Resilience (6 page)

A friend, Phil Lister, whose lovely, brave daughter Liza finally lost her battle with leukemia, wrote:

Death Plus Time

how old is she

I don't know what to say

don't know how to add

six years alive and one year dead

six plus one

is usually seven but not now

six maybe

six plus one is six

in a year six plus two will be six

or six plus one is none

Everything on which we had counted had been turned upside down, even elementary addition, so who could say that our physics was not wrong or our biology was not wrong? I didn't need a new story line without him. He could return to us. And when he did return I wanted him to know we were waiting for him; we hadn't moved on without him. The warrior's wife not moving while he is away, not changing the setting so their story could be unchanged by war, just as mine could be unchanged by physics and biology and Phil's could be unchanged by mathematics.

I knew enough to know, though, that Phil's addition and my biology would seem unbalanced outside our sad world. So I used another logic to explain to others why I didn't move a single thing in his room. His room is what he put together, I wrote. We had gone to Washington, D.C., and looked for furniture together—an odd place to travel from North Carolina in search of furniture, but it was his choice and his room. I let him pick what he wanted. Since he was only sixteen when he died, he had had the chance to put so little together, I could not bear to take any of it apart. There was already too little of him here on earth. People who might have thought I was unbalanced if I said it was waiting for him to return so I wasn't changing his room could understand that he had made the room and I wanted to save what he had made. So no one argued when I left his room alone. I did wonder how I would ever get the strength to change it. Would it be the closed door on the second floor for as long as I lived? I was spared the test of whether I could move anything of Wade's: a food in the laundry room next to his room started to spread a mildew throughout his room, and I rushed to save the things he loved by taking that room apart. His books, his papers, his sports cards and trophies, his signed Michael Jordan Wings poster—which later a dreadful someone tried to steal, an incomprehensible violation of Wade.

It was my job to protect his things—and I did and do—since he could not. I got his belongings away from the mildew, I recovered the poster. But change anything? Shoot, I still store his elementary school project on chance and his high school project on the infinity box. I had to take apart his room, but I could not do any more than absolutely necessary to displace the boy. It is easy to say that my husband and I and our three living children live in my house today, but it is more accurate to say that we house four children here.

I think at some level I also needed particular places in which to grieve. His room was one. I did not need it to feel close to Wade, I was feeling close to him everywhere (in part because I refused for a time to move out of his world), but his room was special, a refuge in my worst moments. When his absence came crashing in on me particularly hard, I would go there, lie on his bed, sit on the floor in front of his backpack, and ignore the reality of his absence. His backpack, just dropped off from school as it always was, just where it always sat. And his sheets with the smell of him captured beneath the comforter. I could pretend—for it was pretense, I knew at some level—that he was just gone, not dead. His room was where I could allow myself not to adjust to the new reality. This was the strongest medicine I had. Well, the strongest medicines—hallucinogens actually—were likely the videotapes of him, but I wasn't ready for them then or now. Wade was with me everywhere, but there was no place like his unchanged room for denying that he was forever gone.

I even saw him places he clearly was not. I looked in every black Grand Cherokee, the model of car in which Wade died, hoping to find him. It had all been a mistake, I so wanted to believe. I even followed a Cherokee one day. The young driver had his arm on the rim of the open window just as Wade used to do while driving. I followed knowing it was not him but unable not to follow on the chance that God had granted my wish but only if I showed the tenacity to find Wade myself, to follow this car when it drove by.

I wanted to scream at people who were mowing their lawns or fixing their porch. Don't build that high-rise, don't paint that store. Please. My God is just about to turn back time. But I didn't scream and they mowed and hammered and painted. Like Tecmessa I wanted it to be as it had been, and it was impossible to think that that this—the most important fact in my life—was invulnerable to my efforts, my prayers.

The movement of a bird on the mullion of the window, the fight of a butterfly or lightbulbs going out. The ring of the phone with no one at the other end, a shiny dime on the sidewalk. Some of us who have lost our children sometimes see them there. Not all of us see them, not all of us see them in everything, but we need them in such an enormous, encompassing way that we cannot imagine that need is not big enough to bring us something, some part of him. So we look where no one who hasn't stood where we stood would look. He had to be here, somewhere here. I looked in closets, I opened drawers. Drawers! He was six feet tall. The distorted biology of a grieving mother. I knew as I opened the drawer that he could not be there, and yet I was powerless: I had to open it. What if somehow he could be there?

And then there came a time when I did not open drawers. The illogical searching did not end, but I moved through that place where I was searching for him to a place where I knew he was not there in a drawer—anymore. (Not, I have to admit, that he couldn't have been there; simply that he was not in a drawer in my house; he had, at the very least, moved on.) It was nearly a year later when I had a dream of finding him, a dream without logic, but with drawers—drawers I could not open. I was at a beach something like Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, where we used to go with my parents. One of those idyllically remembered places, where my father would roll the children down the boardwalk in a big gardener's wheelbarrow, and we would grill corncobs and sit for hours watching the Atlantic and eating steamed crabs and grilled corn and cold beer. But it is not that Rehoboth in my dream. In this Rehoboth, I felt out of place. I am drawn to something in the distance and, knowing only that I need whatever it is, I rush toward it, down the boardwalk to the south, past the DuPont houses, to a place I have never been, where I know somehow I am not allowed. Suddenly there is an older woman beside me, and she walks me to an apartment I seem to know. Another woman meets me at the door and invites me in. She introduces me to her husband, who has no face. I am the woman, she tells him, whose nephew died, and the nephew was the same age as their son Lucky. I can see Lucky behind her and her daughter behind him. I've met them all before. I corrected her: Wade is my son.

