Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (15 page)

Just thinking about stepping foot in a produce aisle brought me back to a memory of the last New Year’s Eve Liz and I had together. That night, Liz, her pregnant belly not showing quite yet, spotted one of her many celebrity crushes, Joel McHale, at the Glendale Whole Foods. The well-trained LA girl that she was, Liz never said a word to him; she just trailed him like a puppy. While we waited to check out only one line over from the subject of her stalking, I said, “Liz, it’s pretty fucking creepy that you followed him around the entire store.”

“He’s so hot. And a lot taller than I expected.”

“Jesus.”

“I wished you dressed more like him.”

“That is
my
child in your womb, right?”

“I think so.”

I smiled thinking about that moment, realizing how much I missed her sarcastic sense of humor. I wanted so badly just to talk to her.

But if I went to these places, embraced them instead of avoided them, maybe I could recall other long-forgotten, tiny moments that illuminated just how amazing both my wife and our time together were. I could share these memories with our daughter and hopefully create some damn good new ones, too—in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and around the entire world.

Chapter 17

starting to feeling like a

divorced parent,

sharing custody,

arranging pickup/drop-off times,

carting baby supplies

from house to house.

this is weird.

and not how i

pictured fatherhood.

damn it.

A
fter the difficulty of leaving Maddy behind for Liz’s second funeral in Minnesota, I was thrilled to finally bring her with me when I went back for my cousin Josh’s wedding in June. It would be her first trip anywhere outside of Los Angeles. Attending the event was going to be incredibly difficult, but Josh had asked me to be in his wedding party, and in going I would be keeping a promise I had made to Liz—or rather, a promise Liz had made for me.

Madeline’s original due date fell just before Josh’s wedding, but Liz definitively told me, “You’re going to his wedding.” She was adamant because she knew how important the event was for Josh. We thought Madeline would be barely a month old, so the plan was for my girls to stay behind in Los Angeles while I headed to the wedding in Minnesota. So now, even though it would be painful to face all of the reminders of the life I no longer had, I was determined to be there for my cousin. I didn’t want my bad days to cast a shadow over anyone else’s good days, and I certainly didn’t want to disobey Liz’s orders.

A family friend took it upon herself to call the airline and tell them it was Madeline’s first flight. When we boarded the plane, the flight attendants presented us with a First Flight certificate and a book in which we could record all her travels. I knew already that this would be the first of many trips together. Of course we’d be regularly visiting family and friends in the Midwest, but a list was already forming in my mind of everywhere else I wanted to take my daughter. The world was full of places where Liz and I lived together and loved each other, and I pledged then that I would take Madeline to see all of them.

Thanks to the advice of my blog readers I was well prepared for the flight, but I might have overdone it a bit. A few people had suggested I bring an extra outfit for Madeline, in case of the dreaded diaper blowout—I brought five. They told me to bring a few extra diapers—so I brought eleven…for a four-hour flight. Though I was physically overprepared for the trip, I was seriously underprepared mentally. I hadn’t even considered how difficult it would be to face the stares and whispers of the other passengers who were expecting my baby to be the crying, whiny horror story they could tell once they landed in Minneapolis. I tried my best to ignore them and focus my attention on Madeline.

Thankfully, she slept almost the entire way to Minneapolis. I didn’t need any of the extra outfits, and I didn’t have to try to change her diaper on the plane. But I was the mess, spending the entire flight awaiting the expected meltdown or the promised diaper explosion, so I really didn’t get a chance to enjoy Madeline’s perfect behavior.

One of the first events of the weekend was a round of golf as part of Josh’s bachelor party festivities. When I arrived at the course to the company of twenty or so guys, many of whom I’d known since fourth or fifth grade, few of them said a word to me. Most gave a polite wave and avoided eye contact, not knowing how to talk to the guy whose wife had died. I felt as though I was a ghost they couldn’t see. It was just fucking weird for some of my oldest childhood friends to treat me like an outcast: I expected this kind of reaction from the strangers I encountered, but not from them. Thankfully, A.J. and my good friend Nate were on the golf course, and they were perfectly willing to talk to me. I just wanted people to be normal, but nobody could be—nobody knew how to be. It may have had something to do with the amount of booze in their systems, or the fact that I was acting completely normal (apparently to their surprise), but by the end of the night all the weirdness disappeared, and I was once again just one of the guys. I had found that people often followed my lead. If I cried, they cried, and if I laughed, they laughed. That night, there was a lot of laughter.

