Signs of Life (9 page)

But then the class ends and I walk into the parking lot along with several other couples. With every single couple, the same thing happens. The husband gets into the driver’s seat and the wife gets into the passenger’s seat. Together they drive away. I get into the car and lose it. I start crying hysterically. The image of the car, the image of Josh always driving, and now the image of me always driving alone is completely overwhelming. I had prepared myself for a class full of couples, but for some reason I didn’t prepare myself for the parking lot. None of the couples realize how special this is, how special it is to have two people in the car, to fill the front seat with a mom and dad. And their children, everyone’s child except mine, will grow up with this distinct image, the same image I have seen my whole life. Dad drives and mom sits next to him. But my son will always see me, alone in the front seat.

As it is for many couples, the car was always the place where Josh and I talked about everything. After we visited Margaret, Deedee, or my parents, we would always debrief about what happened. When we drove up north we had a mutual understanding that the drive itself was half the fun. Josh would drive and I would point out funny landmarks or we would discuss what it would be like to live in Standish or which gas station on I-75 was our favorite. But now my trips up north will be with my parents or Ashley or Deedee or Maggie, and it’s not that I don’t love these people, but they are not Josh. I will never get to carelessly climb into the passenger’s seat as I did a few short months ago. I will always drive everywhere. I had never seriously thought about this concept until tonight.

•  •  •

The other morning on NPR was an interview with people in a small town in Alabama. The point of the story was to show how people feel about the U.S. military in different parts of the country and why. In this small town in Alabama there was an undying devotion. At one point in the story the Stewarts, a couple who had an eighteen-year-old son who had volunteered to go to war after September 11, were interviewed. Their son was killed in Iraq. The mom started to cry when she talked about the three men in uniform who came to her door. More than three thousand people came to his funeral, and that night the townspeople had a walking vigil; they held candles and carried American flags. Obviously, not everyone who attended knew this young man, but to the town he had died an honorable death and he deserved to be commemorated.

At one point when the dad is telling the story about his son’s death to the interviewer, he said that it was a Sunday afternoon and it didn’t feel different from any other Sunday afternoon. Then the doorbell rang and three men in uniform were standing on his front porch with solemn looks on their faces.

“I had to change the ring on the doorbell,” the dad said, his voice breaking up. And right as I heard this, I started to nod my head. I completely understood. Anyone who has not lived through a day like his or mine would hear this statement and say, “Well that’s ridiculous. The doorbell had nothing to do with it.” But to us, the doorbell had everything to do with it. Thank God he changed the doorbell, I thought to myself. Thank God he and his wife never have to hear that doorbell again. I feel like Jay Gatsby and I are the only people who would find importance in that small detail.

When Josh called my phone, the phone erupted with his own unique ring tone. It wasn’t anything special—I didn’t download it or anything—it was just different from the one that everyone else in my phone got. It was called “Latin Loop.” Ever since he died I haven’t heard “Latin Loop” and I hope I never do. One time I was in a coffee shop and I heard a phone ring that was just like the ring he had on his phone. I calmly stood up, got in my car, and cried until I could hardly breathe.

I look at pictures of him every day. I even watch videos of him. But for some reason, it’s the other senses that rip the carpet out from under me. Right before Josh’s accident we had gone to Costco together and bought this new detergent called Eco. Josh wanted it because it had something to do with being more environmentally friendly than our regular Tide. I remember the first time I did a load of laundry after Josh died. I took the clothes out of the dryer and I was relieved that they didn’t smell like they did when he was here. I would have never washed clothes again. Thank God we’d bought this new detergent.

I don’t know why this is, why my brain fears having those other senses register with the past. When I see something, I can rationalize it in my brain or at least can attempt to explain it to myself:
That’s a picture of Josh at Christmas. That was his last Christmas. This year, he won’t be at Christmas
. Sometimes it makes me upset, and other times I just keep walking down the hallway and try to let the words sink in. I feel like I try to explain to my brain what has happened. But with smells and sounds, my brain doesn’t have time to react. There is no internal monologue to make things clear. My sense of smell and hearing don’t quite know that Josh is dead. When I heard that phone ring, when I smelled his T-shirts, for a split second he wasn’t gone. If his smells and sounds were still around, then he couldn’t be gone. It just didn’t make sense. He was so close. If I could smell him, he
must be around here somewhere, right? Then I have to remind myself again, for the six thousandth time, that he’s not here anymore. Every time that doorbell would ring, the Stewarts would have to remind themselves that one second before that doorbell rang they were normal people with normal lives whose son would be home in just a few short months. That doorbell was more than a doorbell now. It was a signal of their passage into the most difficult phase of life, the darkest phase they’ve ever had to face. It signals the moment their lives changed forever.

