Signs of Life (34 page)

But nothing signals the passage of time more than watching my own son. He pulls himself up on his own. He stands without holding on to things. He raises his arms for me to pick him up. He smiles when I sing, he breathes deeply when he sleeps, and he laughs when he sees pictures of his aunts and grandmas around the house. He does a million other unbelievable things. I look at him and think about how happy I am to be here for
him and how happy I am that despite the absence of his amazing father, he will have a great life. He used to be the size of a peanut. Literally a peanut. A little over a year later, he is learning how to walk on his own two legs. I’m sure that pond was impressive for Thoreau, but clearly the guy never had children. The concept, however, is still the same. Nature has a way of figuring it out. I hope my brain operates under a similar premise.

I am made stronger when I think of Mrs. Brewer and Mr. Battersby. I think about how sometimes life gets better even when you think it can’t. Sometimes the thaw can work in your favor if you just let it take its course.

•  •  •

On Wednesday night, Maggie and I do a minitriathlon over at Kent Lake. Training has been going well. I should say that training has been going well when I decide to train. When Kai is in a good mood, I’ll put him in the jogging stroller and go as fast as I can until he cries and then we run home. I have only biked three times and I try to swim once a week. Hales is still helping me coordinate the whole lift arms, lift head, kick legs all at once thing. It’s like coordinating a golf swing, except for the fact that you don’t get to stand there for five minutes and think about it.

I am nervous for the minitriathlon. But when I get there, I decide I just wanted to survive the swim and not have the course close before I finish.

Once I get through the swim and bike and start finally running, I feel better. Running is the only thing I know how to do in a triathlon. And by running I mean jogging, but let me tell you, I am one hell of a jogger. During my run I think about how I want to speed up. Lately, when I get into a point of physical pain in my training or in a race, I talk myself into slowing down
or stopping altogether. It’s like I have two opposing forces in my head. One says, “Just stop. What’s the big deal? You’re not going to the Olympics. Just stop and walk.” And the other side of my brain asks one question. It asks the same question over and over: “What are you so afraid of?”

I’ve spent a lot of my life being scared of things. Scared of an injury during soccer, scared of failure and criticism, scared of being rejected. Then the one thing I was so afraid of happening, so afraid I could hardly acknowledge it, actually happened. So why not go faster? Why not lose? Why not try things that I know I’m not good at? What am I so afraid of now?

On Wednesday during the run, my mind is going in all different places. I start thinking about August 14 of this year and how it compares to August 14 of last year and, reluctantly, how it compares to August 14 of the year before that, the last August I spent with Josh. As I run, I think about how I am doing better, right here at this moment, than I had been one year before. Who knows if I could say the same for two years before, but there’s no point in answering that question.

Time passes and things change. I feel better today than I did one year ago. If I were sitting in Dr. G.’s office, I would try to keep going with this thought. I’d say, “Yeah, but inevitably something bad will happen again. Time passes, but sometimes things change for the worse!” And she would just nod quietly and say, “Natalie, think about what you said a few moments ago. ‘I feel better today than I did one year ago.’ Just stop there. That is a beautiful statement.”

•  •  •

My grandparents on my dad’s side have lived in East Lansing, Michigan, my entire life. A few years ago, my grandfather suffered
from a stroke. Even two years later, he still has minimal movement in his left hand and arm and he has to use a cane to walk. Ever since his stroke, life has been more challenging for my grandma and him. My grandma has her own physical ailments to deal with, and now she has to help my grandpa on top of it.

This past March, a house went up for sale across the street from my parents’ house. It was a small, quaint house that probably hadn’t been redecorated in twenty years. My dad talked to my grandparents about it for a few weeks. He urged them to buy it and sell their house in Lansing, even though the Lansing house is twice as big as this one. Finally, they gave in. Without even seeing the house, they bought it and put their own house on the market. When my grandparents came to see the house for the first time, my grandma walked in and started to cry. My dad had to remind her why she had given up her beautiful house in Lansing. “Mom, you’re going to love it. We are right across the street, remember? You’re going to see your great-grandson every day.”

After a few months of remodeling, the house is finally ready. Three Corrigan moving trucks arrived this morning. My parents go over to help out in the morning. Kai and I stay away until after his afternoon nap. When we get there, everyone looks tired.

