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By Root 281 0

years of photos of Liz. I had a few favorites, but I wanted the funeral home to be wallpapered with pictures of her. I didn’t want her death to define her, or to be the only thing that people remembered about her. If they could see her smiling in front of Machu Picchu, the Acropolis, the Taj Mahal, or any of the other wondrous places we visited around the world, at the very least they’d feel confident that she lived an incredibly full life in her short thirty years on this planet. But I was looking at each photo hoping these memories would help remove from my brain that final image of Liz lying dead in her hospital bed.

The rest of my friends and family took care of the things I was unable to think about yet. Tom and Candee worked with some of Liz’s more astute and money-savvy friends to help set up a financial plan for me and to make a list of all of the things I would need to handle in the wake of her death. Sonja came up with the idea of creating a memorial fund to help us make up for Liz’s lost income, and she worked with my cousin Josh to get a bank account set up. My mom and stepmom helped clean up my house, and my dad, stepdad, brothers, and one of Liz’s uncles teamed up to tackle some long-neglected home improvement projects.

When A.J. and I finally emerged from the office, I walked into the kitchen to hear Candee talking to the Los Angeles Times about placing an obituary in the paper.

“Okay. We’ll get something to you within the hour.” Looking at me, Candee said, “Honey, would you like to write something for Lizzie’s obituary?”

Oh.

She went on. “I don’t want to put pressure on you, but they told me we have an hour to get something in order to make the deadline for the Friday newspaper.”

I glanced at her with the helpless look I’d been wearing since Tuesday. “I’m not sure I can right now.”

Sonja was standing nearby and offered to write it. “Take a look at it when I’m done and let me know what you think,” she said.

While Sonja put pen to paper to encapsulate Liz’s life in fewer than 220 words, I went outside and sat on the bottom stair of my front porch, staring at the houses on the hill in front of me. I breathed in the scent of the grapefruit blossoms in our yard and I did the math in my head. Madeline was born at 11:56 a.m., and Liz died the next day at 3:11 p.m. Twenty-seven hours. In twenty-seven hours I witnessed the only two things guaranteed to every single human being: birth and death. To experience the emotions associated with both events, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, in a little more than one day, well, it was ruinous.

I tried to shake away the tears as I sat there thinking about how close to perfect those twenty-seven hours were. Our love, our jobs, our travels, our house in Los Angeles, our fruit trees, and finally, our beautiful baby girl; these were the things we’d been working toward, and we had finally achieved them all the moment Madeline was born. Twenty-seven hours of pure happiness. I felt so fucking lucky to have had even that short amount of time, and I was positive that Liz died confident that we had achieved all we had set out to. But I couldn’t help thinking that we were robbed of a lifetime of true happiness. Twenty-seven hours wasn’t enough—but really, forever wouldn’t have been, either.

I jumped up and raced back up the steps and into my kitchen. I grabbed a pen and a notebook, and wrote the following:

life and death.

from the happiest moment of

our lives

to the saddest.

all

of it.

in a 27-hour period.

the pain is unbearable.

devastated

doesn’t describe

the

loss

we’re all feeling.

family and friends

from around the world

have

come to our home,

called.

e-mailed,

cried.

everyone died

a lot

when liz left us.

she

loved everyone

more than we can imagine.

she

left us

with the greatest gift she could

have.

a baby girl

who looks soooo much like

momma.

she’d be the first

to say it would all be

ok.