Hannah's Gift (10 page)

MY MOTHER AND HANNAH WERE SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF
Hannah’s room. The Barbie doll box was tipped upside down, spilling dolls, clothes, and tiny pastel shoes across the rug. The two of them were dressing the Barbies for an outing to the Barbie mall that Hannah had arranged in a corner by the door. Hannah was still wearing her bathing suit. We had spent the afternoon at the pool, watching Will, Grandpa, and Uncle Ben cannonball and belly-flop off the diving boards.

Ever since Will was a year old, he had spent the first week of July at the Cherry Festival in Traverse City, Michigan, with my parents. He had begged to be allowed to go again this year. I had no doubt that it would be good for him. Claude and I were doing our best to give him love and attention, but we couldn’t deny the fact that our focus was mostly on Hannah. Her health seemed to be degenerating slowly but steadily. Each day she tired more quickly and coughed more frequently. I was tired, too. My body was full and heavy with the baby that was due any day. While
Hannah and I were content to sleep and snuggle, Will was understandably restless.

I had struggled with the decision. I didn’t want Will to miss the birth of our baby, and I definitely wanted him to be with us for Hannah’s death. Since the doctors couldn’t tell us exactly when either of these things was going to happen, I had to trust my intuition. Claude and I took a leap of faith and enlisted both sets of grandparents to help. My parents and brother Ben had agreed to drive from Michigan to New Jersey to pick Will up, and Claude’s parents had agreed to bring him back ten days later.

Hannah set her doll on the floor in front of her and looked at my mother.

“Will you promise me something, Grandma?” Hannah asked.

“Sure, Hannah,” my mother said, focusing on the half-dressed Barbie on her knee.

“No, Grandma. I want you to
promise
me something,” Hannah said quietly.

My mother looked up. Hannah’s eyes were on her, intent, serious.

“Yes, Hannah,” she said. “Anything.”

Hannah was silent. My mother waited.

“Grandma,” Hannah said finally, “I want you to promise that you’ll never forget me.”

My mother’s eyes filled with tears. Hannah’s were dry, resting on her grandmother, waiting for her reply.

“I promise, Hannah. I will never forget,” my mother finally said.

I AWOKE JUST BEFORE DAWN WITH LABOR PAINS, KNOWING
that today was the day. I called Nurse Katie, who had offered to stay with Hannah while Claude and I went to the hospital. There was no point in calling Will. He and his grandparents were already on the road, headed back to us. They were not scheduled to arrive in New Jersey until the following day.

The streets were quiet in the first light. While Claude loaded the car, I wrote out the instructions for Hannah’s medication. Four days earlier, Dr. Kamalaker had started her on Tylenol with codeine, but despite the fact that she was taking it every four hours, Hannah could barely walk, she was in so much pain. Yesterday, we had called Pat, Hannah’s hospice nurse. She was scheduled to come to our house this evening to instruct us on how to give Hannah morphine. I now had my fingers crossed that this baby would be born quickly, and we would be home by then.

Hannah woke just as Katie arrived. I gave her a kiss as she crawled onto Katie’s lap.

“Call me as soon as the baby comes,” Hannah said.

After five breathtaking hours of labor, Margaret Rose slid, wet and wailing, into the world. She was beautiful, almost eight pounds, with lots of hair, sturdy legs, chubby cheeks, and perfect rosebud lips. Claude wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and couldn’t stop smiling. As I held my littlest girl, her slippery skin against mine, for one long, perfect moment I wanted nothing more.

While the nurses wiped and wrapped Margaret, Claude called Hannah.

“Congratulations, Hannah. You’re a big sister now,” Claude said. “Our baby’s name is Margaret Rose.”

“Oh, goody,” Hannah said. “A girl, just like Briar Rose. Okay, tell Margaret that me and Nurse Katie will be there right away.”

“No, Hannah,” Claude interrupted, “you don’t need to come. The doctors have said that Mom and Margaret are well enough to come home today. You and Katie can wait there. We’ll be home as soon as we can.”

An hour later, standing in the hospital nursery watching the nurses bathe and weigh Margaret, Claude heard someone banging wildly on the window. He looked up to see Hannah in Katie’s arms, grinning and waving, wearing a huge button that read “I’m a Big Sister.”

“I tried to tell her she didn’t have to come, but she insisted,” Katie said. “Hannah told me that, because she and Will had gone to the ‘Big Brother/Big Sister’ class, she
knew
that one of the most important jobs a big sister has is to visit the new baby at the hospital.”

