I
Months after baby Jennifer died, this became my family’s answering machine message: “Hello. You’ve reached the home of Jim, Janice, Jessica, Jillian, Jamie, Jake, and angel Jennifer. Please leave a message at the beach. Thanks!”
My mother didn’t say beach, but that’s what I heard, and that’s what I remembered for years after. I was only five years old and thought my mother must have recorded it when we were vacationing by the ocean.
I grew up staring at a framed drawing of Jennifer in the living room above the piano as I practiced my scales. A scar traveled down her forehead like a road that led to the perilous cliff’s edge of her nose. There were three different images of her collaged together and drawn in pale pink, blue, and yellow colored pencil, capturing her in the colors of infancy.
I only thought of her when staring at that picture, but sometimes I felt guilty and wondered if I should be remembering her more. Where is she now? My mother told me that Jennifer went to heaven, but the answering machine told me that if I wanted to reach her, I must leave her a message at the beach.
So maybe it’s this: The beach is a sandy afterlife.
But I have lived in an apartment located ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean, so I know the beach is not heaven. Every two or three weeks, I drove with a friend to the beach with the windows down, and we read and talked while our feet flicked sand onto our too-small towels. Then our bodies became hot, our throats dried up, and we drove home as the sun set.
II
“Hello. You’ve reached the home of Jim, Janice, Jessica, Jillian, Jamie, Jake, and angel Jennifer. Please leave a message after the beep. Thanks!”
I remember the sound of the “Thanks!” My mother cut the word into two syllables like the loaf of bread Jesus halved for the Last Supper. This is my body, given for you; do this in remembrance of me. Thay-anks.
The answering machine message was in remembrance of Jennifer. I did not know this at the time. I just thought that it had good rhythm. It was the rhythm that lived inside the house whenever we weren’t there. Thay-anks. Thay-anks. The heartbeat of the house.
Jennifer was born with a hole in her heart.
How? Perhaps when a heartbroken person makes love the product is a child whose heart is full of holes. Maybe this is why parents warn their children to only have sex with someone they love.
This theory couldn’t be true for Jennifer, however, because my parents say they were very much in love. After hearing about the divorce of a friend’s parents when I was twelve, I asked my mother if she and my father would ever break up. “No,” she said. “I promise. You never have to worry about that.”
But maybe my parents slipped up once, in 1991, while I was a baby still sleeping in their room. Maybe Jennifer’s hole was the reason my mother promised to never again fall out of love.
III
My mother self-published a memoir about Jennifer’s life and death titled God Was Thinking. Every chapter of her book opens with a bible verse. Every chapter has five or six additional verses inside. I want to tell her this is excessive, but I won’t because she would worry about the metaphorical hole in my heart.
My mother has been invited as a guest speaker to women’s retreats so that she may give hope to other mothers and teach about the goodness that comes from suffering. She became more faithful after her daughter’s death. Before Jennifer was born, my mother went to church because she didn’t want to break the moral rules handed down from her parents. After Jennifer, she went to church because she had fallen in love with a healing savior. She had been healed. Seven years after her death, my parents became missionaries.
Before I moved near the beach, I lived with my parents for one year. It can be hard to live with a guest speaker who is not a guest. At any time, wisdom could spout, even if you’re cooking spaghetti or running to your bedroom in a bath towel.
My relationship with God feels a lot like memory loss, like how I often forget that Jennifer was alive for four and a half months. When I remember her, I remember only that she died.
This is the life I want to remember for her: A continual holding throughout the day. A stream of hugs. A constant hand on the back, on the neck, on the head as she’s settled down to sleep. An incessant passing between palms like a warm basket of rolls handed around the dinner table. A death before knowing what death is.
My first thought is to write that I am jealous of her, but how can I say that of my dead sister? Maybe I should ask my mother?
My mother, who says she is not scared of death, would say: “It makes sense to be jealous of someone in heaven because they’re with God.”
My mother would never say: “Jennifer could be heard crying from the waiting room of the hospital as a doctor tried to take her blood for testing. The doctor tried over and over, and I called for him to stop but the needle kept going in and taking nothing out. I cried and cried as I heard her scream.”
IV
After finding out that Jennifer—who was only an ultrasound image—had Downs Syndrome, my mother couldn’t decide whether to keep the baby. Her mother wanted her to have the abortion. My father’s mother wanted her to have the abortion. Her father was silent. My mother couldn’t decide. She called friends for advice. My father wanted her to have the baby, but he was letting my mother make the call.
