There was a congenital defect in her brain, it seems, entangling two major blood vessels that should have lain smoothly side by side. She never really showed any symptoms, though afterwards Dollie and I remembered a phase of mildly persistent headaches, a problem that seemed to end when she got her prescription glasses. But two months after her thirteenth birthday (she had chosen to have a pool party, out at our house in the country), my granddaughter Norah went to sleep one night, full of plans for the next day, and never woke up. My daughter Christy went in to rouse her, couldn’t get a response, saw that she had vomited. The ambulance came from the fire station, two blocks away, and took Norah to the local hospital. From there she was helicoptered to the children’s hospital in Peoria, with the rest of us scrambling to follow: first Christy and Eric, Norah’s stepdad, in their car; a few hours later Dollie and me in ours, bringing with us Ethan, Norah’s older brother. In Peoria Norah had an emergency surgery that showed promise, but then a second and worse hemorrhage broke out and a second surgery failed.
By the time Ethan and Dollie and I got there the solemn formula “everything we could” was being used. People were giving us looks of terrifying kindness. Incomprehensibly, Norah was gone, her whole life done almost before it started. It was impossible to believe this, to fight off the sensation that she was really just around the corner, that she was waiting for her next conversation with you. That wounded body stretched out among the monitors could not really be her.
We three spent the night in a nearby hospice while Christy and Eric stayed at the bedside, bunking on a little couch under the window. In the morning we returned to the hospital for goodbyes, then drove back to Charleston in the afternoon. Christy had to stay in the hospital four more days, icing down Norah’s swollen face, shampooing her tangled hair, signing consent forms. She and her ex, who never agree on anything, had agreed instantly that Norah would want to be a donor. This required more surgeries, more forms, the courage to say yes to the nightmare again and again; but for most of the year that was coming, brief notes from people saved by Norah’s organs would be almost the only thing that seemed to give Christy real comfort. Her brother Jay had flown in from California on the first available flight and stayed with her those days, helping Eric help her through. Down in Charleston a group of her friends, close as family, went over and invisibly cleaned her house, leaving fresh flowers on the tables. Then Dollie and her best friend Charlotte went over to change the sheets in Norah’s room and wash the mattress. Charlotte herself would be gone in not much more than a year, felled suddenly by a heart attack.
I remember my granddaughter’s hurt face, her forehead bloody and swollen, the stitches from that panicked second surgery crude and crooked. I remember a woman crying at the bedside who turned out to be one of the doctors, telling me, “I’m sorry, doctors aren’t supposed to cry.” And earlier, learning that another doctor had said “She’s about as sick as a little girl can be” hearing a kind of weird gusto in the repeated words, as if it were all a big adventure and would turn out all right. And still earlier, when the first call came, how Dollie’s voice had something of the same note, because she was speaking in her professional nurse’s voice, trying to comfort Eric on the other end. The way something in your mind splits off and turns such hints into unreasonable hopes.
I remember the radiant courage that seemed to float Christy from room to room, task to task, as she navigated the worst hours of her life, so far past crying that sometimes a wan smile played across her face. I remember going to arrange the cremation, blubbering like a fool, the girl across the desk quietly waiting, me thinking, I get to contribute to this instead of her college. I remember all the people converging at the memorial service in town and the reception at our house afterwards, hundreds and then dozens, people I didn’t even know, a huge and maddening distraction, but that was the point. By then some friends of Christy’s had set up a memorial scholarship in Norah’s name, and the total had risen up near twenty thousand dollars, here in our small town where no one has any money. Time going in five different directions, fragments that won’t come together. If there is an excuse for death, an upside, it’s the way it redoubles love, investing other people — even strangers, sometimes — with a mysterious and solemn goodness. At such times their kindness cuts like knives but is the thing you need most, the thread holding you in the world.
So now a year has rolled past, then most of another, and we are coming up on what would have been Norah’s fifteenth birthday. I’ve said it a hundred times, but now I really mean it: it’s time to quit grieving and start celebrating. Time to put aside the if-onlys and just appreciate what she gave us.
One of life’s cruel features is the way even memories wear out at last. “For every step you take, you lose something on the way,” according to the country song, and then you lose even the losses, because the memories grow weaker, shorter, less reliable. But in the jumble of slowly fading recollections there are always a few that stay sharper than the others, often for no obvious reason: what matters is just the way they persist, anchoring something, making the years fall away. What I have in mind for Norah’s birthday, this year, is to string together a few of these.
