Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love (2 page)

Chapter 2

a few weeks

here, a couple of

months there,

nothing more than

a few seconds

when viewed through

the lens

of forever.

I
n early 2004 I received an e-mail from one of my college roommates, Biraj Bista, inviting Liz and me to Kathmandu for his wedding. I was excited. Going to Nepal had been high on my list of things to do since I’d met Biraj, but I never dreamed I’d actually have the money or the time to be able to go. It took a little convincing to get Liz to agree to the trip because we didn’t have a ton of money at the time, and she knew that I would be unable to contribute a significant amount since I made less than half of her salary. But thanks to all of the frequent-flier miles she had racked up traveling for work over the past four years, the flight would be free. She knew how important this trip was to me, and she told me we’d make it work no matter what.

What Liz didn’t know was that I planned on proposing to her a few days after our arrival in Nepal. I’m not exactly a traditionalist, so I wasn’t going to ask her dad for permission or get down on one knee or hire a skywriter to write out my words with airplane exhaust. I always wanted our engagement to be different; I had hoped to surprise her with a ring in a foreign country with the idea that we’d someday make a special return trip there with our children, and this trip to Nepal came at the perfect time. We arranged to go on a short trek through the Annapurna region of the Himalayas. I pictured us hiking to the top of the mountain, at which time I’d whip out the ring and, crying, she’d scream, “Yes! Yes!”

But surprising Liz in any way was a tall order: our finances were closely intertwined, and marriage was a foregone conclusion for us. I’d saved almost no money, so my only hope for getting her the ring of her dreams was to take out a loan for the full amount. As soon as I’d secured it, I called A.J., my closest friend and my only friend who’d already taken the marriage plunge, to ask him where he bought the ring he gave to his wife. He put me in touch with a jeweler in Minnesota, an old friend of his parents who had designed pieces for his family. After eight years together and countless lectures about the “Four Cs,” I knew exactly what Liz wanted, and A.J.’s jeweler was able to custom-make it to my specifications. I sent the guy a check, sight unseen. The ring arrived in the mail the day before we left for Kathmandu, and it was fucking gorgeous.

After a flight halfway around the world, we met up with Biraj and some of his friends, and as if we still were back in college, the beer began to flow. Liz lasted as long as she could that first night, but eventually her eyes began to close. I walked her to the hotel, put her to bed, and went back to drink with the guys. We talked of Biraj’s upcoming wedding, and about the women in everyone else’s lives. When the conversation turned in my direction, Biraj asked when Liz and I were going to tie the knot. Without thinking, I told him that I planned on asking her to marry me when we reached the summit of our trek. There were congratulations all around and, of course, enough beer to require me to close one eye to walk a semistraight line back to the hotel.

I woke up early the next morning with one of the worst hangovers I’d ever had, but we were in a new country and we had to explore it. I thought back to the night before. What had I told the guys? Did they understand that this whole thing was supposed to be a surprise? Shit. I was picturing them congratulating Liz at the dinner party we were to attend that night, thus ruining my dream of surprising her with the ring. I knew what I had to do. Today was the day; it was not the day I wanted, but it would work.

As we walked through town, my sweating had nothing to do with the fact that it was 100 degrees. I tried to get Liz to the spot I’d randomly chosen that morning from the map we were given at our hotel, but she insisted on stopping at every shop along the way. It was so her. I kept my hands in my pockets, trying to hide the fact they were shaking uncontrollably, my right hand clutching the ugly green and white marbled cardboard box that held my promise to Liz. We finally reached Durbar Square, an historic area in the middle of Kathmandu known for its Hindu temples and wondrous architecture. It was obvious Liz was hot and tired, mostly because she kept bitching about both, and her complaining was making me even more nervous. I saw the perfect spot to sit her down and give her the ring, and I suggested we climb the steep stairs up to a temple.

“It’s way too hot and the steps are too big for my short legs,” Liz said. “Besides, there are monkeys everywhere. I’m not going near those damn things.” I pleaded with her to climb up with me, but there was no convincing her. She insisted that it was time to go back to our hotel. I started to panic.

