity that I wanted, or even sympathy. I wanted Grace back. And short of that, I wanted God or someone to help me understand why she was gone and what to do without her. Sam squeezed my hand. “I want to go home,” he whispered. I glanced at him and saw his cheeks were wet with tears. When it was time for children’s hour, I watched as all the same pairs and trios of siblings skipped down the aisles together, hair ribbons dangling, shoelaces untied. Sam was weeping now, unable to control himself. We all were. The minister’s words about kindness and fellowship sounded hollow. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I never wanted to go back.

  But Lorne, in that openhearted way of his, found solace in the sympathy of the congregation and comfort in the minister’s sermon. All those years ago, our different and varying views on spirituality had seemed interesting and manageable. Now we stood on opposite sides of a spiritual divide. Lorne still believed in the Christian tenets that had helped him through his lifetime; I once again found myself questioning them, unbelieving, alone. We debated our different opinions and needs until, with no truce in sight, we turned silent.

  Over the next months, I vacillated between gritting my teeth and accompanying Lorne to church, where I often walked out over some philosophical disagreement or simple frustration with the banality of the service, and digging in my heels and refusing to go. “It makes me too sad,” I explained. “It makes me sad too,” Lorne said. Still, somehow being there did help him in his grief and only made me angrier. On the mornings I stayed behind, I drove the fifteen miles to my mother’s house and let her make me a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast and coffee. I found much more comfort in an hour there than I did at church.

  I remembered how during my years of visiting different religious places, I had enjoyed the Sunday mornings I spent at a Unitarian church. When I’d first moved to Providence, I had gone alone to one right up the street from our house, and found it more appealing than the Congregational church we attended. But Lorne preferred ours, and didn’t like that Unitarians weren’t Christians. Since it mattered more to him than it did to me, I let it go. But now I wondered if some spiritual compromise was necessary. We made an appointment to meet with the minister of our church to see if she had any ideas about our spiritual differences.

  In her high-ceilinged office, she told us about other married congregants who didn’t come to church together. Some went to separate churches. Others had one spouse who didn’t go to church at all. I tried explaining how church—this church, in particular—made me feel. How seeing children Grace’s age there opened my grief all over again; how the shadow of her in the pageant, emerging from church school, holding Sam’s hand on the way to children’s hour, all of it, made me want to run out of there screaming. “It sounds like you shouldn’t come then,” she said, and although her advice held both logic and compassion, I once again felt let down. Ultimately, my spirituality was between me and me. Yet I felt torn in different directions. Shouldn’t someone in charge help me straighten these feelings out?

  Together in that office, we came up with a plan to try other churches. Since we only went to church a couple of times a month anyway, this left me with only one Sunday to have to face my demons here. The next week, we all went to a Baptist church with an African-American congregation. The minister’s sermon was powerful, and the experience satisfying. Then the holidays came, I left for teaching out of town, we went away, and before I knew it we were back to the old Sunday struggle, our decision to visit other places once a month abandoned. In some ways, I dropped the ball on finding these alternative religious experiences. Grief had worn me down; it had exhausted me. My desire to read the religion section of the newspaper to find interesting sermons, unusual services, different congregations, flagged. Deep down I knew this idea was just a stalling technique. I wasn’t going to join the alternative church that met in a real church’s basement; I wasn’t going to return to my Catholic roots; I didn’t want to become Episcopalian, Zen Buddhist, or a practitioner of TM. I just wanted to be angry at God.

  I began to wonder what I would do had I been my younger self, instead of this forty-seven-year-old woman. When I was in a relationship with a practicing Jew, I had given him free reign: no Christmas tree, no Easter eggs. Instead, his contemporary silver crafted menorah held center stage on our shelf of treasures. Although it could be argued that my own beliefs were subjugated to his, an error women far away from middle age often make, in truth I felt comfortable enough with my spirituality to keep it to myself. I spent Christmas and Easter with my family, and he came along, happily imbibing our homemade sangria and Christmas gifts. It was almost a relief not to drag a Christmas tree up to our fourth-floor walk-up. Since my own family didn’t attend church, I never felt that I gave up that much.

