Rosenblatt - Making toast: a family story

The trick when foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands. For some twenty minutes this morning, Ginny and I have been hunting in the kitchen trash can for the top front left tooth of our seven-year-old granddaughter, Jessica. Loose for days but not yet dislodged, the tooth finally dropped into a bowl of Apple Jacks. I wrapped it for safekeeping in a paper napkin and put it on the kitchen counter, but it was mistaken for trash by Ligaya, Bubbiess nanny. Bubbies (James) is twenty months and the youngest of our daughter Amys three children. Sammy, who is five, is uninterested in the tooth search, and Jessie is unaware of it. We hope to find the tooth so that Jessie wont worry about the Tooth Fairy not showing up.

This sort of activity has constituted our life since Amy died, on December 8, 2007, at 2:30 p.m., six months ago. Today is June 9, 2008. The day of her death, Ginny and I drove from our home in Quogue, on the south shore of Long Island, to Bethesda, Maryland, where Amy and her husband, Harris, lived. With Harriss encouragement, we have been there ever since. How long are you staying? Jessie asked the next morning. Forever, I said.

Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old, pediatrician, wife of hand surgeon Harrison Solomon, and mother of three, collapsed on her treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home. Jessie and Sammy discovered her, our oldest son, Carl, told us on the phone. Carl lives in Fairfax, Virginia, not far from Amy and Harris, with his wife, Wendy, and their two boys, Andrew and Ryan. Jessie had run upstairs to Harris. Mommy isnt talking, she said. Harris got to Amy within seconds, and tried CPR, but her heart had stopped and she could not be revived.

Amys was ruled a sudden death due to an anomalous right coronary arterymeaning that her two coronary arteries fed her heart from the same side. Normally, the arteries are located on both sides of the heart so that if one fails, the other can do the work. In Amys heart, they ran alongside each other. They could have been squeezed between the aorta and the pulmonary artery, which can expand during physical exercise. The blood flow was cut off. Her condition, affecting less than two thousandths of one percent of the population, was asymptomatic; she might have died at any time in her life.

She would have appreciated the clarity of the verdict. Amy was a very clear person, even as a small child, knowing intuitively what plain good sense a particular situation required. She had a broad expanse of forehead, dark, nearly black hair, and hazel eyes. Both self confident and selfless, when she faced you there could be no doubt you were the only thing on her mind.

Her clarity could make her severe with her family, especially her two brothers. Carl and John, our youngest, withered when she excoriated them for such offenses as invading her room. She could also poke you gently with her wit. When she was about to graduate from the NYU School of Medicine, her class had asked me to be the speaker. A tradition of the school allows a past graduate to place the hood of the gown on a current graduate. Harris, who had graduated the previous year, was set to hood Amy. At dinner the night before the ceremony, a friend remarked, Amy, isnt it great? Your dad is giving the graduation speech, and your fianc is doing the hood. Amy said, It is. And its also pretty great that Im graduating.

Yet her clarity also contributed to her kindness. When she was six, I was driving her and three friends to a birthday party. One of the girls got carsick. The other two backed away, understandably, with cries of Ooh! and Yuck! Amy drew closer to the stricken child, to comfort her.

Ginny and I moved from a five-bedroom house, with a den and a large kitchen, to a bedroom with a connected baththe in-law apartment in an alcove off the downstairs playroom that we used to occupy whenever we visited. We put in a dresser and a desk, and Harris added a TV and a rug. It may have appeared that we were reducing our comforts, but the older one gets the less space one needs, and the less one wants. And we still have our house in Quogue.

I found I could not write and didnt want to. I could teach, however, and it helped me feel useful. I drive from Bethesda to Quogue on Sundays, and meet my English literature classes and MFA writing workshops at Stony Brook University early in the week, then back to Bethesda. The drive takes about five hours and a tank of gas each way. But it is easier and faster than flying or taking a train.

Road rage was a danger those early weeks. I picked fights with store clerks for no reason. I lost my temper with a student who phoned me too frequently about her work. I seethed at those who spoke of Amys death in the clichs of modern usage, such as passing and closure. I cursed God. In a way, believing in God made Amys death more, not less, comprehensible, since the God I believe in is not beneficent. He doesnt care. A friend was visiting Jerusalem when he got the news about Amy. He kicked the Wailing Wall, and said, Fuck you, God! My sentiments exactly.

Whats Jessies favorite winter jacket? The blue not the pink, though pink is her favorite color. Sammy prefers whole milk in his Froot Loops or MultiGrain Cheerios. He calls it cow milk. Jessie drinks only Silk soy milk. She likes a glass of it at breakfast. Sammy prefers water. Such information had to be absorbed quickly. Sammy sees himself as the silver Power Ranger, Jessie is the pink. Sammys friends are Nico, Carlos, and Kipper. Jessies are Ally, Danielle, and Kristie. There were play-dates to arrange, birthday-party invitations to respond to, school forms to fill out. Sammy goes to a private preschool, the Geneva Day School; Jessie to Burning Tree, the local public school. We had to master their schedules.

I reaccustomed myself to things about small children Id forgotten. Talking toys came back into my life. I will be walking with the family through an airport, and the voice of a ventriloquists dummy in a horror movie will seep through the suitcase. Buzz Lightyear says, To infinity and beyond! A talking phone says, Help me! Another toy says, Im a pig. Can we stop?

In all this, two things were of immeasurable use to us. First, Leslie Adelman, a friend of Amys and Harriss, and the mother of friends of the children, created a Web site inviting others to prepare dinners for our family. Emails were sent by Leslie, our daughter-in-law Wendy, Laura Gwyn, another friend and school mother, and Betsy Mencher, who had gone to college with Amy. Soon one hundred peopleschool families, friends and colleagues of Amys and Harriss, neighborscomprised the list. Participants deposited dinners in a blue cooler outside our front door. Food was provided every other evening, with enough for the nights in between, from mid-December to the beginning of June.

The second was a piece of straightforward wisdom that Bubbiess nanny gave Harris. Ligaya is a small, lithe woman in her early fifties. I know little of her life except that she is from the Philippines, with a daughter there and a grown son here who is a supervisor in a restaurant, and that she has a work ethic of steel and the flexibility to deal with any contingency. She also shows a sense of practical formality by calling Bubbies James, and not by the nickname Amy had coined, to ensure the more respectable name for his future. Ligaya altered her schedule to be with us twelve hours a day, five days a weekan indispensable gift, especially to her small charge, who giggles with delight when he hears her key in the front door. No one outside the family could have felt Amys death more acutely. Yet what she said to Harris, and to the rest of us, was dispassionate: You are not the first to go through such a thing, and you are better able to handle it than most.