By Elizabeth Schmermund
After Alexander died, we moved to a little cottage by the beach. When I talk about the house that saved us, I always emphasize the little. It wasn’t hoity-toity; it was the only thing we could afford. But it lay hidden in a narrow lane that was covered by oak trees and my four-year-old son, Theo, and I would walk under those soft-ridged leaves to the beach most afternoons.
The first thing we did when we bought that house was repair cracks in the foundation. Being in such proximity to the water, and its position on a slope, had left scars on the one-hundred-year-old house. We also had to divert the water from the foundation so the repairs would last. Along the back of the house, I trailed my finger in the wet cement that would carry the water away. Theo, I scratched out, and then, Alexander. To be honest, there was only one name I absolutely needed to record. Theo was my living child; he giggled as the cement squelched around his not-quite-toddler hand. But as for Alexander, our son who had died six months before, I felt a compulsion to write his name everywhere. In the cement that shored up our home, the sand at the beach that would soon be filled in from the waves, and at the hospital he died at, about a mile away, where his name would be inscribed on a heavy brick along the path I walked the night I had given birth to him.
Cheryl Strayed has said that there are some deaths that shock us, that make us sad and upset. And then there are the deaths that make us think we can’t survive them. The deaths that, perhaps, make us not want to survive. During the twenty-first century, in the Western world—if we are lucky—so many of us are protected from the deaths that bring us to our knees. Until we’re not.
For a long time I was angry after Alexander’s death. I was angry that I walked into a hospital in labor to give birth to him, and that instead he had died. Angry that he died before I woke up from the emergency surgery that was supposed to save him. I was especially angry at all the life that continued, undeterred, around us. It was spring when he died, and I watched a sparrow build her nest and then return to feed hungry mouths those first weeks after I handed his body, swaddled and washed, to a stranger. I will never forget grasping the little pouch that contained his ashes and pouring it into dark, root-ridden soil. I couldn’t keep my hands clean; I needed to hold the dirt and ashes in my bare hands. And so I did; I shoveled dirt with my hands until my fingernails turned black.
There wasn’t much hope or joy during those early days. But there was sunlight and trips to the beach with Theo. We hunted for seashells and dug into the sand where little bubbles emerged, showing signs of life. Walking those narrow roads I could escape other signs of life—families, pregnant women, babies, and friends I couldn’t relate to anymore as the new person who had
been born within that unfathomable death. My mind could only hold on to death. There was no space for anything else.
As Theo ran along the shoreline, I thought about a lot of things. I wondered when I would be able to breathe without the physical pain of grief infecting my lungs. I wondered what our future would look like in that house. And I wondered how countless other people had felt the kind of grief that knocked the air out of your lungs—and yet kept living. Because most of the time, I didn’t want to.
There was a lot wrong with that little house besides the foundation cracks we repaired. English ivy covered the back yard, which covered the underground tunnels where rats hid. Apparently, rats like to live near the water too. We had no doors on our bedrooms upstairs and no heat either. But we saw a sliver of ocean from our upstairs window and when I felt like the air around us was drowning me, I just walked to the beach and stared, hypnotized, at the waves. As they crashed against the shore and then reformed out in the ocean again I would whisper, “please come back to me, please come back to me,” over and over again.
Of course, he didn’t—in some ways. I ask for dream visits that never come and I rarely visit his gravesite anymore. I sometimes counsel other mothers who have lost their children and I tell them how I still speak to Alexander most days—and that sometimes I swear he responds. For the most part, my anger has dissipated, although it still visits me uninvited. There is no linearity to grief—or to life. I sat on that same beach the night I was diagnosed with cancer—a curable kind, but still something that no one wants to have. I watched the waves that night, too, and asked myself why I hadn’t just thrown myself in. Of course I survived for Theo and for my family. But the truth is, I watched one wave, then another, and then another. And, soon enough, I didn’t need to count waves anymore—or breaths. Soon enough I had watched enough to know that more would follow and I would live.
We’ve changed houses, although we still live near the beach. This house doesn’t have cracks in its foundation or ivy hiding rats in the back. This house is a little bit more grown-up, although still not hoity-toity. This house holds more people in it, too, and joy resides comfortably with the grief here. Sometimes I don’t have the time anymore to walk the short and wider roads to the beach. But the waves are still there—the same and different. Just like every breath that has come and gone after.