“Leen,” Grammy says in her thick Polish accent, which is hard for some people, like the guys from the moving company, to understand. When she talks to my mom, she calls her “Leen” instead of Lynn. It’s hard to know what she is saying at times. One time when we were all vacationing together, Grammy was walking around the cottage asking for “leetle seesars.” My mom kept asking her why she wanted Little Caesars when we had just eaten dinner. But she kept insisting, “I just need some leetle
seesars!” My mom went over to the phone book, not wanting to disappoint her mother-in-law. “Okay, Mom, but if you’re hungry, why do you want pizza of all things? I can make you a sandwich right here.” My grandma looked at my mom like my mom was crazy. “Pizza? Sandwich? What?
No!
I need
LEETLE SEESARS
!” Finally, we realized she was saying “little scissors.” She needed to cut some thread. It was hilarious.

“Leen, where are da box-says wid da bedding.” My mom tells my grandma that she already put them in the bedroom next to the master bed. “Tank God!” she says, clutching her heart. “I tought I lost dem and I need to make da bed for Grampy.” My mom tells her to sit down and relax and she’ll make the bed. Grammy walks over with her walker and sits next to Kai and me at the white dining room table. She grabs her Diet Coke and takes a long sip. Grammy only drinks Diet Coke out of one specific cup and she only drinks it through a straw with a lemon. After the Diet Coke, she puts her hand on her forehead.

“How is the move going?” I ask her.

She looks at me confused. “Movie? What movie?” This is the other thing about my grandma. She can’t hear anything. She refuses to get a hearing aid. My dad thinks she secretly likes not hearing everything.

“The
move
, how is the
MOVE
going?”

“Oh, da move. Well, Grampy is useless. I told heem, don’t poot your clothes in a place where you will loose dem. Put dem in a box so we can get to dem today. So today I say, ‘George, where are your clothes?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, Mom, I put dem in wid every-ting else.’ ” (My grandpa calls my grandma “Mom.”) She rolls her eyes.

My dad walks in and asks my grandma if she needs anything. My grandma looks around and says, “Yes, Vito, please, where did dey put da grapefruit tree?”

My dad tells her that he’s sure it’s still in the van, but he can go check.

“What do you need now, Mom?” my grandpa yells from the other room.

“Where is
da grapefruit tree
? If dey moved dat grapefruit tree wit out me, I will be
so
mad.”

Grammy turns to look at Kai and me. “I grew dat grapefruit tree from a seed!”

This is true. Grammy has had a grapefruit tree for over twenty years. She considers her grapefruit tree to be one of her greatest accomplishments. A few years ago, Josh and I went to my grandparents’ house on our way up north. My grandma took him around the entire house and told him about each plant. The grapefruit tree, of course, was the main attraction. He was so into it. He asked her all about it, how she watered it, what she did with it in the winter. To my grandmother, having that grapefruit tree is like having an Egyptian pyramid in her living room.

My grandpa walks in from the living room.

“Hi, Nads!” He has to stop walking to say hi. Once he says hello, he continues to walk toward us. He walks slowly with his cane. He sits down at the white table in the middle of the kitchen.

“George, deed you hear me? Where is da grapefruit tree? And where is dat box I told you to poot out with da stuff on top?”

Grampy looks forward for a moment to think about it. My grandma stares at him, waiting for an answer. Then he says in a voice like he is proclaiming a hard-earned truth, “I don’t know!”

She flashes me a look and takes her walker to find the moving crew.

I can tell my grandma is stressed. I know this move is really hard for her. When she was eight years old, she lived in a small
town in Poland. When World War II started, the Russians came to her town and kicked her and her family out of their house. Her dad was taken to a prison, and she and her brother and mother went to live in Siberia in a work camp. They stayed there for four years until the war ended. I think after being evicted to Siberia, no matter how old you get, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when it comes to moving.

My grandpa, on the other hand, is thrilled to be moving closer to us. He loves being around my dad, and I know that seeing Kai and me is really important to him. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen was my grandfather at Josh’s funeral. He came in with his cane, moving at his slow pace. I remember seeing him up by the casket. I remember not really being able to articulate what was so sad about it. Or maybe it’s just that at that time I didn’t want to. My grandpa had been in Europe during a world war. He saw his neighbors and friends disappear. He saw the fall of a dictator. He saw people from around the world put their lives on the line for an idea, something that doesn’t really happen as often as it used to. He came to America believing in the American dream, and for him, it really came true. He has seen the planet at its absolute worst, and over time he has dealt with some serious problems in his own life. But seeing him next to that casket, it was like nothing made sense to him anymore. Seeing his shaky, unsteady body up there, his body that had endured so much and his brain that had tried to work hard for his family no matter what was going on outside; it was as if he was silently confessing to whomever, “
This
is too much.”

