Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (13 page)

Years earlier, the blog had originally been for photos of my travels, and then, when Liz went into the hospital, it was a convenient way to keep all of our friends and family updated on her status. But now, it was different. As I wrote, I realized that the blog was becoming Madeline’s baby book. No, it wouldn’t contain locks of hair or tiny impressions of her handprints and footprints, like my mom has of me. Instead, it would be a chronicle of our day-to-day lives. And this way, I wouldn’t have to rely on my memory for everything. I could record what her first word was, how much she weighed at her three-month doctor appointment, how tall she was, and the circumference of her head. Those are things you think you’ll remember forever, but if you don’t write them down, they disappear.

At first all I wanted was to give Maddy something tangible to refer back to someday. It was 80 percent for her and 20 percent for my friends and family—well, mostly for my family, because my friends don’t read that kind of shit. In the weeks and months immediately following Liz’s death, it was important for me to let everyone close to me know that I was surviving, and that our baby was doing well. I was writing down the things we did to prove to them, and eventually to Maddy, too, that after Liz died I didn’t just curl up into a ball while my kid jammed forks into the light socket in the living room. It felt especially important for Liz’s parents. I wanted them to know more about their granddaughter than they otherwise would have—even more than they would have if Liz were alive. I wanted to reassure them that they would always be a part of our lives.

Every new parent gets advice—from their own parents, from friends who have recently had children, from random people in the grocery store who tell you that children should have socks on even though it’s ninety degrees outside (yes, that actually happened). And while some of it bordered on the ludicrous (because children like to play with their toes, by the way), I needed all the advice I could get. Writing my own blog made me look at other blogs out there, and I soon discovered that my hometown newspaper, the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, had a website with an excellent parenting blog. It was run by two women, but they didn’t just write about mothers. They also wrote about fathers and their relationships to their children. I e-mailed them:

Hello…

I just came across your blog…

I’m a proud new father (originally from MPLS, now in Los Angeles) who is definitely in the process of managing changing priorities. I’m doing it on my own (my wife passed away the day after our baby was born).

I’ll be reading your blog often (while baby sleeps). I’m finding much of the content very helpful.

I’m writing a bit about my experiences. Some of the language is a little blue, but I can’t help it.

It’s been tough.

Matt

The next morning they wrote back asking if they could put my story on their website. It ended up both there and on the front page of the paper. The reaction was amazing: that same day, my blog picked up tons of new readers, and after that it just continued to grow.

I was grateful. Now, I’d made a connection to a whole community of caring people online. To write up a quick post and receive a bunch of responses with advice and reassurance really validated the work I was doing as a father. So I solicited more. I used the blog to ask questions, often beginning “What do I do…?” I always filed every answer away, just in case I might need to refer back to something later. Eventually, I could get sound advice within minutes from people who were reading my blog, even if it was three in the morning in Los Angeles. It was awesome.

This outpouring of advice and kindness was yet another demonstration of the power of community, and of community as extended family. I was lucky to have a great group of friends nearby who did their best to make our lives easier, but most of our family was in Minnesota, and it was impossible for them to help us on a daily basis. And because I didn’t belong to a church or any neighborhood groups, there was no organized effort to assist us. Nevertheless, I’d stumbled onto these sympathetic individuals online and expanded my circle far beyond what would have been possible before the Internet age. I received e-mails from Indonesia, Thailand, Europe, South America—from all over the world. What began as something I wanted for my daughter, my parents, my in-laws, and my friends became a forum of communication for and with parents everywhere. I had built my own virtual support system.

Many of these people also wanted to help in a material way. Just after Liz died, A.J. had set up a PayPal donation link on my blog with the money going directly into a memorial fund in her name, and people had also been sending money separately to help me raise my daughter. There was an address listed for the bank through which the fund was set up, and soon people were also sending actual stuff there.

Tons of it.

They also began to ask for my home address so they could send us stuff directly. Initially I said no. I didn’t want there to be any possible insinuation that I was profiting from my wife’s death, even if those profits were coming in the form of diapers, formula, and clothing for our daughter. That was something I could never, ever do. And to be honest, I was a bit leery about giving my address out to total strangers. It wasn’t that I distrusted them, or that I was worried that they’d show up at my house and attempt to steal my baby. But making friends with strangers had been Liz’s job.

Tom set me straight. “Matt,” he said, “you have to let people help. If they’re asking for your address, you give it to them.”

