An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [20]
I have thought of that card ever since, during difficult times, mine or someone else’s: surely when tragedy has struck you dumb, you should be given a stack of cards that explain it for you. When Pudding died, I wanted my stack. I still want it. My first child was stillborn, it would say on the front. It remains the hardest thing for me to explain, even now, or maybe I mean especially now — now that his death feels like a non sequitur. My first child was stillborn. I want people to know but I don’t want to say it aloud. People don’t like to hear it but I think they might not mind reading it on a card.
I could have taken my cards, translated into French, to the stores of Duras, where the baker, the butcher, the dry cleaner, the grocery store ladies, had seen me growing bigger and bigger over the months: I couldn’t bear the idea of them seeing me deflated and asking after the baby. “Voilà,” I’d say, and hand over a card. I could have given a card to the imperious man at immigration in Portsmouth who almost denied me entry into England. To the waiter at the curry house that summer who was always mean to us. To the receptionist at the ob-gyn practice in Saratoga Springs at my first visit. To the nurses who asked me why I was scheduled for such close prenatal monitoring.
To every single person who noticed I was pregnant the second time, and said, “Congratulations! Is this your first?”
To every person who peeks into the stroller now and says the same thing.
Every day of my life, I think, I’ll meet someone and be struck dumb, and all I’ll have to do is reach in my pocket.
This book, I am just thinking now, is that card.
When I called my friend Ann the first time after Pudding died, she immediately asked what she could do, and then did everything, and then kept asking, and she sent out an e-mail to tell people I hadn’t told that was so beautiful — though I have never read it — that I got the most beautiful condolence notes in response. Wendy burst into hysterical tears at the sound of my voice and asked me questions until I’d told the whole story. “Was he a beautiful baby?” she wanted to know, and I wondered how she knew to ask: she was the only one who did. Margi said, “Oh, Elizabeth, please know that if any of us could absorb your pain for you, we would,” and then laughed at all my dark jokes. Bruce, remembering something just as terrible that had happened to him decades before, wrote, “There is no way for such an event to leave you who you are.” Patti, who has seen as much sorrow as anyone I know, was an extraordinary combination of complete sympathy and complete comprehension. My brother said, at the end of a long conversation, “Well, I guess as a family we’ve been pretty lucky that we haven’t had something awful happen before.” My sister-in-law Catherine texted, Poor poor darling you.
Somehow every one of these things happened at exactly the right time for me. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.
I needed all of it, direct comfort, hearsay grief. Edward’s great friend Claudia’s husband, Arno, a stage manager and perhaps the calmest man I’ve ever met, burst into tears on the phone when Edward called, and when Ann called my friends Jonathan and Lib, Jonathan did, too. “Oh,” Ann said to me, “to hear that big man cry.” I couldn’t have borne listening myself, to him or Arno, but to know that they did — it felt as though they had taken part of the weeping weight from my shoulders. Of course I cried an awful lot, but I also regretted every stupid time I’d ever cried in my life before over nothing, days as a teenager I’d wept myself sick and couldn’t exactly remember why, when I should