September is gone. Another year has gone, our first in West Virginia. My babies are two-year-old boys, bundled once again in sweaters and jackets they wore when we first arrived here, blond hair rather than bald heads backlit by fitful sunshine.
We’ve done better this year at all of the fall stuff – apple picking, soup cooking, cedar-chest opening, stomping in puddles with rain boots. We’re no longer frantic brittle people living in a maze of boxes, just a normal family in a house. Life is so much easier and happier than last year. The simple pleasures of fires and sweaters are sweet.
But it has also been a melancholy September. The light went away so suddenly, and the rain we’d missed all summer settled in. During the short dark afternoons, it was hard not to think of the Earth plodding its slow circle around the sun, and we humans being pulled with it, clutching at joy and enduring ennui and grief, tiny motes caught in a current bigger than ourselves.
Dane’s cousin Johnny died almost three weeks ago. I didn’t know him well; we met only a handful of times. He was always kind to me, and a little flirtatious. He would grin at me across the room like we were the young people having a laugh at the adults, though I was a fair bit older. The last time I saw him I was pregnant, and I will always remember his simple and slightly awed delight over the idea of Dane and I having twins.
At his funeral, Johnny’s mother stood at the head of the casket. She greeted the long line of family and friends who came to say goodbye one at a time for more than three hours. Watching her as she stood there, erect and composed, I was so rung with sympathy that I felt physically sick. It seemed indecent that I, a relative outsider, should bear witness to this terrible grief. At the same time, I couldn’t suppress a sense of admiration for this woman, standing with her son, greeting all the people who loved him, staring unflinchingly into the face of the ultimate risk of parenthood. The ultimate risk of life in a stochastic universe. I imagined her fixing her entire will on a single thought, “For my beautiful baby boy I will endure even this. Even this.”
It was a hard thing to watch, especially as a young parent. When they hand you a squirming infant in a swaddling blanket, this is the thing you want never ever to think about. When your babies are born, but you’re not allowed to see them for 24 hours while they are hooked to breathing machines and IV needles and settled uncomfortably into plastic boxes, your brain tries hard to say, “La-la-la, everything will be fine. La-la-la. Fine, fine, fine.” And when it is eventually fine, you almost forget it ever happened. Almost. When you’re handed a much bigger baby, a rolly-polly 5-month old suddenly turned to a wax doll with a catheter running from his arm to his heart, there is a cold breath on your neck and your bowels and limbs are turned to jelly, but you grit your teeth and insist to yourself, “It will be fine.” And when it is eventually fine, you fixate not on the cold terror but on your incredible good fortune. The night comes when you don’t creep into the nursery and lower a shaky hand to feel the rise and fall of a little chest. You build again that incredibly resilient wall of false confidence that all will be well with the tiny lives entrusted to you. The wall that will one day let you send your children out into the world on tricycles, bicycles, cars, airplanes and maybe even bungee cords or ice axes. It is a wall that can withstand many hard blows, but not all of them.
And what to do for the people whose walls are broken? I don’t know. Except perhaps to be there with them, resist the powerful urge to run away, and stare with them into the face of a terrible thing.
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