Hannah's Gift (12 page)

I TURNED JUST AS WILL CAME IN. HE GLANCED AT HANNAH’S
body on the bed, and then lifted his face toward the ceiling.

“Hi, Hannah,” he said. “I know you’re here. I’m glad you’re not hurting anymore.”

He sat on the edge of the bed next to Hannah’s body.

“Is it okay for me to touch it, Mom?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

I watched as he ran his fingers slowly over her arm, then stroked her hair and hands.

“When will she start to feel dead?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but probably soon.”

He stood and looked toward the ceiling again.

“Hey, Hannah, I’m going to have some pizza,” he said. “I’ll be back to check on you in a little while. We’ll see if you’re more dead then.”

A SMALL GATHERING OF FRIENDS AND FAMILY WERE ASSEM
bled at Hannah’s grave on the morning of her burial. The sun was shining brightly, promising another hot day. Will and his cousins were jostling each other and giggling while they waited for the service to end. They were the same children who, the day before, had stood around Hannah’s open casket at the funeral home. Encouraged by Will, some of them had stroked and poked Hannah’s body. A few adults had looked on disapprovingly; they were the same ones who, now, were trying to shush the graveside commotion.

Claude and I had decided to bury Hannah rather than have her cremated. I wanted to be able to come to her grave and know that the little hands I had held and the form I had loved were there, even if they were underground. Claude, Will, and I had visited a couple of cemeteries before agreeing that we all preferred the smaller, quieter one. There had been some discussion about which
plot to choose. Claude had liked the one nestled in a stand of pines. We had eventually agreed on the one Will preferred. It was situated between a small pond and a beautiful gazebo. “That way my kids will have somewhere to play when I come to visit Hannah,” Will had explained.

Now, I nestled Margaret against my chest and glanced at Laurajane, whose head was bent in prayer. She looked very official in a long white robe, although, in the humidity,’ her hair was as wiry and unmanageable as ever. Standing at the edge of the hole where Hannah’s body was about to be buried, I was trying to hold myself together. Before coming to the cemetery, Claude, Will, Margaret, and I had gone to the funeral home to see Hannah for the last time. I had decided to bury her in her Christmas dress with a pair of her red shoes, but I chose to keep her pink blanket. I was sure that she would understand; Will was now sleeping with it. Will had asked to close the casket. Before lowering the lid, he had placed one of his pillows under her head and laid a beaded Easter cross in her hand.

“Good-bye, Hannah. We’ll miss you,” he had said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Wanda, the cemetery manager, had stood up. One of the things Claude had been emphatic about when we met with her was that, when it came to burying Hannah’s body, he didn’t want any mix-ups. He wanted to know for sure, when we drove away, that Hannah’s body would remain in the grave we had left her in. Wanda had thought about it for a minute and then suggested that, short of burying Hannah
ourselves, the best way to address Claude’s concern would be for us to witness the closing of the concrete vault after Hannah’s casket had been lowered into it. Claude and I had agreed.

What I’m certain Wanda told us, but I hadn’t fully understood, was that this procedure involved a backhoe.

“Amen,” Laurajane said. Wanda cleared her throat and stepped forward.

“Claude and Maria have asked to witness the closing of the vault,” she said. “We’re going to need some room, so if all of you would be kind enough to step back about ten feet …”

The rest of her words were drowned out by the cough and sputter of an unusually loud engine. From a spot in the distance behind a clump of trees, a backhoe, with a gigantic cement lid swinging from a chain affixed to its shovel, began chugging toward us. As the children started shrieking and running in circles, the adults stumbled over themselves to get out of the way.

The backhoe continued its crawl toward us. While two cemetery employees lowered Hannah’s casket into the concrete vault in the ground, the adults, now watching from a distance halfway up the hill, didn’t know whether to look respectfully interested or politely away. The children, however, had moved in as close as they could. They high-fived each other, clapped, and cheered as the backhoe operator expertly dropped the lid in the right spot on his first try.

Claude and I grinned at each other as I caught Laurajane’s eye. Hannah had never hesitated to rewrite the rules; it seemed perfect that her burial had been no exception. I was sure that she would have giggled, too, at the backhoe touch at the end.

MARGARET AND I WERE LYING TOGETHER ON THE COUCH
. The Indian summer sun warmed the picture window glass and spilled onto my lap. Exhausted, I dozed while Margaret nursed. When she finished, I slipped my finger between her lips, releasing the suction of her mouth on my breast. A warm trickle of milk ran across her cheek. She stirred and nuzzled me. Inhaling her sweetness, I began to cry. I felt overwhelmed with love for this tiny baby who had so effortlessly emerged in our lives and my heart. I felt a deep sadness that these days with her were being swallowed by my grief before I had a chance to taste them.

