Still the best day…

12 May 2013 11 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

It’s Mother’s Day, and I am reminded that my children are the best thing I’ve done in my life. And I do know they’re not “mine,” not really. They came to the world through me, and I’ve guided them as I’ve let them go.  All letting go of them ever meant was allowing the bond between us to grow longer. They are, truly, the people I love most.

It might be more precise to say that they evoke the most love from me. That is my comfort; that this love is deeply me, and in that sense, I “have” my children. But I miss my son and I love him so much, so very, heart-achingly much. Still; it’s my love, and always will be.

This is my second Mother’s Day since Philip died. I have the last Mother’s Day card he’d given me on my desk. That year he and Natalie picked out particularly lovely cards, so I laid them flat on my desk, fan-style, as a decoration. This is what the front of Philip’s card says: “You are not only my mother, you are the woman who shaped my life.” He signed it, “Yeah, it’s corny. But it’s true. I love you.”

There is a reason – a very real reason – people say, “Don’t go to bed mad.”

So here are some stories because I very much need to talk about him right now.

Two weeks before Philip turned two – and while I was four months pregnant with Natalie – his Grandpa Bill (Phil’s dad) died. I took Philip to the wake. Death is a fact of life and I don’t think it should be hidden from children. The question is how to tell them? There isn’t any right answer. There’s you and your child and your capacity to know what s/he can handle and some imagination about how to broach the subject. I wanted Philip to begin to understand that sometimes the people in his life would no longer be there. I didn’t want to say his grandpa was sleeping and I didn’t want to say he was dead. One was a lie and one was too difficult to explain. There’s only so much an almost-two-year-old can grasp. So I knelt down to face Philip with a belly full of Natalie and said, “Philip, we’re going to see Grandpa Bill. He’s going to be lying down, and he’s not going to get up. Is that okay?”

Who knows how much he understood of what I was saying? But he was a calm child, so I wasn’t worried. I got him dressed, then picked him up and stood him on the kitchen table to straighten his little shirt, smooth his little pants. As I was being  a (slightly) fussy mom, I asked, “Philip, do you know where Grandpa Bill is?” to see if he’d say, “Sleeping.” Instead, he raised his little hand high in the air, index finger pointing toward the ceiling, smiled, and said “In the light.”

Whoa. I stepped back and stared at him, this sweet, innocent, amazing little boy, standing there with his hand in the air, full of smiles and secret knowing. I didn’t know where the hell that came from except to say that children are closer to something that gets lost for most of us as we get older.

After Philip died, Phil, Natalie and I went to the house he’d been living in to get his things. I took his notebooks, and it was just a couple of weeks ago that I looked through them. I found a short essay he’d written about his childhood, and he talked about two things. The first was the apartment we lived in until he was seven, which he described as small, dark and cramped. It wasn’t. It was a big, bright apartment, the entire first floor of a house. But the room he shared with Natalie was small, and maybe that’s what he was remembering.

The second thing he wrote about was the wake. He thought he was four years old, said that he saw his grandpa lying in a coffin and it was creepy, but that he looked around and saw people talking and laughing and then he knew it was okay. Being there struck him deeply, more deeply than I ever knew.

And this is what I mean about Philip being a calm kid:

We were a “traditional” family. Phil worked, which meant I got to stay home with the kids. They were my “work.” I nursed them because it was a way of loving them, washed their diapers because I didn’t like fuzz and plastic, made clothes for them because I love what I can do with fabric. I put them to sleep when they were tired and stayed up with them when they weren’t. And when they were ready for solids I made their food, which mostly meant throwing whatever I cooked for dinner into a blender. I don’t get buying Designer Baby Food packed in teeny, expensive jars. I can mash my own bananas, thank you very much. And what was the point of made-for-baby-applesauce when Mott’s-no-sugar-added served the same purpose? Earth’s Best came from my kitchen and not from a jar, no matter how many green fields, fresh fruits and diapered-only toddlers its adorable label had.

But traditional doesn’t mean popular, and the few friends I had went to work soon after their babies were born. My world was small and lonely before I had Philip, and shrunk to mostly me and him after he was born. By the time he was a year and toddling around I hadn’t changed my mind about staying home, but I was bored and frustrated which I attributed to my lack of imagination and not my circumstances. Most of my conversations were the ones I was having with myself, which is pretty bad news since I do not keep myself very good company.

One thing I did was set up a nook in the corner of my dining room where I could sew. Which involved pins. Lots of pins. When I worked, I’d wind up spreading out to the floor and the dining room table and I took my pins with me. Carefully, because pins in the hands of a child are weapons, which they’re likely to turn on themselves in ways I still don’t like to imagine.