“What about her pain?” Claude asked.

“She told me ‘bring the pills just in case,’” Katie said.

“Oh, one more thing,” Katie said. “You didn’t mention it, so I don’t know if you knew, but Will and his grandparents called. They left Michigan a day sooner than they had originally planned. They’ll be at your house this afternoon.”

While I waited for our release to be processed, Claude headed home to meet Will and his parents. Hannah asked to stay. She took a dose of pain medication and fell asleep on the bed with Margaret and me.

Holding my girls, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I knew there were so many other ways things might have happened, and I hadn’t been alone in my worry. When I had first shared the news of our pregnancy, some people’s eyes glazed over. There is no polite way to say, “You’re crazy. What were you thinking?”

When the doctors gave Hannah only three months to live, it hadn’t taken me more than a second to calculate that this baby was going to be born just when Hannah was expected to die. It had seemed an impossible situation. Yet, the decision Claude and I had made to get pregnant hadn’t been made in our minds; it had been made in our hearts. I could only trust that the God who had a hand in all of it would be there to see us through, one way or another.

Now, listening to the breath of my little girl on one side and my baby girl on the other, I knew that only the most awesome grace could have arranged this day: both my girls in the same world, and Will coming home.

I WAS SITTING IN A ROCKING CHAIR IN OUR BEDROOM,
nursing Margaret, who was a week old. Will was sitting on the floor, staring out the window. A picture book about dinosaurs lay open at his feet. Hannah was on the bed, lying in a half-seated position against a pile of pillows, covered by her pink blanket. Her eyes were closed, but I didn’t think she was asleep.

Several days before, she had announced, “I hurt too much. I want to sleep in the bed that smells like you and Daddy.”

Her tumor was growing rapidly now, large enough to press against her ribs and spinal cord. Although a constant dose of morphine was being pumped into her body, twenty-four hours a day, Hannah could no longer walk; she had to be carried. Other than asking to go to the toilet, she seemed content to stay where she was.

I felt frustrated that there wasn’t more I could do to help Hannah, and longed for information about how to prepare her and us for her death. Pat had given me what she could,
but the hospice she worked for rarely dealt with dying children; none of the hospices in our area did. It seemed almost inconceivable to me that there had been shelves of books, videos, and even classes at the hospital to prepare Hannah for Margaret’s birth. Where were the experts now, when I needed to prepare her for her death?

I had done my best to anticipate what Hannah might need. The antique rocking chair was a testament to that. It had always been Hannah’s favorite spot to snuggle and read. I had asked Claude to bring it upstairs, imagining it would be the perfect place for us to spend her final days. I was wrong. “It hurts too much,” she said. My image of us rocking peacefully into her death was simply one more thing I had to let go of.

Will looked up.

“Mom, how long does it take a body to become a skeleton?”

Hannah heard Will’s question. Her eyes popped open. These days, death was one of her favorite subjects.

You’ve got to be kidding
, I thought. I was all for telling the truth and facing fears; but I wasn’t ready for
this
conversation.

“I’m not sure, Will,” I said, feeling that I didn’t want to know, either.

He screwed up his lips and creased his brow, as if he were contemplating probable rates of decomposition. Hannah had her own ideas.

“You know,” she said, her eyes bright with mischief, “they can bury your body, but they can’t bury your spirit!”

She was grinning. Will looked at her and grinned, too.

“That’s great, Hannah,” he said. He turned to me.

“What do you think, Mom? Do our spirits go to heaven even though our bodies are buried?”

I had been waiting for this question for a while. I had even wondered if I should bring it up myself. I loved that the two of them had done it on their own.

“Well,” I began, my thoughts tripping seven sentences ahead of my words, “I believe that when the body is too sick or too old to live anymore, it dies, and then the soul is free.”

“What happens to the soul after the body dies, Mom?” Will asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I admitted. “Some people believe that souls go to heaven after the body dies. I think I believe that, too.”

“Me, too,” said Hannah.

Will wanted to know more. “I know the Bible says that, but does anybody else?” he asked.

“Well,” I answered, “I’ve been reading books about something called a ‘near-death experience.’ Sometimes people die for a few minutes, like in very serious surgeries or car accidents, but then doctors manage to bring them back to life. When this happens, those people describe death as a long tunnel with a bright light at the other end that draws them into a place of beautiful love. Not everyone believes that’s what happens. I guess we can’t be sure until we do it ourselves.”