Claude was at work and Will was at school. The house looked and smelled like a museum. These days, I had no energy for anything. I felt tired, endlessly tired, and barely able to think. Sometimes my thoughts, like a pack of dogs, chased each other in circles for hours. Other times, it seemed that a whole day passed without my having thought a single thing. The four of us were still eating and sleeping in the same room upstairs, like inmates who refuse
to leave their cells once they are freed. Life felt more manageable and closer to Hannah where her scent still lived in the sheets.

The first few weeks after Hannah’s death, I moved through my days feeling numb but efficient. I had returned phone calls, written thank-you notes, and filled vases with bouquets of flowers that arrived each day. At first, an almost constant stream of visitors and mail poured through our front door. Gradually, as the flurry abated, I had started to clean. Beginning at the top of the house and working my way down, I wiped, washed, and vacuumed every surface in every room except Hannah’s. Then I made lists of things yet to do and people yet to see. I might as well have written my plans in invisible ink.

It was as if I had been lowered into a vat of slow-drying cement; I had become immobile gradually, and now felt almost completely paralyzed by grief.

I WAS DREAMING, BUT I FELT AWAKE. EVERYTHING AROUND
me was darker and deeper than night. I had no eyes to open. Hannah was with me. I could feel her weight on my lap and the softness of her hair on the top of her head where I rested my chin. She was leaning against me, or perhaps I was leaning against her. I held her quietly, breathing her in.

My eyes opened. I could barely see the outlines of furniture in the room. Had I been awake or asleep? I wasn’t sure. I could feel Hannah’s presence, lingering, as if she had just stepped away for a moment.

I closed my eyes, knowing she had been here, greedy for her to return.

BY THE SOUND OF ITS ENGINE, I KNEW THE CAR WAS
coming fast. I stood on the curb, and, with a sense of calm detachment, rolled the image around in my mind. Before the unsuspecting speeder could slam on his brakes, I would throw myself in front of him.

Three months after Hannah’s death, my life felt completely out of control; the pain of losing her was more than I could bear. I felt as if I were caught in a downward death spiral; there seemed to be no relief from grief. I had expected, having had a year to prepare for Hannah’s death, that by now I would have a handle on things. I felt like a failure because, instead of feeling better, I kept feeling worse and worse.

My rational mind’s desperate attempts to convince me that I had a lot of reasons to live kept getting blotted out by my pain. I felt detached from my body and everything else. Despite having two children I loved, despite my bond with Claude, life seemed empty and meaningless now that
Hannah was dead. The same impotence I had felt in trying to prepare for Hannah’s death, I now felt in my grief.

A white sedan crested the hill and roared past. I turned my head and closed my eyes as a whirl of dust blew into my face. My body started to shake. Stepping back from the curb, I collapsed in a heap on the grass.

I didn’t know what to do. All my life, whenever I had been faced with a problem, I had done what I could to control the situation. I had read about it, made lists, and carefully planned my response to it. I had coped by creating a sense of order in the midst of chaos, by finding something good in it. Now, it was as if Hannah’s death had dismantled me; I could no longer think clearly. My attention span was so limited that I found it almost impossible to read. Since a life without Hannah felt pointless, planning for it or trying to find something good about it seemed obscene.

I couldn’t understand why our family had been singled out for suffering. The sight of other children Hannah’s age made my heart shrivel. I felt cheated by life and hated that they had lived while she had died. I knew that what had happened to Hannah wasn’t anyone else’s fault, and I felt deeply ashamed for feeling the way I did.

Curled up in the grass, I let the tears and frustration pour out of me. Then I slowly sat up, wiped my face with the sleeve of my sweater, and took a deep, shuddering breath. The cool autumn air crept into my lungs, filling my chest. I was surprised by its bite. I held my breath for a moment and then exhaled. It had been so long since I had felt myself
in my body. I loved how good it felt. I momentarily forgot about my thoughts and began to concentrate on my breath. I inhaled again, this time more slowly. I paused, then exhaled through my teeth. I inhaled again, this time through my mouth, and exhaled quickly through my nose. I savored the fullness in my chest as I breathed, amazed to feel life coursing through me.

I realized then that my body was telling me I didn’t really want to die. As I continued to breathe, I softened into an awareness that I didn’t need to control my life, deny my feelings, or try to get better. I only had to allow myself to be who I was, where I was, in the moment. Life would do the rest.