But the wedding itself was more difficult for me. I struggled to keep my composure, trying to be strong for my cousin and wanting not to cry openly on his wedding day. I felt like I occupied an awkward position in the celebration: I wanted to be social and catch up with as many people as possible, but without taking the focus off the bride and groom. I tried to blend in, but it seemed like wherever I was, people were giving me too much attention. Sure, I might have been imagining it, but it really felt that way: like I had some spotlight following me everywhere I went, illuminating the fact that I was the guy who had already experienced the “until death do us part” line of the vows. I was even more worried that Madeline would deflect attention away from Josh and his wife, but I was happy that my family got to see her.

The evening ended up going way better than I expected. Madeline did draw a lot of attention, but she went home with Tom and Candee before the reception really kicked into high gear, and the rest of the night was exactly the kind of party that Josh had planned. Liz would have loved the wedding, and knowing that I had successfully survived the day, she would have been proud.

In addition to getting to know more distant relatives, this trip was a great opportunity for us to start spending more time with the grandparents—even more than I might have if Liz had been with me. When she and I came home, family hadn’t always been our first priority. We both had a lot of friends still in town, and would often head straight from the airport to someone’s house for a dinner party that had been arranged just because we were visiting. But this trip was different. With Madeline in tow, I had to pay more attention to our families because they wanted (and perhaps needed) to spend time with her as much as I did. So during this trip we began a new tradition: my two sets of parents would meet us at Tom and Candee’s house on the night of our arrival for dinner and some shared time with Maddy. Thankfully, everyone had always gotten along well, but after Liz’s death they became even more willing to spend time together.

During that first trip back, everyone sort of swapped her around, eager to have her in their houses—I like to think that Madeline’s presence brought their homes to life in a way that Liz had. But it wasn’t just the grandparents who wanted to hang out with Maddy; each set also made sure that their friends and extended families were able to spend time with her as well. Though I was happy to lend out my best girl, it felt fucking strange that she was having new experiences with new people, and I wasn’t there to witness it all.

But while everyone else was getting their fix of Madeline, I got to take a short fishing trip with three of my five brothers. It was something I wanted to do to recapture a camaraderie that had disappeared long ago, so we went up to the family cabin, where I hadn’t been since the late ’90s. We headed out to the middle of the lake in a boat, drinking beers, joking around, and doing some fishing. For a second, it felt like it used to feel when we all lived in the same state and could get together more easily. It was great to be back with my brothers—there was no pretense. We didn’t have to worry about awkward silences, and no one had to fear saying the wrong thing.

Going back home again, this time with my daughter, was exactly what I needed to refocus and remind me that my life would continue to move forward, even if I thought it never again would. The trip to Minnesota had been a refreshing and much-needed escape, giving me a chance to spend time with family and friends who kept my mind off of Liz’s death. It was these people who’d be there for me to make sure I’d someday be happy again. And with their help, I’d been able to start making new memories with Madeline in this old place.

When we arrived back in Los Angeles, I was jarred into the present. One of Liz’s friends had arranged for a housekeeper to come in and give our house a thorough cleaning while we were gone in Minnesota, which it had not had since Liz died. When I set our luggage down in the living room, I was surprised to see a path carved through the piles of unopened packages that had been arriving from blog readers. The outpouring of kindness had been unreal—and now the boxes were stacked neatly, which was a massive improvement.

With Madeline in my arms, I walked through the house as if for the first time. The kitchen was immaculate: the sink free of dishes, bottles behind the cabinet doors, counters clear and devoid of anything but small appliances. I walked into the hallway. The kitchen door closed behind me and I stopped in my tracks; one of Liz’s black elastic ponytail holders on the doorknob had caught my eye. She had left one on every doorknob in the house so that anytime she needed to throw her hair back she could do it without having to dig one out of a drawer in the bathroom. They’d always been there, but seeing the little bungee cord now—without being distracted by messiness—was like being stabbed in the heart all over again. Like when I saw her car parked out front, for a brief second it felt like Liz was still here. Like she was just in another room and would be coming back shortly to put her hair up in a ponytail. I missed her so fucking much, and those little black things were a big enough reminder to set my heart racing.