The dad on NPR isn’t crazy. Gatsby isn’t crazy. That’s the word my students always use,
crazy
. They call Macbeth crazy, Lady Macbeth is crazy, Winston Smith is eventually crazy in
1984
. Any time they see a human outside of the normal range of emotion, they call them crazy. Gatsby just can’t get it into his head that he can’t go back. He’s just like me and the Stewarts and so many other people.

Two years ago Ashley’s live-in boyfriend abruptly moved out with little explanation. I remember her standing in our kitchen crying, going through her old text messages from him about how much he loved her, how he couldn’t wait to marry her and have kids. She kept reading them, like little relics of a past life, and she didn’t understand how she had crossed over into a new world of singleness. It was like she was arguing with the person who works at the ticket counter at the airport. “No! I was scheduled for a wedding and pregnancy, but you’ve rerouted me to twenty-six and single!” And we all expect that some person behind a counter will just type a few buttons into their computer and hand us a new ticket. “We’re so sorry, ma’am.” And poof, we’re back on track. But life can be so fucking absolute. It takes us a while to get that we will never be rerouted.

•  •  •

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a woman who had also lost her husband in an accident when she was pregnant with their first child. It was very nice of her to talk to me and I did find a lot of her words comforting, but the meeting did not leave me feeling particularly inspired. At one point in the conversation she said, “You know, you just have to find your new normal.” I have heard this phrase before and I hate it. I want to wave my index finger at people and say, “Don’t put me in the same sentence as normal. I am not normal and I’m never going to be ‘new normal,’ so knock it off.”

Now that my due date is quickly approaching, I keep thinking more and more about being a mom and starting a family, a very abnormal family. How will my son develop knowing that he is different from the majority? My whole life I tried to put things together so it was completely normal—college, job, marriage, baby. But now, everything in my son’s life will somehow remind him that most people are not like us. The language his teachers use at school will always include the phrase “your mom and dad,” and he will know that it doesn’t apply to him. Throughout his entire life people will constantly say stupid shit to him like “Your dad must be so proud” or “Did your dad take you to the Red Wings game?” And he will have to figure out how to deal with these stupid people. Sometimes he will have to say, “I don’t have a dad. My dad died before I was born.”

Then one day both of us will figure out that not being normal has its perks. Baby Taylor will have twenty-seven men he calls uncle and thirty-four women he calls aunt. “Did your dad take you to the Red Wings game?” “No,” he will reply. “My grandpa took me and my uncle Toby and my uncle Brian and my uncle Chris and my uncle Adam. I ate so much pizza and pop that I threw up on the way home. My uncle Chris threw up too, but he didn’t eat any pizza.” While all of the other kids go on
family vacations over spring break, Baby Taylor will travel to all sorts of different places. He’ll go to Miami to visit his aunt Moo and uncle Dubs, he’ll go to Los Angeles to visit his uncle Ads and aunt Ellie, he’ll go to San Diego to go surfing with his uncle Pug, or maybe he’ll even go hunting in the Rockies with his uncle Chris. Then during show-and-tell after spring break, all of the other fifth-graders will be showing pictures of their perfect families posing together at the top of a ski slope or sitting together in a giant teacup in Disney World. Baby Taylor will show his picture of him and an adult male both standing over a dead animal carcass in the middle of the mountains. “This is my uncle Chris. We shot a buck together.” All of the girls will say, “Eeeeeewwwwww,” and initially, Baby Taylor will wonder why his picture doesn’t look like the rest of the students’. For a moment, for a fleeting moment, he may wish he were one of them. But then at lunch recess when all of the other boys are chasing him around asking him about shooting a gun and cutting the guts out of an animal, he will realize that being different is not always a bad thing. “Is it hard to shoot a gun?” they will ask him, with their wide eyes and imagining the reaction of their own overprotective mothers. “It’s not
that
hard,” Baby Taylor will say, with his hands in his pockets, not knowing just how much of an enigma he is to his peers. “It’s a lot easier than shooting a bow and arrow,” he will say. “You’ve shot a bow and arrow?” They will gasp in awe. “My mom won’t even let me watch movies that have guns in them, let alone shoot one,” says the boy from the teacup picture. Later that night Baby Taylor will call his uncle Chris and tell him all about show-and-tell and how all the other boys wished they had an uncle Chris who lived in the mountains and had guns.

