Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (9 page)

But I didn’t know how to make these choices. Liz handled the tough decisions in our life. And before that, my parents had made them for me. I didn’t know if I should even be the one to answer the question at all. Maybe it should be up to the people who birthed and raised her? I peered up at them once again, and still their faces told me that I had to decide.

I was transported back to our 2004 trip to Kathmandu. During a break in Biraj’s wedding festivities, he suggested we visit Pashupatinath, the holiest Hindu temple in Nepal. A tour guide led us around the grounds, finally stopping on a bridge overlooking the Bagmati River. He pointed to the smoke rising from the banks of the river, the smoke that we had been breathing in. “If you look closely, you will see funeral pyres and cremations taking place down below,” he told us. Our faces instantly went from inquisitive to disgusted, and we did our best to stop inhaling the smoke that was all around us. The sight and smell of a body on fire was too much to deal with, so our tour ended there.

Then I thought about when I was in Kathmandu in 2006, this time by myself. I was compelled to go back to Pashupatinath, and to sit on the banks of the Bagmati River, watching the entire cremation ceremony. I witnessed body after body, each wrapped in white linen, brought to the cremation ghats on stretchers made of bamboo, then put onto the ground while a series of rituals were performed. The bodies were then placed on the funeral pyre, covered with wood, and lit while a man with a big stick stoked the fire. I watched as the wood and body were transformed into ash, and finally pushed into the river, thus bringing to an end the physical body. That day I realized that it was not the burning body or the smoke that rose from it that had alarmed us on that first trip; it was that we feared our own mortality. And to me, someone who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, as I sat there on the banks of the Bagmati River that day in 2006, finally came some peace with the idea of death.

This insight was a huge contrast to the mostly Catholic funerals I had attended growing up. I found a funeral with an open casket to be a bit macabre, and always felt that burial didn’t bring about any sense of finality. But cremation—the process of actually destroying the physical being once the brain stopped working and the heart stopped beating—well, that seemed like the only way to really say good-bye.

“We’re looking at urns.” It wasn’t my answer that surprised me as much as it was the certainty with which I stated it. I looked around the room once more, waiting for someone to object. No one did. The funeral director stood up and led us to a hallway in the back of the funeral home where a bunch of urns were lined up on shelves along the wall. I quickly scanned them, finding every single one unacceptable. There was no way in hell I was going to place Liz’s ashes into an urn with an image of an American flag and a crying bald eagle.

As I searched the wall for at least one possible option, the funeral director, perhaps sensing my disapproval, started talking again. “You don’t necessarily need an urn. You can also have her remains stored inside a plastic bag and then placed inside a cardboard box.”

I had no idea what to say. He continued, “And you can either come pick her up, or we can mail her to your house.” I was stunned. I was completely unprepared for this.

“Uh… no. I am not picking her up, and there is no way in hell you’re mailing her to my house. Are there any other options?” He gave me some speech about state law prohibiting funeral homes from holding remains after some predetermined amount of time.

I was becoming visibly agitated. I was still in shock. Was I really standing here making funeral plans for Liz? My mom noticed my growing unease and stepped in. “Matt, I’ll make a few phone calls and see if my funeral director friend in Minnesota can hold on to her until you’re ready to make a decision.” I was sick of making choices, and was desperate for someone to do so for me. I was so thankful to have help at that moment—it was exactly what I needed.

We all headed back into the front room so I could sign the necessary paperwork and make the rest of the arrangements. We agreed that the service would be held in the chapel at the funeral home on Saturday in order to give as many people as possible the opportunity to attend. I insisted that religion be left out because I wanted the focus to remain on Liz, rather than on the not-shared belief that God had taken her to a better place.

I thought the questions were over until the funeral director asked how many death certificates I wanted.

“None. I don’t want any death certificates. I know she’s dead,” I replied. Really. The last thing I needed was another reminder that my wife was never going to hold her baby.

“Mr. Logelin, you’ll need at least a few copies in order to settle her estate issues.”

Estate issues? I hadn’t even begun to think about her bank accounts, credit cards, and the countless other issues I was going to have to deal with over the next few weeks. This was most definitely not my area of expertise. Tom stepped in. “Matt, why don’t we order ten copies so you have extras, just in case you need them.” Once again, it was wonderful to have someone else make a decision for me. These were simple questions requiring simple answers, but to me, they were questions I never imagined I would have to answer. Especially not at age thirty.