But I wasn’t careful enough. One day Philip toddled over to the dining room table. One determined hand grasped its edge while one curious hand went searching until it found a box of 200 pins which made a slightly pleasing tinkling sound when he knocked them down and they scattered all over the hardwood floor.

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and it seemed to me that picking up the nearest chair and banging it repeatedly on the floor while yelling, I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE! was the exact right thing to do. Except no matter how much I tried to lose my mind, a piece of it remained. “What the fuck?” it asked. “Your kid is watching you and you’re scaring him to death.”

Philip was behind me, and I imagined the terror that must be on his face, his eyes tearing, his mouth turned down and trembling, ready to open up and start howling. Goddamnit. I stopped with the chair and turned around expecting to gather him up to shush and reassure him, except he didn’t need any of that at all. He was watching me, little Buddha, waiting for me to stop, and if he could’ve talked I swear he’d have said, “Better now?”

I was, enough to laugh and pick him up and forget about sewing pins for a while. Which makes me think of the saying, “Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.” It never occurred to me what they were talking about.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

The Story

08 May 2013 7 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I thought of this story because I was talking about protecting Philip, and because of how deeply we’re affected by the vulnerability we share with our kids. Because we do share it. I might be the one who’s supposed to be doing the protecting, but look at the price I pay if I can’t.

The summer when Philip was four or five and Natalie was two or three, we stayed overnight in Point Pleasant, NJ, with Janine and her son Jake. It was hot and sunny and sticky and when we got to the beach, it was closed. If there was such a thing as a triple-X red flag, it would’ve been flying. I’ve never seen a beach this way. The water was hurling itself at the shore, right up to the boardwalk. In fact, there was no shore; just a boardwalk and lots of hysterical water.

Do Not Enter or not, the beach wasn’t roped off, so we went down the boardwalk stairs just to gape. I’m a weather girl. Not as in, oh, it’s warm and sunny so we should get our asses out and do something. I mean as in ice storms, snowstorms (which my town has decided to call “snow events,” leaving me to wonder just what it is our Town Officials spend the better part of their time – and our money – doing), rainstorms, thunderstorms, storms of any kind. The more nature misbehaves, the better. Of course, all I know is the NY Metro area kind of weather, not the Storm-Chaser, Dorothy’s-house-flying-through-the-air kind. The ocean that day might not be classified as “weather,” but it was Nature being Really Exciting.

The five of us stood just under the boardwalk, Janine and I holding our kids’ hands. No one else was there because really, no sane person would’ve been. You could see what was going on from the top of the boardwalk; no need go down those stairs to get under it. But we did, and the panorama of that unobstructed wild ocean letting its white, foamy hair down and shaking it out with a vengeance was mesmerizing.

Possessed, I took Philip’s still-chubby four-(or five)-year-old hand and walked deeper into that maniacal frothing sea. I was both thrilled and terrified; for God’s sake, I wouldn’t know how to float in a bathtub, never mind do a free-stroke or a backstroke or any other stroke that was supposed to keep my head above more than about four feet of water; what the hell was I doing tempting fate?

Correction. What was I doing tempting fate with my child?

I’d say it was a modified version of that thrill-seeking thing that makes people jump out of airplanes or climb big, scary mountains. And I think that attraction, dangerous as it is, is the pull of life. It’s the need to have all your senses mobilized and attentive, so there isn’t you and the ocean or the sky or the mountain because you are the ocean and the sky and the mountain. I mean, you’re not thinking about anything except what you’re doing, and how peaceful is it not to have to listen to the damn whining voices in your head. It’s what I’d thought meditation was about, but I hadn’t the patience to get there by sitting around and trying not to think. And here was an unsought opportunity to shock myself awake.

We didn’t walk far. We couldn’t. The water rushed at us, smacking my shins and splashing up my thighs, then rushed back on itself, trying to take us with it. It was gorgeously, savagely, beautiful; it was The Call of the Wild that I wanted to answer, but I didn’t know how.

So I turned to go back to the boardwalk, and a few steps later I realized I’d let go of Philip’s hand. I had stood there marveling at the ferocity and velocity of that ocean and then I dropped my son’s hand. I don’t remember doing it, I just remember spinning around in shock and dread, to see that Philip had been knocked down to his hands and knees, and some woman was helping him to get up.

What followed was some eerie dream-like sequence where I moved toward her and she gave Philip’s hand to me and I took it, unable to see what I’m sure were her accusing eyes behind her sunglasses, unable to say anything because the enormity of what I’d done was already taking hold, because the roaring of the ocean wouldn’t have allowed me to be heard anyway. Then somehow I was back at the boardwalk, back to Janine, who hadn’t seen any of it. I didn’t tell her. If I had, I would have had to say, “I think I almost let my child die.” That he didn’t die didn’t change my carelessness. It wasn’t because of me that he didn’t die. It was because of that woman, whoever she was, wherever she came from.  As far as I was concerned, she saved his life.

