Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [101]
Over the past few weeks, as this anniversary had approached, I had noticed some kind of resolution creeping into the voices of the people I talked to every day. Like we had made it to the end of the race, or that everything would now be better. Well, I could confirm that everything was just as it had been before the twenty-fifth. I was never going to not miss Liz, but during this trip I had realized that there was a way to hang on and let go at the same time. That I could retain all of the positive parts of my love for Liz without gripping so tightly to her memory that I cut off the oxygen flow to other parts of me.
In the five minutes it took for A.J. and Sonja to find Emilia’s missing pacifier, I figured out that I would mourn Liz for the rest of my life. I figured out that it would get easier to mourn her. I figured out that the unending anguish I felt would gradually become less intolerable. It would get more comfortable, this memory that I carried. It would fold itself into my blood, into my cells, into my DNA. My heart would pump it and my veins would carry it, every moment, all the time.
In my head I apologized to Liz for forgetting Maddy’s cake, and promised her that I would never do that again. Then I promised her that I would never move on. And right there in the rental car in the driveway of the condo, I switched my wedding band from my left hand to my right, where it will remain until the day I die, and I promised her that I would keep on learning how to move through. For her. For me. For Madeline.
Chapter 27
i’m dreaming of soap,
warm water and
a wash cloth
as some asshole
hands madeline
a cupcake with
green frosting.
it was something
she had no
intention of eating,
and i knew it.
Madeline deserved a day that was just about her. I had to keep those two landmarks entirely separate, and the trip to Mexico had really been for Liz and for me, too. The proximity of Madeline’s birthday to her mother’s death was something she would be dealing with for the rest of her life, but I didn’t want her to ever feel overshadowed when we commemorated her life and her accomplishments.
I also felt a bit guilty for taking Maddy away to celebrate her birthday in Mexico, so having a second party at our house seemed like the best way to make it up to all of our friends and family. Even before we had purchased the plane tickets, I knew that I would want to celebrate her first birthday at our house in a major way when we returned. Actually, that’s an understatement—I wanted to make sure my daughter had the best fucking party we could possibly throw.
All the grandparents came out from Minnesota, and Deb came down from San Francisco. There was a fair amount of preparation to be done in order to properly entertain a house and yard full of people, and everyone was excited to be involved in planning out the details. The grandfathers were great about finding projects around the house that I’d long neglected. On this trip they decided that I should have a new dishwasher, stove, and tankless water heater installed, and they planned to have everything done in under two days. It sounded impossible, but my dad had been a contractor since the 1970s, and I swear he could build an entire house in a week. Whenever he came to visit, especially with my stepdad and Liz’s dad, too, I was ready to have my house turned into a construction zone. Deb and the grandmothers decided that the first task was cleaning up and reorganizing my house, and by the time they were done, I could see the floor in my dining room for the first time in almost a year.
As for the party itself, there was going to be ice cream, cake, party favors, and pink and blue balloons, and goldfish. Yep, live goldfish.
But the ice cream never came because the shop