  But now I had a child to consider, a broken heart, a churchgoing husband, and I didn’t believe in God. In many things, middle age has allowed me to easily admit defeat. I no longer feel like I have to do a difficult hike because everyone else is doing it, or that I must keep up shallow friendships, or that I have to read a book I don’t like all the way to the end. That same maturity that has allowed me to prioritize all kinds of things now made me more confused. In a moment of clarity, I agreed to go back to church.

  It was another Se
ptember, and I harbored a small hope that I would find strength in church that Sunday to face what had slayed me last year: back to school and Grace’s birthday. I felt good seeing how this simple decision to go with him without an argument made my husband so happy. What was two hours a month after what we had been through?

  We settled into our pew, and as the choir began to raise their voices, I skimmed the program. As an overachiever, I always like to know ahead of time what the Bible verses are going to be so I can read them before they’re read out loud, and I like to mark the hymns that are going to be sung. That was when I saw that coming up, soon, was “Amazing Grace.” When you have named your daughter Grace and she is alive and thriving, it is exciting to see her name in books as the snappy protagonist or on the sides of pharmaceuticals, and even in this most beautiful hymn. But everyone in that church, including the people who chose that song, knew two things: Grace’s birthday was that week, and that song had been sung at her funeral, achingly beautifully, by my sister-in-law.

  Already prayers had been spoken and other songs had been sung. At any moment the organ would play those heartbreaking opening chords. I grabbed my coat and walked out of the pew, down that center aisle, and out the door, where I sat on a cold stone bench and cried like I might never stop. When I felt an arm slip around my shoulders, I expected it to be one of the ministers or other laypeople who help out during the service. But it was my stalwart friend Amy, who had sat and held my hand, took me out for teary dinners, taught me how to cast off when I learned to knit in those dark new days of grieving.

  “I saw what was on that program and I couldn’t believe it,” Amy said. “Then I saw you walk out.”

  Amy sat with me in the sharp autumn sun, and let me cry and rant against church and God, while Lorne remained inside. I wondered how he could do it, how he could sit there and let that song wash over him. Was he stronger than I? Or was this just another example of our different ways through grief?

  We made another meeting with our ministers. “How could you?” I asked them. “You knew how hard it is for me to walk in here, and then you play that song.” I explained that as a popular and beautiful hymn, it should be played. But so close to Grace’s birthday? And without any warning? Even if that didn’t occur to anyone, we were always getting calls to come to meetings or to ask us to bake cookies or work on a Sandwich Brigade for the homeless shelter, but no one could call us to apologize after they saw me walk out in tears?

  It was a mistake. They were sorry. It would never happen again. In fact, they would not play “Amazing Grace” in September, or in April, the month Grace died. I looked into the face of these people—people no closer to God than I was—and saw their fear. Both of them had young children. If I had lost Grace, anything could happen. Was that why it was so difficult for them to offer comfort, to help me come up with answers, to massage my wounded spirituality?

  In the gumbo of spirituality, of church and religion and God and beliefs and faith, it is hard to separate one from the other. It has been three years since Grace died. My husband has turned fifty since then. He is a handsome man, but sorrow has taken some of the twinkle from his eyes. He is a man who believes in the power of church and religion. He wants a simple thing: for his wife and his son to stand beside him and lift their voices in a song of gratitude for what we have and for having had Grace at all. I try to give him this. It isn’t easy, but I am trying.

  I see now that my own journey has led me back to what I knew as a child facing down a priest hidden by the screen of the confessional; what I knew as a younger woman living alone in New York City, chopping basil and peeling potatoes for the dying men in my neighborhood.

  It took two years from that summer day when I boiled water for pasta again and cooked dinner for my family until I once again began to cook for them every evening. I spend too much money on a perfectly ripe cheese. I buy fancy crackers from Italy. I boil the water for spaghetti, and carefully cook pancetta and garlic to make a carbonara. I toss this with the pasta, mix in eggs and good parmesan. Right before I serve it, I add two egg yolks. This is the secret to real spaghetti carbonara. I believe in this: good food, the sounds of forks against plates, the perfect blend of flavors. And later, in the night, I believe in the quiet sound of my son’s deep breathing as he sleeps; I believe in my husband’s hand, resting even in sleep on my breast, trusting, loving, there. Even now, there are still days so beautiful, I almost believe in God.