“Liz…” I rarely began a sentence with her name, so she knew I was serious. “Can we please just sit down in the shade before heading back to the hotel!” I said this with the kind of frantic urgency usually reserved for demanding that some awful pop song playing in her car be turned off before my ears started bleeding. So she agreed.

We were now as alone as we could be in such a public place, and I had to do something to stop my hand from shaking. I pulled the box from my pocket, and without a word I handed it to Liz. She looked more surprised than I’d ever seen her, and without opening it she said, “Oh my God! You bought me earrings!”

I just shook my head. “Open it.”

She lifted the top of the box and immediately started crying. And screaming. Her high-pitched screams attracted the attention of everyone within earshot, including a man sweeping the inside of the temple who poked his head out of a door to make sure everything was okay.

I smiled, knowing that I had succeeded in making her happy, and I was thrilled that my vision had mostly been realized. She couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d told her I was a woman. I wasn’t sure this was how Liz had pictured her engagement when she dreamed of it as a little girl. We were both unshowered, wearing white T-shirts (mine with yellow stains under the arms), and looking as jet-lagged as we felt, but for us it was the most perfect imperfect moment.

We decided to get married in our hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, so that our friends and family wouldn’t have to travel to attend, and we set a date of August 13, 2005. I’m not a superstitious guy, but I suggested we choose a different date, reminding Liz that our anniversary would eventually fall on a Friday. But she said, “I checked out the
Farmer’s Almanac
, and the thirteenth of August is historically the best Saturday of the month, weather-wise.” Holy shit. I should have known. She had seriously examined the historical weather patterns to ensure perfection. She was a masterful planner, and for this wedding to be a success she had to be. We were living in Los Angeles, but for eight months leading up to the wedding, Liz was traveling each week to Connecticut for work, all while planning our wedding in a third state. To no one’s surprise, and with very little help from me, she executed it perfectly. It was elegant, beautiful, and dreamlike, just like Liz.

Surrounded by more than two hundred of our favorite people, we put a label on the love we’d felt for each other from the first moment of our second meeting. I can still see the huge smile on her face, her body wrapped in a cloud of white, and her feet enveloped, making it appear as though she were floating. She commanded the attention of everyone in the room, and not simply because she was the bride. It was her presence and the radiant beauty that flowed forth from every pore in her body that had everyone watching her every move. I can still remember the scent of Stargazer lilies permeating every piece of fabric in the place, from Liz’s dress to the linen napkin I used to dab the tears from my eyes as I thought once again that she could never be more beautiful than she was that night.

A few months after returning from our honeymoon in Greece, we sat down for dinner and a serious conversation. Liz told me that she was sick of traveling and that she wanted to find a different job that wouldn’t require so much of it. When I questioned whether or not we could afford such a change, she told me that she didn’t care if she had to take a pay cut—she wanted to be at home with me. She wanted us to be together. She loved her job, but she was willing to give it all up to be with me.

I don’t know if it was marriage, maturity, or possibly even fear, but just a month after Liz told me that she was quitting her job so we could be together, I volunteered to move to Bangalore, India, for a major six-month-long work project. It was a temporary reassignment, but if I did well, it could have led to much larger responsibilities. When I told Liz, she was thrilled—I knew she would be. She saw me taking initiative at work, and she knew what this would mean for us. Though it wasn’t ideal, delaying our time together by six months would bring us closer to fulfilling the dreams we had for the future: a house in Los Angeles and, soon after, a baby.

I left for Bangalore on a Sunday in March 2006—the day before Liz was to start her new job at Disney. It would be three months before we saw each other, which was the longest we would have been apart since we’d started dating. In May she came to Bangalore and I took a couple of weeks off so we could travel through South India before heading north to visit the Golden Triangle area and, most important to Liz, the Taj Mahal. We had the time of our lives seeing sights together that we had only dreamed of, but before we knew it we were back to the routine we knew so well: daily phone calls, nightly e-mails, and the occasional video chat.

