Planting Dandelions (13 page)

My son propped his head up and looked at me with a kind but resolute expression, like a psychotherapist about to get down to business. He touched my arm.

“Do you mean he's
dead
, Mom?” he asked, gently.

In my momnipotence, I sometimes forget that my kids came fully assembled. When they were infants, I'd marvel over their tiny ears, how intricately formed they were, pink and golden like the inside of a conch. They were miraculous to me. And humbling, because I can't draw an ear, much less take credit for making one. I lose sight of that from time to time, and delude myself into thinking I'm the
auteur
of their experience, when actually, I mainly work in catering. They don't need me directing, feeding them their lines. They get it. The script for life and death, grief and joy, is written on their DNA.

As I knelt in the dirt around Wanda's grave, my weeping son clasped to my chest, my grandiosity dissolved. He knew his part. Not in my little production, but in the theater of life. His mourning was both authentic and appropriate, and all that was required of me was to honor it. “Let's have some juice,” I suggested, brushing his sandy brown hair from his eyes. We walked up the steps to the front porch and sat at the boys' little table. I brought out the whole jug of orange juice and two plastic tumblers. I thought we could both use a drink.

“To Wanda,” I said, raising my glass.

To life, I thought. The bitter and the sweet.

I wanted to teach my kids about grief without exposing them to it. There was just so much death around us during our children's first years, I was afraid of the shadow it might cast over them. My mother-in-law passed away four months before our oldest son was born. My father-in-law followed her less than five years later. In between, there was a nine-month stretch during which my father, both my grandmothers, and our dog died, and exploding in the center of that year's cold heart, its atomic nucleus, September 11. It felt like the end of time.

Though it sounds like something straight out of a cheesy country-and-western song, the dog took it over the top. Bailey was my Chesapeake Bay retriever, an eighty-pound lap dog I'd adopted the week after we got married. She drowned before my eyes, in a lake in the country, catching sticks. There was no one around but me and the kids, and the baby could crawl, fast. I didn't dare leave him and my two-year-old on the shore while I jumped in to rescue her, so I watched helplessly as she thrashed and rolled in the water. Some people on the far shore heard my shouts and came running, hauled her out, and revived her long enough for me to get her to the emergency vet clinic, but it was too late. The call came in the middle of the night that she was gone. Patrick brought home her collar and the X-ray image of her waterlogged lungs, a dark cloud passing over her heart, moving into mine.

I could extract some meaning from the other losses, if only as an end to suffering, but Bailey's death mocked those inferences with its gratuitousness. Chesapeakes are bred for swimming—they have webbed feet and waterproof coats. Something had caused her to take on a little water—a stroke, maybe, or exhaustion—and in no time at all, she was sinking. I saw how quickly she lost her sense of which way was up, and I knew I was also dangerously close to the tipping point. Your center of gravity changes when a loved one dies. Part of your life goes with them, so you no longer stand with your full weight on this side, each loss inclining you a little more toward death. I was beginning to list. I tucked my children under my arms, and I pushed off from the silt-bottom sadness with everything I had, diverting my grief into compartments I had sealed off a long time ago.

My unwept tears for my grandfather sloshed around in one of them. He was the first person close to me who died. I was eight years old, and he was the god of my small heaven until cancer took him from me. He went into the hospital for a while, then he came home to his bedroom. I watched my parents, uncles, and aunts coming and going from there for weeks, before I was called to go see him, all by myself. I was scared as I walked down the dim hallway toward the door. I had been told he was dying, and I grasped the word, but not the reality. I knew dimly that it meant he was going away and not coming back, but when he saw me, and began to cry, I understood fully. He didn't
want
to die. He was scared, too. I ran out of the room, terror stricken, and ashamed of myself for abandoning him.

