I sit on the couch and absorb all of the you that’s in front of me. It’s pushing a lot of buttons. I finally take a good, deep breath, and the tears pour out. I try to muffle them, so Iris doesn’t get upset, but I can’t. Mike comes behind me and hugs my neck. Iris comes over and lays her head on my legs, looks in my eyes and grins. She gives me a pat-pat-pat.
I say, “Remember what I told you about when your friends are sad? What do you say when your friend is sad?”
She says, “You need hug?”
I say, “Yes, baby, I need hug.” And she does.
I keep saying it, but it’s true again and again: it’s hard to wallow in misery when this creature is staring back at me. This is why I kept sending you videos and photos of her and why you kept asking for videos and photos of her. She is the best medicine. I feel less nauseous after staring into my daughter’s eyes and finally breathing into the place that hurts, and I’m able to move on with my day. I do have one more hysterical, explosive, crying fit once I get to work, which hasn’t happened in a while, but it is what it is. I’m dreading the end of this week. We all are.
Later that evening, Iris’s speech therapist sends us an email with the results of the speech evaluation we did earlier that week. It was the first time Iris actually performed the test herself. On previous occasions, Mike and I would answer a bunch of questions and the therapist would use them to score her progress. According to the report, Iris scored higher than 90 percent of kids her age. At two years old, she is “performing similarly to a three-year-old,” which means she’s on a three-year-old level of a child with typical hearing.
I think back to all those initial questions that plagued me when she was first born:
Will her voice be affected? No.
Can she hear birds chirping with hearing aids? Whispering? Yes.
Concerts, music classes, dance classes, movie theaters, airplanes? She does it all.
Can she hear us if we call for her from the other room? Yes.
Do we have to be looking at her when we talk? No. She has supersonic hearing.
Daycare with hearing kids or special school? She’s in daycare with all hearing kids.
Mainstream education? Yep, headed that direction.
What can she hear now? Everything. She can hear everything. Calm the fuck down.
I think about how devastated I was when you came home a few weeks after she was born, how you said it was the most depressed you’d ever seen me. I think about how worried I was about her future—that she would fall behind, that she would suffer, that all of it would be so hard. I think about how you told me to stop “future-tripping,” that Iris would be just fine—better than fine. She was just a chill baby. I was the one who was fucked-up about it. Not her. I want to go back in time and talk to myself and tell that terrified new mom that everything is going to be okay. I want to tell her, “Your child is a wonder. That’s all you need to know.”
I celebrate my child’s success, and I yearn to share it with you.
• • •
I often wonder when all of this will end, but there is no end to grief. There’s only navigating the way to a new normal. The old normal consisted of us being a family of four, then a family of five, then a family of six. In the old normal, we texted each other constantly about Iris, about girls, about television shows. We told each other secrets and compared notes on Mom and Dad. In the old normal, we constantly worried about whether you were sober, using, alive or dead, and you constantly reassured us that you had it under control.
On February 19, 2015, you died of a drug overdose. You were thirty years old. You were talented. You were successful. You were loved.
Time is now measured before and after that day.
I remember thinking at the time that I would never feel joy again. I was wrong. I often smile without guilt or hesitation. I play hide and seek. I make small talk, paint portraits, sing songs, buy groceries and cook things with them. I co-parent a flock of baby dolls and pick fresh strawberries with my toddler. I’ve shared a bottle of wine with friends. I directed a couple of plays. I survived being stranded outside of a gas station ’til 4:00 a.m. after a flash flood. I worked to get a bill passed in the Texas Legislature that didn’t pass because Texas is the worst, but the point is, I tried.
Sometimes we even eat pizza and dance in the living room to reggae music and Annie Lennox. I never expected to dance in the living room again. I still post too many pictures of Iris on the internet, but my God, she is just the funniest little person. She makes me laugh a hundred times a day, a thousand times a week, a million times a month. And what better way to honor you than to laugh? So, I’m going to continue doing that. And as time passes—as it inevitably does—the good days will outnumber the bad.
Now I find you in places I never looked before. Like today, I saw multiple clouds in the sky shaped like fish and knew it
