“we’re going to go to the cemetery, where great grandpa is in the ground,
and there’s going to be a stone in the ground with a cloth on it. when we
get there, you’re going to take the cloth off, ok? under the cloth will be his name.
and we’ll say hello to him, and then we’ll say goodbye, ok?”
“in the ground?” lydia said.
“uh huh”
“and when do we see him?”
“see him?”
“i want to see his face,” she said.
“we don’t see his face,” i said. “we only see the stone with his name on it and the dirt.”
——
that was sunday, when you could smell h and s bakery
in the baltimore air and the trees at the cemetery were heavy
with mulberries.
i said goodbye to leanne’s grandfather, a grocer, a carver
of turkeys, an arranger of pickle trays, a wearer of guayaberas,
a drinker of warm red wine from a box, a man who prefaced half
his sentences with “incidentally”.
but on saturday, we went to visit one of leanne’s friends
who has an old sink in their garden and a purple trim
all the way around.
incidentally,
she and her husband just lost her baby at 38 weeks.
this was the baby that grew in a test tube.
this was the test tube that held her husband’s sperm.
this was the sperm that was unfrozen.
this was the sperm that was frozen…
twenty years ago…
before he had cancer.
and here’s the thing:
you’d think i’d know exactly what to say
(at least i thought i should know exactly what to say)
having just been through something similarly haunting,
the frayed twine of cancer and pregnancy knotted and woven
between us all,
but i didn’t.
in fact, i felt more inept in my ability to console
than at any other time i can remember.
instead i was quiet, the worst thing to be.
we went out to a restaurant that somehow had stopped
serving breakfast, but wasn’t yet serving lunch,
and all sat hungry, talking about the entrees
of loss we had all been served.
and later, back at their house, jittery from too much coffee,
they showed us the baby room, the footprints and handprints,
a dining room table full of a hundred cards,
and a throwaway, brightly-colored photo album,
full of pictures of them with their lifeless daughter,
her skin yellowed and blued and bloated,
her face, the only one not paralyzed
with an open-mouthed and skeletal grief
that was obviously there before and after
the shutter had clicked.
—–
sometimes i wonder about this blog.
if maybe it has done no good at all.
weeks ago, carley had given us an article in the new yorker
about a stillbirth. and in it i had read about a man, a woman,
and the daughter they lost. and i remember that when i read it,
i had thought about our friends, and that i had been able to maybe,
just maybe, be there with her when she had to push a dead baby
out of her, when they had to pry her hands off of her daughter
because she was literally starting to fall apart.
i wasn’t there, but i was as close as i could get.
i told her this after breakfast.
that maybe for a moment, she wasn’t alone.
even if it was a moment that never truly existed.
and then i thought about here, this, right now.
this blog.
and how maybe, if i’ve done anything, i’ve given
you a chance like the author of that story gave me:
a chance to not be alone,
a chance to not leave someone else alone.
—–
at the cemetery, lydia wouldn’t touch the footstone,
but she would pick mulberries with me
and while she stuffed her mouth with them
i looked at the ground at all the ones that had fallen -
deflated and blackening on the grass.
incidentally, there was a time
when i thought leanne would be here,
and that we’d be here for her,
under us and the sky and the mulberries and the ground.
instead she was waiting for us in the car.
when lydia climbed over into her car seat,
she left purple stains on the fabric
that can’t go away.
