Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [48]
I had never actually used a nasal aspirator before, but I didn’t think it could require too much instruction. I thrust the skinny end into her nose and pushed my thumb down hard on the round part. Madeline started coughing and squirming harder. Fuck! I forgot the one and only rule for using the thing: squeeze all of the air out of it first. I removed the aspirator from her nose, scared to death that I had done some permanent damage to my daughter by forcefully blowing the vomit further into her nasal passage, but I knew I had to try it again—no one else was going to, certainly. I reinserted the aspirator, this time correctly. When I took my thumb off, I heard a sucking sound, indicating some form of success. I emptied its contents right onto the wood floor of her bedroom and repeated the steps.
By the third round, it sounded like Madeline was breathing fine, so I stopped trying to clear her airway. Mentally exhausted, I dropped the aspirator, lay down in the middle of the now-dirty floor and cried, holding Madeline to my chest and gently rubbing her back.
I couldn’t help but think how different things would have been if Liz had been here to help. I would have been freaking out, and she calmly would have dealt with our choking baby. Or maybe it would have been the other way around. But no matter what, we would have been able to responsibly handle the situation together, instead of it being just me, alone with our child, in pieces. My confidence was shaken a bit, but I was pretty damn impressed how well I handled the crisis in the end.
I spent a great deal of those first few weeks in tears. Often they would come upon me suddenly; I was as overwhelmed by the ordinary as I was by the inconceivable. I couldn’t help crying, but I worked very hard to avoid doing so in front of Maddy. It’s not that she would have necessarily known that I was sad, but I wanted to ensure that she didn’t feel my pain. Happy father equals happy baby, right? So as soon as she was comfortably sleeping, her tiny chest rising and falling, I’d sneak out to the garage to cry over old photos of Liz and me. Or I would shower, not to get clean, but to hide behind the green and white curtain, letting the sound of the water drown out my bawling.
But even in the depths of my grief, when Maddy was just a few weeks old, there had to be laughter and I had to have a sense of humor, because it was fucking awful to keep thinking about Liz dying. It’s not that things were necessarily funny—I just made light of certain situations. An avalanche of greeting cards steadily flowed into my mailbox, usually with two cards from each sender: one congratulating me on the birth of my daughter, the other offering condolences on the death of my wife. I found this to be as absurd as it was comical. I was baffled that friends and family didn’t have the words in their minds or their hearts to be able to say both things at once. They had to buy two cards at Target and get two fucking stamps. I understood the sentiments were difficult to express, and I did appreciate that they made the effort to let Hallmark say it for them, at least. If I hadn’t been able to find the humor in it, though, I would have lost my mind.
As much as I joked about the incongruity of the cards, I know it was this type of support that got me through those first impossible weeks. Being alone with my baby and without my wife, support was what I needed the most, and my personal community stepped up to the challenge with grace—and generosity.
Countless local friends stopped by the house with gifts for Madeline, and on most occasions they’d arrive with food and beverages, too. Liz and I had cooked together all the time, but now that she was dead I just couldn’t do it. Friends would try to make me feel better by saying, “It’s hard to cook for one,” which was valid, but the real difficulty for me was actually entering our kitchen.