In the next four weeks I am going to have a baby. That baby will know that his life is missing someone, someone very
important. But Baby Taylor will always know that he can choose how to live. He can be brilliant or tragic. In having that choice, he will always know that there is only one choice he can make.

This positive sentiment feels good when it sits in my brain. I know my son will be okay. He’ll be awesome. But for every inspirational flash, and they are merely flashes, I feel like I have a hundred dark moments to match. This is the craziest part about grief; it just swings you like hell from one end of the spectrum to the next. I try to savor my flashes of hope in regard to motherhood. I wish I could hang them on the refrigerator to remind myself of those moments on any given day when I am not scared to death of the future.

But always too soon, right after a fleeting moment of hope, the floor opens up and I sink to the bottom again. I’ll think about Josh or I’ll look at a picture I hadn’t seen before and I’ll think, I’ll never be happy again. I’ll never smile the way I did in that picture. I’ll never see the world as I once saw it. No matter how much time goes by, no matter who comes into my life, I will never be as happy as I was before June 17, 2007. Even when I do buy my beautiful house, and even when Baby Taylor gets a full ride to Notre Dame on a soccer scholarship, and even when I somehow become famous and get to be on
Oprah
, and Victoria Beckham calls me and wants to be my best friend, even all of that won’t do it. At the end of the day after Baby Taylor falls asleep, I’ll still stand in the kitchen and cry over a bottle of wine and sing “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” and my life will still feel just as pathetic and meaningless as it does right now.

Dr. G. says that this is a place I am only “visiting.” That my feelings of loneliness and emptiness are merely stops along the way of a very long journey. I believe her because she is a smart lady, but what if I never can smile again like I used to?
What if I try everything and nothing seems to work. Then what do I do?

A couple of weeks ago I had to call Josh’s dermatologist, Dr. Samor, and leave a message explaining that Josh had died tragically in a horrible accident and that I wanted to pay off his account. I expected a return message saying, “Sorry for your loss, you owe us fifty-three dollars.” Instead, I received a message from a woman named Suzanne. Suzanne works in the billing department. I had never met her or spoken to her before. Suzanne called me back and proceeded to tell me, all on my voice mail, that she was dreadfully sorry to hear my news. She could hardly speak, she was so broken up. She explained that a similar situation happened to her. Two weeks before her wedding her fiancé was killed in a motorcycle accident. She said she knew how I felt and she “prayed that sunshine and rainbows find me down the road.” I don’t know why, but her words sent me into a complete breakdown. When I first heard the message I was driving south on Adams Road back from Deedee’s house. I was so upset that someone else had had to deal with this, that someone else had to feel the same way I did. I couldn’t bear the thought that this had happened to another young woman, that this had happened to millions of people before me and would continue to blindside completely happy people and ruin their lives forever. For a split second I wanted to swerve into the other lane and just get out of here. How ridiculous. I was so distraught by the idea of loss and death that I contemplated killing myself. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I was painfully annoyed that this is what so many of us live with. Isn’t that almost an oxymoron, living with the pain of death? But as Suzanne and I have come to realize, you can’t really fully live with the pain of losing someone in your heart. I had spent the last three months feeling so irritated when people looked at me like I was half dead, but
in listening to Suzanne’s message, I realized I felt like I was half dead and so many other people had to feel the same way too. I’m half dead and I’m pregnant. How, as a twenty-four-year-old pregnant woman, am I supposed to compute all of this in my brain? Life sucks so much to the point that I don’t even feel alive, and yet I am one month away from having a baby. So what do I do? I go through the motions of a day. I run errands, I write, I talk to Dr. G., and I spend most of my time trying to convince myself that it will be okay.