Hannah's Gift (15 page)

I COULDN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF IT. STANDING IN FRONT OF
Monet’s masterpiece in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized that his bold whips of paint had captured the moment when a vase of sunflowers on a crimson cloth is all you need from God.

The next day I bought a small set of acrylic paints, a few brushes, a stretched canvas, and a how-to book. I spread sheets of newspaper over the dining room table, filled a small bowl with water, dabbed small buttons of paint on a paper plate, and began to mix the colors. I took my time, letting each step lead me.

I started sketching, light gray pencil on white canvas, and watched a sturdy wood cabin settle into a valley of rolling hills, surrounded by a mountain of trees. Gradually a stream emerged, its white water spilling over rocks in the bend, then slowing to deep, cool eddies where it swung past the house. I built a tiny well, complete with an oak dipping bucket, and added a well-worn flower-edged path that led to the cabin’s back door.

I touched the first stroke of paint to the canvas tentatively, then got bolder with each subsequent one. The colors on the tip of the brush swallowed the pencil drawing, leaving me to trust, not my plan, but the vision that had inspired it. The more patience I had with the process, the more it had to teach. I learned that a leaf is a mosaic of light and green, that a roof of cedar shakes offers hairline cracks of gold to the afternoon sun. Even mistakes were transformed on the canvas: When too much blue was accidentally mixed into the yellow, mossy shadows I hadn’t known were there emerged around the rocks in the stream.

As I painted, I felt completely alive, filled with a sense of joy that was not oriented to time or place. I remembered watching Hannah as she set the table for the tea party, and knew that I had finally accepted her invitation to participate fully in my life. It was the quality of presence and attention that I brought to what I was doing, not the activity itself, that made it what it was.

Two months later, I signed my name in the bottom right corner and leaned the canvas against the window above the kitchen sink. I watched Claude through the window, pushing Margaret and Madelaine on the swings. As the girls squealed with delight, soaring in and out of a warm patch of sun, I remembered my fingerpainting afternoon with Hannah. I could almost see the drips of red, blue, yellow, and green winking at me from the grass.

I WAS A BLOCK AWAY FROM THE TRAFFIC LIGHT, AND IT WAS
red. I was late and didn’t want to slow down. Just before I lifted my foot off the accelerator, the light turned green.

“Thank you,” I breathed.

These days, tired of trying to figure it all out, I had stopped praying “please, please, please” and had started saying “thank you, thank you, thank you” instead. Beginning with the obvious blessings in my life—my kids, my friends, my health, the effort Claude and I were putting into our marriage—once I started, I found that I couldn’t stop. The more I looked, the more I found. Soon I was thanking everything: trees for their shade, sweaters for their comfort, dogs for their fur.

Gratitude had begun to transform the way I saw and experienced my life. Because of it, I could see that each moment contained something to be thankful for, even if it was simply the gift of another breath. I was reminded of Hannah and the way she had harvested kernels of joy almost everywhere she looked. This practice of being present with
what was happening was far more than an exercise in positive thinking; it was a return to the deep stillness she had shared with me.

Within that stillness, I began to realize an even more awesome thing. No single moment stood on its own; each was a combination of all those that came before and all those that would come after. There was a pattern, an intelligence, in the way they were woven together that seemed to suggest that I was not living my life; my life was living me.

I WALKED ALONG THE EDGE OF THE WATER, SAVORING THE
sliding crunch under my feet. I loved the ocean, and I felt humbled by its expanse and relentlessness.

I was filled with a sense, both frightening and exhilarating, that everything in my life needed to change. In the years since Hannah’s death, I had wriggled out of the claustrophobic expectations I had once had for myself. Now I longed to have a clearer sense of purpose, to live a life that included more of me.

Although Claude and I were still trying to save our marriage, our love, as real and unstable as shifting sand, was eroding beneath our feet. Both of us were desperately unhappy with the way things were but couldn’t agree on what we needed to do to change them. I still couldn’t imagine myself without Claude; divorce seemed like a faraway option. While I felt desperate to let go of the things in my life that were no longer working, I was terrified of losing everything that still mattered to me.

Sitting down on the edge of a dune, I leaned back into its curve. I closed my eyes and listened to the pounding of my heart over the crash of the waves on the beach. I inhaled the stiff wind and licked my lips, tasting the salt on my tongue. I lay quietly, letting the immensity envelop me. I felt small, infinitely small, and yet fully embraced, held. I could feel the tide of my life sucking me away from my old ideas about who I was supposed to be. I longed to surrender to it, but first I needed to be certain that wherever it was going to take me, Hannah would be there, too.

I heard the squawk of a gull just above me. I opened my eyes and sat up.

Shading my eyes with my hand, I squinted into the brightness of the afternoon sun. The brown mottled form with its expanse of white wing swooped and dived toward me. As he dipped and juked, the bird’s brown beaded eyes never left mine. He landed on the sand a few feet in front of me. The two of us quietly studied each other. At first glance, he looked like a thousand other seagulls, but as I continued to stare at him, I noticed that his belly was whiter than most, only the tips of his wing feathers were dipped in brown, and his right leg was slightly mangled. He winked one eye and then ruffled his feathers. I realized, as I looked at him, that he was as common and singular as me.

I knew then that the same mystery that hung the moon, turned the earth, and replenished the sea had given life to Hannah, made this seagull and me; it was the source of everything, arising and falling away, constantly changing
and forever unchanged. Whatever I did, wherever Hannah was, the two of us were forever part of each other. It wasn’t just a poetic fantasy, designed to comfort me; it was the truth.

