Chapter 19
Grace
“Grace.”
I turned around and found myself being hugged by Mrs. Babcock. Her hair was gray and her face was lined, but she still wore the same peacock-blue eye shadow.
“It was a beautiful service, Grace.”
“Thank you. Thank you for coming.”
I tried to draw back, but Mrs. Babcock didn’t seem inclined to let go of me just yet. Over her shoulder, I made an apologetic face to Jerry, my father-in-law, whom I had been talking to before Mrs. Babcock approached. He shrugged to let me know it was fine, then walked off to join Penny, my mother-in-law, who was sitting in a corner, her eyes red from crying.
“I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Babcock squeezed me much too tightly. I took a firm step backward so she’d have to release me.
“Thank you,” I said again.
“Such a terrible thing. Pneumonia, wasn’t it? That’s what I heard. And after all he’d been through.” She clucked her tongue. “I hope, at least, that he went peacefully?”
“He did,” I said truthfully.
I could have said more and I expect that Mrs. Babcock wanted to hear more, but that wasn’t information she was entitled to. In the twelve years of our marriage, Jamie and I had shared countless private and personal moments, but none more intimate than the moment of his death.
For six days, I sat by his bedside. Every day he grew weaker. Every morning, breathing was more of a struggle than the day before. On the final morning, when it became obvious that there was no hope, I asked the doctors to remove all the needles and tubes.
I climbed into Jamie’s bed and nestled close to him, lying on my side and stroking his hair, telling him one last time how much I loved him, how happy he had made me, promising him that I would be strong and fine and well, and that it was all right to go before me. As usual, Jamie was staring at the door, now closed to protect our privacy. Though I was lying right next to him, he didn’t look at me, or acknowledge my presence.
Somehow I had thought . . . I had hoped he might. After all the months of worry and anguish, I hoped that at the end there might be some brief but miraculous reconnection with consciousness, a sign, and that Jamie would, if not speak, at least look at me in a way that let me know I had not failed him.
It didn’t happen.
As the sun was beginning to set, he took a long, ragged breath and then released it slowly, along with his life. In those final seconds an expression of peace and recognition spread across his face. He didn’t bid me farewell in any sense that I could understand, but I knew that the one he had been watching for had come for him at last and that was enough for me. The peace granted to Jamie lighted and lingered upon me as well. After so many months of struggle, we were able to rest at last. And then he was gone.
I couldn’t explain it to Mrs. Babcock, or to anyone, but it was the most intimate, sacred, and precious moment that Jamie and I ever shared.
“Well, that’s a mercy at least,” Mrs. Babcock said. “For both of you, I should think.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying that it had to come as something of a relief. You’ve been so brave, Grace, but it had to be a burden. I mean, first the cancer and then this?”
I felt my jaw clench. “Jamie was never a burden to me. Never.”
“No, no,” she clucked, “of course not. But now, after all this time, Jamie is at peace and you can move on with your life, poor darling.”
She shifted her weight in my direction, as if she were about to hug me again. I took another step backward.
“Excuse me. But I think my in-laws need me. Thank you again for coming.”
“Of course. Of course,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello and tell you how sorry I was. You run along and take care of your family.” She reached out and grabbed my hand. “But, Grace, can I just say how wonderful you look? It’s amazing, the way you’ve been able to keep the weight off for all these years. When I think about that fat, little girl who used to sit in the back row of my classroom, always dressed in black and too shy to speak, working so hard to be invisible even though she was as big as—”
“Mrs. Babcock, I really have to go.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you. It’s just so good to see—”
I pulled my arm from her grip and walked away.
The crowd was starting to thin out and I was glad of it. I couldn’t ever remember being as exhausted as I was at that moment. My encounter with Mrs. Babcock had sucked up the last drops of energy remaining in me. How in the world did the tradition of post-funeral receptions ever begin anyway? As if funerals weren’t draining enough, somebody decided that the bereaved family members should host a party after?
It wasn’t all bad. I hadn’t been home in almost two years, so it was nice to see my little brothers, Tommy and Skip, and my cousins. And it was good to talk to some of our old classmates and share Jamie stories. Until Mike Zimmerman sought me out, I’d never heard the one about how he and Jamie had driven Mike’s beat-up, goner of a Chevy, a rust bucket he’d named Captain America, into the river one night just to see what it felt like to escape from a sinking vehicle.
