Promise Me (21 page)

“Sweetheart, we have to go to the hospital,” Mom told her one morning after Stan took the children to school. “We need to go over there and get you better.”

Suzy tried to answer, but her tongue was swollen in her dry mouth.

“I know, I know,” Mom soothed her, stroked her hand. “But I love you, your dad loves you, your sister loves you, your family loves you.… That’s what you know for sure.”

She was awake and trying to talk on the way to the hospital, but Mommy couldn’t understand what she was saying. The moment they pulled in, the orderlies rushed out, and by the time Mom had parked the car and caught up with them, Suzy was in a bed and had slipped into unconsciousness. Mommy stayed beside her, unable to tear herself away
as long as there was the slightest chance Suzy might drift to the surface for a moment.

Over the next few days, Stan came when he could get someone to be with the children. Daddy came when he could stand it. Suzy’s closest friends—Linda, Patty, and Dee—took turns, keeping the quiet vigil with Mommy.

Looking down at the verdant green of the midwestern summer, I knew in my heart I was too late.

S
uzy died August 4, 1980.

She was thirty-six years old. Her children were ten and six. Mommy and Linda were there with her. I was on my way, but Daddy met me at the airport again, his eyes rimmed in red, his mouth drawn down to a tight line of self-control.

“She’s gone,” he said.

There was a shock wave of agony, relief, guilt, and sorrow. Then a strange state of white noise settled in my head. That night I slept with Steffie in her ruffled pink bed, drifting off for a few minutes, then jarring awake as if a bell tolled in a tower next to my head. I cried as quietly as I could for a while, then lay there feeling empty, listening to the soft, consistent breathing of Suzy’s little girl beside me.

“Aunt Nan?”

The door creaked open, and Scott peeked in. I patted the bed beside me. He crept over and crawled in, and though he was a great big boy of ten, he let me pull him into a good snuggle.

“What’s going to happen now?” he asked.

“It’ll be like … when your mommy had to be away for a few days,” I lied, but trying to make it true, I added, “Grammy will be here. And your daddy.”

“Will you be here?”

“I … yes. Sure, Scott. I’ll be here.”

He looked up at me. Skeptical. Ten.

“I will, Scott. Maybe not as often as I have been lately, but I’ll come to visit you, and you’ll come see me and Eric in Dallas, and we’ll all go to Florida to see Grammy and Grandpa. It’ll be hard for a while. You have to be a good big brother, and we all have to … just … just cover each other up with love.”

He burrowed into my side, and I stroked his hair away from his forehead, resting my other hand on Stephanie’s back, and we stayed that way until morning.

We all walked through the next few days as if we were characters in an old TV show, negotiating the set pieces, speaking our lines through the static, our faces in grayscale, everything around us black and white. With a numb efficiency, Mommy and I ordered flowers and discussed appropriate readings with the rabbi. We agreed that Suzy personified Solomon’s good woman in the Song of Songs.

Daddy made arrangements for the above-ground mausoleum. Stan nodded and agreed to things, ashen, exhausted. Suzy’s wonderful friends stepped in with food and flowers and warmth for Scott and Steffie.

The casket was to be closed during Suzy’s funeral, but there was a private viewing for the family before the service. I knew Suzy wasn’t there, but I needed to see her.

The absolute stillness of her body seemed to anchor the room. All the months of twisting frustration and abject terror disappeared now, drawn into a peaceful center of gravity. But when Mom and I stepped closer, the breath caught in my chest. Heavy-handed makeup covered Suzy’s soft, expressive face. Everything about it was wrong. The eye shadow was blue as a bruise. Sweeps of rouge attempted to impart a blush of life in her cheeks, but the wrongness of the tone and the matte finish of foundation made her look plastic—almost puppetlike.

“No. No way.”

I strode to the back of the room where the funeral director stood, trying not to hear the obvious punch line Suzy would have whispered with one hand cupped to my ear if it had been someone else lying there. “I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like that.”

“Excuse me.” I was quiet but firm. “That makeup needs to be removed. That’s not at all how my sister looked. Just take it off, please. I’ll redo it myself.”

Sensing there was no room for discussion, he quickly had it done. I took my own little makeup bag from my purse and leaned down over the edge of the coffin. Her skin was smooth and white as a pearl, her lips faded lavender, her eyelids porcelain gray.

I clenched my teeth against the need to sob. Tried to breathe around it, but couldn’t.

Mom watched from a chair off to the side. She didn’t make a sound, but she didn’t fight or push away her tears.

The light-handed way Suzy had always applied her makeup was as much about her personality as it was her sense of style. She had no desire to hide or alter anything about herself, only to make the most of what she had. There was a daytime look routine and a nighttime look routine. She’d taught me to do both and updated me periodically with new tricks and trendy products.

Suzy left us with the daytime look.

Evolution

I
n a garden square near the Szechényi Chain Bridge, which spans the Danube to connect the cities of Buda and Pest, the stylized Zero Kilometer Stone carved by Miklós Borsos symbolizes the starting point from which all major roads in Hungary count their distance. While serving as U.S. ambassador to Hungary, I spent some time staring at that stone, contemplating the starting points in my life. The moments from which I mark the distances I’ve traveled are not, in and of themselves, all that remarkable. They tend to be smooth and stylized, elegant and immovable, like the Zero Kilometer Stone.

