Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter Twenty-Nine

How integral is the bed to bed rest? It was a question I intended to answer, in part because the cabin fever was threatening to consume me entirely, and in part because I needed to speak to Al.

Yes, I knew Al was dead; in spite of my slow descent into insanity, I still retained that fact. But I hadn't been to his grave since his funeral. When my father had died, my mother tried again and again to get us to go to his grave and speak to him. The idea seemed ludicrous to me. Even then, as a burgeoning atheist, I didn't believe in life after death, and talking to a stone was only the first sign of religious madness, to be followed immediately by apparitions of Jesus in your kitchen. I went a couple of times to humor her, each time muttering something to the grave. By the third attempt, I gave up all pretenses. Now, though, I was a little more understanding of where Mom had been coming from. I didn't expect Al to hear, and I certainly didn't expect him to answer, but I needed to voice my questions out loud, and this was as good a place as any. Plus, cemeteries are just about the only public space in which talking to the dead is acceptable.

I waited until a Monday morning to slip away. Most people would be at work, Mom included, and Rashad was busy that particular day. My absence wouldn't be noticed. I wasn't trying to keep my visit a secret; I just didn't need to be told by ten different people why getting out of bed during my last weeks of pregnancy, on bed rest, was a bad idea.

"Al," I began, kneeling awkwardly next to his tombstone, my belly seeming to protrude in every direction. Speaking to a grave is just as strange as I remembered it. But I soldiered on. "I'm sorry I didn't visit you sooner. No, okay, this is ridiculous, you're not actually here. I know that and you would know that too, if you were here. Which you're not."

I took a deep breath and reminded myself why I had come.

"So here it is. I don't know what to do without you, love. You were—you were my everything, and then you were gone, and now I have so many things going on in my life, and I wish you were here to help me even a little bit. I don't know how I'm supposed to do all of this alone. This is really your fault, and by the way, don't think I'm not angry with you for that. Because I am. Very angry.

"But that's not the point. The point is, we're pregnant, Al. You and me. We made a baby, we created life. With arms wide open, and all that crap. And so now I'm going to be a mother, like any day now, and moms are supposed to know everything—my mom sure as hell does, and by the way remind me to tell you about her later—and I don't know a freaking thing about shit. I can't even figure out my own life. How am I supposed to guide someone else's? What am I going to tell her when she asks me about God and life and everything? You were the thoughtful one. You were the emotional one, the one who was so ready to be a father. And instead you're leaving me to be a single mother."

I stopped paying attention to what I was saying and let the words flow out.

"What I'm trying to say is, Al...I miss you. A lot. So, so much. And Ethan, I mean, I like him, but if you were here, well he'd just pale in comparison. I think I sort of miss having a companion, as silly as that sounds. You, you had this special glow, not literally or anything, but there was just an essence to you that was so obviously perfect for me, and Ethan and I, we connect, we get each other without trying, and it's a different sort of feeling, but it's a good one. And good feelings have been harder to come by lately, so I guess I sort of jumped on the bandwagon. I don't know. Does that make me a bad person? Or at least bad mother material? Because honestly, being a mother, that's what's most important right now.

"I don't think I'm ready for it. But you know what? I also don't have a choice."

I sat there a little while longer, letting my own words sink back in—to my head, to the ground over Al's body, whatever. I sat there until my legs went numb and then I sat a little bit more. I sat until I felt the first pangs in my stomach and I felt like I had been expecting this, and so I hoisted myself up, supporting myself with Al's stone, and drew myself up. I calmly took my bag, got into my car, and drove away.

Epiphanies, in my opinion, shouldn't happen en route to the hospital, with another human's head already pushing its way into the world through an unyielding, unhappy and entirely unprepared orifice. But then, the world has rarely heeded my opinion, and by now I should have expected only the most inconvenient timings. As my baby—as Ava, she was Ava—made her way into this crazy, undependable, loving, hating, restless world, I finally understood what had been murking about in my head for the past few weeks.

Advice was wonderful and there are times when guidance is absolutely necessary—I don't think I would be in the place I am now without it—but in the end, you have to make your life choices on your own. Even if Al had been there to go through his death with me, in whatever bizarre parallel universe that might have been possible, he couldn't tell me what to do. He could tell me what he thought I should do, and he always had surprisingly good insight, even when I didn't expect him to understand what I was going through, but I was the only one who could make decisions for myself.

The truth is, at a certain point advice becomes gratuitous. There comes a point where you know what you should do, what you need to do, where you've taken all the advice there is and balanced it accordingly, and what it comes down to is actually doing what you know is right. That is the hardest part, and that is when no one else's opinion can help anymore. You need to turn inward and tell yourself what to do—and listen.

I've always had a problem listening to myself, really listening. Knowing what to do in a tough situation is difficult enough; balling up and following through on that is damn near impossible. But at this point in my life, I know what I need to do. Finally. I have a say in my own mind, I can actually heed my own advice, and listening to other people is no longer necessary.

I need to raise my child. I need to be a good mother for her and a good person for me. I need to be happy, something I've often forgotten to do. I need to take care of myself so I can take care of my child, and I can't rely on anyone else to do that for me. If I lean on someone now, I may never stand straight again.

Maybe one day I'll be ready to let someone else into our tight circle of two. Maybe I can make room for a third, and if that's possible, who knows, maybe I could even expand to four or five, have the sort of family that people expect instead of the one I was left with. But for now, for me, for Ava, I needed to be alone. Ethan, of all people, would understand that.

I didn't regret my time with Ethan. I couldn't regret what had, in the end, finally showed me how to grieve. If the fact that I needed to meet and love another man to mourn the one I'd lost was a bitter irony, then let it be added to the list of ironies that together make up my life.

That was about as far as I got before they were shoving me into a wheelchair—shove being the operative word as my pregnant girth protested loudly to such a narrow space—and I lost track of my thoughts. I was in the entrance to the hospital and then I was in a room with a curtain and cries on the other side and then there was pushing and breathing and no epidural, because of course I was too late for that and breathe, Jen, breathe, you can do it, push, Jen, push! "Where are you, you bastard, you did this to me!" I yelled, high on pain and wishing Al were back so I could kill him for this. Mom was at my side and I felt better until it hurt again and I cried out. "Shhh, Jen, you can do this, you're okay, just keep pushing," Mom was saying, and I gripped her hand and pushed and pushed and then Amy was there and Julia too and soon all three women were around me and holding me and telling me to push, and I could feel them there with and it helped, it really did. We were pushing, all four of us, pushing. And suddenly, there she was. They took her from me and I could feel the emptiness in my belly where before I had been so full, they took her and then suddenly she was back and she was in my arms and I was full again. Days would come and years would pass and horrors might happen, but right now, right here, I was holding Ava and that was life. She is life.