“Teenage boys are such a bunch of knuckleheads,” Mike said. “But Jamie was the worst of all—thought he was invincible. But I’ll tell you, after he beat the cancer and then survived that fall, I kind of thought it might be true.”
“Me too,” I said, smiling wetly but keeping my emotions in check because, by that point, I didn’t even have enough energy to cry. But Mike did it for me and hugged me even longer and tighter than Mrs. Babcock had. I let him.
That was a good conversation, a story I would treasure, and there were many more besides. But I also had to endure a number of less lovely exchanges with people who, though less directly than Mrs. Babcock, hinted that Jamie’s death must have come as a relief. They had no idea what they were talking about.
And though I love my in-laws—Jamie and I lived in an apartment over their garage for six years before we moved to Portland—it was hard to see them grieving. Penny was a wreck, had sobbed through the whole service. I felt terrible for her, and for Jerry.
After surviving cancer, Jamie worried about what he might be passing on to a potential child, so we put off the idea of having kids for a few years after we were married. Considering how young and broke we were, it was probably just as well. Later, we were so busy working and going to school that we put it off again. With Jamie only a year away from finishing his paramedic training, the time finally seemed right to think about starting a family. We’d discussed it just a couple of weeks before Jamie’s accident and decided to start trying for a baby in the fall.
I’d thought about that a lot, especially in the last few days. If we’d never gone on that camping trip for our anniversary, if it hadn’t been raining so hard, if Jamie hadn’t tried to be a hero, if, if, if . . . I might be the mother of a chubby-cheeked one-year-old.
How would I feel if that baby, my only son, was taken from me? What special brand of grief accompanied the misfortune of outliving your child? I didn’t know. But as I thought about the baby and what might have been and now never would be, I could imagine.
Accepting brief condolences from the few remaining guests along the way, I crossed the room to check on my in-laws. When I sat down next to her, Penny looked at me with tear-stained cheeks and hollow eyes. The look on her face was heartbreaking. I reached out to hug her. The tears I was sure had run dry began flowing again.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Honey, you stop that now. What have you got to be sorry about?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I should have—”
“Should have what? Never left Minnesota? Stopped Jamie from being Jamie? You could no more do that than keep the earth from spinning.
“You were a good wife to my boy. You stood by him when everyone else had gone; you made him so happy and supported him every minute. Nobody could have taken better care of him. Not even me.”
She looked up at Jerry, who was standing behind her chair.
“Now, Gracie, you know Penny well enough to know that it just makes her teeth hurt to admit that,” he said, smiling through a sheen of unshed tears. “I sure wish we’d been able to come and help you at the end, but—”
I reached for Jerry’s hand. “You drove out at Christmas. I was so happy you did.”
“Me too,” he said. “Helped a lot to see what a nice place it was. Even if we’d had the money, we couldn’t have gotten Jamie the kind of care he needed, not way out here in the country. I know how hard you had to work, keeping him there. I’m just sorry we couldn’t help more. But since we lost the farm . . .”
“I know, Dad,” I said, and squeezed his hand. “I know. We all did the best we could.”
Penny sniffled. I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and handed it to her.
She dabbed at her eyes. “I know he’s in a better place now, but it seems so unfair that he’s gone. It just makes me feel sad. But then I remember that we almost lost him once before. I remember when you and Jamie got married. You were wearing a blue dress with little yellow flowers—”
“And Jamie was wearing a yellow dress shirt,” I said.
Penny bobbed her head, confirming my recollection, and smiled a little.
“Between the family and all the nurses who wanted to be there for the wedding, I bet there were forty people crammed into that hospital room. Jamie was skinny and pale, not a hair left on his head because of the chemo, but he was grinning from ear to ear,” she said as a tear rolled down her cheek. “He was so happy. I remember thinking that he was never going to leave that hospital room. But I was wrong. He got thirteen more years and we got the chance to see Jamie grow up, fulfill his dreams, and find love. He’d never have found the strength to do that without you, Gracie.”
Penny gazed up at her husband. “Do you remember, honey? It was everything we prayed for when he was so sick. In lots of ways, we were blessed, weren’t we?”
Jerry nodded and laid a big, workingman’s hand on her shoulder.
“He was a good son, a good man. And you’ve been a good daughter, Grace. We couldn’t have asked for better.”
After giving Jerry and Penny another hug, I excused myself and went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face, an attempt to rally the energy to endure a final hour of condolences before driving back to Minneapolis. I had to catch an early flight to Portland the next day.