  CHAPTER NINE

  There

  TIME DOESN’T HEAL. It just passes. One day we rearrange the family room, moving the couch so it faces this way, buying a stand for the television. One day we decide to paint the living room green. We turn a spare room into a knitting room to hold all of my yarn. Sam buys me an Oxford English Dictionary for my birthday; it is the thing I have most wanted for all of my adult life and now it sits on an old library dictionary stand, stately and wise. I sell my station wagon and buy a bright orange VW Bug convertible. I grow my hair long. Sam stands at five feet eleven. I put turquoise Marimekko sheets on our bed. Sam’s bunk beds are gone, replaced with a double bed. Time passes and I look around and see how many things have changed since Grace died.

  Now her shoes stand like sentries at the top of the stairs. Four pairs: leopard rain boots, sparkly red Mary Janes, blue Skechers sneakers, worn metallic pink slip-ons. They break my heart, those shoes. I cannot go up or down the stairs without seeing them, which is why we put them there. They are lined up, toes pointed out, ready to be put on, ready to skip down those stairs, out the door, into the world.

  Sometimes, I cannot go down the stairs without touching one of them, like a talisman. Sometimes, I find a dust bunny wrapped around a shoe, catching on the glitter or trapped under a Velcro strap. That makes me stop to clean that entire corner. If there’s dust, we are reminded that no one wears those shoes anymore. We are reminded that our funny blonde Grace is dead.

  “I hope,” a man told me at dinner one night about a year after Grace died, “that you’ve cleaned out her room.”

  We were sitting in a fancy Italian restaurant, eating homemade gnocchi and drinking Pinot Grigio. The man’s wife had died some years back, and like many people who had lost a loved one, he was trying to help us, to show us that we would survive. Here I am, these people seemed to say. Look! I made it! I didn’t doubt that at some distant point in the future, I would still be alive, still enjoying a good glass of wine and good food. What I wasn’t sure of was how I was going to get to that place without Grace.

  “Nothing worse than a shrine,” the man said.

  The truth is, before Grace died, in fact, for my entire life, I’ve loved visiting shrines of all kinds. Homemade ones, official ones, religious ones, personal ones. I used to love to travel to offbeat locations in foreign cities to find shrines to dead cats, to victims of war, to small-town heroes.

  “Get rid of her clothes,” the man said. “Make the room a guest room or something.”

  GRACE WALKED OUT of her room one day a healthy, vibrant five-year-old and never walked back in. Her ballet tights smelling of her stinky feet lay in a tangle on the floor. A basket beside her bureau held all of her socks—the leopard print and zebra print, the ones covered with pink hearts, the crazy stripes, and polka dots. On a shelf in her closet sat a pink bag. In it, I had put a New York Times from September 24, 1996, the day she was born; her sonogram pictures; the tiny newborn hat she had worn in the hospital; dozens of little things that celebrated the day she was born. I had imagined doing something clever with them when she turned sixteen, or went off to college, or got married. Now I cannot bear to open that bag with all of its ignorant joy.

  The funny thing is Grace never slept in her bedroom. Once she left her crib behind, my mother and I went to a local furniture store and bought an antique white bedroom set. A sleigh bed and bookshelf and a bureau with a scrolled mirror. Her cousin bought her sheets covered with cats. My friend handed down a comforter from France. We kept the green rocking chair that
I rescued from a beach in Far Rockaway, New York, long before Grace or Sam was born; that was the chair I used to nurse in when she was a baby, the chair I rocked her to sleep in each night.

  Grace loved her room, and often went in there to paint on the easel that sat in one corner, or to change her outfit, or to get a book. But she slept in Sam’s room—Sam on the top bunk, Grace on the bottom. Sam got a thrill out of threatening her. “Next year you have to sleep in your room,” he’d say. But she didn’t believe it for a minute. She knew he needed her there as much as she wanted to be there. Grace loved to sleep. As a baby, she slept through the night early and easily. She liked to sleep late whenever she could. But Sam hated naps and bedtime. He feared the shadows that trees sent spilling across the walls at night, feared robbers roamed our yard. “How do you fall asleep so fast?” he’d ask Grace, and she would put her hands behind her head, close her eyes, mutter, “Like this, Sam,” and go to sleep. At night, when bad dreams woke Sam, or kept him from falling asleep at all, he climbed into the bottom bunk with Grace. He would wake her up, and the two of them would talk in the dark until, sleepy, he could finally go back up, and fall asleep.