Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (17 page)

“To who?” she asked.

I already had a couple of people in mind, I told her. And then I thought about how many more people could use some support—the support of a community as loving as the one that had erupted around me.

“Maybe we should just start a nonprofit,” I said. I was surprised by how quickly the words came from my mouth. I hadn’t even considered doing something like this. In fact, I was totally kidding when I suggested it.

Then Rachel said, “You know, I was thinking the exact same thing.”

Fuck, I thought. I guess we’re going to do this.

Chapter 20

no one to

kiss me on the cheek

while wishing me

a good day

at work.

no one to call

on the way into

the office

with whom i could share

traffic information.

no one to deliver to

me the lunch

i’ve forgotten

on the counter.

shit.

this is all

hitting me and i

haven’t even left the

house yet…

today should be a real

fucking treat.

I
t was time to get my life together. Realizing that I was ready to direct all of my help and support to others through some sort of organization was just the kick in the ass I needed. Well, that and HR at Yahoo! was beginning to wonder when I was coming back to work.

I could have stayed out longer with a physician’s note declaring me mentally unfit to be in an office environment; the doctor I visited said she would prescribe me antidepressants, and whether or not I chose to take them, a diagnosis would be on my record. Diagnosis? What was there to diagnose besides “dead wife”? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any sort of help, but I didn’t think I would benefit from it. Even if I did take Zoloft or Paxil or anything else, I was sure that I would still feel the grief just as keenly when I eventually went off the medication. I intended to go into therapy with Madeline when the time was right for her, but for me, right now, the best way to handle my situation was head-on. I needed to feel it.

So I admitted that I wasn’t really mentally unfit for an office environment. And frankly, I felt curious about what life as a functioning member of society would be like. After seven months with my daughter as a permanent sidekick, spending her days sitting in her pink bouncy chair near my desk while I wrote and listened to music at home, or strapped to my chest as we explored the city, I was ready to welcome responsibilities beyond feeding her and putting her down for naps. It was time for my return to the world I never expected to leave, time to make good on my promise to provide Madeline with the kind of life that Liz and I wanted her to have.

But before I left the bubble that had become mine and Madeline’s world, I realized I could no longer put off the list of to-dos that had been building up. I would have to do them; I would have to be the responsible parent. Liz’s death hadn’t just completely changed my life—it had changed my perspective on how tenuous my grasp on life was. Before, I might have driven around without a seat belt or put myself in the middle of a riot to get the perfect photo (Bangalore, 2006). But now I hesitated to even rush out of the shower, fearful that I might slip and crack my skull open, my brain spilling out onto the wet tiles. I spent a lot of time considering all the ways that I could die and leave Maddy completely parentless: a heart attack brought on by years of unhealthy eating; getting crushed by an avalanche of records; tripping into and drowning in the pond in our backyard.

While Liz had a certain amount of life insurance provided to her as part of her employment at Disney, we hadn’t taken out an additional policy—early death hadn’t really been an option for us. We assumed it would come at the end, only after we had finished with the important business of raising our daughter together, of growing old together. And though we had decided that A.J. and Sonja would be Madeline’s guardians if the shit really hit the fan, they’d need some sort of financial recourse as well. No matter how much you love a baby, it cannot grow up on hugs and encouragement alone.

So here we were. Tom put me in touch with a friend of his in Minneapolis who sold life insurance, and the guy sent somebody over to the house to collect samples from me—in my backyard….

My backyard was lovely. It really was. Big and lush with a giant eucalyptus tree in the far corner, and a koi pond full of fat, orange goldfish that did nothing but swim in circles all day. It was a big part of why Liz and I wanted this house: so our children could run around in this backyard, and we could host big parties for all of our friends and family. One thing I never imagined happening in our backyard was a woman coming over to take my blood and collect a urine sample. (Okay, that wasn’t technically collected out back, but it
was
where I handed over the warm jar of piss.) Then the lady and her mobile unit drove away with the bodily fluids that would hopefully prove I was worth more dead than alive. At least if I was going to die, I was going to die responsibly.

My reentry into the real world also meant that I obviously needed to find somewhere for Madeline to spend her days while I spent mine in an office. The idea that people could just leave their kids somewhere all day was crazy to me, but I knew I had to do it. The place I wanted for her was clear in my mind, but more elusive in reality—somewhere incredible. The most gentle, safe, healthy, loving day care on the entire planet.

Liz had been adamant about returning to work after she had the baby. “I cannot be a stay-at-home mom” was a familiar refrain, which hadn’t surprised me—she had always worked her ass off, focused on and determined to do well at her job, to move up. I have no doubt that she would have been a VP by the time she was thirty-two while raising our child at the same time. So when I started thinking about what it would be like to leave Maddy at day care, it helped to know that Liz would have been all for it.

But finding the place for our daughter without my wife’s input meant a lot of research and a lot of legwork. Luckily, one of Liz’s best friends, Elizabeth, stepped in to help me with the search. She had been one of Liz’s colleagues and supporters at her first job out of college, and later they had been reunited at Disney. When Liz died, Elizabeth generously incorporated us into her life, bringing her three little girls over so they could play with Maddy. Well, by
playing,
I mean looking and poking—she was just an infant.

I had also posted on the blog about my search. One reader sent a note that said, “I just moved to Portland recently, and the thing I miss most about LA is this day care.” My first reaction was that this e-mail was incredibly weird. I mean, if I left LA, the list of things I’d miss would include the Tiki Ti and Amoeba Records, but probably not the place my kid hung out without me all day. But my second thought was that this was the most ringing endorsement I had ever heard for a day care.

