The next morning, at the hospital, it was as if Nate was supercharged. When he saw me, he lit up and gave me a big hug and kiss, and when I said, “Oh, Nate, you’re so sweet!” he replied, “Oh, Mommy! That’s just love!”
“I was so worried about you,” I told him, and he said, “But Mommy, I was so worried about you, too! And you know what? I just love you, all the time. I’m just always going to love you!”
He was fine, but I was not. Because I’d thought all of that was gone. When he was lying there on the couch seizing and turning blue, I thought all of that—all of that personality, the sweet brilliance of a kid who could happily and freely reassure me that he was just always going to love me—I’d thought that was gone forever. And even once I knew it wasn’t, I was still somehow perpetually stuck in that awful moment when I was on the phone with 911 and he was dying and I was so sure that my own death was the only way I would be able to survive it.
He was fine, but Emi and I were not. I tried to cope by staying in motion, so as to keep at bay the impulse of my mind to replay those endless scenes of my running around the corner, finding him slumped against the wall, his face turning lifeless and gray. In every small moment of rest, I would relive it, and so I tried to remain restless, doing what I could to keep the flood at bay. Emi coped by allowing the flood. “Let’s talk about how Nate died,” she would say, while coloring or getting ready for bed, and this was the last thing I wanted to talk about, the thing I was endlessly trying to prevent my mind from chattering at me about. And yet I knew this was her way of processing, to create a narrative to understand the trauma, and thus tame it. I suggested, “How about we think of it like a book, a very long book that we can’t read all at once because it’s just too long to read at bedtime, and we read a chapter at a time together and then put it away?” And she agreed. And so each night, we’d lie there in the dark, and she’d narrate the story of how Nate died but didn’t die, and I would will my body to be calm next to her, embracing her, even as my heart hammered in my chest and every nerve ending I had seemed to scream He’s dead, he’s dead, you have killed him.
The first weekend after the accident, Emi requested a “Mommy-Emi” weekend, so that we could spend time together, just us. I wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea, for us to be alone—after all, we had experienced Nate’s accident alone, just the two of us. And yet her impulse to create a different, more positive bonding experience for us was a good one. Gil took Nate to his parents, and Emi made a list of all the things she thought we should do: bubble baths, s’mores, going to the shoe store to look for fancy shoes, going to a “grown-up” yoga class, playing dress-up, doing art projects, playing beauty parlor, watching movies and eating popcorn, sleeping in my bed together. I marveled at her natural impulse toward healing, this restorative, remarkable combination of ordinary and extraordinary things.
It was a good weekend for both of us. At the yoga class, which she managed to keep up with, and which I managed to survive without a panic attack during the quiet moments, she accepted the compliments of the teacher with grace, and when a fellow class-goer we knew asked her “How is your little brother?”—unaware of what had happened, or what a loaded question that might be—Emi responded, “He’s fine, thanks,” with a smile. But these things, too, were fragile: On the way home from the shoe-shopping portion of our weekend together, she tripped and fell, ripping her tights and skinning her knee, and I sat with her on the sidewalk, crying along with her as she sobbed and shook in my arms, the grief of everything finally pouring out.
The further we moved away from the event, the more things shifted in my memory, in much the same way Emi’s narrative changed and shifted as she retold it to me and to others. Lying in bed together in the dark those nights as she read a chapter at a time from the Big Book of Nate Almost Dying, it wasn’t that she was lying or confabulating; it really felt to her as though she saw sparks shoot out of Nate’s body, it really felt to her as though she saw a lightning bolt descend from the ceiling and cause him to fade away, even though of course he never dissolved into thin air; even though, like me, she never saw the actual incident, only the second or so afterward. I couldn’t argue with the validity of her interpretations. I couldn’t say that any of it wasn’t true. What about me and my own memory? What is more important or true, the memory of clumsily stabbing at the phone, trying and failing to dial 911? The memory of realizing he was gray and not breathing?