Here’s a silly one. Ethan must be six, and Norah a pretty precocious almost-four. They have overnighted with Dollie and me, a treat all around, and in the morning I take them down to Fox Ridge, the state park a few miles south of our town, for a little hike in the woods. About a mile from the trailhead, Norah notices that she has a BM coming. We have no tissues with us, so we turn around. As we trudge back up the hill, she begins giving regular bulletins: “Papa, I really have to!” “Papa, there’s no potty out here!” “Papa, it’s coming!”
One of the gifts children give adults is the chance to play the hero in small emergencies. I tell Norah to let me know when she really, really can’t hold it any longer. When she does, I kick a little hole in the grass, take off my cheap jersey work gloves, and have her squat down, holding onto my pants for balance. The gloves end up being perfectly adequate in place of tissue, even luxurious. With her business done, Norah instantly transforms back into her usual ebullient self. Somewhere down there, beside the road, those gloves are still buried under a clump of sod.
Actually this ends up being Ethan’s story, his and Dollie’s, for five minutes later, while my back is turned, he takes a savage fall from a big retaining wall he has been scaling. I hear the impact, a terrible dead sound, a log dropping onto pavement. Then the inexpressibly welcome sound of his yowling. When I get there he has a pebble nastily embedded between his eyes but is basically OK. But he has been warned in the starkest terms about his climbing habits — “You could kill yourself!” — and thinks this may be happening. “I’m gonna die!”
I tell him he isn’t, and we get back to town. Alerted by cell phone, Dollie meets us on the outskirts, calms Ethan better than I could, gets the pebble out. Taking a good look, she renders the verdict he most wants to hear: no stitches needed. Maybe too cautious, maybe just feeling guilty, I insist that he should still see a doctor, and Dollie manages the remarkable feat of tracking one down outside the emergency room, an old friend and colleague who is in town at an auction. He takes a look, down there at the yard, concurs that a steri-strip will be fine, and all’s well again, by noon or so of this sunny day.
So their story, clearly. But what I remember most comes earlier: Norah’s distress and then her elation, me bending over, her holding on to my pants for dear life as she squats, both of us laughing like maniacs.
Grandparents are bit players and backseat drivers, seeing the main drama only in glimpses. But Christy did everything she could to keep us in the loop, and it was what we wanted most. We stayed in town after we retired, and we changed houses when we didn’t need to partly because we kept seeing pool, pond, and woods through our grandkids’ eyes. Another gift from children: the way they make everything new again, every last little thing. The way you rediscover the universe as you explain it to them. It was what our own kids had given us three decades before, and now here it was again.
In one of my earliest memories of her, just a fragment but strangely luminous, she is maybe six months old, rocking in her baby swing on the floor at the old house, staring at me. People call to her, but she keeps staring at me. I seem to be the most interesting person she has ever seen. It feels calming, flattering, and just a little creepy.
Of course all babies stare like this. But with Norah the trick feels like a window into her essential personality. All through her life, she took an intense interest in people and had a knack for making them feel noticed and important. She would pepper you with questions, right to the edge of discomfort, till she sensed that and backed off. She thought about things that kids usually don’t: asking Dollie how she could still pay her bills now that she was retired; asking me how I could slice zucchini the way I was doing without slitting my thumb. You would forget she was a kid and talk to her as to an adult, and she made BFFs of all her mom’s closest friends.
When we move to the new house, first priority is to make sure Ethan and Norah will be safe around the pool and the pond. Ethan teaches himself and is soon graceful as a guppy even in the deep end. The danger to him is more from the tree in back, which he scoots up heart-stoppingly whenever he has a chance; he goes through a stage when he tells people quite seriously that he is not a boy but a monkey. But Norah is just turning three, and Christy lets me sign her up for a lesson at the Rotary pool in town. She does just fine for the first half hour, joining two older boys as the instructor has them put their faces in the water and blow bubbles. But then she decides that the big 50-meter pool is far more interesting than anything that will happen in the wading pool with the instructor. Her face is all alight as she keeps grabbing my hand and pulling me that way, shaking her head happily whenever I try to lead her back to the class. It’s impossible to be annoyed with her. Grandma hovers, remembering her Mama and Me class with Christy a lifetime ago. We practice having Norah leap off the side into my arms, in about five feet of water. She laughs and laughs.
About a year later, there is a moment that stays very clear and sharp somehow. She is standing on a stepstool at my elbow to get a close look at the aerator on the kitchen faucet. “Cool,” she says, after I have showed her the on-off motion and she has tried it. Already real, practical things appeal to her as much as toys, maybe more. She is a little dressy today, in a blue-plaid jumper with a white blouse, and her hair is blond from sun and chlorine.