After we looked at somewhere between fifteen and twenty facilities, I actually ended up picking that one. My choice was based on a mixture of research, recommendation, and gut feelings. Usually, when Elizabeth and I went to check out a space, something would turn me off immediately, like the way the staff talked in baby voices to the infants, or the surplus of baby books about Jesus. But at this place, I was charmed. The school was in a house with a calm, friendly, earthy vibe that I immediately connected to, even though I’m the last person you would find in the parking lot at a Phish show. There were toys everywhere, the schedule seemed less rigidly structured than at some of the other places, and their philosophy included talking to children like adults. I was never a goo-goo ga-ga kind of dad—I’d rather just explain to my six-month-old that the Silver Jews were never a Pavement side project. As soon as I saw the garden out back where the older kids grew vegetables and flowers, I knew it would be a good place for Madeline.

On the morning of Madeline’s first day, I spent twenty minutes thinking about how Liz would have dressed her, and none at all thinking about how her father would be presenting himself. She was in a brand-new, pink long-sleeved onesie with flowers, and I in my usual outfit: a plaid shirt with pearl snap buttons, jeans, and a pair of vintage Nikes. I was stylish in certain parts of Los Angeles, but next to the parents of the other children, I probably looked like a college student.

When we arrived, I sat in the car for fifteen minutes, alternating between sobbing and thoughts of just taking Madeline back to the house. Shit. Could I kidnap my own kid? For the first time in a long time, the tears were not about Liz’s absence. They felt different. They felt more normal, more common—the kind of sadness natural to parents abandoning their young. Which was exactly what I felt like I was doing.

When I handed Madeline over, she went to her teacher without a fight, which made leaving her there even more difficult. We had developed an incredible bond, and I was worried that by leaving my daughter with someone new, we would somehow lose that. I finally understood Liz’s fear that she wouldn’t be as close to Madeline because I’d been the one to change her diaper and feed her first. I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous and that this day care would be the best place for her while I was working—the only place for her—but leaving her that first day felt almost impossible. I walked out and closed the door behind me, crying like a motherfucker.

Walking through the familiar doors of my office gave me anxiety, too. When I arrived there a little while later, my head started pounding and my heart was pumping so hard that a doctor would have been able to check my pulse in even the smallest artery in my body. I had imagined work as a place that wouldn’t—couldn’t—change in my absence; I was looking forward to a reintroduction into what I remembered as a bustling office with jokes between colleagues who acted casually but managed to complete their assignments somewhat professionally, balancing sneakers-and-jeans attire with a secretly impressive work ethic. My family life may have imploded, but in my mind, the desks at Yahoo! were still organized in the same configuration, the same friendly faces occupying the spaces above them. I thought I would walk in to a bunch of back slaps, a couple of hugs, maybe a few congenial nods. Three
I’m sorry
s, two
Welcome back
s, and one or two
Hey, Matt
s.

I could not have been more wrong. I realized almost immediately that things at Yahoo! had gone on without me—everything here was business as usual. It was like I had been transported to the days before Madeline was born and Liz died, when the only thing I should have been worried about was what to eat for lunch that day.

Some facts about my job had stayed the same: my salary, which building I would be in, my phone number. But everything else had changed: my old responsibilities had been reassigned to somebody else, which I knew, since somebody had to manage the outsourcing while I was at home. There had been a slew of layoffs, turning what had been a social, busy space into a decimated department with rows of empty cubicles. My desk had been relegated to a desolate corner, where I sat alone.

Every day after I handed my daughter over, I sat in the corner of the room at work waiting for someone to give me something to do. My coworkers had been amazing and understanding during my time off, but now that I was back here, some of my colleagues were less sure how to handle the potential awkwardness of my situation. They had sent me kind e-mails when I was away at home, and now it felt like they were ignoring me. They weren’t doing it to be cruel—for all I knew, it was the way they thought they could be the kindest.

Sure, I was never a “big man on campus” type, but I’d never been a social pariah, either. It was like my identity had been reassigned. Instead of The Guy Who Loves Music, or The Guy Who Worked in India for All Those Months, I was somebody else—somebody weird and unfamiliar. I hadn’t even had a chance to be The Guy with the Baby; I was just The Guy with the Dead Wife. I felt as though some of my coworkers were treating me like death was somehow contagious. And I couldn’t blame them, really—I probably would have reacted the exact same way.

Even the phone’s silence drove me crazy. I watched the light at the top stay dark all day. Liz had been the only one to call me on that line—as an Internet company, we almost exclusively used online messaging and e-mail to communicate. I would come back from lunch and see that red rectangle lit up, excited to have a voice mail from Liz, however mundane her message would be. Now I dreaded I would never see that light again—or worse, I would, but the message wouldn’t be from her.

I spent my first few days back sorting through e-mails. I moved all of the messages that had come during my leave to a folder called Before. But first, I sorted everything by sender and moved all the e-mails from my wife to a separate folder called Liz. I had thousands of them from her, but I simply wasn’t ready to look through them yet. I wanted to preserve them, though, so that if I ever felt ready to revisit her words, I’d be able to.

I did read two of them, but not on purpose. The e-mails were sorted by date received, the most recent e-mail at the top. There it was: the last e-mail she ever sent to me.

from: liz

to: matt

sent: sun 3/23/2008 5:48 PM

subject: I gained weight.

   Probably from cookies and crap but when I stand up I feel bigger…can’t wait to show u!