“Here you go, ma’am,” I hear one of the movers say. He places the grapefruit tree in the corner of the dining room. My grandma walks in behind him.

“Tank God!”

My grandpa lifts his head up like a tortoise craning to see
the sun and says, “Tank God! What would we do wit out da grapefruit tree?!” He looks at me and smiles. He is making fun of my grandma. Clearly she knows this too.

“Shut up, George!” She slowly walks out of the room. “Eediot.”

After an afternoon with my grandparents, Kai and I go home to our house. August evenings in Michigan are the best. Things slow down, we can feel September looming, so we savor the free time and peace that comes with no school nights. Grandma Deedee has been up north for the last several weeks, or pieces of weeks, getting her last moments in at the lake. Kai and I haven’t gone up in a few weeks.

Without Deedee here, I realize that I really miss her when she is away. I miss seeing her car pull up at expected times. I miss her unannounced visits and her communication with me via Kai. I miss watching her sit him up on the counter (which I never do with him) and letting him splash his feet in the sink. She always lets him do things that I don’t allow. Initially this frustrated me, but now I get it. Josh would have done the same thing. Josh and Deedee are so much alike in how they play with children.

When Kai was up north with Deedee and Ashley, they took a video of him sitting in his high chair splashing water everywhere. He just kept slamming his little hands down on the plastic tray and squealing as the water flew all over the floor. There was no mom there to say in a slightly irritated tone, “Kai, the high chair is for eating,
not
for playing.” Sometimes I really struggle with the fact that I never get to say, “Kai, let’s pull out all of the toys and make a giant mess,” because I know I’m the one that cleans up every mess we make. Josh would have made a mess with Kai. Josh knew that when you are a kid, everything,
everything
is for playing. I know that he was this way because his mom taught him that.

Now that I am a parent, I am beginning to understand that I have no idea what Deedee is going through in dealing with the loss of her child. Not a clue. I knew Josh for four years in college, then we dated for a year, and then we were married for a year and a half. Because I’m twenty-five years old, that seems like a lot of time. But Deedee grew him from a seed.

When Josh was in the hospital after his accident, I saw his body once, and then I had to leave. I never went back. Deedee stayed at the hospital for days. Long after he was pronounced dead, he had to stay so they could remove his working organs. She stayed by him until they wheeled him away for his final surgery. I couldn’t be there because to me he was gone. That body wasn’t him. But as a mom, I know why she had to stay. When you watch something grow from a seed, you have a very different relationship with it than the rest of the world does.

I know Deedee spent those days staring at his body, taking in the last images of the body she had watched for twenty-seven years. Dead or alive, that body was too special to leave in an empty hospital room. She had been by his side since the day she brought him into this world, not to mention the nine months prior to that. You better believe she would be there on the day he had to leave. Right up until the last second.

When I was in high school, the minister at our church lost his son to suicide. After some time passed, Dr. Logan spoke about his son’s death in front of the congregation. He talked about when kids are little they love to jump from high places into the arms of their parents. Every parent has the image of their son or daughter yelling, “Catch me, Dad!” as they jump from the tree branch or the jungle gym. And the child knows that those strong arms are always there. But there are times, he went on to say, where as a parent your arms aren’t long enough to reach your falling son, and that is the pain he has to live with for the
rest of his life. The death of a child is something different from any other loss in the world. It is the most unnatural circumstance. Parents are hardwired to protect their offspring. Every single species since the beginning of time has one thing in common: We all protect our young. So when a child dies, it goes against the fibers of our brains and souls. Dr. Logan’s metaphor has never left me. I miss Deedee. I wish she wouldn’t leave so often. Someday, who knows when, I want to tell her how sorry I am for her loss. Because her loss is not my loss. And it’s not about whose is worse, but I just want her to know that I love her, I love Josh, and I will always love Josh. I want her to know that she can have all the time in the world.