I had been standing near the doorway in a narrow room with a linoleum table, and as we walked to the kitchen, my eyes were drawn at once to the handles on the cabinets and drawers. They were all broken in the middle and only the stumps of handles were still connected, too small to use to open the drawers. I continued to talk to the woman, and then Lucky and his sister were gone and Wade and Cate came in and stood by the linoleum table.

We spoke a little more and then left, Wade by my side, Cate wandering behind us some, looking back at the couple standing at the door. We walked and talked, and when I talked to Cate I had to turn around. When I turned back to Wade, he was climbing the steps of a bright white porch. I can help you with that, son, I said. Cate walked up with him. I knew I was not to go. I know, he said, thanks, Mom. I stood outside. Alone.

And I didn't look in drawers again. I seemed to have understood that even if there had been a time when I could have erased all that happened and have him, that time had passed and now he was going on without me.

Maybe it should have scared me a year later that he was still this enormous presence in my life and in my dreams but I felt quite the opposite: I was more distressed when he was not with me. Drawers, beaches, thin sliced ham he liked, black Grand Cherokees, a blinking answering machine light, I knew these were irrational triggers, but I did not even ask myself not to respond when something pushed a button on Wade's memory. Without them, where was he in my life? And if, when it happened, I was alone, I fell willingly into the grief. I think I actually wanted it; I think I reacted to the song on the radio or the cola on the grocery shelf as a trigger precisely because I needed his company. It was not a hairshirt to me the way it might have seemed to someone outside my family; it was a warm enveloping comforter, it was as close as I could be in this life to my boy. But that comfort, I had to learn, was an impediment to being able to live as fully as possible after Wade's death. As long as I lived there, I wasn't living in the present, and part of Wade's legacy would be that in dying, he took with him part of his mother as well, leaving half a mother for Cate.

Part of becoming functioning again was accepting what I could not do, much as my father had done as his body failed him. I could not bring him back, as much as I tried, as much as I prayed. I could not let him go, which is what people who cared about me wanted. So many people, thinking they were taking care of me, asked if I was over Wade's death yet. I will never be “over” it, I would tell them, and they would look back at me blankly. If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was “over” it. They would ask how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never ever going to be the life I had before.

Not too unlike the wives welcoming home their warrior husbands, I had to adjust to a new reality. Clinging to the old reality with a living Wade was paralyzingly unattainable, and as long as I did that, I was not going learn to walk. A hundred friends, at least, came by or called or wrote to tell me that I needed to move forward, for myself, for my remaining family. What did they know? I was in pain and vulnerable to every trigger that reminded me of my boy, and they were innocent and invincible. My dearest friends and my family who loved him helped. Some knew just what to do. Gwynn and David came every night in the first months, letting us talk of Wade until we were too tired to speak; they would put us to bed and come back the next evening, Gwynn often with a dinner for us in her hands. Sally would come sit with me in Wade's room. Ellan would find reasons why I should go out, walk with her, anything to leave the house to which I was so bound. Cate gave us reasons to leave, reasons to live. Her soccer games and then her softball games, all the life she had had before and was holding on to as hard as she could.

Those less close to us tried in their way to be there for us, but they seemed like foreigners who could not speak our language. We relied on their smiles and their hugs even when their words did not, could not relate to our pain. Looking back, their compassion and presence and their memories of Wade sustained me in a way honestly I did not then understand. All I thought then was that they did not know what I had not known: They could not really understand what it meant to place your child in a casket, to stand beside it in the church, to sit beside it at the cemetery. If they couldn't tell me anything about the death of my son, who could?

I found a group of people who were as lost and miserable as I was and we helped each other find our footing and find our individual paths. I suspect there are few better examples of barely functional people than those who have just buried their children. We are fortunate just to be dressed, particularly fortunate if it is not exactly what we wore the day before. We barely eat, we don't know where to go, we don't seem to belong anywhere. Yet some of us gravitate to the Internet, and there, with a little searching, we find one another. There we have no faces, no races, no houses, no cars, no jobs, no reputations. Our children were equal, no one was smarter or faster or better-looking, none were troublemakers or lawbreakers. And there we were all equal, in a fashion. There we were all parents who have done the impossible: We have placed our child in a box and the box in the ground and we do not know what to do next. And yet we were stronger when we were with one another. I mean “with” in the important figurative sense.

Around 1991, Wade had taught me how to use the Internet. Five years later I realized he had taught me how to reach a safety net that, in his permanent absence, I would sorely need. I went online sometime after his death not knowing what I would find, not really knowing what I was seeking. But there they were: a group, more than one, actually, with a safe place and a comforting if distant empathy, a group of the bereaved looking for one another. They weren't afraid, as some of my most precious and well-meaning friends (who were helpful in different ways) were, to talk of Wade's death. Losing a child to disease or accident or an intentional act—their own or others—is a reality from which the blessedly uninitiated understandably turn away. I did it before Wade died. I am not proud now that I never asked about the birthday or death day of the long-deceased son of a good friend, but I didn't. And I understood why others circumscribed the conversations they had with me: no talk of dead children. Wouldn't I rather talk about living Cate anyway? And part of me wanted to fall wholly into that glorious child, but I could not shed Wade, didn't want to shed him.