IT WAS A COLD, WET NIGHT, BUT I WANTED DESPERATELY
to escape the house. Our fourteenth wedding anniversary was a week away, but that hadn’t stopped Claude and me from engaging in a bitter argument. Claude had wanted to make love; I had refused. Weeks of unspoken resentment had poured into the space between us. For years, this pattern of advance, rebuff, resentment, and frustration had been a source of pain and tension in our marriage, but what had felt before like a series of skirmishes now felt like a fight to the death.

I was resenting more and more Claude’s expectations of me as his wife. I also knew that we had created them together. In the early years of our marriage, it was I who first believed that I would have to be perfect in order for our marriage to work. I had devoted myself to making Claude happy. Although I eventually resented his dependence on me, I had loved it, too; the more indispensable I felt, the more worthy of love I believed I was. Now, fourteen years into our marriage, Claude and I had both come
to expect that a “good wife” meant hand-packed lunches, a clean, quiet house, home-cooked meals, well-behaved children, and sex on demand.

After a lifetime spent taking care of Claude and everyone else, a hungry bear was waking up in me; a fierce commitment to making something of myself was lumbering through the dark cave of my soul, sniffing cautiously in the direction of the light. I still felt mostly overwhelmed by sadness, so the moments when I wasn’t suffocating were especially precious. I wanted to spend them carefully, to be honest about what I needed, to do only what really mattered to me.

For our marriage, my shift in priorities couldn’t have come at a worse time. Both of us were clinging to the wreckage after Hannah’s death, trying desperately to reassemble our lives. Everyone we knew, including Hannah’s doctors, nurses, and social workers, had been impressed by the way Claude and I had managed to walk side by side through Hannah’s illness. But now it seemed that the chasms that had always been between us were widening.

As convinced as I was that I needed to make something of my life, I was even more determined to make things work with Claude. I didn’t think that I would be able to survive without him. I knew the statistics were against us; I had read that more than seventy percent of couples divorce within five years of their child’s death. I wasn’t willing for us to become one of them. Despite all our difficulties, Claude was Hannah’s father, the only person in the world who could ever know the extent of my loss and share the
depth of my grief. I would do anything to save our marriage; being alone in missing Hannah was more than I could bear.

Bending my head into the pelting rain, I stepped into the December night and began to wander through our neighborhood. Looking at the warm light spilling from other people’s windows, I felt more and more desperate and lonely, as if the life that had abandoned Hannah was now, in a different way, abandoning me.

It made me sick the way everything was moving on faster than I could keep up, as if Hannah’s death had already been forgotten. Why couldn’t it be like a giant game of freeze tag, where everyone got temporarily frozen, not just me? While I resented that Claude had been able to take refuge in his work, that my friends were busy with their own families and lives, I had no wish to return to the way things used to be. Almost everything I’d once cared about seemed foolish and meaningless to me now.

I had no idea what I wanted; I only knew that I was terrified of being alone in it.

The fear I had been holding at bay took a deep breath and swallowed me up. I doubled over in the middle of the street. A low moan rolled out of me. I began to run toward Laurajane’s house, two blocks in the other direction, pleading with God to let her be home. Stumbling across her front yard, I sloshed through an ankle-deep puddle, so numb that I barely noticed. A light was on in an upstairs room. I rang the bell, collapsed on her front step, and waited. Nothing. I rang it again and began pounding on
the door, hammering my fists into the wood, ramming my shoulder against it.

Nothing. I sank to my knees, my body wracked with sobs.

Dragging myself home, I let myself in the front door and climbed the stairs to the nursery where Margaret was asleep. I sat in the dark, in Hannah’s favorite chair. While the storm raged outside, I rocked mindlessly, my rain-soaked jeans staining the green upholstered seat.

I stared into nothing and stopped resisting my loneliness. It enveloped me in a pillow of darkness. I closed my eyes and felt myself descending into a sightless, soundless place. I inhaled its silence and then, opening my mouth, let out a silent scream. It was as if I were releasing all the intensity of my suffering into the world without making a sound. It poured out of me until there was nothing left but my presence, without form, suspended in the sense of aloneness that was alive in me.

I let myself rest in the stillness, felt it holding me, breathing me. I was alone but not lonely. I realized then that alone and lonely were two different things. Loneliness came from my belief that something was missing from my life; that I needed someone or something else in order for me to be complete.

But this aloneness I now felt was the fullest experience of myself that I had ever known; in it, I knew that I was at once incomplete
and
whole.