I wanted to run away, but with a sleeping baby in my arms, where the hell could I go? Exhausted, I opened the door to my bedroom. When I walked inside I was completely awestruck. It looked like
our
bedroom again. Since Liz had died, only the color of the walls had changed. They had been covered in a sponged-on yellow when we bought the house, giving them the appearance of having been pissed on. It really was like urine—that was Liz’s interpretation of the color. I vowed that when industriousness got the better of me I would paint the bedroom, because that was what Liz had wanted, and I may have been the first man to arrive at Home Depot with a pillowcase to match to a bucket of paint. But regardless of the color on the walls, the housekeeper had made the room look exactly like it had the day Liz went into the hospital. The books on the nightstand were perfectly lined up. The clock that used to blink
12:00
was plugged in and reset. The piles of clean clothes stacked against the dresser and the shirts hanging from the doorknobs were no longer visible. I’m not sure where there had been room to stash everything, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to open any closet doors to find out.

But more than any of these small details, seeing the made bed really put me over the edge. Since Liz died, I hadn’t made the bed at all. Yeah, I’d washed the sheets and done a half-assed job of putting them back on and throwing a comforter over them, but never the right way—never the way Liz would have done it. Now on the bed were the three big square pillows that matched the comforter, the ones she never let me use because, as she explained, they were for decoration only. They had been on the floor since Madeline had come home from the hospital. There, on Liz’s dresser, was the silver tray with peacocks on the handles that held seven bottles of perfume. Next to it was the black velvet jewelry stand that she had purchased in downtown Los Angeles, displaying her newest bracelets and necklaces. I stared at all these things until my eyes started to burn, then closed them tight and tried to remember what Liz smelled like and when she had last worn each piece of jewelry. I strained my mind, and it returned nothing.

All of a sudden, the room that had been a place of comfort became completely suffocating. Seeing everything set up and arranged how Liz had kept it sent me out in tears. I couldn’t be in there, and I absolutely couldn’t sleep in there that night. I put Madeline in her bassinet and lay down to sleep an arm’s length away on the couch. This would be our arrangement for the next several months.

Chapter 18

i can’t remember what

we did for our

anniversary last year.

the only other person

who would know

is no longer here

to jog my memory.

so how the fuck

do i figure this out?

T
he middle of August came, and with it my trip to Canada with Liz’s family. Our actual anniversary fell a few days in. That morning, we took Madeline to Sulphur Mountain, where she experienced her first gondola ride. The apprehensive look on her face made me think that she had inherited my fear of heights and thus enjoyed the experience about as much as I did (not at all). Before Liz’s death, I never would have voluntarily gotten into a box suspended high above the ground by a couple of wires, but when I looked up at the mountain that day, I heard Liz’s voice saying,
Don’t be such a pussy.
Roughly, that translated to:
I’m not around anymore; you have to do the things with Madeline that I would have done.

So I scaled the mountain with my baby, and I actually felt pretty proud when we made it to the top—until I realized how frigid it was at those heights. Thanks to me, Madeline was completely underdressed: I had a hat to cover her ears and socks to cover her feet, but I hadn’t brought along any mittens—we didn’t even own any. Just as I started to worry that my daughter’s tiny fingers would get too cold and that the well-prepared parents nearby would judge us, I found a pair of socks in the diaper bag and placed them on her hands. Maddy started waving around happily, and I instantly felt better. It might not have been a pretty solution, but at least my kid was warm. And I had conquered one of my biggest fears thanks to her and to the memory of her mother’s urging, too.

Later that night I found myself at a dinner table in Banff, surrounded by Tom, Candee, and Deb, unable to say a word. I just sat there, Madeline in my arms, thinking about how Liz and I would have celebrated this occasion if she were still alive, and trying not to think about our wedding. It was at that moment that I realized I had no idea what the fuck we had done for our second anniversary. Our last anniversary together. I searched the deepest part of my brain, trying to find some hint of a memory that could help me recall what it was we had done the year before. Were we at the beach? Did we go out to dinner? Had we been on a trip? I couldn’t remember anything.

I stayed focused on keeping Madeline from pulling everything off of the table, and I didn’t manage more than a few bites of my steak. I was silent, staring down at the tablecloth while conversation flowed steadily around me. We toasted Deb for her law school accomplishments, but no one had mentioned Liz at all, or the fact that it was our anniversary. In our few days together in Banff, I was the only one who had so much as uttered Liz’s name, and each time the word floated off unacknowledged.