For years, right up until Philip died, I’d get slightly sick and slightly dizzy when I thought about that day. For just a second my stomach would lurch. I told Philip about it once, but he just shrugged it off. What did it matter to him? He didn’t even remember it.

But after Philip died, the truth of that day hit me, and it knocked me over like one of those big old waves did to him. My son wasn’t saved that day; I was. Because if he would have died then, I don’t know what shell of a person I would have become and what Natalie would have had to suffer because of it. Look; Philip was a young man on his own, and I couldn’t protect him from the choices he made, or the body he was given. But he is my son. He was vulnerable and I was helpless. That I can work through; and to a degree, I have. But if I’d lost him then? If he had died because of my carelessness when I was supposed to be taking care of him?

My heart is on its knees in gratitude. I was graced that day, and I understand the difference between the way it happened and what it would have been like if it had happened then. It’s a nightmarish way to get perspective. But if my son had to die, better it be with my conscience clear.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Again

06 May 2013 17 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday a window opened. Just for a moment. And there he was – Philip, in his biker jacket, standing there. Palpable. Tangible. In living color. As in I could touch him? No. Do I mean I had a vision? No. I just mean I remembered him like it was yesterday and I am aching for what I can’t have.

Sometimes…well, it’s like this – and not as in a complaint, but as a result of choices I’ve made. I haven’t anyone to hold me; I mean, to just sink into. And right about now, that’s feeling like it would be a good thing. I’d rather be sitting on my couch balled up under someone’s arm with a reassuring head resting on mine than sitting on my couch trying to explain it to you. There’s a release that happens when it’s the right person. Like lancing the wound and the pus runs out and the hot pain chills out and from the simple act of touching, there’s nowhere one of you ends and the other begins. Just breathing in a place where you think you’re safe from something it’s not possible to be safe from, but it’s okay to make believe you are, just for a while.

It’s a break in the tension. It’s what I drank for; that click, the one that came right around the third drink, when I started nodding to the music all warm and dreamy because really, everything was going to be all right.

Philip used to let me sink into him. Just for a moment, here and there. He knew me. He saw my unhappiness, he wrote about it, he tried to love it out of me. Funny thing is, I was finally letting him, then he went and died.

Yeah, well. Maybe not so funny.

I guess I’m saying that it just hit me weak-in-the-knees hard that my son is gone and I am crying crying crying again and for what? I well know that people are suffering this and I can’t do anything about mine like they can’t do anything about theirs. And it matters; it matters that people suffer all sorts of things because I don’t think I’ve been given more or less than anyone else. It matters that people are trying to cope with what’s in front of them. It has to matter because if I can’t make some sense – even some vague, primitive sense – of this, I think my spirit will lie broken and useless and my body will follow right along.

For months and months and months I asked Philip to come to me in my dreams. I had two dreams about him after he died, but no more. Phil told me he dreams of Philip. He sees him standing with his friends, and he wants to tell him something but he can’t. How do you feel when you wake, I asked? Terrible, he answered.

Then I thanked Philip for not dreaming of him because I got it. To feel like I experienced him would only make me feel worse. There’s a cushion that’s developed, between and around me and my son. It doesn’t keep me from him, it doesn’t make the grief go away. But it’s the difference between how I grieved when he first died and how I grieve now. It has to do with the physical fact of him; 14 months of not seeing him or touching him has lost its sharp edge.

Then that window that opened. It was visceral. Again; the brutality of loss. Philip popped up and was gone, and I’m haunted by the line I wrote, weeks ago:  “I see him, beautiful boy…”

My beautiful boy; oh God, where is he? When Natalie went to pre-school, and then again in kindergarten, she screamed for me. Mrs. M had to carry her in while I watched, Natalie reaching her arms out to me over Mrs. M’s shoulder, Mommy…Mommy…Mommmmmmmyy!! And kindergarten, Mrs. R holding her hand, Natalie screaming, Mommy! My stomach hurts! Mommy! Mommy! Please!

I can’t stop thinking about this because I am Natalie, screaming for help, reaching out for someone who cannot or will not help, and it’s killing me that I let her go and I know exactly how she felt, her big eyes streaming tears, terrified, not understanding how mommy could let this happen and of course it took one day for it to be all right, but she didn’t know that, not in those moments. I am stuck in that tableau where I am Natalie more than I am me. Terrified and bewildered at what’s happened, guilty and ashamed for letting it.