Jump ahead three years, we are in the same room, and she abruptly asks — almost demands — to know what I think about God and Heaven. Pretty clearly, she has been polling the adults in her orbit and getting a range of views, some of which must feature brimstone. Her parents are agnostic. I hedge: “Well, people believe all kinds of things. I don’t think anyone really knows. But it’s important to respect people’s beliefs, whatever they are.”
“Well, I think there’s a God and you go to Heaven when you die.”
“I hope you’re right about that,” I say, which gets me off the hook.
In fifth grade she won an award for Kindness — not for Awareness or for Goofiness, which I think would also have been strong categories for her. There is a picture of her accepting the certificate, over at the school district building after hours, fighting through stage fright to give the camera a grin. After her death someone was kind enough to post her teacher’s citation:
Norah is very aware of her environment and . . . quick to come to me if she feels a student is struggling. . . . She is sensitive to those around her and strives not to say or do anything that might offend. . . . She exudes an aura of pure joy, which is contagious!
Yes, that joy, that headlong enthusiasm for life: the thing everyone seems to mention most. Never bored, she was keen on school, on babysitting, on cooking, on nearly everything she did. She loved card games, especially when she won, and attention, and having slightly too much money spent on her for trinkets or birthday dinners. She loved to laugh and didn’t mind making a fool of herself, leaving us more than one goofy video of her singing and dancing. But she had a bossy, sassy, stubborn side. During her terrible twos and threes, she threw epic tantrums, fiercer even than her mother’s had been at the same age. (“Oh, you just need to leave her alone for a while,” Christy would say. “Then she gets it back under control.”) Later on she would feud with Ethan over who was really smarter (her for her straight As, him for the offhand, nerdy grasp of science he showed in scholastic bowl meets). She could be tenacious in argument. My joke with her, never entirely a joke, was that she should go to law school when she grew up, because she loved to argue and was good at it. She would accept the compliment with a grave nod but reply, “No, I’m going to be a teacher.”
If I sound like a geezer bragging about his granddaughter, that is exactly right. It was Norah (fact!) who taught me how to mail photos from my cell phone and how to use the “List” function on my TV remote. She was the one who set the wallpaper on my phone to say “Papa,” as it still does. She taught me her technique for folding T-shirts and I adopted it. One year she prevailed on Eric to dress up in the old uniform from his Iraq days, so she could take him to school for show-and-tell on Veteran’s Day. She loved going to father-daughter dances with her real dad, too.
The spring she was twelve, I had the job, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays of alternating weeks (don’t ask), of picking up Norah at the middle school. On the way to her dad’s house out in the country I would give her driving lessons, and she purely loved this: never said no to an offer to take the wheel, always wanted to go farther and faster than the last time. She was good at it, vigilant and smooth, not needing much coaching or reminding. Thinking about the future stretching out in front of her, I would give quick lectures on safety and best practices as we coasted past the cornfields.
We kept it up through the summer and fall, off and on, and at one point I rashly told her that she and her brother needed to have a flat-tire drill. She kept reminding me, wouldn’t let me forget about it. So one evening, with her at the wheel and Ethan in back and me riding shotgun, I saw a safe spot and barked, “Flat tire, now! Left front!” She pulled over and we all got out and I told the kids, “Manual’s in the glove compartment. Decide what you’re going to do!”
They got right on it: Norah reading the manual, mostly, while Ethan did most of the physical things, the two of them grabbing and pointing and arguing, competing and cooperating in the best sibling tradition. And they got it done: read the instructions from the unreadable manual, found the jack and the lug wrench in their secret compartments, identified the cryptic winch thingy that holds the “doughnut” fast to the car’s underside, cranked it down, removed the supposedly flat tire, got the doughnut installed in its place, put everything back where it belonged. “I am just so proud of us,” Norah said when they finished. We were on the way to her dad’s house, running late but now with a trophy to show, and he would be proud too. She had dyed a big splash of auburn into her long hair and had been brushing it a lot, and it gleamed in the warm sunset. We took pictures of the changed tire and texted them to her mom, showing off.
For more than a year after she passed, I was haunted by that sensation survivors all have, of having missed any chance to say goodbye (as if you could have known; as if the right goodbye would somehow quell the pain). I couldn’t seem to remember when I had last seen Norah, what we last said to each other. Then Christy happened to tell me, “I’m so glad you sent me those pictures; she was gone so soon afterwards.” Of course: the answer had been staring at me all along. That day with the tire was our last act together, the last time I saw her conscious and unstricken.
So now I remember her in the October twilight, with that gleaming long hair, so satisfied she doesn’t even mind sharing credit with Ethan: “I am just so proud of us,” almost the last words she said to me. We could have done worse, by God.
