Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (17 page)

B
aby Giulianna arrived in a fury. The weeks leading up to her delivery didn’t seem fast—they stretched out like a summer sidewalk, long and hot. I spent them walking around Denver dilated to four centimeters, wondering what was taking her so long. But when it was finally time for her to come, it was fast and excruciating. Because it was my fourth time around, I assumed my body would know what to do. And it certainly did; I progressed too quickly for the epidural to take effect. I was in and out of consciousness for the hour following her arrival, glad she was my last because I would never want to experience childbirth again after that.

Because she was our fourth, I knew three times over how much I loved her. I knew what was ahead, a love that would change and shape me into a new woman. My experience pointed to the belief. And I trusted it to be true.

My experience also shaped my expectations for the weeks ahead. I knew my days would be filled with nursing the baby and few consecutive hours of sleep. And yet looking at my family’s calendar in the four weeks following Giulianna’s arrival, I noted two kids’
birthdays, my husband’s fortieth birthday, and school starting for a third grader and a kindergartner. I cleared my schedule of anything that didn’t have to do with those required events. I was going to be smart about it this time and let the first few months be about the baby and my family. Nothing else.

I sat on the chair in the living room, looking onto our front porch as I nursed the baby and scrolled through my emails on my phone. Despite my efforts to minimize, I was attached to the habit of checking my phone anytime I sat still. Through the large windows in front of me, I could see my three big girls playing on the porch. Every few seconds, one would press her face against the glass and cup her hands around her eyes to shut out the glare and make sure I was watching. “See me, Mommy,” their motions screamed to me as I watched through the window. “I’m still here, even though you have a new daughter to care for.” I smiled through my exhaustion to reassure each one she had a secure place in my heart, and I tried to ignore the fingerprints that were left with each nose-smooshing incident.

Gracie, almost two years old, was leaving a unique nose signature marked with a trail smear of boogies.
She’s getting sick
, I thought.
I need to make sure she doesn’t touch the baby.
The last thing I needed was a sick two-week-old.

I opened an email from Jill titled “Our Church Family.” Only a few sentences, short but shocking. Rachel had died the night before. The blood rushed out of my face. I felt my shoulders slump and the tears flow.

“Derek!” I called. There must have been a strange timbre to my voice because he rushed in the house from the back patio. I couldn’t get words out, so I held up my phone for him to read. He bent down and hugged my shoulders while I cried.

The girls came rushing in from the front porch. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

How do I explain this?
I thought.

“Mommy’s friend Rachel died,” Derek answered.

“You mean Jane’s mommy?” Genevieve asked. Her eyes widened as she thought of her friend from Sunday school.

“Remember how I said she was sick?” I asked through my tears.

Genevieve nodded.

“She didn’t get better.”

Genevieve turned and ran down the hall to her room.

I’d been out of the Rachel loop. While I was delivering sweet new life, Rachel was coming to the end of hers. She took a turn for the worse, with her last few days in a coma. The progression at the end went at the same speed as the rest of her cancer: fast and furious.

I was left right back where I’d been with Becca, asking,
Why, God? Why this mom?
Only this time, she didn’t just leave a grieving husband, she left two little girls. I was sure God would spare her. Her girls needed her. And not in a petty “I really need a bigger kitchen” sort of way. Their lives, their hearts, would be changed completely by their mother’s death. And she was such an incredible mother.

I felt the baby pressing down on my arm that cradled her and remembered only months earlier when Rachel wondered about having another baby. How was it that I came to have this baby, this new life, this blessing that I didn’t ask for, straight from the life maker himself, and she died? Another tragedy to add to the list of things I would likely not understand this side of heaven.

I was one big hormonal, wet, drippy mess. And my heart was broken. I called Cindy. I was sure she’d heard, but I wanted to make certain she knew.

“I was there,” Cindy said.

“What?”

“I was with her. I was with her when she died.”

“What?” My brain couldn’t get what she was saying. I was still in shock that Rachel had been as sick as she was, but Cindy had
been with her as she moved from one place to the next. From this world to forever.

“After she died, I pulled her oxygen tubes out and told her, ‘You’re free now. You’re free from the pain. From the suffering. You’re free.’”