I could give up trying to figure everything out. There was no single, right answer to the questions I was asking; their uncertainty, fullness, and mystery simply had to be lived.

MARGARET AND MADELAINE WERE STRAPPED INTO THEIR CAR
seats in the back. Will was in the front next to me. I lifted my foot from the accelerator as the car ahead slowed to make a left turn.

“Mommy,
look!”
Maddy cried excitedly, pointing her finger and wiggling in her seat. “That’s where Hannah and I played in heaven before I was born!”

She was pointing to Hannah’s favorite house, the light pink one with dark pink trim.

I had no idea how she knew, and didn’t need to, either. I received it simply as a gift from Hannah’s life, evidence of the unfathomable mystery that lives in all things.

Looking back, I realized that through the last year of Hannah’s life and in the three and a half years since her death, my faith had been patiently ripening. It was in this single, exquisite moment that it finally released its hold on the uppermost branch and dropped, plump and juicy, into my lap.

THE PINK-FROSTED CAKE WITH ITS CLUSTER OF WHITE
candles sat in the middle of the breakfast table. Today was Hannah’s eighth birthday, and we would be celebrating just as we had every year since the day of the red convertible. Before they left for work and school, Claude and Will had blown up three bags of balloons, which were now hanging in bright bunches alongside the tissue paper streamers that swooped from each corner of the room. Margaret and Madelaine had been happy to “help” by unwinding miles of cellophane tape from the dispenser, but when I stopped to load the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, they began to jump up and down, begging me to hurry. Hannah’s birthday wasn’t the only special thing about today; it was also Margaret’s and Madelaine’s first day of ballet.

I had known what this day would look like ever since I dreamed of being the mother of a little girl. My daughter, like the others in her class, would wear a light pink leotard and light pink tights. She would carry her light pink ballet slippers to class in a black patent leather case. Her hair
would be swept into a neat ponytail, fastened with a pink satin bow. In my dream, the other moms and I smile proudly, and they all look pretty much like me. We wear tailored slacks, crisp cotton shirts, leather flats, gold watches, bracelets, and earrings. Our hair is pulled back into sleek barrettes; our younger children, the babies in their strollers, are clean, burped, and sleeping.

Yes, I knew the way the first day of ballet was supposed to look, and this
definitely
wasn’t it. Madelaine’s leotard was light pink, but it was covered with chocolate and last night’s spaghetti dinner; she had worn it nonstop for two days, too excited even to take it off before bed. Her pink tights and slippers would match the other little girls’, but her hair was already escaping from a garish pom-pom, fluorescent green, pink, and blue. Instead of a black patent leather bag, she carried her shoes and Margaret’s in a yellow vinyl tote filled with the books and Barbie dolls she had packed “just in case.”

As for Margaret, she had pooh-poohed my suggestion of a pink leotard and chosen to wear a dance costume from her dress-up box instead. Its electric-blue sequins and shimmering, multicolored tutu clashed only slightly with the red tights underneath. She wore sparkly silver bedroom slippers that looked like ballet slippers but weren’t, and a rhinestone tiara fit for Cinderella.

Catching our reflection in the hall mirror, I hesitated. No matter what the other mothers would be wearing today, I knew that my long skirt, black leather boots, and red wool wrap would look as out of place as Margaret’s
sequins. Where had that other woman—the one I was in my first-day-of-ballet-class dream—gone?

Suddenly a voice in me made itself heard: “Maybe you should change your clothes into something more appropriate. Or at least insist that Margaret and Madelaine change theirs.” I almost laughed out loud. This, I knew, was the voice of that other woman, the one who had always been concerned about what other people might think.
She
was afraid, but
I
wasn’t.

As I stood in front of the mirror, gazing at the picture we made, I felt the sides of the box I had been living in for years drop off and fall away. I knew then that part of me would always be afraid of getting hurt, making mistakes, or not being loved. I didn’t have to wait for my fear to go away. Like my suffering, it was simply part of who I am.

I turned to Margaret and Madelaine. “You two look gorgeous,” I said.

“You do, too, Mommy,” they said, giggling.

“Then what are we waiting for?” I said. “Let’s go!”

Hannah had taught me that there is a death more painful than the one that took her body from this world: a soul suffocated by fear leaves too many joys unlived. As I watched Margaret and Madelaine march into dance class, smiling, their heads held high, I knew the magic of Hannah’s red shoes had finally come full circle. She had not only given this gift to me; she had given it to her sisters, as well.

I WAS ASLEEP, SUSPENDED IN A SILENCE WHERE NOTHING
was present or happening. Something broke through the surface. The stillness let go. I floated upward, toward consciousness. I wasn’t alone. I drifted slowly, gently, toward this other. My eyes were closed. I was not afraid. I heard her breath and felt the patience in her waiting, and knew she was standing beside me, next to the bed. My eyes were still closed. I let them be closed. She waited. I opened them.

She stood in the first light, smiling quietly, as if she had known all along, and still knew. It was spring, she was sick, and we had already been told she was dying.

“Mommy,” she said, “I had a dream.”

I lifted the covers and felt the warmth of a good night’s sleep escaping. She climbed in, wiggled her body close to mine, and turned to face me.

“Mommy, I had a dream,” she repeated, “a very very
special
dream.”

Our faces were almost touching. She paused, her eyes shining, as if she was about to spill a secret.

“I dreamed that God and His angels came and picked me up and carried me into His world!”

She clapped her hands.

“Mommy,” she exclaimed excitedly, “wouldn’t that be so great?”

She threw her arms around my neck. I held her as close as I dared.