I know Philip’s death wasn’t my fault. But I am his mother; protecting him is what I’m supposed to do. It’s beyond sense or reason. It’s biological, it’s psychic. I didn’t do it, couldn’t do it, and that’s what I have to live with. I did nothing wrong; if you think I’m saying I feel guilty because I could have done something to prevent this, I’m not explaining it right. See, what I know and what I feel have nothing to do with each other. The fact is that Philip is dead, the fact is I couldn’t have stopped it, the fact is I am wired to protect him and I didn’t.

Next, I want to tell you a story.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Day 3, and So On

04 May 2013 6 Comments

by Denise in Death, Motherhood Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I hate this. I goddamn hate that my son is dead and that you’ll say so very sympathetically, “Of course you do” but you don’t know. You think I’m brave and I’m doing great and hey, I’m writing a blog and maybe it’s what’s keeping me sane, but what do I do when I’m done with my story? Day One and Day Two (parts one, two, three and four) and now Day Three, and then what? What if I run out of things to say? Because I certainly won’t run out of things to feel. It’s my silences I don’t know how to live with.

It’s Friday, and I am at my parents’ house in Brooklyn. Philip is all around, pictures of when he was 2 and 4 and 14 and 17 and 18 and 20. He’s kissing his cousin, sitting with his grandma, sitting on a rock in Wyoming during the last vacation we’d taken as a family. And he’s in my old bedroom, on the bureau, he and Nicole, two dead grandbabies with a place of their own. And if I sound angry that my mom did that, I’m not. I’m angry that such a thing should be necessary.

I’m here to visit my dad in the hospital, where he was taken for arrhythmia on Monday, and where we briefly thought he might die. What do people think about when they’re not thinking about death? It’s most of what I think about, no matter whatever else it seems I might be thinking about. Fill it up, regular; do you know my son is dead? Three veggie burgers and a chicken Panini; do you know my son is dead? What time should we meet for dinner; you didn’t forget my son is dead?

I don’t want to be in this hospital, this Bizarre Hotel where the NICU is opposite the birthing center and which I suppose might be viewed as perfectly normal, but it’s a normal I don’t want to be reminded of. Philip and Natalie were perfectly healthy babies who were the result of perfectly healthy pregnancies and had perfectly healthy births, right in my very own home – but who knew that babies who aren’t sick or hurting didn’t necessarily grow up to be adults who aren’t sick and hurting? If they managed to grow up at all, that is.

I’m at the hospital with my mom, and my Aunt Joan and her granddaughter, Andrea. The two of them flew in from North Carolina Thursday night. I picked them up from the airport, drove them to my parents’ house and slept there with them. Natalie’s working in the city. When she’s done, she’ll take the train here, to the hospital. Tonight we’ll drive home.

But I want to go home now. I want to be in my TV room on the couch, the same couch I’d tucked myself into when I found out Philip died, and where I’d spent most of the next year because to move off it was to take my attention away from my grief and I refused to take my attention off my grief.

No. That’s not it. It wasn’t possible to take my attention off my grief. It was intolerable. People thought it would be good for me to go out, get my mind off it. Even now I want to throw my head back and cackle like a crazy hyena at the absurdity of such a sentiment. You can be forgiven if you say such a thing because you don’t know what else to say, but if you really believe what you’re saying, then naiveté is the color of your world.

Never mind. Either way, there’s deep ignorance involved to suggest there’s such a thing as getting my mind off what Philip’s death felt like, and today I am in no mood to be charitable about any of it. The damn stupidity of suggesting I could take my mind off it, like getting some fresh air would do anything other than remind me that Philip couldn’t breathe it. What was I supposed to do, pluck my mind out of my head, lay it down on my pillow, tell it, “I’ll be back a little later, when you’ve calmed down?” As if that would have mattered, as if without a mind to think about it, my body wouldn’t still have been folding in on itself in its shock and disbelief that This Is My Reality, not some episode of ER where I could shake my head and think, “Wow. Sucks to be them.”

Maybe there’s truth to that. If emotion truly is the body’s response to what the mind’s thinking, “taking my mind off it” might’ve given me some relief. Except it’s delusional to think there was another response to Philip’s death besides the one I was having, that spending my time figuring out how not to think about my son being dead was somehow going to help me live through it. Why not just tell me to go get drunk about it? That would have been just as productive as any other way to not think about it. I mean, isn’t this what I got sober for? So I could fully feel what something like this feels like?

Really?

If, in fact, “getting my mind off it” was valid advice, it didn’t matter. No one can tell anyone else how to grieve. The one thing that made any sense to me was when my friend Debbie, who works with the bereaved, told me to follow any creative impulse I had. Which led to months and months of me sitting on my couch and knitting, and to consider writing the book, “How Knitting Saved My Life.”

