To Survive

After Joshua died, there was no point in living. Without him I was nothing but an empty shell, or a seething mass of pain. I took the sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor only to wake up to an even greater emptiness and disappointment at still being alive.

A small shred of me could see that Paul cared, that my mother and father cared but they too were grieving.

Sometimes, I’d dream that there was a way to bring Joshua back, a cure or a magic trick I had overlooked. An improbable possibility, a budding realization that dispersed in the stark light of consciousness. I’d wake up to nothing again.

Everyone had to do something. In between trying to work, my father wrote the terrible story of how Joshua died. It was published in Punch magazine under a pseudonym. My mother disguised her grief with an apron and dust-cloth, cleaning the house, polishing the wooden floors that Joshua would never slide around on. He would never wheel his new Christmas trike, the little wooden horse I had found in the closet. All the unwrapped gifts.

Our lives were stripped to the barest of bones. My mother would cook meals that I couldn’t eat because I had nobody sitting in a highchair with his portion. The offending highchair was moved to the garage. The wooden trike returned to the closet. Christmas was over forever.

For as long as I could remember there had been music in my home. It had been a constant thread in my life. But I couldn’t hear it anymore. I would never again be able to stand the emotion it stirred, a cauldron of painful sounds. I walked in quiet misery.

Paul meanwhile, driven by a need to provide and to heal and for his own sanity, found a job at a record store in Kingston, bringing home albums as perks of the job. I looked at them sideways, heard them from a distance, each note terrorizing my heart. Paul didn’t know and I couldn’t say how disturbing music had become for me.

I could only tend the grave. After the last frost I planted yellow daffodils, then purple lobelia. They would grow as the earth warmed with their color and short-lived life in Joshua’s honor.

I read books about other tragedies, sharing my own with the written pages. I read a book called Escape from Auschwitz, a true story based on the author’s real-life experience and a near impossible escape. As I read the book I was remembering the family trip to Buchenwald in Germany when I was nine years old where I saw the gas chamber, the body sized ovens, the mass grave. It was important to see for ourselves, those of us who lost family or ancestors. That people could find some hope of survival in that living hell, could see the proverbial light, then I must be able to as well. Throughout history, past and present, whether individual or collectively, people have survived the most dreadful conditions. And let us not forget animals, our silent, suffering partners.

I wasn’t used to being just me but I signed up for a typing course in town. It was a solitary thing in a room of unknown women who, I guessed, wanted to become secretaries. I just wanted to be able to type without looking at my fingers. Halfway through the course, before I mastered the technique I saw an ad in the help wanted section of the local paper for Surrey Sound Studios. It was a familiar place where I had recorded in pre-Joshua days.

Encouraged by Paul to venture bravely into this latest version of reality meant pleasing him. I used to do that and I would try to again because maybe he had the right idea. The one thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything. If asked to write book on how to survive the loss of a child, it would be a contradicting tale of total mess-ups and sheer luck. My message; there’s no clear path.

I sat in the office at Surrey Sound Studios chatting with Helen like old friends, which we weren’t. Her speech impediment was endearing, her enthusiasm for me to take over her job, totally unfounded. The only experience I had was half a typing course and singing in a band. She saw past that, said I was qualified in all the right places and offered me the position of office manager, glorifying it with the addition of in-house session singer.

I choked back the tears not because I wanted the job but because this was a poor exchange for being a mother. I would have to learn how to engage with other humans, in person and on the phone, figuring out pay-roll, and chasing up late payments from clients. The mundanities of daily existence and the routine of getting up in the morning and going to a job were, as it happened, just what I needed.

My new job got me out into the world, got me away from my internal agony for part of the day. And I was so grateful to all the characters I met during that brief time. My bosses, my fellow work partners, the colorful bands of musicians whether well-known or not. Music was finding its way back into my repertoire. Like a thief, it came in through the backdoor and gradually I let it stay.

In April when all the daffodils were blooming on top of the grave, I found out I was pregnant. The tiny seed of light and energy growing inside was all I needed to look ahead.