“I don’t know. I just feel a little weird just handing my address out to random Internet people.”

“Matt, this isn’t just about you and Madeline right now. This is about them, and their desire to help a human being who is in pain. Let them help you.”

He was right. Our conversation allowed me to realize that there was absolutely nothing wrong with accepting help. So I threw off the shackles of the possible negative perceptions of others, and opened myself up to the kindness and support of total strangers.

And help they did. Every time I walked up to the porch, I found boxes sitting there. Stuff came in constantly, so often that I couldn’t keep up with opening all of it. Several people mailed me perishable items that I unfortunately didn’t always get to in a timely manner. A woman from Duluth, Minnesota, sent me all the fixings for chicken noodle soup after I had written that I was sick. I didn’t open the care package until months later, unfortunately to find rotting garlic and a leaking container of chicken stock.

Some gifts were incredibly thoughtful but simply too difficult for me to deal with. One of Liz’s best friends from high school put together a book written from Liz’s point of view with photos captioned “I love you,” “I’m sorry I’m not here,” stuff like that. It was very kind and very touching, but for many months it was much too painful—I wasn’t yet strong enough to confront what was in it. More than one person sent me a pillow with an image of Liz on it. I know they meant well, but for me that was just a bit creepy. But at the heart of this outpouring of generosity was something very basic and very human: the fundamental goodwill of each sender. People wanted to help, and so I let them—Tom helped me understand that they felt good by reaching out to Madeline and me.

It quickly became impossible for me to look at these expressions of sympathy and generosity without thinking about how I could help other people. Something about all this support made me feel ready to focus on others in need. How could I acknowledge these many acts of kindness? I didn’t have the money to assist anyone financially, but I had all of this stuff—more than Maddy and I could ever possibly use.

The answer was to give back. Through the blog I had become friends with a woman in New York City whose boyfriend got her pregnant and then took off. When she decided to leave the city for Oregon because she couldn’t afford to stay in her apartment, I shipped her seven or eight giant boxes of clothes. I sent many more to a battered women’s shelter nearby because someone explained to me that the women there had often abruptly fled their abusive partners with their children. They arrived at the shelter with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Just like people wanted to help me and Maddy, I wanted to help the people around us, and so I passed on what I received to those who needed it more. It became a really important part of what the blog brought to my life, and an important part of my beginning to heal after Liz’s death. Concentrating my attention on others allowed me to remove some of the focus from my own situation, and finally I felt less like a victim of my horrible circumstances.

Chapter 15

she’s got so

much of her mom

in her.

as a kid,

sitting on a swing

(more than capable of propelling herself)

liz

would say, “somebody push me!”

she wanted attention

and loved having

people around.

madeline is obviously no

different.

her cries said,

“somebody hold me!”

so i did.

almost all day.

T
hough I had many sources of advice, there were some things I was beginning to realize I could figure out for myself. While some parents claimed allegiance to Dr. Spock, I was more from the MacGyver school of parenting, which was less about having an arsenal of baby equipment and more about troubleshooting with whatever was available. Early on, I took Maddy to a Dodgers game. This was something that Liz and I had imagined doing with our future child from the moment we put the down payment on our first year of season tickets—way before Liz was even pregnant. And just like in our dream, Maddy was dressed in a pink and white pinstriped Dodgers onesie and wrapped in a free blanket we had been given on one of the team’s many promotional nights. Of course, the dream included the two of us here with our baby, but in reality Liz was dead and I was at the stadium with her friend, Diane. Madeline was still so small that she was only drinking formula. I had remembered the diapers, I had remembered the wipes, I had remembered the formula, but I had forgotten the bottle.

What the fuck does a guy do for a kid who doesn’t have a bottle to drink from? I felt like an asshole. She needed to eat, but I didn’t want to leave the game, defeated by my forgetfulness and ruining my daughter’s first Dodgers experience. I sat there for a couple of minutes thinking that there had to be a solution.

I bought a bottle of water from the concession stand, which I needed for the formula anyway, and I asked for one of the lapel pins behind the glass case—the kind they sell with the Dodgers logo. I removed the pin from the packaging and sterilized it with a lighter borrowed from a man behind me in line, and then jammed it through the water bottle cap. I mixed the water with the formula and squirted it into Maddy’s mouth, just a little bit at a time. I felt as victorious as I used to when I beat Liz in a game of Scattergories—I had to think on the spot. It worked for us, but that’s not something you’re going to see in any parenting book.