You’d think it would’ve taken something heroic for me to make it through that night. The magnitude of my loss seemed to demand heroism to survive it. But I’m no fireman running into a burning, crumbling tower. They were the brave ones, the ones the word “heroism” was meant for. Me – I had no choice in this. This was life. Wait – no. This was death. Happens every second of every day and sooner or later everyone has to deal with it. Just so happens now it was my turn.

That night I sat on my couch like a wild thing caught in a trap, scrunched in a fetal position, knees bent, toes clenched, hands fisted, chewing on my thumbnails and staring at nothing, wanting someone to come and help me, embarrassed and afraid that they would. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be. For two hours I sat in an ungodly silence broken only by my on-and-off sobbing and heaving. It should have been storming outside; the rain should have been pelting, the thunder ferocious, the lightning dazzling, the trees snapping and cracking from its impact. At the very least someone in the house besides me should be making maybe a sob or a moan.  And when the silence of that huge and implacable house provoked the racket in my brain into a simply unbearable frenzy, I grabbed my phone, went to my bedroom, shut the door and called Janine.

Janine is my friend from Brooklyn; we’d met one morning when we’d taken our kids to the same park on 79th Street and Shore Road. Philip was around 4; Janine’s son Jake was a few months older. There’s no good that can come from an unexpected phone call at 4:00 in the morning, which is maybe why she didn’t pick up the first time around. I chose her to call because if you’re going to give someone a 4am call, it’s got to be someone who’s going to start screaming right along with you.

Because that’s what we do, we women. We moan when our children come into the world, wail if they leave it before we do.  Our lives then become Life Sentences, as we’re condemned to carry on without those we carried into this world. What are we to do, we ask? We are a society of do-ers. What use is it to just be? Where’s the value in that? If we don’t have something to show for our time spent, what the hell are we worth? That’s why we have such a hard time with the elderly; theirs is a time to be, but the rest of us are so busy doing that we whiz on by while they watch with rheumy eyes, eyes that probably have lots to teach us if we’d just slow down and pay attention for a bit.

How ill-equipped are we to deal with death, then? The original moment when the immovable object meets the irresistible force. My body was screaming for action while my mind understood it wouldn’t matter. I wanted this feeling out of my body. One night, during the relentless progression of Nicole’s cancer, Robert went to South Beach on Father Capodano Boulevard in Staten Island and screamed. I picture him, head thrown back, maybe shaking his fists, maybe stamping his feet, howling his anguish to that dark and endless universe, the only place that could contain it.  And maybe he screamed until he was sure he had not one more drop of rage to exhaust, only to find that all it took was one night’s sleep – and not even a good one, at that – to revive his rage, but not his spirit.

Animals caught in traps have been known to chew off a limb to escape. I was that animal, but short of ingesting my entire body, there was no escape. Where would I escape to, anyway? I wanted to escape what I knew. I cursed Eve for biting into that goddamned apple. The Tree of Knowledge; the tree of consciousness, the part where we woke up and began to know things like loss and grief and death, things that I was quite clear I did not want to know about. Not where my children are concerned. Most unequivocally, especially, assuredly where my children are concerned.

But here’s the thing. There’s only grief because there’s love. That’s what it means to live in a world of opposites. Once we decide “good,” we’ve automatically created “bad.” Once there’s birth, there’s death. Once we love a child, we grieve if we lose that child. If I intend to make meaning, then I have to pay attention to what I say. “I do not want this grief,” I say. But I love my son; I want to love my son. What am I meaning, then? That I wish I had no kids so that I didn’t have to know this formerly unspeakable thing that is kicking the damn shit out of me? But you don’t know the unspeakable without having the mad, deep love that is its cause, and I would have rather had Philip for a while than not have had him at all.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

I am going to kick his ass…

30 Apr 2013 14 Comments

by Denise in Death Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I am going to Kick. His. Ass.

At the end of Philip’s wake, a young woman came over to me. Look at this kid, I thought, she’s beautiful. In a China-doll way. Dark, straight, shiny hair and poreless, creamy skin (skin that even at her age I never had). The kind of girl Janis Ian was whining about when she was 17* (and sadly, she wasn’t so wrong). “Mrs. Smyth?” she said. “My name is Natalia. I’m Philip’s girlfriend.”

What the???

If Philip had a girlfriend, I thought I’d know about it. I didn’t expect to know every girl he crossed paths with, but if he called someone his girlfriend, he was serious about her. In fact, the only other girlfriend he’d had was Laura, Nadiya’s daughter (which is how I met Nadiya). They were together for a year, and remained deeply good friends afterward.