When we headed back to the hospital, I went straight for Madeline. I saw her lying in her incubator and the tears immediately started to flow. But these tears were different from the ones I’d been crying for the past few days; these were tears of relief. Right then, watching Madeline’s little chest move up and down as she breathed, I knew I wouldn’t be able to deal with any of this without her. Just two days old and she was already saving me in a way that none of my friends and family could.

Chapter 10

inside, where you

used to be,

though filled with

your things,

it’s as empty

as it was the

day we moved in.

E
arly Friday morning, I finally arrived back at my house. In the same way that I couldn’t let Liz spend a night alone when she was on bed rest, I couldn’t let Maddy be alone at the hospital, either, so I’d been sleeping at the attached hotel and planned to do so until she was ready to come home.

Behind me on the porch was a small army of friends and family there to support me as I entered our home for the first time since Liz died; I was not looking forward to this. I unlocked the door and rushed inside alone to deactivate the alarm. I walked through the kitchen and straight into our bedroom. It was exactly as it had been the day Liz was admitted to the hospital three weeks earlier.

While I scanned our bedroom, everyone gave me the space they thought I needed. There on Liz’s nightstand was a nearly empty water bottle, reminding me of all the times I gave her shit for her inability to finish one off. Next to it was a packet of her nausea medication, the foil sticking up from all but two of the pill slots, reminding me how difficult her pregnancy had been. Toward the back was her alarm clock, bringing me back to the day she had unplugged it to put an end to the awful interference buzzing it made when she received an e-mail on her BlackBerry. In the middle was the book of names we had pored over, where we found a name for our child.

At that moment, the last few lines of “I Remember Me” by the Silver Jews started playing in my head:

I remember her

And I remember him

I remember them

I remember then

I’m just rememberin’

I’m just rememberin’

Just rememberin’

I’m just rememberin’

The words repeated over and over again in my head as I rushed out of the room and into our office.

I sat down on the floor in front of my wall of music and began furiously grabbing CDs and records from the shelves. It probably was the last thing I should have been worried about then, but I had an overwhelming compulsion to gather songs for Liz’s funeral. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing all the usual depressing funeral music—“On Eagle’s Wings” and all the other bullshit songs that you’re supposed to play when someone dies. I was suddenly determined to create the greatest funeral playlist that there had ever been, and it was a more difficult task than I had imagined. Liz and I had way different tastes in music. She was into the kind of pop music that made me want to gag—you know, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, and anything else played over and over again on the local Top 40 radio station—while I listened to indie rock and jazz that rarely made it to commercial radio at all. I tried to think of the best way to honor her memory, but there was no way I was going to be responsible for turning her funeral into a dance party. Luckily, most of the music I listened to was rather mournful, so I couldn’t really go wrong with that. The only real requirement was that the songs meant something to both of us.

But the first song I wanted to add violated my only requirement, and was in fact hated by Liz because it was the one song I asked her to play if I died: “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” by Smog. The title alone indicates that it’s completely inappropriate for an actual funeral, but I always hoped that mine would have a few moments of laughter, and I thought Liz’s should be the same way. A.J. came into my office and sat down on the floor next to me, immediately joining me in scanning my music shelves. I didn’t tell him what I was up to, but he figured it out. He knew what an important part music played in my life, and he understood just how cathartic the playlist creation process would be for me.

Without looking at him I said, “Dude. The first song is gonna be ‘Dress Sexy at My Funeral.’”

A.J. shared my music taste, but had a better ear for the appropriate. “I don’t know about that,” he said, looking at me as if I’d truly lost my mind.

“Oh, come on. No one’s gonna be listening to the lyrics. You and I will be the only people who’ll know just how screwed up the song is.” I added it to the playlist and continued digging through mine and Liz’s musical past, running ideas past A.J., and listening to his suggestions.

He proposed “Une Année sans Lumiére” by Arcade Fire, “Last Tide” by Sun Kil Moon, “Falling Slowly” by the Frames, and a few others.

“I’ve got to include that Bee Gees song that Feist covered, you know, the one we played at our wedding? ‘Inside and Out.’ And ‘Tennessee’ by the Silver Jews. Oh. And anything off of
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
.” An hour later I had my playlist.