I arrived home from India a few days before our first wedding anniversary and promised Liz that I would never leave her again. But after two months back at work, I was asked to return to India to help get a new team up and running. The assignment would mean a huge increase in pay, a salaried position with a well-defined career path, and, finally, a challenge. It was a tremendous step forward for me, but I had just promised to never, ever, leave Liz again. When I talked to her about what was going on, she cried, but mostly out of excitement. There was something in her reaction this time, a slight look of disappointment that made me think she didn’t want me to leave her, though. She had already given up so much for me, and I had just returned from six months abroad and was now preparing to leave her again, but we both knew I needed to take this job.

By December, I was back in Bangalore. Liz came out to see me toward the end of the month, and for the first time for either of us, we spent Christmas away from our families. It was an emotional visit. We had obviously missed each other terribly, but finally we were truly in a place that would make possible a home and a family and our happily-ever-after. I decided that this was what it felt like to be an adult.

When I returned to Los Angeles a few months later, Liz must have picked up on my newly achieved sense of adulthood. She told me that she wanted to buy a house before the year was over. I knew what that really meant: she wanted to be pregnant before the year was over. She didn’t have to convince me—I was ready, really ready, to become a father. I felt like together we would be fucking amazing parents. In May we found the house of our dreams, a house we couldn’t ever have had in Minnesota, complete with lemon, grapefruit, and orange trees in the yard.

And four months later we found out we were going to be parents.

Chapter 3

together during

the worst of times

is better than

being alone at

the best of times.

E
arly on in Liz’s pregnancy, there were concerns about the health of our child. She had awful morning sickness. I mean
awful
. I called it “morning, noon, and night” sickness. It was so bad that her obstetrician, Dr. Sharon Nelson, prescribed her Zofran, which is usually given to people undergoing chemotherapy to help them control the nausea. Liz was worried about taking the medication, but Dr. Nelson assured us that it wouldn’t harm the fetus. Though it did little to actually help her feel better, she took it for almost her entire pregnancy.

More often than not, the nausea led to vomiting, and with the vomiting came a significant loss of nutrients to Liz and to our baby. The nausea also ruined Liz’s appetite, so she ended up losing weight, and as a result our baby was not gaining the expected amount of weight at each gestational age. To assess the situation, Dr. Nelson suggested we see an ultrasound doctor, Dr. Greggory DeVore.

Dr. DeVore’s primary concern was the health of the fetus. That’s not to say that he didn’t care about the health of the mother, but we were warned by some parents in the area that Dr. DeVore had a bedside manner that made him seem rather cold. More than one of these people referred to him as Dr. Doom because of his proclivity to present the worst-case scenario. When we arrived at his office, I immediately felt that his waiting room was one of the most depressing places I had ever visited. On the walls there were photos of Dr. DeVore surrounded by his large brood, giving me the feeling that the photos were there to provide reassurance that the babies in his care would turn out as healthy as his own kids had—apparently, if the recommendation of your ob-gyn along with this guy’s copious certifications, published works, and awards didn’t make you believe that this guy knew what he was doing, then these photos would. It wasn’t just the decor, though. The waiting room was filled with expectant couples. Yeah, families. Unlike every trip I’d made with Liz to Dr. Nelson’s office, there were actually men in this waiting room. Maybe the seriousness of these tests convinced them that they should be there to hold their wives’ hands, but I found the presence of these men most disconcerting.

Many of these families were here because an earlier test had indicated something of concern. Others, like us, were there preemptively, hoping to rule out their worst fears. But everyone in the room had the same sullen and pale look, and it was obvious that they were wondering the exact same thing that we were: were they about to hear that their unborn child would be the one out of every thirty-three babies born with birth defects? I still remember the words from Dr. DeVore’s website that followed that shitty statistic—that these birth defects are the “leading cause of infant death and childhood disability.” We hoped this visit would rule out the unnerving possibility that our baby would wind up dead or disabled, and we saw firsthand how quickly that hope could disappear. More than once we watched as a woman, held tightly by her partner, was led through the doors in tears. We knew exactly what that meant, and each time Liz squeezed my hand a little tighter.

The door opened and a nurse popped her head through, calling Liz in. As she lay down on the exam table, I sat down next to her and grabbed her hand, aiming to give her the kind of reassurance that only the report of a completely healthy baby could provide. Within minutes, Dr. DeVore entered the room, sat down at Liz’s side, and with very few words began to perform the ultrasound.

