Kay-Baby

I have an older sister named Kay. We don't speak, we never exchange gifts, and we've never borrowed each other's clothes. There are no fading, curling black and white photos of her, age eight, awkwardly cradling a newborn me just home from the hospital.

Image by Teece Aronin

There never was any of that, but for one day there was Kay, a tiny train that barely left the station. And for more than fifty years there has been me, the train that left years later to travel miles beyond her.

Kay was born at full-term but breathed too soon, and with that over-eager breath, ingested amniotic fluid. She was cleaned up by the nurses and placed in a bassinette where whatever could be done for her back then was done. On the other side of the nursery window my father stood, murmuring over and over, "The more I see her, the more I want her."

From that day on, when my father spoke of Kay, he called her "Kay-Baby."

When Kay died, my father got back to his job, and my mother returned to the full-time care of their toddler son. That's how the Greatest Generation grieved, by blowing their noses, wiping their tears, and getting back to the tasks at hand. Not long after that, my parents had another child, a boy who thrived. They considered their family complete and once again, got on with things.

Almost seven years later, I was born, an oops baby if ever there had been. My mother was 32 when her doctor broke the news, my father, 47.

My mother wasn't thrilled to learn of her pregnancy. In those days, even at her age, she was considered a bit old to be pregnant, and her boys had long since stopped draining her with the demands of babies. Then, my aunt said something that turned my mother around: "Maybe this one will be a girl."

My father was delighted from the get-go.

Like my brothers and unlike my sister, I was born without complications, and I knew from early on that a baby girl had come before me but died. I stood on a kitchen chair one day, helping my mother bake cookies. I asked her if I was Kay. To me it made perfect sense that if a little girl was born and died, the sister born after would be the kind of do-over that God would permit Himself under special circumstances. 

My mother's reaction to my question, along with her response, are lost to me now. 

I pictured Kay's soul as a beautiful piece of cloth blowing in the breeze and hovering over the world. With my birth, it floated back down, became my soul and helped me become me, Kay-Baby restored.

The idea that I might be Kay, that the universe can recycle a soul taken out of circulation too soon, still appeals to me somehow.

Today Kay-Baby's remains lie in a cemetery next to my parents'. But maybe, just maybe, the bigger part of her is sitting here writing these words. 

A Man, or a Building, Like That

Recently I lost someone I had come to love. Oh, it’s alright in the sense that he didn’t actually die, but he’s gone just the same.

Building Down 

Image byTeece Aronin

If I imagine my life as a skyline, the building that was this man is gone from it. There is an ugly gap such as one sees after a building is demolished, brought down in that clever way demolition experts use.

You’ve seen film footage of these detonations, I’m sure. There is a countdown, a roar, and the building collapses onto itself like an accordion dangled by one strap and then dropped. This method of demolition minimizes the risk that someone will get hurt. 

It was this same building, just weeks ago, that pounded the mattress with his fist as he laughed himself sick at my jokes, who found it endearing and not annoying when, because of my bad driving, I smashed the pristine snow in his yard. Now I grieve the gentle, funny, fallen building, and I dread the morning light where the gap in the skyline is so jarringly evident.

Nights are somehow better. Darkness blacks out the skyline, and I almost forget for a while, curled up inside the evening chatter of my children.

Writer C.S. Lewis lost his wife, Joy Davidman to bone cancer. His book, A Grief Observed, was based on notes he made as he mourned her. Said Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

If grief feels like fear, it is because so much of grief is fear. This grief of mine fears that now, when it rains, instead of dashing into my warm, sound building, I'll stand outdoors instead, lost and abandoned, a weeping clod. My pain will stick to my body like a see-through second skin, and parts I'd shown only to him, will gleam in the wet, public light.

It is the fear that now I'll have to find someone else with a van and as much patience as my lost one had to help me haul home that sofa from the thrift store to replace the one the dog chewed up. And this replacement person must be someone I can sleep next to, blissful, as he drives, even though I know I look drunk or anesthetized or in some other slack-faced way, compromised when I sleep.

Where do I go to find a man or a building like that, and to whom will I offer up my love, with the exception of my children, because my love for them will be hardwired and unconditional forever? Was, is, and is forevermore. 

If there are angels, protectors who watch over us, wanting what is best for us, do times like these test them, too? Do they blame themselves, as if symbolic deaths and imploding buildings were a ball they should have caught, but dropped?

I will find my way through this grief, and since he is grieving too, I hope he also finds his way. Then I will offer my friendship. When we have stopped grieving, I will offer him that, and maybe we can try each other on for a different kind of fit.

I hold tight to the ability to grieve. I wear it like a badge earned many times over, and I see it as hope that hurting deeply means living deeply. 

The alternative of not living, someone told me, is deadly. And the alternative of not living deeply, I tell myself, is worse than death.

But again, if you know this answer, please tell me: Where do you go to find a man, or a building, like that?