A.J. worked on extracting the files from the CDs and creating the perfect play order while I moved on to the next important task: culling through over twelve years of photos of Liz. I had a few favorites, but I wanted the funeral home to be wallpapered with pictures of her. I didn’t want her death to define her, or to be the only thing that people remembered about her. If they could see her smiling in front of Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal, or any of the other wondrous places we visited around the world, at the very least they’d feel confident that she lived an incredibly full life in her short thirty years on this planet. But I was looking at each photo hoping these memories would help remove from my brain that final image of Liz lying dead in her hospital bed.

The rest of my friends and family took care of the things I was unable to think about yet. Tom and Candee worked with some of Liz’s more astute and money-savvy friends to help set up a financial plan for me and to make a list of all of the things I would need to handle in the wake of her death. Sonja came up with the idea of creating a memorial fund to help us make up for Liz’s lost income, and she worked with my cousin Josh to get a bank account set up. My mom and stepmom helped clean up my house, and my dad, stepdad, brothers, and one of Liz’s uncles teamed up to tackle some long-neglected home improvement projects.

When A.J. and I finally emerged from the office, I walked into the kitchen to hear Candee talking to the
Los Angeles Times
about placing an obituary in the paper.

“Okay. We’ll get something to you within the hour.” Looking at me, Candee said, “Honey, would you like to write something for Lizzie’s obituary?”

Oh.

She went on. “I don’t want to put pressure on you, but they told me we have an hour to get something in order to make the deadline for the Friday newspaper.”

I glanced at her with the helpless look I’d been wearing since Tuesday. “I’m not sure I can right now.”

Sonja was standing nearby and offered to write it. “Take a look at it when I’m done and let me know what you think,” she said.

While Sonja put pen to paper to encapsulate Liz’s life in fewer than 220 words, I went outside and sat on the bottom stair of my front porch, staring at the houses on the hill in front of me. I breathed in the scent of the grapefruit blossoms in our yard and I did the math in my head. Madeline was born at 11:56 a.m., and Liz died the next day at 3:11 p.m. Twenty-seven hours. In twenty-seven hours I witnessed the only two things guaranteed to every single human being: birth and death. To experience the emotions associated with both events, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, in a little more than one day, well, it was ruinous.

I tried to shake away the tears as I sat there thinking about how close to perfect those twenty-seven hours were. Our love, our jobs, our travels, our house in Los Angeles, our fruit trees, and finally, our beautiful baby girl; these were the things we’d been working toward, and we had finally achieved them all the moment Madeline was born. Twenty-seven hours of pure happiness. I felt so fucking lucky to have had even that short amount of time, and I was positive that Liz died confident that we had achieved all we had set out to. But I couldn’t help thinking that we were robbed of a lifetime of true happiness. Twenty-seven hours wasn’t enough—but really, forever wouldn’t have been, either.

I jumped up and raced back up the steps and into my kitchen. I grabbed a pen and a notebook, and wrote the following:

life and death.

from the happiest moment of

our lives

to the saddest.

all

of it.

in a 27-hour period.

the pain is unbearable.

devastated

doesn’t describe

the

loss

we’re all feeling.

family and friends

from around the world

have

come to our home,

called.

e-mailed,

cried.

everyone died

a lot

when liz left us.

she

loved everyone

more than we can imagine.

she

left us

with the greatest gift she could

have.

a baby girl

who looks soooo much like

momma.

she’d be the first

to say it would all be

ok.

please try not to cry

(says the husband who can’t

stop).

instead

think of liz.

remember

that laugh.

that smile.

that love.

i know i will.

I tore the sheet of paper from the notebook, handed it to Sonja who accepted it with no reaction, and walked out of the room. I had never written anything like this before. Sure, I wrote term papers in college and graduate school, and I wrote a couple of record reviews for a music magazine, but I had never shared my feelings in such an explicitly personal way. Getting those words down left me with an incredible sense of peace. They would end up on the back of Liz’s funeral program.

That afternoon I found myself sitting back in the common room of the hospital’s hotel. Though not reserved for us, it had become our de facto property based on the sheer number of family and friends who camped out there in the days following Liz’s death. We had outgrown the waiting room in the maternity ward. Tables, countertops, and even portions of the floor were blanketed with fruit baskets, boxes of cold pizza, cookie platters, and all of the other offerings brought in by well-wishers hoping to keep my family and friends fed.

It had been three days since Liz died, and I still hadn’t eaten anything, despite everyone’s insistence. I was so sick of the questions about my food intake that I started lying to everyone who asked. No one seemed to understand that an empty stomach meant only dry heaves, and at this point I preferred dry heaves to the feeling of vomit burning through my throat and nostrils.