Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (14 page)

“Fuck. I’m gonna call them.”

“Do you want to listen to the message?”

“No, I can’t.”

What I couldn’t tell Steve was that I was hiding from the answering machine. There was a message somewhere on there from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office, and I didn’t want to hear it. There was also another message that I’d been avoiding—it was from Liz. She’d left it from the hospital when she was on bed rest. I’d never listened to it, but I knew it was there. I hadn’t heard her voice since the day she died, and as much as I thought I wanted to, I was afraid that if I did, everything would start to seem unreal, as if she were on an extended business trip or something. So I had been avoiding the answering machine altogether.

I called the airline later that day. “I received a message about an itinerary change. Do you have the details of that?”

“Yes, Mr. Logelin. It looks like your flight to Oahu on May tenth has been moved up by two hours.”

“Okay. This may sound strange, but I had no idea that I was going to Oahu. Can you give me any more information about the trip?”

The agent laughed. “It looks like the flight was booked by Elizabeth Logelin, and was originally scheduled for one year earlier. Elizabeth rescheduled the flight for May tenth, 2008.”

It all suddenly came back to me. I hung up the phone without saying thank you or good-bye, and instantly fucking lost it. All six feet seven inches of Steve got up off the couch and hugged me, making me feel like I was a child again, back in the arms of my father.

I sobbed, now remembering everything about this trip. We had booked tickets to Hawaii the year before for a wedding, but we both ended up having to travel for work. Liz rescheduled the trip as a vacation for us, choosing the furthest possible date from the original reservation. This had all happened a few months before we found out Liz was pregnant, and like me, she must have forgotten about it. Madeline’s original due date was May 12, and there was no way we would have been able to travel, even if everything had gone as planned.

All it took was this one phone call to knock me back down and crush my confidence. All of the positivity I had been building instantly evaporated, and I wondered if I had made any progress at all. My face remained buried in Steve’s chest for what seemed like hours. When I finally pulled myself together, I called Liz’s dad. Before he even had a chance to say hello, I launched into my proposition.

“Tom, I just got off the phone with United Airlines. Liz and I were supposed to go to Hawaii in May, and I just can’t do it alone. Can we take a trip together? You know, you, Candee, Deb, Maddy, and me? Maybe we can go in a few months for our wedding anniversary or something? I don’t want to be alone, and I can’t be in Minnesota, Los Angeles, or Greece on August thirteenth.” I didn’t take a breath until I’d said it all—it must have been a lot for Tom to take in without warning.

“Yes,” he responded calmly. “We can do whatever you want, Matt. Let’s talk about this tonight with Candee and we can plan something.”

That was all I really needed to hear. Later on, we agreed that we would take a trip together on what would have been my third wedding anniversary. I informed Tom and Candee of my self-imposed travel parameters: somewhere outside of the United States, and somewhere none of us had ever visited before. By the next night, we had a flight and a condo booked for a week in Banff. I felt sure that Liz would have been thrilled to know that I planned to spend time with her family. I was just relieved to know that I wouldn’t have to be alone on our anniversary come August.

Chapter 16

she’s a little

too little

to fly.

but,

she won’t be

alone in her

bassinet with one of

those hamster feeders.

M
any of our friends and family had been unable to attend Liz’s funeral in Pasadena and so had been unable to get any sort of closure about her death. What’s more, my decision to have Liz cremated and her remains stored until I decided what to do with them also left people without a permanent place to go to mourn her. Everyone I was now spending time with in Los Angeles—all of Liz’s college and work friends whom I’d rarely spent time with previously—was still devastated. Everyone was still buried in grief. Tom, Candee, and I decided that we should have a second funeral for Liz.

We would have the service in our home state of Minnesota so that those who hadn’t been able to travel previously would have a chance to say good-bye. The funeral home in Pasadena had sent Liz’s ashes to a funeral home in Milaca, Minnesota, a town that held my family’s roots. It was where my mom was born, and where my grandfather’s hardware store had been.

Initially, I thought having a second funeral was insane. I understood providing an opportunity for more people to mourn, but I wasn’t ready to stand up and give another fucking eulogy for my wife. The first time I had done it was pure hell, and it would never get easier, even if I did it a thousand times. Besides, who the hell has two funerals? Then my thoughts went to Madeline. Though nothing would bring about closure in her situation—and even if it could, she wouldn’t have any clue what was going on—I couldn’t help thinking that she needed to be at her mother’s funeral.

I called Dr. Hartstein.

“I’m flying to Minnesota so we can have another funeral for my wife. I want to bring Madeline with me.”

“Matt. It’s not a good idea.”

I knew that was going to be her answer. Maddy wasn’t even supposed to be out of the womb yet, so the notion of taking her on an airplane was kind of absurd. But I kept wondering how I’d someday explain to my daughter that she missed not one but two funerals for her mother. Of everyone whose life Liz had ever touched, the one who would endure her death the longest and hardest would be the child she never held.

