New Meanings

"When a loved one dies, the process of grieving is a completion that allows us to honor that person's life and claim the wisdom we have gained through the relationship. As we receive the gift of understanding, it transcends time and space, simultaneously gifting the soul of the one who has passed over. Grieving is more than learning to live without a dear one. In many cases we are also required to forgive them and ourselves as we bring the story of the time we spent together to a meaningful completion."

--Joan Borysenko, Pocketful of Miracles



Felix and I went on a lovely, sunlit walk today. The air was November cold, but the sun felt warm and there was no wind. We were headed for the creek, but I decided to stop at the neighbors' houses we were passing to collect goods for the Food Bank. Jon Gerster down the street, in his thoughtful way, hatched the idea of doing a neighborhood food drive when he read in the paper that our local Food Bank was short on donations and inundated with need.

After only four houses, my load was already too heavy with generosity for the stroller's carry basket: I expected I would receive a can or two, perhaps a box of mac and cheese, but everyone gave so much that I needed to drop it off at Jon and Chris's house right away.

I knew what I was going to write in here today after I stopped at Matt and Michelle's house: blessings. It just so happened that Michelle had sat down to read this blog when I stopped in. Strange cosmic mind meld! While Matt entertained Felix by giving him a simulated overland jeep ride in his stroller, Michelle gave me a warm hug and we both teared up. She told me about a woman we both know who decided she wanted a change after years in Bozeman and moved to Pittsburgh. In the weeks leading up to her departure, dozens of friends came by, threw her a party, and gave her farewell gifts. The day before she left, Michelle commented to Rachel that she sure had lots of people who loved her. Two days after arriving in Pittsburgh, Rachel came back to Bozeman, certain that such love is truly a rare thing.

When I think about Elise's death, I almost always picture the fifty-plus friends and neighbors gazing up at us from our front yard at her memorial service. This image sustains me through many a dark moment. One of the things I think binds people together is a shared history. By history I don't mean simply experiencing events, but sustaining each other through the drama of joy or trauma, and more important, through the mundane routine of living with their aftereffects. I'm thinking here of my friend LizAnn's return home from rehabilitation after her spinal injury, where she can count on the continued dedication of friends to, for example, shovel snow from the ramp to her front door, help her dress, retrofit her home. I'm thinking of how my friend Ann became one of my dearest friends years ago, when she called me at 1am in tears because a policeman had just delivered her cat's body to her when it was hit by a car. I'm thinking of when my friend Cara organized a group of girlfriends to gather at Chico Hot Springs a month after Elise's death. We talked until late at night in the lounge outside our rooms, and Cara shared the experience of seeing her elder sister dead at the hospital earlier that year.

When Cara's sister died in June 2006, I didn't go to her memorial service. I thought to myself, Cara probably wants her privacy, I didn't know her sister, Cara has closer friends than I am to be with her...in other words, I was thinking only of myself. A couple of months before Elise died, she invited me to get together, and the first thing I said was that I was sorry I didn't call or send her a letter when her sister died, I was being silly and thinking only of how I felt about whether or not she needed me, instead of just being there for her.

Now we've become closer through the shared experience of losing a beloved. For Elise's birthday, she gave me a lovely card and a pendant that I wear all the time: it has a sweet ink drawing of a little Asian-looking girl on each side. We agreed that it reminds us of what Elise might have looked like had she grown to become a little girl.

And so Elise remains in my life, and blesses us all.

Elise's Birthday

At this hour two years ago, I was trying to get to sleep while feeling anxious that I hadn't felt Elise moving inside me. Usually she got active just as I settled into bed to read. Sometime after 1AM I woke up and still didn't feel her moving, so I phoned the doctor on call and was told to go to the ER.

As I write this I just had the realization that I also arrived at the hospital at a little after 2AM the morning Felix was born, and that was the same time two years later that the ultrasound technician in Labor and Delivery confirmed that Elise's heart was no longer beating. While waiting for that damn technician, who had fallen asleep with her beeper on vibrate and kept us in dread for 45 minutes while the L and D nurses tried--and tried and tried--to find a heartbeat with the Doppler, I was silent, not wanting to say or feel anything. I did want to shout at the nurses to go away with their useless Doppler, stop pretending you might find a heartbeat when you know there isn't one but don't want to be the ones to tell me my daughter is dead. For some strange reason I felt a flash of relief when the technician finally did show up. Maybe it was because I was going to get an answer.

I couldn't look at the monitor. Then, "There's no heartbeat," my doctor said. I burst into tears as Dan sagged against my chest, burying his face in my neck.

That was the last definitive answer we ever had concerning Elise: the certainty of death. I ask myself, the universe, "Why?" But even getting an answer would not bring her back.

I write about the moment we learned of her death because it is a chapter of her life and, more relevant to those of us on this planet, a chapter in our own lives; a chapter that will be written for us all eventually, whether short story or long novel. In Elise's case, I suppose her story might be the length of a haiku.

Two years after her death felled me, I can say I am on my feet again. I've been brought to my knees again and again over the months, but one of the best things I've gained, which some people might think very strange, is that I am able to cry, sob, wail whenever I need to. I haven't cried like that since I was little and my family called me a crybaby. I used to laugh at the memory of being a crybaby. Now I know I cried because my heart is tender, and I suffered for not being seen as tenderhearted, and for wanting to seem tough and self-sufficient. I am all of these things when I cry the gift of tears.


My friend Shirley, pictured here with Felix, lost a son in 1978 when he was killed in a car crash at twenty-one. She adores Felix, and will babysit him tomorrow night when Dan gets home from a week-long trip and we go out to be together and remember Elise on her birthday. As I spoke to Shirley on the phone tonight, she told me some more fond memories of her beloved husband, how handsome he was, how fun-loving, how they were "like boyfriend and girlfriend again" when their grown children moved out. I knew from previous conversations that he had died in 1984, and mentioned that next year, 25 years will have passed since his death. "He seems frozen in time," she said. "And I can't imagine my son Howie as a 51-year-old. He'll always be a young man in my mind."

Lately I've found solace in Barack Obama's book Dreams From My Father. At one point he writes:

I remember a conversation I had once in Chicago when I was still organizing. It was with a woman who'd grown up in a big family in rural Georgia. Five brothers and three sisters, she had told me, all crowded under a single roof. She told me about her father's ultimately futile efforts to farm his small plot of land, her mother's vegetable garden, the two pigs they kept penned out in the yard, and the trips with her siblings to fish the murky waters of a river nearby. Listening to her speak, I began to realize that two of the three sisters she'd mentioned had actually died at birth, but that in this woman's mind they had remained with her always, spirits with names and ages and characters, two sisters who accompanied her while she walked to school or did chores, who soothed her cries and calmed her fears. For this woman, family had never been a vessel just for the living. The dead, too, had their claims, their voices shaping the course of her dreams.

I never heard Elise's voice or saw the color of her eyes. But these things are merely audible and visible with the senses. I do long to hold her, but again, I console myself by remembering that she is much more than her physical being. My senses cannot define or contain her, nor can my intellect. But she is with me, with her Papa, and her brother, as we grow and change, and she remains forever our sweet baby.