I turned to the god of my grandfather's heaven, and I began to pray in earnest for the first time in my life. Not for a miracle—I knew that would be asking too much—but for one small mercy:
When Poppy dies, don't let me cry
. I prayed those words over and over. I suppose I thought if I didn't cry, I might not hurt. Or maybe the shock of seeing my grandfather break down made me fearful of tears. But that's hand-tinting the picture with an adult brush, guessing at the true colors. I don't remember the reasons, only the urgency. The prayer was answered. I didn't cry when I heard the news, or saw my grandfather in his coffin, or walked behind him to the grave. I was proud of keeping it together. I felt very grown up, though the actual grown-ups were weeping freely. In a world that could apparently take anything from me, at any time, I at least had mastered my emotions.

As kids, we make those kinds of internal errors in navigation, deviations that are slight in the beginning, but widen tangentially as we grow, taking us a little further off course each year. My attitude toward grief became very skewed. For years, I felt about crying the way most people feel about throwing up. I'd really rather not, even if I did feel better afterward. If I had to cry, I did it alone and in private, and there had to be a good reason for it, like death or divorce. I was afraid that if I started crying, I might not be able to stop. Other people's crying made me very uncomfortable. It was like watching them vomit. I'd avert my eyes and hand them a tissue.

I've tried to get better about it since having children. I want the boys to know that sorrow is natural and acceptable. I can tell them, but I have trouble showing them. My tendency is still to hide when I need to cry. I go to the bathroom and turn on the faucet to mask the sobbing, or slip out the back door to sit on the steps. I wait for the redness of my eyes and face to settle down before I reemerge, worried that my tears will frighten them, or that I'll have to explain whatever it is that's the matter. I don't want to have to tell them that awful things happen to people, or that their parents are capable of hurting each other sometimes, or that someone who isn't done with living can die.

But grief seeps in anyway, especially during the holidays, when the absence of our parents feels most acute, and the lengthening nights invite melancholy. We light the Advent wreath to mark off the time. Three weeks in, we come to the pink candle. Anglicans say the color is for “joyful anticipation,” but I borrow from my Catholic roots, and claim it for Mary, for the mother. The candlelight kindles storytelling. We linger in its glow after supper, and Patrick tells the boys about Christmases past, years when his family filled and overflowed the house that belonged to his grandmother, long gone. As he enumerates kin, the boys' eyes grow wide. It's hard for them to imagine. They don't know the kind of family gatherings we did as children.

Baby boy, at three and a half, perceives the void outlined by these stories. He climbs into my lap, and with both hands pulls my face toward his. “Who grandfather's name called?” he whispers.

“Al,” I tell him. “And Patrick. Poppy and PawPaw.”

“Who grandmother's name?”

“Nanny.”

“Who other grandmother's name called?”

“Honey.”

“Honey,” he repeats.

Old grief is a cunning street robber. It can pick your pocket slyly in a crowd, without you noticing your joy is gone. Or it ambushes you straight on, out of nowhere, steel to your gut. Your knees hit the ground and you're breathless.

I gaze into the flame of the rose candle. Not in joyful anticipation, but with thought for La Virgen María de los Dolores, Virgin Mary of Sorrows. Patrick and I spent a season of Lent in Mexico, where a fiesta is dedicated to the sorrowful mother, and people open their homes to display elaborate house altars in her honor, adorned with wheatgrass and bitter oranges.

I was in fresh, raw grief at the time, mourning the end of my first marriage. It was the kind of sadness that makes every breath an effort, a decision. It sounds very romantic to say I ran off to Mexico with my lover, but the truth is, I spent most of my days there in a fog. The Night of the Altars pierced it. Sorrow and loss were allowed. I wanted to gather all the oranges into my arms, bite them through their skins. I began to understand that the pain wouldn't let go of me unless I clasped it first.

I sometimes think we haven't been able to gather in the pain of losing our parents. As they were going, our children were coming. There hasn't been time or space. In the case of Patrick's parents, I'm not sure we've ever come out of shock. Even my dad's death, more expected, still seems unreal. My mother and sister experience his absence nearly every day, but I only encounter it when I visit. I remember riding in the back of a car with my sister in front of me on the way to Mom's from the airport a few years ago. My sister was saying, “When Dad died . . . ,” and I could hear my own voice inside my head, asking “
What
did she say?”