Turns out Philip and Natalia had been together about six weeks. Turns out they met because Philip was a referee for high school fencing and Natalia was a high school fencer. Turns out they wanted to wait until the end of the fencing season to go public (impropriety and all). Turns out the end of the fencing season was February 25th. That would be two days after Philip died, and one day before the first day of his wake.

Dazed as I was at the end of the wake, Natalia shocked me awake for a moment. I asked her if she wanted my phone number, and she jumped back like I’d spit fire at her. “NO,” she said, and then she was gone. I figured she was too upset to want to have anything to do with me.

Weeks later, Natalia was in touch with Phil on Facebook. It kinda bothered me that he got her attention when I couldn’t…but an active Facebook page seems the currently preferred method of communication, and other than having a page with my face on it, you weren’t going to find me there. She asked if she could have Philip’s army jacket. The one I’d picked up in Urban Outfitters and given him last Christmas. As in, his last Christmas. Phil probably took my “Um. Uh. Well. Oh. Okay. I guess” as an affirmative. Give something of Philip’s away? To a girl who’d been seeing him for six weeks, and would probably forget him in six more?

In the end, I told him to go ahead. She seemed to really want it, and besides, I had his black leather jacket, all warm and worn and broken in the way leather will, the way mere fabric never can.

Then a few weeks ago, I got an email that started “Dear Mrs. Smyth,” and at which I smiled. I’ve never gotten used to being addressed as “Mrs.” Who is she, “Mrs. Smyth?” Some older woman with a muffin top,** wearing Not My Daughter’s Jeans*** because they have so much stretch in them you can size down, their legs cut just a little too baggy and sitting just a little too long atop her sensible flats. Hair grayish and shortish because Women of a Certain Age cannot be bothered taking care of long hair. Brisk and business-like, her life in order, and having pretty much figured out all she’s going to figure out about life. Not young any more, but who cares? She has her husband, her kids (the ones who’ve flown off to separate colleges and isn’t it so great because it’s so good for them to go away), her friends, her work. She might not be in her prime, but at least her life is settled.

I wasn’t Mrs. Smyth. I was Philip and Natalie’s mom. Big difference. Huge, ginormous, world of difference. Skinny jeans, black leather boots, long streaked hair, still-don’t-know-what-the-hell-I’m-doing, God-please-help-me and all.

And did I mention I was really, really happy that my kids were a 45-minute-I’m-coming-home-to-do-laundry drive away?

The letter was from Natalia,**** and while I appreciated her respect, I wrote back and asked her to promise to call me Denise. We weren’t going to have a meaningful conversation with me being Mrs. Smyth.

Rather than go on about what she said, I’ll let her tell you herself. Here is what she told me about Philip:

Ever since Natalie posted that you had a blog dedicated to Phil, I have been quietly reading through every post, every day. It has been a very long time since I cried as hard as I did. Phil was one of the most amazing people I have ever known. The connection I had with him was one that I will never find ever again. Many people say that I am too young to know such things, but I believe that when you know when someone is perfect it doesn’t matter when you feel it, just that you do. He and I had a friendly acquaintance-like relationship the year or two prior. It wasn’t until the end of 2011 that we started to talk more. The click between us was instantaneous. It was like I knew him my whole life. He was constantly supportive… Even now, in my darkest of days, our old conversations are the only things that can make me smile. He had that sort of magic about him. He was a once-in-a-lifetime guy and I was lucky enough to even be able to be loved by him …Honestly, the way he treated a girl would make any mother proud, and it sure did make a huge impression on my mom…she loved him. There was something about him that just told her he was an amazing guy.

And when I asked her how she found out that he died, she wrote:

I found out that he had passed because I contacted Natalie after spending a few days without hearing from him and by that point I was freaking out. Something told me Wednesday that something had gone horribly wrong. The last thing he said Tuesday night was that he would talk to me in the morning and when he hadn’t (something which was completely out of the ordinary) I began to worry. My slight worry turned to full blown I-can’t-concentrate-on-anything-else freaking out by Friday. I had gone home for lunch (something I never did) and saw I had a message from her. That message came with the news…then I was on the ground, attempting to even slightly make sense of things and maybe even wake myself up from this bad dream…

And that is why I am going to kick his ass. Because I blame him? Of course not. But he is dead and I am pissed off. Much as Natalia and I are in touch, I will never know the two of them as a couple.  And here I go again. I don’t want to open my heart to this girl; I am trying to keep my heart still – like I would any other part of me that was broken. You don’t move a broken arm or a broken leg. You let it rest, give it a chance to heal. But a broken heart doesn’t just “heal.” It can’t get put back together because it doesn’t know its shape any more. And now I feel myself loving this girl, this smart and beautiful and lovely child that I already know I could have loved as one of my own if Philip had just stayed around and let me.