And once during our travels, I didn’t realize until we were already on the plane that the pants I had put Madeline in were way too big for her tiny waist. With her other clothes in our checked luggage, I had to come up with some way to keep her pants from continuously falling down. After considering—and ultimately deciding against—tying my BlackBerry USB charger around her waist, I decided the simplest and most effective way to deal with the problem was simply to button her onesie over her pants. After I posted a photo of it on the blog, some of my readers questioned whether or not I had any idea how to dress a baby girl, but others defended my function-driven sensibilities and left comments telling me that they were now dressing their babies the same way. Well, with that slick move, Madeline and I had accidentally started a mini fashion trend. I used to make fun of Liz when she wore heels in the rain or didn’t wear a hat in winter because she was concerned her hair would get messed up, taunting her with the words “fashion over function.” Liz would have been proud of me for figuring out such a practical solution, and she certainly would have found my effort adorable, but she most definitely would have questioned my style sense.

With each experience Madeline and I had together, my confidence level increased. After a while, I kind of felt like I could handle any parenting challenge thrown my way—what a big difference a few months had made. Though I initially had been preoccupied with the possibility of ruining or breaking my daughter, through everything she was thriving. Each successive trip to the doctor brought more words of encouragement, and with that encouragement came more confidence, too.

Despite being born seven weeks early, Madeline’s measurements were in the average range on the growth charts at her three-month appointment, though the NICU doctors had warned me that might not happen until she was two years old. Madeline’s pediatrician, Dr. Jennifer Hartstein, would ask me all sorts of questions to get a clear understanding of Madeline’s physical and mental development, and when the appointment was finished, she would offer a simple but effective “Matt, you’re doing a great job.” Considering how out of control my life seemed after Liz’s death, it was incredible for me to know that I was succeeding at the most important job in the world—a job I didn’t know I had been so well prepared for—or prepared for at all.

These day-to-day experiences, early successes with Madeline, and praise from real experts led to an interesting transition in my blog. There were people who’d been reading my blog since Madeline’s birth, many of whom had found it because they were pregnant. By now, some of their babies had been born, and with infants of their own at home, they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. So they turned to me, a guy they knew had been through it.

Everyone assumes—and society encourages—that all women are experts at being mothers. What I found, however, was that women are just as fucking clueless as men are; they’re just more willing to ask for and accept help. Here was a man—me—who just months earlier had no goddamned clue what he was doing, and now I was giving advice to many of the same women who had given it to me.

Not that what I was offering was really “advice.” I would never tell anyone how they should do things. All I could offer was my own perspective: “Here is how I did it. It may not work for you, but this was my experience.” For the first time since I had begun talking to other moms and dads, I felt that I could hold my own in any parenting conversation that arose. In fact, I not only felt as if I was equal to the rest of them, but I also felt a little bit like being a single father somehow gave me a leg up. I was, after all, doing at least twice as much work as I would have been if Liz were alive, and I was doing it as a stay-at-home dad. If that didn’t make me an expert, I don’t know what would.

Many questions also came my way regarding the death of a spouse. After all, fathering a newborn was only half my story. People wrote to find out how they could help in the immediate aftermath of a death in the family. Asking the bereaved what they need may be kind and well-intentioned, but ultimately it didn’t help me at all. When Liz died, all I knew was that I wanted my wife back, and that that was not possible. I didn’t know that I needed to have the floor swept. I couldn’t recognize that there was no food in the refrigerator. I had no idea that my mail was piling up and I was probably not paying my electricity bill. My most common advice for these people was anti-advice—what not to do. “Don’t touch anything in the house. Don’t throw anything away because who knows what she may be attached to. Don’t wash the sheets, because maybe she wants to be able to smell her husband’s cologne awhile longer.” I told people to find what little tasks and chores needed doing and to do them without having to ask the surviving partner any questions.

I also, and without intention, became the voice for a small community of young widows and widowers. They heard about my blog and began writing to me almost daily, and I became great friends with most of them as we shared our experiences via e-mail and phone. It was a bit like the parenting community that I’d found myself a part of, but this group was much smaller and more intimate. It was one thing to bond over the birth and raising of a child, but it was another to find an incredible group of widowed people under eighty years old, all of us united by the worst moments of our lives.