My husband doesn't have the geographic disconnect, but he also manages to get around the gaping hole. We don't visit Patrick's parents' graves, a half-hour drive. We almost never get together with his brother's family, although our relationship with them is genuinely warm. Apart from Christmas cards exchanged with a steadfast few, we don't see or hear from relatives or friends of his parents. Patrick's never been back to the house his father sold soon after his mother died. It's as if the entire space they carved out in the world simply closed over.

Every year, my children's schools have a Grandparents' Day, and every year I have to scramble to come up with a substitute grandparent for each of them. Once, the best I could do was get a co-worker they'd never met. The schools insist I come up with somebody. I lamented the situation to a friend's ninety-four-year-old mother once, half hoping she would take the bait. She had outlived two husbands and a daughter.

“Well, honey,” she said, smiling, and patting my arm, “that's just the way it is.”

She was right. I decided we needed to accept reality. The reality, I told my boys, is that they have only one grandparent, and she lives 2,500 miles away, and it's too bad, but Grandparents' Day is probably always going to be a drag for them because of it.

It's just the way it is. Sorrow and loss are allowed.

I have to remember her words when Patrick describes for the boys how deeply the presents would be piled under his tree.
Oh, don't tell them that,
I think. I don't want my children to feel lack. But they do lack, and it's not in presents. It's in three wonderful people who would have loved them unconditionally, and indulged them shamelessly, the way only grandparents can do. Even my youngest, the only child to never meet any of them, understands that some of his family are missing, and misses them.

I have to let him. Even if it means I have to miss them, too.

I
never used to pay attention to foreclosure notices. They were just inscrutable boxes of black-and-white text I had to flip past to get to a more interesting section of the newspaper. I slow down when I see them now, as I might do if I were passing headstones in a graveyard. I'm aware there are names and dates buried in the legalese: a street, an address. A home. Sometimes I'll stop and read them. The names are often followed by the words “husband and wife.”

I wonder how they're doing, if they'll make it.

It wasn't that long ago that my husband and I were the ones facing foreclosure, hanging off a cliff by our well-gnawed fingernails. I know the exhaustion and terror of staring into that abyss. It's hard on the soul, and it's hell on a marriage. It's tempting to assume that people who fall on hard times have brought it upon themselves, through recklessness or greed. But every financial disaster is disastrous in its own way—easy enough to see where the downward spiral ends, harder to sort out where it began.

The year our last child was born, Patrick left a twenty-year career in corporate advertising to open his own design studio. Other people on the verge of such a leap might have gotten all their ducks in a row first: formulated a business plan, banked a year's worth of living expenses.

We've never been other people. There was no plan. Our ducks tend to be free-range. We'd chased after them a few times—like running off to Mexico early in our courtship to live until our money ran out, then coming back to the States to start over with nothing but our clothes and an antique Mercury Comet, powder blue and chrome. “Fortune favors the bold” was our motto.

When we married, we vowed to keep following our bliss. But after our kids came, Patrick's wistful notion of working for himself kept getting deferred. “When the children are all in school,” I'd tell him. Or, “When we've saved enough money.” And then, “When we're out of debt.” When it feels safe to abandon a predictable paycheck, matching contributions to a 401(k), group health insurance, and paid vacation, that's when. That day never came. Patrick kept the lid on his growing unhappiness until it began to leak out messily; then he and his job broke up.

At the time, my income as a part-time administrative assistant barely covered groceries. It was just something on the side, a foothold in the grown-up world. The job that mattered most to me was being home with our three small children. I thought it was the thing that mattered most to Patrick also—a noble reason to put up with an unsatisfactory situation for a few more years, at least. I was angry, disappointed, and frightened when he came to the end of his rope.