The Grief of Others

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALSO BY LEAH HAGER COHEN

FICTION
House Lights
Heart,You Bully,You Punk
Heat Lightning

 

 

NONFICTION
Without Apology
The Stuff of Dreams
Glass, Paper, Beans
Train Go Sorry

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Copyright © 2011 by Leah Hager Cohen

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Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
“Cigars Clamped Between Their Teeth,” from
Dime-Store Alchemy
by Charles Simic. © 1992 Charles Simic.
Funeral Customs the World Over
by Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers.
Copyright 1960 The National Funeral Directors Association.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Cohen, Leah Hager.
The grief of others / Leah Hager Cohen.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54777-9

1. Children—Death—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. I.Title.
PS3553.O42445G
813’.54—dc22

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

I’ve read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world.We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.

 

CHARLES SIMIC
, Dime-Store Alchemy

W
hen he was born he was alive. That was one thing.

He was a
he,
too, astonishingly—not that anyone expected him to be otherwise, but the notion of one so elemental, so small, carrying the complex mantle of gender seemed preposterous, the designation “male” the linguistic equivalent of a false mustache fixed above his infant lip.

His lips: how barely pink they were, the pink of the rim of the sky at winter dusk. And in their curl—in the way the upper lip rose to peaks and dipped down again, twice, like a bobbing valentine; and in the way the lower bowed out, luxuriant, lush, as if sated already from a lifetime of pleasures—how improbably expressive were his lips.

His hands like sea creatures curled and stretched, as if charged with purpose and intent. Five of his fingers closed around one of his mother’s and held it while he slept. He was capable of this.

His toenails: specks of abalone.

The whorls of his ears were as marvelously convoluted as any Escher drawing, the symmetry precise, the lobes little as teardrops, soft as peaches.The darkness of the ear hole a portal to the part of him that wasn’t there, that hadn’t fully formed, that spelled his end.

His mother had been led to believe that the whole vault of his skull would be missing, raw nerve tissue gruesomely visible beneath a window of membrane. She’d pictured a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, the top removed, the yolk gleaming and exposed. She’d braced herself for protuberant eyes, flattened nose, folded ears, cleft palate: the features of an anencephalic infant. But the opening in his skull was no bigger than a silver dollar, and all his features lovely. She believed, at first, triumphantly, that the diagnosis had been made in error, that now the doctors, seeing the baby, would be forced to downgrade their diagnosis to something less serious—still severe, perhaps, but not lethal.

He was out of the womb and alive in the world for fifty-seven hours—a tally that put him in rare statistical company and caused in his mother an absurd sense of pride—during which time she kissed his ears and insteps and toes and palms and knuckles and lips repeatedly, a lifetime of kisses.

She could not bear to let him out of her arms. He belonged to her, exclusively, a feeling she had not had when her other children were born. This one was bound to her in ways no one knew. Just as she, having hidden his secret these past four months, was bound to him. She would let no one else hold him, not even the baby’s father, who asked only once and then, with great and terrible chivalry, pressed her no further.

During the hours she held him she could not make herself believe how fleeting his life would be.

His breath, above all, gave incontrovertible proof of his being. With grave equanimity, eyelids closed, mouth relaxed, he took and expelled hundreds, thousands, of the most exquisite wisps of air, amounts that might be measured in scruples and drams, and which his mother imagined bore their own delicate hues, invisible to the human eye.They, his breaths, were the one thing she wished could be saved. In her state she almost believed it possible (it seemed a matter simply of having the right vial in which to stopper them . . . what were they called, those special vials for holding tears?—lachrymatories, yes; if only she had one intended for breaths: a
spiratory
), and although she did not allow herself to sleep properly during all those fifty-seven hours, still she had some passing dream or medicated fantasy in the hospital bed, while she savored the feel of his inaudible, numbered breaths still stirring against her cheek, in which she glimpsed herself with an actual such vial on a chain around her neck, an amulet she might wear forever.

He wore, during his short life, a white cotton shirt with a single, covered, side snap,a white flannel receiving blanket, and a white cotton cap, fitted so gently over the opening in his head. He was given two diaper changes, the second proving unnecessary.

His mother found that once he was in her arms, she didn’t want to name him anything, not even the name they’d picked out, Simon Isaac Ryrie, a name she had loved but which struck her ears now as a terrible quantity of pricking syllables. It was not that she was trying to resist forming an attachment, nor that she wished to deprive him of any blessing, any gift or token, but only because once he was in her arms it became obvious that a name was too clumsy and rough and worldly a thing to foist on such a simultaneously luminous and shadowy being.

She tried explaining this to her husband, and also to the nurse and the midwife and the neonatologist, and then to the lady who came with the forms that had to be filled out, and to the resident with the beautiful sad eyes and the accent that made her think of anisette cakes and tiny glasses of thick coffee (his name was Dr. Abdulaziz, which she remembered because of the way he kissed the feet of her fading child each time he came in)—but she couldn’t seem to produce words that matched the authority of her conviction; her voice encountered obstacles, so that the easier and ultimately more rightful thing to do was abandon speech and simply hold her baby swaddled against her chest. This was all she could do and she did it absolutely. In the end it was the resident, Dr. Abdulaziz, who dissolved her resistance to naming the child, not by design or conscious effort, not even knowing he’d played such a role.Yet when he stopped in to visit her, visit them, for the last time (he explained it would be the last time, as he’d come to the end of his shift), he called the baby by name, in so low a voice, his accented syllables seeming to drape the baby in a beautifully embroidered garment as he pronounced, with care and not a speck of fanfare, almost as though it were private, not intended for either parent but for the baby’s sake alone, “Simon Isaac,” and bent to touch once more his mouth to the soles of the baby’s feet.

And so she let her husband inscribe the name they’d chosen on the forms.What did it matter? She recognized her child as he truly was: all-spirit, his limbs pale as candles, his eyes never open once, innocent of all terms.