                 ************************************************************************

*If you actually had to refer to this asterisk, all I can say is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k39P2MK6WPo

**A muffin top is when your belly hangs over the top of your jeans.

*** That is actually a brand of jeans, made for us “mature” women with our “mature” figures.

**** I asked Natalia for some pictures. She hasn’t any of the two of them together, but she sent me some of herself. I’ve put them on my photo page. Take a look for yourself; you’ll see what I’m talking about. I mean, how do you not love a girl who rides a horse? And remember – that guy in the picture really is just her friend. Really.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Happy Birthday?

19 Apr 2013 4 Comments

by Denise in Death Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday was my mom’s birthday. Natalie and I went out to dinner with her and my dad, my brother Robert and his wife, Maria (if you’ve been reading along and are confused about “Maria,” one is my cousin and one is my sister-in-law. It’s an Italian thing.), my nephew and two nieces. My other niece is away at college in Boston. Yes, that Boston. She was in the area an hour or so before the bombs went off.

Last year, Philip hadn’t even been dead two months when my mom turned 80. That was the end of the surprise party. Birthdays are way too ironic in the face of death. We weren’t about to celebrate life after it had turned on us, and in such a vicious, impossible way.

This year, my dad kept it simple. I don’t think my mom wanted a bigger celebration. Last year we were in our separate orbits around Philip. This year, not so much. This year, I remembered that everyone had lost him. Philip was a brother, a nephew, a cousin. He was a grandchild, the second one who had died. See, I have been greedy in my grief, wanting it all, allowing no portion to anyone else. It bound me to my son, and I believed it was all that was left between us. I was not about to share. It was Natalie who had to remind me that yes, I lost my son, but she lost her brother, and that very much mattered, too.

Tuesday I didn’t need to be reminded. Tuesday I looked around the table and had a collapsible moment where I realized that these people are my family and I love them. Don’t “of course you do” me. I do not love so easily. In that moment I knew why. Because it hurts too much. It hurts. I am helplessly in love with my children; thank god for that. But Philip’s death left my heart roadkill, and when love reaches in and touches, it does not soothe.  It reminds me of its cost. I see the terrible beauty of grief, the cost of a life deeply lived. I have spent my life wanting to live deeply; did I understand what I was asking for?

I have to take it in bits and pieces.

Full disclosure #1: I’d considered writing about my mom’s birthday, but decided not to – time to get back to the narrative. But Natalie had been taking pictures that night, and she posted some on her blog. Just a few; my mom and dad, Robert, me, Natalie. It’s a happy blog; she’s a happy girl. So if you want to see what some of us look like – and give her a little more traffic while you’re at it – you can find her at www.flockingowls.blogspot.com .

Full disclosure #2: Natalie told me that the reason my gravatar is my picture is because it’s my Facebook picture and it’s somehow linked to everything else I do online. So in case you think you know what I look like, that is my face dressed up for a gala that was five years ago.

Just sayin’

© 2013 Denise Smyth

His Eulogy

18 Apr 2013 2 Comments

by Denise in Death Tags: , , , , , ,

I’ve added a page with Philip’s eulogy. It was my last gift to him. As I wrote in the introduction, I’m posting it so you can know him a little better. I’ve just re-read it, and I remember reading it out loud, with Phil and Natalie beside me. I remember that I’d spent the last two hours in my chair at the wake, non-stop sobbing. I remember my cousin Maria leaning over and saying, “If you don’t stop crying you won’t be able to read.” I remember my voice clear and strong. And when I was done, I remember being told, “I feel better because I know you’re going to be all right.”

Me and “all right” didn’t belong in the same sentence. But there it was. And here it is; I hope you’ll take a look.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

Please dear god; please (Day 2, Part 3)

15 Apr 2013 8 Comments

by Denise in Death Tags: , , , , , ,

I don’t think I sat very long on that landing. I was vibrating, like a big old church bell someone whacked with a gong. I had to move. Something had to be done, even if I didn’t know what. I walked down the stairs, one slow, bare foot at a time; eyes wide and stunned, biting hard on my lower lip, hands dug in and pulling my hair tight up to heaven. Maybe if I pulled hard enough, that pain would become the real pain. That pain I could recognize; that pain I could manage. Please God, please; help me, hurt me, do you what you want, anything, anything but this; because if this is true, if my son is dead, then please dear God, please, you have to take me with him.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the foyer, the policemen who’d picked up Phil were waiting near the door. What for? Maybe they knew something; maybe they could tell me something. Maybe some word came over the radio that would change things. They are officials. They have authority. They have power. Maybe if I begged them…

“What happened?” I asked, in a high and breathy imitation of the voice I was used to. But the cop I’d turned to only knew what he was told…which was what? Is there a script for this? Was Philip just another dead kid to him, one more kid who bit the drug pile? This was my son, this wasn’t supposed to happen, it was all a mistake; kids like him are not the ones who die. He was young, this cop; all he said was, “I don’t know, ma’am” and I could see he was sorry for it. He was helpless to help me, as if any answer would have “helped” me. All it would have done was put a picture in my head that I did not want to see.