I continued. “You know how a butterfly grows inside
the cocoon until it’s ready to fly? Or the way a hermit crab lives in a shell until it gets too small for his growing body and then moves to another? I like to think death is something like that.”

“I’m going to be a butterfly,” Hannah stated, and with that settled, rolled back onto the pillows and shut her eyes.

HANNAH WAS DOZING ON ONE SIDE OF THE BED, HER LONG
legs barely covered by her pink blanket. She was wearing only a pair of cotton underpants.

“Clothes are too scratchy,” she had said.

One of her arms lay across Margaret, who was asleep next to her, tightly bundled in fuzzy pink pajamas. The hum of the air conditioner in the window accounted for the nip in the air despite the fact that the late July sun was baking the roof overhead. The sicker Hannah got, the colder she wanted the room to be.

I rocked to the rhythm of the morphine pump’s click. As Hannah’s tumor grew, so did the amount of morphine she required. I was grateful for the way the drug seemed to dull Hannah’s pain, but the more effective it was, the easier it was to deny that she was sick enough to die. For days now, I had fantasized that she might wake up, ask to get dressed, and suggest we all go out to dinner. Claude seemed even more lost in the fantasy. Every time Dr. Kamalaker had prescribed an increase in her dose, he questioned the need to do
it, explaining that he was afraid she might get addicted. Nobody had the heart to tell him that addiction is not possible for someone who is dead.

I continued to rock back and forth. A stack of books on the dresser with titles like
Living With Death and Dying, Embraced by the Light
, and
How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies
was as neglected as the shriveled piece of cheese that Hannah had requested and then refused to eat. Even her Christmas dress, which she had asked me to hang on the curtain rod where she could see it, seemed to be holding its breath.

I closed my eyes. My lids felt heavy and warm from too little sleep. I could feel Hannah looking at me. I opened my eyes slowly. Her arms were outstretched, reaching for me.

“Mommy, I want you to carry me to my room.”

I came alive. It was the first time in days she had asked to go anywhere other than the bathroom. Perhaps this was the moment everything had been waiting for. Hannah was taking an interest in life again. I gently and gingerly ran my hands under her bony hips and back and lifted her from the bed. I moved slowly to give her body time to adjust. I could almost hear her internal organs groan as the tumor shifted its bulk inside her. Hannah wrapped her thin arms around my neck and locked her legs around my hips. She pinned herself against me with a strength that surprised me. Her head rested on my shoulder. I breathed her in, felt her soft, “woolly mammoth” hair against my cheek. Her body was unnaturally warm given the coolness of the room. She was burning with a fever that would not break. Her chest
rose and fell against mine, and I could feel both of our hearts beating—mine slow and deep, hers quick and light.

As I lifted her from the bed, I tried to imagine her sitting on the floor of her room, surrounded by baby dolls and dress-up clothes. I knew the image was as fragile as a painter’s wet canvas. As I adjusted Hannah’s position on my hip, she winced. The image slid out of my mind. I tried desperately not to jiggle or jar her too much as I carried her down the stairs. When we got to the doorway of her room, Hannah reached out and grabbed the wooden molding.

“Don’t put me down and don’t go in,” she said. “I just want to look.”

The two of us stood on the threshold, watching dust dance in the late afternoon sun. A pink comforter and her cow-jumping-over-the-moon quilt stretched neatly, without wrinkles, across her bed. Dolls and stuffed animals stared blankly from their perches on the shelf. Two seashells from a preschool field trip leaned against each other on top of her dresser. The magic wand she had made at her birthday party almost a year ago lay in the middle of the floor. I wanted to wave it through the hush and bring everything back to life.

I knew she was saying good-bye, but I wasn’t ready. This room with its sugar-pink sweetness, Barbie dolls, and red patent leather shoes
was
Hannah. If I were to say good-bye to this, what part of her would be left?

Releasing her grip on the door frame, Hannah wrapped her arms around my neck, and buried her face in my shoulder.

“I’m ready to go back now,” she said.

As we climbed the stairs, I walked as slowly as I could, savoring the closeness of her. Before returning her to the nest of pillows and blankets, I stood silently, swaying from side to side, as if in a trance. I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to remain in this moment forever.

I thought about her room, how possible and yet inconceivable it was that she would never see it again. I wondered if it would always wait for her to return, if it would always be her room, if it would ever forget. I wondered the same things about myself: if I could accept that she would never return, if I would always feel like her mother, if I would ever forget.