One way of dealing with death is to avoid discussing it altogether—it’s not uncommon. But seeing this reaction from Liz’s family surprised me, and it made me feel even more lonely and isolated. Worse was that I’d known these people for almost half my life—Tom and Candee were as much my parents as my own mom and dad. They didn’t have to change my diapers or pay for my education, but they had been there through so many of my challenges and successes. I wasn’t angry or even mildly upset about their silence; it just showed again how different the grieving process is for everyone, and I could recognize that much. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t make me sad. One of my great comforts since Liz’s death had been talking about her—I was afraid that if her name went unmentioned or the stories went untold, our memories of her would forever disappear, and so would she. And I felt like this possibility was already manifesting itself as I struggled to remember what we did for our second anniversary.

By the end of the main course, I really just wanted to be alone with my baby. I loved Liz’s family dearly and I knew that they loved me, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to mourn together, and I needed that to heal. Especially today. When dessert was served, I grabbed Madeline, presumably for a diaper change, and left for a walk around the hotel where the restaurant was. I sat down in a big leather chair in the middle of the lobby and gave up keeping my shit together. What a scene: a bearded man alone with a baby, crying like a little bitch in the lobby of one of the nicest hotels in Canada. I let myself sit there for ten minutes, and then returned to the table without a word.

After dinner, we all drove together back toward our condo. I was still feeling restless. While we waited for a traffic light in the center of town to turn green, I said quickly to no one in particular, “Would you mind taking care of Madeline for a bit?”

They were kind of caught off guard, and without any fanfare or hesitation, I thanked them and hopped out of the car, striding alone toward the bars I had been thinking about all evening.

The place I walked into had horrible live music, but I needed booze to dull my senses more than I needed to be a music snob. I sat down at a table near a window, far away from the few people who were inside. Minutes later a waitress stood over me, listing off a bunch of Canadian beers from memory. The last one she mentioned caught my attention: Kokanee. Liz and I drank that crap on a retreat we took to Whistler with the first company she worked for. I ordered it along with a shot of whiskey.

The waitress returned with my drinks and placed them in front of me silently. I threw back the shot and quickly downed the beer. I put my hand up like I was in third grade, eager to call out the answer to the math problem on the blackboard. She came back and I said, “Same thing, please.” Soon I had a glass in both hands, and soon both were empty again. Up went my hand; over came the drinks. This continued for four more rounds.

As I drank, I sat passing judgment on the guitar player with the awful voice and the asshole businessmen trying so hard to pick up women at the bar. Everyone there seemed so happy and carefree. Fuck them, I thought. I’m in pain, real pain. The kind of pain no one would wish upon anyone else. That night, sitting alone at that table and getting more and more drunk, I wanted every single person in the bar to know my heartache.

A while later, the waitress approached me to see if I needed anything. My slurring made her persist when I tried to brush her off. “Are you alone?” she asked.

Well, that’s a complicated question, I thought. “I’m in town with my in-laws and my baby,” I said.

“And what about your wife?”

“My wife died,” I said.

After months of being asked that very question, I had discovered that people reacted differently depending on how I worded my answer. When I said
she passed away,
I got a very sympathetic reaction and the person I was talking to generally asked more questions about my life. When I said
she died,
well, that was a conversation ender, every single time. The waitress didn’t bother me again. I sat there with my thoughts, taking in the shitty music and observing the scene until the bar closed.

When I finally left, I walked for what seemed like hours, eventually arriving at our condo. I went inside and headed straight to my room, where I found Candee curled up in my bed with a sleeping Madeline in her pink pajamas with the white polka dots. Without a word, Candee gave me a hug and went upstairs. I sat down at the edge of the bed and looked back toward my best girl. This was not how our life was supposed to be, but this was not how I should be dealing with it, either.

I hadn’t had this much to drink since my last trip to Vegas for a friend’s bachelor party, and I knew it could never and would never happen again. I crawled into bed, kissing Madeline twice on one cheek: once for what is, and once for what could have been.

Already jet-setters, a few days after we got back to LA, Maddy and I flew to New York City to visit a friend of mine.

We had a room booked at the Waldorf Astoria, the same hotel where Liz and I had stayed on our way to Greece to celebrate the beginning of our marriage. It was just another stop on the list of places that I wanted to visit—to revisit—with Madeline. The doors were still ornate and the entryway was still grand, but just three years later, she was gone, and I was here with our daughter, just the two of us. Madeline was nestled against my chest in a Baby Bjorn, and I held her hand as the bellhop opened the door and led us up the staircase.