I was also scared shitless about heading to Minnesota without Madeline. It would be my first trip back since last Christmas with Liz, and I knew I’d be confronting a lifetime of memories by returning to our childhood homes. What I needed most was not friends, family, music, or booze. I needed my security blanket. I needed my baby. But faced with the very real prospect of jeopardizing the well-being of my otherwise healthy preemie, I had to heed the doctor’s advice and leave her in Los Angeles. I asked my friends Ben and Dana if Madeline could stay at their house while I was gone. Their first baby had been premature, too, so they would best know how to attend to Madeline’s needs.

When it was time to send Maddy home with Dana for the three days I would be in Minnesota, I did my best to keep from crying. I wasn’t ashamed to let my tears flow in front of anyone anymore, especially a friend, but I’d recently started to notice how my crying affected those around me, and so I began attempting to hold it in. My success rate wasn’t 100 percent yet, but I had become rather good at it. I took it as a challenge, and better still, a way to get my mind off of the reason I felt like crying in the first place.

And oddly enough, I had even started to enjoy it. There was a strange sensation that came along with holding in tears, and it became more and more intense the longer I held them in. As they welled up in my eyes, the bridge of my nose started to tingle, the feeling slowly traveling down to its tip and finally sending pulses of numbness through the rest of my head. I became obsessed with trying to hold on to the feeling as long as possible; at one point I thought about carrying a stopwatch around so I could time myself and see if I could set a record each and every time I was about to cry. That seemed a little crazy, though, so I decided against it.

Dana’s voice brought me out of my game.

“Don’t worry, Matt. We’ll take good care of her.”

“I know you will. In fact, I’m pretty sure you guys will take better care of her than I do.” I’m just really going to miss her, I thought.

I buckled Maddy into her car seat (now in Dana’s car), gave her two kisses, and whispered, “I love you.” With my palm on the car window, I pushed the door closed. I left my hand there as the car started, still reaching out for my daughter. Even after they disappeared over the hill, I still held my hand out, frozen in place, my feet firmly planted in the grass below. Driving away from me was the only person left in the world who I actually cared about, and I couldn’t believe I was going to be without her for the next three days.

The tears were welling up again, but this time I didn’t want to play the game. I just let them flow; I knew it would be impossible to stop them. I felt myself sinking into the wet ground outside my house, the moisture and mud soaking through my socks. Shit, I thought. Where the fuck are my shoes? I looked around, hoping that my neighbors weren’t watching. The last thing I needed was for them to know I’d lost my mind.

I walked up the stairs to my house, leaving wet footprints, and thought about how pissed Liz would have been that I had just ruined a pair of perfectly fine socks. I stood in the doorway removing the soggy things, thinking I shouldn’t make matters worse by tracking wet footprints into the house. I pulled them off and pushed the front door closed, slowly realizing that this was the first time I’d been completely alone in our house since Liz died. Though fewer than 1,200 square feet, it then possessed the kind of cavernous emptiness I imagined could only be felt in palatial structures. I melted into the couch and listened to the music I had left streaming into my living room. The words from “Last Tide” by Sun Kil Moon reached my ears and the torrent of tears continued to flow.

Every bird fall weak on lifeless ground

Every eye swelled from tears ever clear

Every seed broken in spring lived till fall

All your babies be around to see them growing up.

Will you be here with me, my love

When the warm sun turns to ash

And the last tide disappear

All darkness near.

I kept quiet so you’d think my heart was tough

I never showed you if I loved you enough

The dreams I had, yeah, I kept but I wouldn’t dare

Share with you for fear of things still living in me.

Will you be next to me, my love

When the cold moon vanishes

And the last cries no yells

For it to hear?

It was one of Liz’s favorite songs, and it would be echoing through the chapel at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis in fewer than twenty-four hours.

“What the fuck is up with this weather?” I said with exasperation.

“It’s Minnesota,” A.J. replied. “Have you forgotten?”

He was right. Spring snow at the end of April was not unprecedented, but it seemed unreasonable and more than a little cruel. I guess after six years of living in Los Angeles, I’d officially become a weather snob—I couldn’t stand any temperature below seventy degrees. I tentatively shuffled my feet through the icy snow, hoping to avoid falling on my ass in front of the large group of people already lined up outside of the chapel.

I gave depressed looks of acknowledgment to the couples clutching each other as they walked in, and I was sure that after seeing me they’d look into each other’s eyes and squeeze each other a little tighter. I knew what they were thinking:
I’m glad this isn’t us.
No person with even one ounce of compassion would say those words in front of a grieving widower, but the way they gripped each other’s arms, the looks—that said it all.