I walked to the kitchen, still pulling hard at my hair. Everything was spinning. It was like walking through one of those tunnel-things at the amusement park that’s going round and round while you desperately tried to stay balanced. I walked around the table, staring, focused on something I couldn’t see, unable to recognize the shape and contour of the trembling mass I used to know as my body.

Then came the panic.

Things had to be done. I had to call someone; I had to tell the people who would protect me. My cousin Maria, first. I knew she’d be in her car before I finished what I had to say. With that call, everything started moving with a terrible momentum, flying around in bits and pieces. The tornado hit, the house was in the air, Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.

What I remember next, in no particular order:

I remember I cried.

I remember I told Phil we had to get Natalie; he said the police were already driving her here. Frightened to think of her sitting with this alone in the backseat of a police car, I was also relieved at not having to drive 45 minutes to Rutgers and another 45 minutes home. I didn’t think there was a car big enough to hold the wild, ravaged thing I’d become, who might need to scream or to scratch or to beat her hands on the floor or bang her head somewhere so it would shut itself up. There wasn’t enough room on the Jersey Turnpike to contain me.

I remember sitting on the floor in the foyer and crying, Nadiya hugging me and crying right back. What can I do? she asked. Don’t leave me, I answered. Exactly what I told my midwife during Philip’s birth.

I remember going upstairs to call Ed, who sounded confused no matter how many times I said, “Philip died; my son is dead.” After we hung up, he called me back and asked, “Did you just call me?”

I remember that downstairs, I went into the den to call my therapist. I was embarrassed to bother her because if I’m talking to her, I think I should be paying her, but guess what? She’s human and she’s a mom and when I told her, for a moment we cried together.

I remember Maria showing up in her big, brown fur coat, and I – who would not eat an animal, much less wear one – sat on the floor and folded myself into her like she was a great big Mama Bear and I was just a little Baby One.

And I remember that somewhere in the middle of all this, my brother Robert called. When I saw his name on my phone, I knew that he’d found out. But how? I answered my phone wailing and he said, “What happened?” and I kept wailing, “You know what happened” and he kept saying he didn’t know, until finally, panicked, he yelled, “Denise. I don’t know what happened. Maria called and told me to call you.” His disbelief at what I told him was outdone by my sister-in-law screaming in the background and when she got on the phone I said to her, “No one knows this like you do,” and she said, “But Denise, Nicole was young and she was sick and we knew she was going to die.”

That’s right. My brother and his wife lost their daughter, their oldest, Nicole, when she was four. In November, 1994. In January she’d been diagnosed with a rare brain cancer. Ten months later she was dead. But he and Maria, my sister-in-law, were just beginning their family; and while one child cannot replace another, children are the love we grow and the more we grow, the more love we have.

In my loss, that is exactly what I reduced life to. The number of kids you had. I saw with perfect clarity the dank, gray life I lived while my brother had warmth, and the light of Christmas. His four children were proof he was loved; my dead one was proof I was not. I was exposed for what I was, ashamed that everyone could see. Now I only had Natalie.

As if she is an “only.” As if “have” isn’t temporal, brittle.

That was the craziness battering around in my brain. And all I can tell you is that trauma will hurl you back into the hot mess of All The Things You Thought You Worked Out, and send a well-versed chorus along to remind you what a shit you are in case you’d forgotten. And what I heard were those oldies-but-goodies like, “There Is Something Inherently Wrong With Me” (else how could my child die??), “I Am the Center of the Universe” (because this happened to me more than to Philip or his father or sister) and “Of Course; What Did You Expect?” (variation of hit #1).

I am not saying I could have thought or said or felt anything other than what I did. And if I sound like I’m being hard on myself, I’m not; I am looking back one year, one month and 23 days to see where I was then and where I am now, and to ask, what does any of it mean? For months and months I believed that Philip’s death was proof of the cold indifference of the universe, which was especially intolerant of me. I knew with certainty there was a god; this much cruelty could not possibly be random.

And that was about all I thought this could mean.

© 2013 Denise Smyth

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