The memories flooded back with such force that without Maddy’s little fingers in mine, I might have drowned. I had held her mother’s hand when we walked up the very same staircase on the first night of our honeymoon. We weren’t giddy, though—we were stressed. We were to stay in New York for fewer than twelve hours before our next flight, and the airline had lost our luggage. Since Liz was such a frequent business traveler, we were spending a night in one of the world’s fanciest hotels for free, but because our bags were missing we didn’t get to enjoy the massively excessive three-room suite. Liz was teary, worried about arriving in Greece without all of the clothes she had purchased specifically for our honeymoon. I spent the night alternating between consoling my new bride and calmly arguing with customer service agents in the hopes of finding some sort of resolution.

After more than a few hours of this, Liz went to sleep, but I continued working the phones until I found a sympathetic ear on the other end. Instead of granting us the usual policy-mandated few hundred bucks for lost luggage, the agent told us to go out the next morning and have a shopping spree, courtesy of the airline. We could each spend one thousand dollars, and as long as we sent him the receipts, he would personally see to it that we were reimbursed.

And so we did just that. We had less than an hour to complete our shopping spree before we were supposed to head back to the airport to catch our flight to Athens, so we went to Macy’s, where we each bought a new suitcase and hurriedly filled them with as many items as we could.

Before we checked in for our next flight at JFK, we stopped by to check the lost luggage area just in case ours had surfaced. Sure enough, sitting in a corner were our two suitcases. While we waited for our flight to board, I called my contact at the airline to tell him that we had found our luggage.

“That’s great news!”

“We’ll return all of the stuff we just bought when we get back from Greece.”

“No, keep it. You deserve it after everything you’ve been through. Consider it a wedding gift from the airline.”

When I relayed the story to Liz, she smiled.

“Not a bad way to start our honeymoon, eh?” I said, smiling back at her.

“It’s as perfect as I could have imagined it.”

But this time at the Waldorf, things were a lot less perfect. After we got everything into our room, I transferred Madeline to her stroller and headed down to the restaurant on the ground floor for a little late dinner after our long flight. All eyes in the bar fixed upon me as I wheeled in my sleeping child and parked her stroller against the wall. I sat in a chair next to her and pulled out a book to keep me company.

The waitress came over to me a few minutes later. “What can I get for you?” she asked, a gray-haired woman probably in her late fifties. As I pondered the menu, she said, “Cute kid. Where’s her mother?”

Come on. It was the fifth time that day that someone asked where her mother was. Was it that unnatural for a man to be out in the world, alone with a four-and-a-half-month-old baby? Maybe. I tried to think about the last time I noticed a father traveling alone with a child as young as Madeline, and couldn’t remember ever seeing it. And then I put myself in the shoes of the waitress, and realized the scene was probably pretty odd—a scruffy-looking dad and his baby girl, hanging out in a hotel bar in New York City well after midnight on a Friday. But still, I couldn’t bring myself to be polite.

“She died the day after our baby was born.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry. What are you drinking? It’s on the house.”

“I’ll take a glass of water.”

The waitress returned a few minutes later with a water and a scotch, even though I hadn’t asked for it. I drank the water and ordered some French fries.

Madeline was still asleep as I pushed her stroller through the lobby and into the elevator. When we got back to the room, I picked her up and gently placed her in the crib the hotel had provided. She stirred a bit, but then settled in. I picked up my book and continued reading, but I only made it through a couple of pages before Madeline interrupted me. She was awake, and she wouldn’t go back to sleep unless she knew I was nearby. I took her out of the crib, and brought her to the king-sized bed in the middle of the room. I laid her there on her back and sat down next to her, rubbing her stomach until she fell asleep.

A while later, settled back in my chair, I heard her make a noise and I looked up from my book. Madeline was on her stomach, her face buried in the comforter. I immediately jumped from the chair and rolled her onto her back. I was tired, but I was sure that I hadn’t put her on her stomach. I was equally sure that she couldn’t have just rolled over on her own.

There’s no way, I thought. I sat back down in the chair, my eyes now fixed on my daughter. In less than a minute, she was on her stomach again, letting out the same muffled cry. It was confirmed: my child had rolled over.

I crawled onto the bed and rolled her onto her back once again. I sat there next to her, smiling through the tears gathering in my eyes. This was major. But my heart broke to think that Liz had missed it. She would never see her daughter walk, her first day of school, or her prom. But at the same time, I had to rejoice: our baby had made her first move toward growing up. She gained some freedom—and I lost a lot of mine. No longer could Maddy be left unattended on the couch while I ran into the kitchen to make her a bottle; no longer could I leave her on her changing table while I ran to the bathroom to wash her crap from my hands.