I pictured Cindy, her long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, using her training to release Rachel’s body from the tubes that tried to keep her alive. Second nature for a nurse to deal with the tubes, her years of practice kicking in, yet so against her nature, her understanding of how the world works, to watch a friend, a fellow mom, leave this world early. Cindy then went home to her family plus two little girls who had stayed for a sleepover.

“I pushed them on our swings this morning,” Cindy said, “and thought,
She’ll never do this again. Rachel will never push these girls on swings again.
”

I pictured Rachel lying in the hospital bed and wondered what that transition was like. Moving from the tangible to beyond. What was she experiencing now? Could she see her girls? Her husband? Was she in God’s presence? How did that feel?

The next morning we managed to herd our now family of six into the minivan and to church. I was grateful for an hour of Sunday school and nursery for my big girls, trusted care that gave me a break and let me sit in the sanctuary with the baby snuggled up. But it was more than the free child care. I wanted to be there. With my community of believers. My shared place with Rachel.

During the announcement time, Jill said Rachel’s family was coming to Denver from California and Nevada for the funeral. I thought of our basement with its three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen. The college girl who lived with us all summer had just moved out, leaving plenty of private space for a big group that wanted to be together. I told Jill after the service it was available.

A few days later, Jill brought over an air mattress. Kristi gave me extra towels. I bought snacks and drinks to stock the basement
kitchen. I hadn’t been able to be with Rachel when she was dying, but maybe I could give her family a comfortable place to stay. I cried as I picked up toys in the playroom. Praying for God’s presence in that space in the days to come.

I knew nothing about the people who would arrive. I was only sleeping two hours at a time, and I could feel my throat starting to get scratchy. Had Gracie gotten me sick? It didn’t matter; I was alive and Rachel wasn’t. I could do this. I would do this. I would love her in this way. I made beds with the baby strapped to me in the bjorn.

Do what only you can do.
My home and my heart had been positioned to offer this to her family. The “do what only you can do” was not only about cutting things out of my life, it was also about stepping up when it was time.

I
pried my eyelids open. Was she really ready to eat again? It felt like I’d only been asleep for a few minutes. I heard car doors slam through our open bedroom window and thought how different our neighbors were from us, coming home at 2:30 in the morning. I was seeing a lot of 2:30, but that was by force of a hungry baby. Then I heard a rustling and more slamming of doors. I sat up, climbed on my knees to look out the window above the head of our bed, and saw two figures dressed all in black going through a car trunk on the other side of the street. Strange. They didn’t look like the neighbors I was expecting, but I didn’t know everyone on our block. Then one of the figures shut the trunk, and they both ran without a sound to the next car on the street.

I now know what it is to have a shiver go down my spine. I watched as one slid a small object down the doorjamb of the second car. He quickly unlocked the door and popped the trunk. The car’s interior light went on, and I could see the partner going through the glove compartment on the passenger side while the street-side thief ran back to evaluate the trunk’s contents. Within
seconds they were shutting doors and running on to the next vehicle. Thieves in the night. Sinister and silent.

I shook Derek and whispered, “I think someone’s breaking into cars.” After calling the police, we discovered our cars, which were parked in the driveway, with the doors open and our garage door up, but nothing gone. I knew right away that they broke into our cars and then used the garage door opener to open the garage.

I stood in my pajamas knowing they’d been there only minutes earlier. Two faceless figures there to rob us, to take what was rightfully ours.

“They were probably looking for easy things to pawn,” Derek said, the light from our garage spilling out into the darkness of our driveway. I guessed his table saw was not an easy item to carry away.

We whispered in the hall, not wanting to wake the houseguests filling our basement, in town for Rachel’s funeral. It wasn’t until the next morning that we realized the sound that woke me was the smashing of Rachel’s father-in-law’s minivan window. They stole his GPS.
Why not just stab this family in the heart and then wriggle the knife around a little?
I thought.

The day before the funeral was spent filling out police reports and calling insurance companies. I couldn’t shake the sinister nature of the night before. Evil. The opposite of good. I knew it existed. The counterforce to love. With the visual of two silent figures slithering through our neighborhood, I felt it in a palpable way. Dark. Mysterious. Making people do awful things. Letting cancer take over a young mother’s body and take what was rightfully hers—a life with her family.