Liz’s death had turned me into an uncertified expert in death and dealing with it, which was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I could offer a truly informed opinion based on personal experience, rather than the kind of bullshit advice that spews forth from the countless grief books that line the shelves of every store. The curse? Well, to be confronted with so much death and sadness on such a regular basis really took a toll on me emotionally. Every time I heard another heartrending story about a husband dying, I was transported back to those seconds just after I realized Liz had died, and the hideous feeling that came over me every time was as real as it had been on that day.

Hearing these stories was awful, but I had to think that I was helping these women in some small way. And the truth was, they were helping me, too. Realizing that I wasn’t alone in my sadness was a valuable tool for fighting through it, because in talking to this group I understood that there was no such thing as moving on after what we experienced. With each other’s help, though, we could continue to move through. Without their companionship, wicked jokes, and sarcasm, I wouldn’t have laughed nearly as much.

Just a little while after I brought Madeline home, three of my best guy friends from Minnesota offered to come out to Los Angeles to stay with Madeline and me. They coordinated their trips so as not to overlap, ensuring that I would have maximum time for help and company. A.J. came first. When I picked him up from the airport, I kind of got the feeling something was different, and it became obvious what it was within the first few hours of his arrival. He hadn’t told me, but I was positive. My suspicions wouldn’t be confirmed for another few months, but the questions he asked and the way he interacted with Madeline had me convinced that Sonja was definitely pregnant. A.J. immediately took a very active role in feeding, burping, and changing Maddy—things I didn’t think a childless man would want to do, let alone
could
do.

This was not the type of help I had expected. I thought these guys were coming out to Los Angeles to make me laugh, to shoot the shit—mostly to keep my mind off Liz. They’d probably cook and do some other stuff around the house, and only help me with Madeline if I asked them to. I was sure they’d never even touch a diaper, but it became apparent very quickly that I had assumed incorrectly.

When Steve arrived a week later, he immediately told me that his wife, Emily, was due to give birth within the next few months. My theory was spot-on. Here were guys with whom I used to speak only about booze, sports, and music, and now they wanted to discuss the best methods for preventing diaper rash.

While he and I were out one day, we sat on a bench watching the world go by. Two women walked by, each of them pushing a baby stroller. We looked at one another and Steve blurted out, “See that stroller on the left?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the stroller Emily and I registered for.”

“Yeah. I know Liz looked at that stroller as well—” I interrupted myself midsentence. “Jesus. Do you realize how fucking old we are?”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked me.

“Well, did you see the two women pushing those strollers?”

“Yeah. They were totally hot.”

“I know. And all we could talk about was the strollers they were pushing.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head with mock disapproval of just how adult we’d become since our college years. Steve let out a laugh, then I made a joke about the frozen chocolate-covered banana he was about to insert into his mouth.

John was the last to visit. On the way to my house from the airport, I asked up front, “Is Andrea pregnant?”

“I hope not,” he replied, laughing. “Why?”

“Just testing a theory,” I explained, then turned the conversation to his upcoming wedding.

I taught three grown men how to hold, feed, and burp a premature baby—skills that they then demonstrated via videoconference to their impressed (and relieved) women. It was about to become a reality for two of them, and it was kind of awesome to be showing them the way. To be the one who’d already been there.

They knew they could rely on my experience and probe my ever-growing knowledge base for future use with their own children, and they were determined to learn as much as possible from me before they flew back to Minnesota. And I felt confident that the guidance and practical experience I could give them was the real deal. I wasn’t pretending to be a father; I was a certifiable success. I got to be their friend with the baby instead of their friend whose wife had died. It was a relief.

No matter how eagerly they tried to provide diversions and distractions, though, there were always reminders of Liz. Some of them, like her perfume bottles on the dressers or her shoes in the corner, were constant and to be expected. But others, like the calls my friends made to their ladies before going to bed, made me sick to my stomach; I no longer had Liz to say good night to. But I did have my baby to tuck in every night, and holy shit, was I thankful for that.

One morning when Steve was still in town, I got out of the shower and heard him call my name from the living room.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Yeah. Maddy’s fine,” he replied. “Your phone rang, but I didn’t know if I should answer. I let it go to your answering machine.”

“Shit. You didn’t happen to hear who it was, did you?”

“United Airlines? Something about your trip to Hawaii?”

“Are you sure? I’m not going to Hawaii.”

“I’m pretty sure I heard the automated message say something about an itinerary change for your trip to Oahu.”