I wished so badly that I were in this line with Liz, waiting to walk into someone else’s funeral. I wished that she were holding tight to my side, her teary blue eyes looking up at me, saying, “Those poor motherfuckers. I love you.” I wished that it wasn’t us.

More than anything, that’s what I wished.

But it was.

An hour later I was standing at a podium, microphone just below my mouth, staring out at a sea of people. This was an exceedingly shitty feeling, waiting to give my wife’s eulogy again. Before I’d walked in here, I thought it might be easier to do this a second time, but as I strained to hear Liz’s funeral soundtrack, the same one we’d played in Pasadena, I realized just how wrong I was. I wanted so badly to hear a familiar song, no matter what it was, something other than the depressing-ass one in my head at that moment. “If I Needed You” by Townes Van Zandt was playing over and over again, and the line “If I needed you, would you come to me?” was making me think about how impossible it was for her to come to me now, when I needed her most. But the sounds of people shuffling in drowned out the music we had playing, leaving me stuck with that one. When all the pews were taken, people filed into the side aisles, and when those spaces filled up, too, they sat on the floor behind me and in the aisle running up the middle of the chapel. The place was packed like the Animal Collective concert I had seen at the El Rey.

I could just picture the look Liz would have given me if I had sat down on that floor, ruining my only suit. A mess of melting snow, dirt, and salt had been tracked into the chapel and was now being ground into the funeral clothes of everyone who had come out for Liz. I looked down at my suit and tie, and thought, I really need to retire these things. After wearing the ensemble to my wife’s funeral—twice—I knew I could never put it on again.

Standing there, I thought about the conversation I’d had with the funeral director in Pasadena. With the emotionless tone expected of an undertaker, he’d said to me, “You know, you’re the first person to use the word
fuck
in my chapel.” I don’t think he was admonishing me as much as he was trying to tell me he was proud…but then again, I might have been projecting. “Well,” I’d replied, “it was the most accurate way to describe my feelings.”

The shuffling stopped before I could replay any more of the conversation, and I knew it was time for me to speak. I felt the same way I had the first time around, so I began with the same words: “This fucking sucks.” And for the next hour, we all remembered Liz.

Once the service concluded, people made their way to Tom and Candee’s house. I caught a ride with A.J.—I needed to be with my best friend at that moment. We drove out the gates of the cemetery in the direction of Liz’s parents’ house, and after sitting in silence for a couple of blocks, I suddenly yelled, “Take a right!” just as we approached Lake Street. A.J. took the turn without question or hesitation, even though we were now heading in the wrong direction.

“I need to stop at the record store. Those Replacements reissues came out on Tuesday and I need to get them.”

He laughed. “Do you think that’s a good idea right now?” I knew what he meant. The few hundred people on their way to Tom and Candee’s would likely want to talk to me, or would at least expect me to be there.

“Liz wouldn’t have it any other way,” I replied.

Actually, Liz probably would have been pretty pissed about me stopping for records after a funeral, but in this case, I felt like she’d understand. Yeah, I was being a little selfish, but she knew that one of the great joys in my life was buying records, especially when I was having a bad day. This was a bad day of epic proportions. She’d grant me this stop, and she’d be glad to know that I was keeping my shit together, even if doing so meant that I kept some friends and family waiting.

“I know exactly what I need; we’ll be in and out,” I promised.

Five minutes later we were back in the car and heading over to the house. A.J. followed the road on the north side of the lake, and my stomach sank when the stoplight turned green. Just ahead was the Calhoun Beach Club—the place where Liz and I had gone to dinner before our prom, and the place where we had been married not even three years earlier. As A.J. and I approached the building I did my best to avoid looking at it, but the harder I tried, the faster it came at me, and I started sniffling before we had even reached it. It was like the drive home from the hospital past the funeral home all over again.

A.J. looked over at me, tears welling up in his eyes, too. “Matt, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think about it.”

I managed to say, “It’s okay.” But I wasn’t okay, not yet. I would be, though—or at least I tried to think so, until we got to Tom and Candee’s house.

This miserably failed attempt to ignore the unavoidable forced me to realize that after more than twelve years together, it would be impossible to steer clear of all the places that held memories of my life with Liz. It would be to my advantage to go to these places, to embrace them, and to remember the moments that shaped our relationship, no matter how painful confronting them was. As A.J. and I continued driving, I thought about all the significant places we had passed that day just going to and coming back from Liz’s funeral. The gas station where we had met, the restaurant where we had our first date, the spot where we had our rehearsal dinner, and the countless stores, streets, and restaurants that had been a stage to so much of our lives. And it wasn’t just Minnesota—I had felt this way in Los Angeles as well. I wasn’t going to the farmer’s market at the Grove or the Oinkster or Whole Foods anymore.