2
When I was nine and a half, my mother died suddenly, thrown from a horse while we were vacationing in Colorado. My older sister and younger brother and I saw most of it, till the wranglers grabbed our horses’ bridles and pulled us away. Our oldest brother, Deke, was down there on the ground with my father, trying to help, pulling his white T-shirt off to wrap Mom’s head.
On the day of the funeral I made corny jokes, one after another, as we waited for the fancy car that was to take us to the church. My sister alternated between giggling and shushing me. All through the long dull service I fidgeted, eager for another chance to play the wise-ass. My father wanted to spare us the ordeal of an open-casket funeral; our whole job was just to sit quietly in the hard pews. But toward the end, near the recessional, I caught a glimpse of it, up near the altar: just the corner of a huge box, with a long pretty tapestry on top of it and my mother inside. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. Some grownup led me out a couple of minutes later, sobbing like a baby, shamed down to the soles of my feet. It was as if I had wet myself in front of everyone.
A couple of days later, I remember, I went through the day’s mail so I could intercept the sympathy cards, those disgusting things in which strangers pretended to feel sorry for us all, as if a few words not even their own could fix anything. I tore these up and threw them out, but my grandmother soon found them in the wastebasket and asked about it. She was going to take care of us now, a rotten bargain, and her lack of real anger added to the humiliation of getting caught. Instead I was the one who was furious with her, furious for her daring to mention any of it — the cards, my mother, what any of us were feeling. Everyone just needed to shut up about it, to my way of thinking. Talking about it was a form of consent, a betrayal. Another step down the road from the place where we had all abandoned her. But if we would all just shut up, there was a chance my magic might work. I felt I had a secret plan, so secret even I didn’t know most of it yet, to go back eventually and make this thing un-happen. Only I could do it, because I was the one who had loved her best and vice versa.
What I can tell you about denial is that it doesn’t work and is bad for the character. You’re trying to hang on, but what you’re holding just slips away all the more, because memories don’t last if you never share them, talk about them, relive them. You end up empty. Then the world grows humdrum and cheerless, as if that were its own quality rather than something you had done to it. Meanwhile you’ve chosen fantasy over reality, and though all boys live in fantasy and have to, overdoing it can be corrupting and dangerous. I became whiny, withdrawn, and difficult, a pretty obnoxious kid who felt entitled to act out childishly, because after all nothing after that day really counted, so why shouldn’t I go back and be nine when it suited me?
What I needed to do instead is pretty obvious in retrospect. Norah, with her sunny and strong disposition, could have told me. So could anyone else, because it’s no mystery: just grieve and go on. Accept what has happened, then open yourself back up to each new day’s possibilities, to love, to joy, to loss when it comes again as it always does. She herself had bounced back from her parents’ divorce in much that spirit, after some rocky times.
But the whiner in me, the skeptic, still wants to challenge this good advice, and most good advice. What does that easy word “accept” mean, exactly? The trouble is that the first part of the formula — grieve and go on — refutes the second. Grief is already a kind of refusal, fleeing the present and its “new normal.” It takes you back to dispute and then rehearse the fact of loss, again and again, in slowly lengthening and lessening cycles. Remember, refuse, surrender, repeat. An act of loyalty and a betrayal all in one. The acceptance is the refusal and can’t be rushed.
Finally it’s not a question of will power, but of when the memory-ambushes will subside to a level at which you can at least function. For that first year after we lost Norah, Dollie and I couldn’t take a trip with our big truck and fifth-wheel camper, as we love to do, without one or the other of us being in tears within the first hundred miles. Something about the excitement of being on the road — the break from routine, the changing scenery, the sharpened attention — would bring Norah back in a rush, and then there we were, back at ground zero. That happens less lately, but we still have trouble watching corny medical shows (which we otherwise love), because it takes us back to Peoria. The other night Dollie, speechless, handed me a note that had been a little too well hidden in her underwear drawer, maybe five or six years ago: “Grandma, thank you for letting me spend the night at your house.” That was just the kind of thing Norah did, and a sweet, sudden, painful moment. But in the first weeks after her death, nearly everything was such a note, a stinging reminder of her presence and her absence. (And how much worse it must have been for Christy! Also for Ethan, who lost his best friend, audience, cheerleader, and antagonist.)
Eighteenth and nineteenth century English poetry, I know from my desultory but pleasant academic career, is full of people wandering around graveyards, reading inscriptions and reflecting on them. In one poem that sticks with me, Wordsworth’s “Two April Mornings,” the poet remembers a long-ago day when his friend Matthew told him of another day, still longer ago and further back, when he passed his village churchyard, saw the grave of his long-dead daughter, and was jolted by a kind of flashback:
Six feet in earth my Emma lay
And yet I loved her more—
For so it seemed— than till that day
I e’er had loved before.
