Cohen - The Grief of Others

Table of Contents

ALSO BY LEAH HAGER COHEN

FICTION
House Lights
Heart,You Bully,You Punk
Heat Lightning

NONFICTION
Without Apology
The Stuff of Dreams
Glass, Paper, Beans
Train Go Sorry

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright 2011 by Leah Hager Cohen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed
in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in
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Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following:
Cigars Clamped Between Their Teeth, from Dime-Store Alchemy
by Charles Simic. 1992 Charles Simic.
Funeral Customs the World Over by Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers.
Copyright 1960 The National Funeral Directors Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Leah Hager.
The grief of others / Leah Hager Cohen.

p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54777-9

1. ChildrenDeathFiction. 2. MarriageFiction. 3. GriefFiction. I.Title.
PS3553.O42445G
813.54dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Ive read that Goethe, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll were managers of their own miniature theaters. There must have been many other such playhouses in the world.We study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.

CHARLES SIMIC, Dime-Store Alchemy

When he was born he was alive. That was one thing.

He was a he, too, astonishinglynot that anyone expected him to be otherwise, but the notion of one so elemental, so small, carrying the complex mantle of gender seemed preposterous, the designation male the linguistic equivalent of a false mustache fixed above his infant lip.

His lips: how barely pink they were, the pink of the rim of the sky at winter dusk. And in their curlin the way the upper lip rose to peaks and dipped down again, twice, like a bobbing valentine; and in the way the lower bowed out, luxuriant, lush, as if sated already from a lifetime of pleasureshow improbably expressive were his lips.

His hands like sea creatures curled and stretched, as if charged with purpose and intent. Five of his fingers closed around one of his mothers and held it while he slept. He was capable of this.

His toenails: specks of abalone.

The whorls of his ears were as marvelously convoluted as any Escher drawing, the symmetry precise, the lobes little as teardrops, soft as peaches.The darkness of the ear hole a portal to the part of him that wasnt there, that hadnt fully formed, that spelled his end.

His mother had been led to believe that the whole vault of his skull would be missing, raw nerve tissue gruesomely visible beneath a window of membrane. Shed pictured a soft-boiled egg in an egg cup, the top removed, the yolk gleaming and exposed. Shed braced herself for protuberant eyes, flattened nose, folded ears, cleft palate: the features of an anencephalic infant. But the opening in his skull was no bigger than a silver dollar, and all his features lovely. She believed, at first, triumphantly, that the diagnosis had been made in error, that now the doctors, seeing the baby, would be forced to downgrade their diagnosis to something less seriousstill severe, perhaps, but not lethal.

He was out of the womb and alive in the world for fifty-seven hoursa tally that put him in rare statistical company and caused in his mother an absurd sense of prideduring which time she kissed his ears and insteps and toes and palms and knuckles and lips repeatedly, a lifetime of kisses.

She could not bear to let him out of her arms. He belonged to her, exclusively, a feeling she had not had when her other children were born. This one was bound to her in ways no one knew. Just as she, having hidden his secret these past four months, was bound to him. She would let no one else hold him, not even the babys father, who asked only once and then, with great and terrible chivalry, pressed her no further.

During the hours she held him she could not make herself believe how fleeting his life would be.

His breath, above all, gave incontrovertible proof of his being. With grave equanimity, eyelids closed, mouth relaxed, he took and expelled hundreds, thousands, of the most exquisite wisps of air, amounts that might be measured in scruples and drams, and which his mother imagined bore their own delicate hues, invisible to the human eye.They, his breaths, were the one thing she wished could be saved. In her state she almost believed it possible (it seemed a matter simply of having the right vial in which to stopper them... what were they called, those special vials for holding tears?lachrymatories, yes; if only she had one intended for breaths: a spiratory), and although she did not allow herself to sleep properly during all those fifty-seven hours, still she had some passing dream or medicated fantasy in the hospital bed, while she savored the feel of his inaudible, numbered breaths still stirring against her cheek, in which she glimpsed herself with an actual such vial on a chain around her neck, an amulet she might wear forever.

He wore, during his short life, a white cotton shirt with a single, covered, side snap,a white flannel receiving blanket, and a white cotton cap, fitted so gently over the opening in his head. He was given two diaper changes, the second proving unnecessary.