Eight weeks after Suzy’s death, I was so deeply entrenched in grief, I wouldn’t have believed that a new beginning was possible, let alone so close that I could almost reach out and touch it.

In September, Eric started kindergarten, and I went back to work. I wasn’t ready to face the reality of a daily life without Suzy, but I had rent to pay, a child to raise. People searched for the right thing to say and came up with, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I’d grown immune to the words. My automatic response was a wooden “Thank you. You’re very kind.” But it didn’t always feel like kindness. Sometimes it felt like politeness. This was the correct thing to say, and if I were a correct-thinking person, I would rise above this now. It was time to let go. But how do you let go of someone so thoroughly woven through your soul? How do you live without someone you would have died for? I read books on the psychology and methodology of grieving, feeling like a failure because I still couldn’t sleep or eat or think straight.

“How long has it been?” someone would ask, and I didn’t know how to answer.
How long has it been?
implied that this foundation-shifting event was over, and for me, it was still going on. My mother’s unstoppable
spirit was shattered on the floor. My father’s bounding energy had aged to a weighted sigh. My own ability to help them or even make it through the day felt frozen. Literally. My heart and mind felt encased in ice. The only warmth I could feel was Eric. Sometimes I had to take hold of him and hug him until he squirmed away, complaining that my hands were cold.

“When can we visit Aunt Suzy?” he’d ask the same way he asked, “When can I go to Grammy’s house?”

It tore my heart out that I’d let another person disappear from his life, but he was just asking out of curiosity. “Why are you crying?” was a candid, legitimate question coming from a four-year-old who was just as likely to ask in the next breath, “Why are fire trucks red?” or “Why do some dogs not have tails?” He didn’t know there was any such thing as grief; he was just figuring things out, fitting life into his lunchbox. It was comforting, this tiny happy-talking refuge in the midst of all that emotional wreckage.

I lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, scenes from Suzy’s life and death replaying in my head. We were there, on a street corner in Paris.

What a great life! We’re so lucky, Nan. The luckiest
.

The next moment, we were on the street corner in Houston, staring down the oncoming bus. Now it felt like I was the one who’d been slammed to the ground, stunned, run over.

Fancy meeting you here
.

My father’s dignity and the grace with which my mother faced all this were heartbreaking. Mommy had witnessed Suzy’s first breath and her last and remained grateful for every day between. I should have felt lucky to be the tagalong little sister who got as much of Suzy’s time as I did, but all I could feel were the missing hours, the wasted words, and all the thousands of days that Suzy should be here and wouldn’t be. I couldn’t fathom the character of a God who would turn his back on her.

“I’m not sure I can even believe in the existence of such a God,” I told Mom. “I don’t know where to put all this. Mommy, if you think I should move back home for a while, …”

“No,” she said flatly. “That would be a disaster. Your life is in Dallas. You have your job. Eric has school. Live your life and take care of your responsibilities. That’s the best way to get through it.”

This was the hardest moment of my mother’s life, but she was no stranger to loss. Her style of grieving was eminently pragmatic. Daddy was strong for her; she was strong for him. Scott and Steffie desperately needed a mother’s love, and Mom was there with the closest possible approximation. It didn’t surprise or hurt me that Suzy never asked me to step in and be a mother to her children. She knew I loved them, but we had very different mothering styles, and she knew our mother didn’t have to be asked.

I know you’ll take care of everyone, Mommy
, she’d said.

She’d trusted Daddy to look after her.
Don’t let them bury me in the ground
.

He was the one who’d always sheltered her. I was the one who’d challenged and perplexed her, so maybe she was getting a bit of her own back, leaving me with this impossible task.

Promise me, Nan
.

I’d promised, and I meant it, but what was it she expected me to do? Paint the walls in the waiting room? Stand on the corner with a sandwich board? Was I supposed to find every woman who didn’t know better and shake her till she listened? Did Suzy expect me to
cure breast cancer?

“Knowing Suzy,” Mom said wryly, “she expected all of the above with a pink ribbon on it. Plus a box of chocolates.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Go back to what you know. Volunteer. Raise money. Make noise.”

I went back to what I knew, picked up where I’d left off. At the time Suzy died, my autumn and holiday season had already been booked full of various projects. The doing of those familiar things kept me busy and tenuously connected to the life I had when Suzy was alive. Charity functions. Fashion shows. Luncheons to support hospital wings. I did everything I could to sync my PR job with the charity work I wanted to do so that I’d learn from these events, connecting with people who knew people and spending time with the guest speakers, whether they were oncologists, researchers, or celebrities. At the annual Cattle Baron’s Ball, a star-and-rhinestone-studded event benefiting the American Cancer Society, I ran into Dr. Blumenschein, and he greeted me with a warm embrace.

“How are you, Nancy? How’s Miss Ellie and your dad?”

“We’re fine, thank you.” I went with the polite response; he already knew the real answer. “I’m glad to see you, Dr. B. I need your advice on something.”