I know that Liz had a thousand questions for the doctor; she
always
had a thousand questions, and I can’t think of a time in our twelve years together when she bit her tongue. But here, she was intimidated into silence by Dr. DeVore, and she let him do his work in the quiet. He did speak a couple of times—not to us, but to the nurse in the room, who was taking notes. Even if he had been speaking to us, there’s no way we would have understood his medical jargon. Just a few minutes later, he was pulling off his rubber gloves and walking toward the counter near the door, still without a word to us. Liz was practically jumping off the table, waiting for any sort of information.

Finally he spoke: “Liz, your amniotic fluid level is low, your baby is very underweight for the gestational age, and the umbilical cord is wrapped around its neck. You’re going to have to go on bed rest for the next three weeks, beginning by lying on your right side. When you can no longer handle lying on your right side, then switch to your left side. When you can no longer handle that, switch back to your right side. You’ll come back in three weeks so I can check you out again.”

And with that, he was out the door. Liz immediately started crying, and I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach.

“What the fuck?” I said to Liz.

The nurse tried to calm us down with an explanation of what the doctor had said so tersely. “It’s just a precaution. The low amniotic fluid is a concern, because a normal amniotic fluid level is like a shock absorber. It offers the fetus some protection from being jostled around as you carry on your normal daily activities. If you spend the next three weeks lying on your side, there’s a much lower risk of causing damage to the fetus, and the hope is that all of the calories you’d normally expend walking through your office or around your house will go directly to the baby, which will help her gain weight.”

It made perfect sense, but we were both thinking the same thing: how was Liz going to lie still for three straight weeks?

“What about the umbilical cord around her neck?” Liz asked.

“That oftentimes corrects itself,” answered the nurse.

There were a few more questions from Liz and a few more answers from the nurse, but I really wasn’t paying attention. I was too distracted wondering if our child was going to become a statistic.

And so just like that, Liz stopped working and followed the doctor’s orders. No more constant trips to public restrooms to vomit or lunch hours spent catching up on sleep in the car. Liz completed her three weeks of bed rest, complaining far less than I thought she might. I did everything I could to make her life easier when I was around, and when I had to leave the house, I only wished I could be at home with her.

When we found ourselves back in Dr. DeVore’s office, he said, “Things don’t look any better. You need to go to the hospital immediately. You’ll be there until your baby is born.” Fuck.

Liz was devastated. For some reason we had both been under the clearly mistaken impression that the three weeks of strict bed rest would be the magic cure for all of the problems Dr. DeVore had previously diagnosed. Obviously not. Then I realized our daughter wasn’t due for another nine weeks, and I had a physical reaction to my fear. I’ve never been so scared in my life—my entire body was shaking. I tried my best to suppress it in an attempt to be strong for Liz, but I was holding her hand and she could feel it.

“Immediately?” Did this mean that our baby was in some sort of grave danger? Now it was me who had a thousand questions, but I sensed that there wasn’t time for any of them; we needed to get to the hospital. Luckily, the nearest one was less than half a mile from Dr. DeVore’s office. We jumped in my car, and a few minutes later Liz was filling out admission papers. While we were checking in, a group of expectant parents and a hospital staff member walked past us on a tour of the maternity ward. We never got the chance to take that tour. Nor did we take any birthing classes. I realized then just how useless I’d be to Liz when it finally came time for her to give birth.

This new hospital setup required us both to adjust, and neither of us found it that easy. There were all sorts of medical machinery, scheduled tests, a ton of staff in and out of the room, and little comfort or privacy. We had to make our own entertainment. For the duration of her stay, Liz was required to wear leg cuffs that helped circulate the blood in her calves to keep potential blood clots at bay. She hated how hot they made her feel, and one afternoon she decided to remove them. Not long after, a nurse entered the room and noticed the cuffs dangling from the end of the bed.

“What are you doing?” she screamed like a mother who had just busted her teenage son with a stack of porn. “You must keep these on! Not wearing them can kill you! It’s happened before and it will happen again!”

Liz just nodded as the nurse put the cuffs back on her lower legs, but as soon as the door closed behind her, Liz lost it.