This is exactly how the worst (and maybe the best) ambushes work. The blunt truth is there (“Six feet in earth”), but a part of you refuses it absolutely. The heart and the world are forever out of sync, and the love, the attachment, remain exactly what they were, tunneling through time to deliver the past to your doorstep.
In old age I think I get it a little better than I used to, why those old graveyards mattered so much. Back in the day, death came early and often, and almost anyone who survived to middle age would be many times bereaved. How could those people not have believed in an afterlife, when they felt themselves continually on its brink, when so many of their most important conversations were with the recently deceased? I learn these days what they must have known much earlier in their lives: with time, your own mind becomes a kind of graveyard, though not necessarily a gloomy one. It’s just that more and more of the people you care about — still care about — happen to be dead. They’re not coming back, you’ve had all of them you’re going to, but in your memory they still live in a way. All sorts of things — the way your dead stood or smiled, the words they used, an opinion about something, the old tools still left in your garage, the recipes in your cookbook — become part of who you are. There are times when something they said comes back and suddenly has a whole new meaning, and you feel grateful for this.
W.B. Yeats seems to be talking about such things, in a stern highbrow key, in lines that have stuck with me since I first read them in my teens:
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
Back in the human mind: your life is permanent because of the way it ripples out into other lives, whether we are talking about intellectual history or just the reveries of people who miss you. Yeats concludes the poem, “Under Ben Bulben,” by proposing for himself an epitaph that treats death quite dismissively: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” Admirable stoicism, I sometimes think, but what room does it make for grief?
What I wanted to say to Norah, that day we talked about God and Heaven, is that maybe it doesn’t matter so much. What could Heaven be like, anyway? I have heard priests and ministers freely admit they have no idea, and once, in Confirmation class, aged eleven, I browbeat my pastor into promising that if I got in, my dog could come too. When you try to imagine an existence purified of suffering, what’s left is not a convincing vision of happiness. Huck Finn finds the whole idea of unchanging bliss wretchedly boring and at his best moment decides to go to Hell instead. "Death is the mother of beauty," Wallace Stevens counsels sternly in his masterpiece "Sunday Morning," a poem that struggles to imagine Heaven as something better than an overlong company picnic, then turns away to celebrate, instead, the imperfect, terribly fleeting life "Of men that perish and of summer morn." Embrace loss too, the idea seems to be, because it’s of a piece with everything else. No immortality is on offer, but a helping of hedonism and a touch of sangfroid will get you by.
What we all know past doubting is that the dead live on in us, wandering through our thoughts, shaping our actions, keeping us company. Their loss and their lingering give us strength when we need it, like Norah's strong heart beating on in the chest of a woman who would have died without it. Maybe that’s all the Heaven we get, and maybe it’s enough.
Begging patience, another bit of graveyard poetry, this from Whitman’s long poem “Song of Myself,” lines I’ve turned to more than once since Norah passed. The poet, in his usual high spirits, sees grass growing from graves on a sunny day and muses happily:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life,
and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Lucky? That’s pushing it; but then, Whitman always does. His optimistic, almost joyous take on death seems to me pretty close to what Norah’s was. She didn’t quite get it, she had lots of questions, but she felt sure it couldn’t be all that bad.
That helicopter ride that took her away to Peoria was actually her second. The first came two years before, near her eleventh birthday, when Dollie and I took her and Ethan out to the county airport for the Civil Air Patrol’s yearly air show and encampment. Dollie stayed on the ground because she hates flying, I rode along because I love it. I paid double for a double ride, all the way out to the county line and back, the best money I ever blew. Fearless as always, Norah sat up in front with the handsome young pilot, while Ethan and I perched in back. It was too noisy to talk, but we all kept grinning, nodding, pointing. A helicopter tips forward as it skims along, aiming that marvelous big bubble of a windshield slightly down, so the landscape rolls right up into your lap. Out at maximum distance from the airport, just after the Douglas-Hart Nature Preserve slides under us, I see Norah turn around, the sun-filled windshield behind her, to give me a goofy grin and a delighted thumbs-up. She loves this.
I’ll leave her there, zooming off toward the horizon, while Ethan and I circle back to the airport with the young pilot. Now and forever, she is not my granddaughter who died, but my granddaughter who was a joy while she was here, loving and funny and full of life, leaving good memories with everyone who knew her. It’s not enough, nothing is ever enough, but it's the most anyone can ask, here in this hurtful, beautiful world.
200817