The days followed with the funeral, hugs good-bye to new friends, and Cindy’s family coming over for dinner. We’d had an exhausting week, but theirs had been even more intense. I couldn’t remember ever feeling this drained. I figured it was traumatic childbirth followed by sleep deprivation combined with hormones and
grief. Cindy held Gracie on her lap and wiped her boogies. I was thankful for friends who found comfort in being together.

The next morning I took pictures of Genevieve on her first day of kindergarten. My second girl going to all-day school for the first time. Proud, excited for her, and sad the baby years were slipping away, I was starting to feel manipulated by the emotional extremes of the last two weeks. That afternoon was my first naptime with two at home and two at school, so I finished revisions for a work project that was past due. As I typed, I started getting chills. It was inevitable, I was getting whatever Gracie had.

The next day I couldn’t move. The chills were more extreme. I was shaking as I held the baby. Standing up and walking into the kitchen occurred to me, but I couldn’t make my body follow my mental instructions. I mustered enough energy to push the play button on the television remote for another episode of
Dora the Explorer
for a worsening Gracie. I watched the digital minutes tick away on the television’s cable box. Every minute a minute closer to Derek’s return from work.

The next morning I woke up and knew I needed to see a doctor. I made back-to-back appointments for me and Gracie and kept the big girls home from school. They were showing signs of getting sick too.

Carol called to check on us. “I’m coming with you to your appointments,” she said. It sounded nice to have another grown-up be in charge, but I knew it would take her whole afternoon to drive down to our house, spend two hours at the doctor’s office, and then drive home, so I declined the offer.

“You can’t do this with four kids,” she said.

“I have to. I will always have four kids,” I snapped into the phone. I was keenly aware that this was the beginning of the rest of my life. A simple chore like going to the doctor sounded exhausting, but it was my new reality, and I needed to figure out how to manage it.

“But you won’t always be sick.” She was gracious with my snapping, and she was right. I was sick, and help sounded wonderful.

Thankfully she came, because six hours after our phone conversation, I was leaning over Gracie in an ambulance, transporting her from our doctor’s office to Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children. I’d been diagnosed with pneumonia, and Gracie’s oxygen levels were low enough she needed to be hospitalized.

The Tylenol I’d taken before we left our house for the doctor was beginning to wear off, and I could feel the shakes starting again. My breasts were bulging with milk, but the baby wasn’t allowed in the ambulance with me. Carol was driving my other girls to our house, where she’d meet Derek. He would then bring the baby to the hospital, though it would be a few hours later. This new reality of four kids was requiring a military-strategy map, and my brain was too fuzzy to quickly think through it all.

Derek and I had our reunion in an ER exam room. I was shaking from the chills, Gracie was screaming from the tubes in her nose, and the baby was screaming her tiny baby chirps from hunger. I slapped the baby onto my breast and tried to talk over Gracie’s screams to come up with our family-management plan for the next twelve hours. Gracie was being admitted for pneumonia. The nursing baby took me off the list of staying at the hospital, so Derek was on for the night duty. It was already late in the evening, and I knew the older two girls would be waiting for me to get home before they’d fall asleep. I wasn’t sure I had enough energy to drive myself home, much less meet everyone else’s needs.

I put my face close to my daughter’s and said, “Gracie, I love you,” and willed myself to turn around and walk out of the ER with her screams at my back. I was certain I’d never felt more torn to be in two different places. A scared Gracie needed me to comfort her. The baby needed my breast milk with its antibodies to protect her from the germs swirling around our family. My older
girls, scared from their sister’s ambulance exit and also starting to cough, needed the reassurance of their mommy at home.

Driving home with the baby in her car seat, I stopped at a red light and laid my head on the steering wheel. I wasn’t sure I could make it the next twelve minutes to our house. I prayed,
God, I have nothing left. I am empty. All I have is you.

Five days later, Gracie came home from the hospital. Five days of feeling pulled in two different directions. Of wanting to meet all my kids’ needs and unable to do it. Five days of depending on my mother-in-law to be with a screaming Gracie, restraints on my daughter’s arms to keep her from pulling out her tubes. Five days of my friends rotating shifts at the hospital to walk the baby around the lobby so I could give Gracie some undivided attention. Five days of pneumonia-induced body aches and wet pillowcases as I cried myself to sleep, picturing Derek squished on the hospital sofa and Gracie in the hospital bed with tubes in her nose.

When she came home, it felt as though I’d experienced the greatest endurance test of my life. And I passed—barely.