Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley Page A
Authors: Kara Stanley
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possible near-future events is terrible to contemplate, but what is worse are the past memories that descend with a clarity and closeness that is devastating:
Simon, returning home from work one evening when Eli is about seven. He is sad. On the road home, he saw a mama duck get clipped by a car, her ducklings scattering as she hobbled across the road. He jumped out of the car and tried to flag down an oncoming vehicle, a green Sundance full of teenagers, but they ignored him and hit the duck. Si said he could hear, could feel, the heavy death sound as she hit the asphalt. He searched for the ducklings that had dispersed into the bushes but couldn’t find a single one.
Simon, at sixteen, calling to tell me he has tried pot and my prissy response that he shouldn’t bother to meet me before the school dance, seeing as our lives are moving in such obviously different directions. Then the sense of relief three hours later when he arrives at the high school—the world has suddenly turned so boring without him—that I run across the gym and jump into his arms, a dance move we have perfected during long lunch hours at his house.
Simon, at twenty-one, two days after Eli is born. He has left to go do laundry at his aunt’s house and, because of a faulty dryer and the distraction of an empty house in which he can practice guitar for his upcoming exams, is away for much longer than he intended. I am outraged at being left alone, a fatigued and nervous first-time mother. The following day, anger dissipated, I snap a picture of Simon and Eli: Simon, asleep on the yellow crow’s-nest chair, Eli, glowworm-wrapped and snuggled so securely in the expanse of his father’s broad chest.
Simon and Eli, only last Saturday, up at Connor Park, Simon helping Eli to perfect a set play penalty kick, the soccer ball curving neatly under the crossbar.
Waking, that first time, with Simon in my bed. “Your legs are gorgeous,” I say. “I never noticed before.”
I WAS SEVEN when my father died, and I have always attributed my sense of loss and aloneness to that early childhood experience of death. In
On Keeping a Notebook,
Joan Didion writes that “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” a passage I recognized myself in when I read it in my early twenties. It is part of my process of magical thinking that I now see that all my earlier presentiments of loss were not, as I had previously thought, due to my father’s death or a writerly quirk of my nature. Rather, the strange sense of loss I felt had always been leading toward this moment. Not as a preparation for it, but because of it. Simon’s death, or his loss of meaningful consciousness, is a potential loss that is so big, I have, it seems, already spent my whole life grieving it.
Beau. Dear Beau. You know you are the music while the music lasts. Please let the music last. Please.
{ 13 }
SLEEPING BEAUTY
----
JULY 27, DAY 6
LEGS, SHMEGS,” I say to Emily as we lean against the nursing station, waiting outside Simon’s room until the on-duty nurse finishes her routine assessment of his status. “Just give us his brain back.”
“Oh, Stan.” She reaches for my forearm. “I love you.”
It has been a tough night. Emily lost her wedding ring, an event that would be terrible in any circumstance but that, in our current context, contributes dramatically to the sense that the entire world is unraveling around us. She correctly identified the hand-washing station at the doors of the ICU , where we stop upon every entry and exit to rigorously scrub fingers, palms, and wrists, as the last place of contact. As Emily scoured the floor and shelves around the sink, the sympathetic overnight nurse methodically uncrumpled every scrap of discarded paper towel from the emptied wastebasket and managed to locate Emily’s ring in one
Simon, returning home from work one evening when Eli is about seven. He is sad. On the road home, he saw a mama duck get clipped by a car, her ducklings scattering as she hobbled across the road. He jumped out of the car and tried to flag down an oncoming vehicle, a green Sundance full of teenagers, but they ignored him and hit the duck. Si said he could hear, could feel, the heavy death sound as she hit the asphalt. He searched for the ducklings that had dispersed into the bushes but couldn’t find a single one.
Simon, at sixteen, calling to tell me he has tried pot and my prissy response that he shouldn’t bother to meet me before the school dance, seeing as our lives are moving in such obviously different directions. Then the sense of relief three hours later when he arrives at the high school—the world has suddenly turned so boring without him—that I run across the gym and jump into his arms, a dance move we have perfected during long lunch hours at his house.
Simon, at twenty-one, two days after Eli is born. He has left to go do laundry at his aunt’s house and, because of a faulty dryer and the distraction of an empty house in which he can practice guitar for his upcoming exams, is away for much longer than he intended. I am outraged at being left alone, a fatigued and nervous first-time mother. The following day, anger dissipated, I snap a picture of Simon and Eli: Simon, asleep on the yellow crow’s-nest chair, Eli, glowworm-wrapped and snuggled so securely in the expanse of his father’s broad chest.
Simon and Eli, only last Saturday, up at Connor Park, Simon helping Eli to perfect a set play penalty kick, the soccer ball curving neatly under the crossbar.
Waking, that first time, with Simon in my bed. “Your legs are gorgeous,” I say. “I never noticed before.”
I WAS SEVEN when my father died, and I have always attributed my sense of loss and aloneness to that early childhood experience of death. In
On Keeping a Notebook,
Joan Didion writes that “keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss,” a passage I recognized myself in when I read it in my early twenties. It is part of my process of magical thinking that I now see that all my earlier presentiments of loss were not, as I had previously thought, due to my father’s death or a writerly quirk of my nature. Rather, the strange sense of loss I felt had always been leading toward this moment. Not as a preparation for it, but because of it. Simon’s death, or his loss of meaningful consciousness, is a potential loss that is so big, I have, it seems, already spent my whole life grieving it.
Beau. Dear Beau. You know you are the music while the music lasts. Please let the music last. Please.
{ 13 }
SLEEPING BEAUTY
----
JULY 27, DAY 6
LEGS, SHMEGS,” I say to Emily as we lean against the nursing station, waiting outside Simon’s room until the on-duty nurse finishes her routine assessment of his status. “Just give us his brain back.”
“Oh, Stan.” She reaches for my forearm. “I love you.”
It has been a tough night. Emily lost her wedding ring, an event that would be terrible in any circumstance but that, in our current context, contributes dramatically to the sense that the entire world is unraveling around us. She correctly identified the hand-washing station at the doors of the ICU , where we stop upon every entry and exit to rigorously scrub fingers, palms, and wrists, as the last place of contact. As Emily scoured the floor and shelves around the sink, the sympathetic overnight nurse methodically uncrumpled every scrap of discarded paper towel from the emptied wastebasket and managed to locate Emily’s ring in one
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