Mike and a couple of Jamie’s old friends had urged me to stay an extra day; they wanted to take me to dinner. But the funeral and final medical expenses had wiped out what little was left of my savings, so I needed to get back to work.
Exiting the ladies’ room, I spotted a woman with white hair kneeling in front of my mother-in-law, holding the leash of a silken-coated golden retriever. The dog’s muzzle was resting in Penny’s lap, and she was stroking its head and nodding in response to the woman’s murmured conversation.
“Nan?”
She turned around, then got to her feet and started walking toward me.
“What are you doing here? I told you that you didn’t need to come.”
“I know, but I wanted to. Malcolm is taking good care of the other dogs, including your Maisie.” She opened her one good arm to embrace me. “I’m so sorry we missed the service. There was some kind of mechanical problem in Portland and our flight was delayed.”
“You flew here? You hate flying.”
“But I love you. And Blixen was with me, so that helped,” she said, smiling at her dog, who was sticking close to Penny. “I thought it would be good to bring him. I thought he might be a comfort.”
Penny stopped petting Blixen and looked up at me, her eyes still sad, but dry and calm.
A brief bout of light-headedness reminded me that I’d forgotten to eat that morning, so while Nan and Blixen made rounds among the mourners, I visited the buffet table. There wasn’t much left by that time, just some cheese and crackers, deviled eggs, a little potato salad, and a few brownies.
My mother, who had been talking to the minister, walked over when she saw me putting food on a plate.
“Are you sure you want all that?”
“All what?” I asked, looking at my plate. It held two pieces of cheese, four crackers, half a deviled egg, a tablespoon of potato salad, and a brownie. “The only thing I’ve had today is coffee.”
“Well,” she said grudgingly, “just so you don’t start channeling your grief into food. I’m just saying, you had to work so hard to take off the weight. It’d be a shame if you gained it all back. So many do. The people on that show, the one where they go to that camp and compete to lose all that weight? I read a story just last week saying the winners almost always gain it back.”
“Mom, I’m not going to gain back the weight. I’ve kept it off for thirteen years.”
“I know,” she said, watching nervously as I ate a piece of cheese. “I’m just saying—people do. And you’ve been through a terrible loss. You holding up okay, Grace?”
I nodded. “I’m fine. It’s been hard, but I’m fine.”
“Good.” She put her arm around my waist. “You’ve been so brave, honey. When Jamie had his accident, I didn’t think you’d be able to cope. But you did and I’m real proud of you. You took good care of him.”
My mother, a glass-half-full person, who believed it was important to keep her children from getting “a big head,” was never one to throw away compliments, so her comments surprised me. I was a little curious to know why she thought I might not be able to cope, but decided I was better off not knowing.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Well,” I said, “my flight leaves out of Minneapolis at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so I hope I can get on the road before dark. I’d like to get at least a few hours of sleep. There’s a little bit of paperwork I still need to do to get the ashes shipped out to me.”
She tilted her head far to the right. “Shipped? Do you mean you’re not going to bury them here?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think that’s what Jamie would want. I talked it over with Penny and Jerry and they agree.”
My mother set her mouth, the way she always does when she’s irritated with something I’ve done. Growing up, I saw that look on her face at least twice a day, sometimes more. It got to the point where I realized that her expression wasn’t even necessarily related to my actions. Sometimes, my mere existence irritated her.
That hurt: I won’t pretend that it didn’t. When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, but somehow I never could. Jamie said that it wasn’t me, it was my mom; that she was the kind of person who just couldn’t be pleased with anyone. It wasn’t until Jamie and I moved into that little apartment over his folks’ garage and I saw firsthand how a happy family operates that I realized he was right.
It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t Mom’s either. She wasn’t wired for happiness.
“Grace,” she said impatiently. “Answer my question. What are your plans? When are you coming home?”
“Home? You mean back to Minnesota? Mom, I’m not. My job is in Portland now.”
“And your family is here!” She clicked her tongue and set her mouth yet again. “For heaven’s sake, Grace. You can always find another job. Family is irreplaceable.”
I looked at my mother, the thin woman with the thin smile and the unhappy heart. Then I looked across the room at Nan, whose heart was infinite, who took in strays of all kinds—four-and two-legged—and nurtured by nature, who had swallowed back her greatest fear to fly halfway across the country so I would know she cared, and I realized that my mother was right. Family, wherever you may find it, is irreplaceable.
“I’ll call you when I get to Portland. I’ll be out to visit at Christmas.” I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, Mom.”