“Fuck her! I mean, I know she’s right, but she didn’t have to yell at me like that. How scary! God! What a bitch.”

I let out an uneasy laugh as the words came from her mouth, and then I agreed with her. “Yeah, that nurse is a bitch.” But that was the last time Liz ever removed those leg cuffs without consulting a nurse. No matter how painful the procedure, no matter how awful and uncomfortable she felt, she knew she had to endure it—and she wanted to, because her only concern was delivering a healthy baby as close to full-term as possible. She made it her job, and once it became her job, it was her singular focus. That was just Liz. Once her mind was set on something, she not only had to complete the task but she had to do it as well as she possibly could.

Even though we lived closer than a ten-minute drive to the hospital, I refused to let Liz spend even one night by herself. I was there as much as I humanly had time to be; this pregnancy was bringing us so much closer, and I just couldn’t let her do it alone. I slept on an extremely uncomfortable foldout chair, waking up at least once every hour when some random alarm would go off, or when Liz woke me up to tell me to cover my ears so she could use the bedpan. (I have a passionate, lifelong hatred for the sound of anyone peeing.) My schedule was the same every day: I left the hospital before six o’clock each morning, to avoid the daily parking charge, and headed home to take a shower and change my clothes. I spent most of my days at work thinking about our soon-to-be-delivered baby while replying to e-mails from Liz:

Watching
Titanic
. You’re sooooo lucky you’re at work.

Meatballs sound so good tonight. Can you pick some up before you come up here?

I just had the BEST mani/pedi in my hospital room, thanks to Mari.

I’m watching midget madness on
Jerry Springer
…  AAAAHH!

Good massage, onto my bath… Ah, the life of luxury I lead…

I would leave my office after eight hours of being too distracted to accomplish anything, and stop home just long enough to grab our mail, pick grapefruit from our tree for the nurses, and gather flowers from our yard for Liz. I would pick up meatballs, mint chocolate chip ice cream from Baskin Robbins or whatever she was craving at the moment, and deliver it to her hospital room. We ate together, watched shitty television, listened to the music I thought she should hear, entertained guests during visiting hours, and talked on the phone to friends and family about how we were doing.

Liz was often not up to taking visitors, sometimes because she felt nauseous, other times because she thought she didn’t look cute enough. Instead of telling them not to visit, though, she insisted that I was happy to entertain them, usually just outside of our room, in the lobby of the hospital, or in the cafeteria. When the phone calls became too much for Liz to handle and I grew unwilling to repeat the same mundane story to friends and family all over the world, I decided that I’d update my blog each evening so that everyone had a central source of information whenever they had a question or wanted to know how our baby was doing. It was a website that I’d had for years but rarely posted to—nobody but my mother checked it. Liz thought this was a good alternative to answering the endless stream of calls that flooded our evenings, but she insisted that I not post any photos of her lying in a hospital bed.

As much as I complained at the time, I was happy to be there with Liz, especially learning things about her that I didn’t yet know. For example, I never knew that her lucky number was seven, or that she considered herself Catholic even though she wasn’t religious. In retrospect, it feels strange that we had never discussed these things before, but in the hospital we had nothing to do but talk. When we were apart, we hadn’t had the luxury of discussing mundane details, as we were in different parts of the world, where conversations were either expensive or difficult to conduct due to the constraints posed by different time zones. And these simple conversations were not urgent; we were looking forward to a long life together during which such details would eventually emerge.

During our waking hours, when Liz was most worried, I put on a smile, used a confident tone, and assured her that everything would be okay as I sat next to her in her hospital bed, softly stroking her IV-free arm. “Our baby will be perfect…she has you as a mother.” That always brought a smile to her face. When she’d finally fall asleep, I’d sit on that back-ruining foldout chair and worry about how things would turn out. Yeah, she was going to have Liz as a mother, but she was going to have me as a father, and that couldn’t be good. I’d felt fairly sure of myself over the last seven months, but now that our child was closer to being born, I was far less certain that I’d be a good parent. More worrisome for our baby in the short term, however, was the unknown: her health. We had no idea what was really going on inside Liz’s womb, and this early in the pregnancy we didn’t want to know—really knowing could only come after delivery and it was too early.