She made an appointment for an abortion. My father stayed in the waiting room, wondering if he would feel the moment when the piece of himself died. My mother walked up the stairs and stepped in the threshold of the surgical room. “I saw sunlight coming through the window,” she tells me on the phone. “It’s really hard to explain. It’s really amazing. It came at the same time as seeing clearly what I was getting ready to do. I was so unsure, but then I was so sure.”
She turned around and left the hospital with my father. They strode quickly back to the car. They would have this baby. They went out to lunch. They went to the mall, and everything was decorated for Christmas. They had forgotten about Christmas.
Jennifer was born May 3rd and lived until September 12th. They experienced the strongest of summer loves.
V
“Hello. You’ve reached the home of Jim, Janice, Jessica, Jillian, Jamie, Jake, and angel Jennifer. Please leave a message at the beep. Thanks!”
I’ve grown into a thankful person. I make lists in my journals. I mutter thanks out loud as I walk.
Thay-anks for the sky, I whisper. Thay-anks for this day, Lord, I used to pray every night in my head, the same words. It was a habit I couldn’t quit.
Thay-anks says my mother every time she sits down to eat at the table with my father. Thay-anks she says even with a daughter marooned on the shores of some distant beach.
She has found Jennifer, I think, with God. Eventually the bread basket of Jennifer’s body was passed to Jesus at the head of the dinner table and was never returned. Now my mother must keep a good relationship with her daughter’s eternal caretaker or the connection between them may be lost, drowned forever in the ocean that separates mother from daughter, land from land.
VI
When I was twenty-two, I closed myself into my grandparents’ spare bedroom, leaving the family to bicker downstairs. It was a room older than my mother, and wiser than I was. People were always staying there. I lived there for a summer. I had memories stored in the closets.
I didn’t want to go back downstairs, so I perused the books in the tiny bookshelf sitting on the floor by the left side of the bed. I noticed The Grief Recovery Handbook and pulled it out. I wondered what my grandparents had to grieve. A letter was nestled in the pages. I slipped the letter from the envelope.
“Dear Martha,” it read. “I’m so sorry to hear about the death of your granddaughter.”
I remembered Jennifer again.
I didn’t check with whom my grandmother was corresponding. I had already intruded enough. But it had to be someone she didn’t know, or perhaps an acquaintance giving formal advice (who to talk to, what scriptures to read) about how to grieve such a loss. It could have been the author of the book.
My grandmother never spoke about Jennifer. There were no pictures of her in the house. She wanted my mother, her daughter, to have the abortion.
I slipped the letter back into its envelope and put the envelope back inside the book and put the book back on the little shelf.
VII
“Hello. You’ve reached the home of Jim, Janice, Jessica…”
Jessica married an Englishman. Jessica, the social worker, who is the most thoughtful of my parents’ children, who buys birthday presents for our grandfather and ships them across the Atlantic, who orders flowers to be delivered to our mother on Mother’s Day. Many years ago, Jessica told me she’d been thinking about maybe trying for a baby. “What do you want to name your children?” I asked her, both of us lounging on the couch.
“If it’s a boy,” she said, “Noah. And Jennifer if it’s a girl.”
Jessica was two years older than me, which meant that she was four when Jennifer was alive. I wondered if she could picture Jennifer’s face or if she, like me, only had photographs. There were pictures of Jessica holding me as a baby. There were pictures of her holding Jennifer. Jessica took care of people in a way I couldn’t take care of people. She was better at remembering them, and better at remembering God. I wondered, again, if to find Jennifer was to find God— after all, they were supposedly living together, their toothbrushes by the same sink.
The name Jennifer means “fair one,” however its Celtic meaning is “white wave.”
But Jennifer cannot be found in the waves. She was not scattered there, but in the mountains. And a tree was planted outside my parents’ church in her memory. The tree has since died, although it had a much longer life than the memorialized. A member of the congregation carved a bowl, big enough to hold half a dozen apples, out of the tree’s wood that now sits in my parents’ dining room, empty.
VIII
Here is a sad truth: I do not have a problem remembering Christmas.
When I was twelve, my family spent Christmas in Mexico. We climbed the pyramids in Chichen Itza. I had never been so hot. We ran to patches of shade like cats chasing yarn. We spent seven hours on a tour bus. At the end of the day, we returned to our cruise ship. It sat like a beached whale that had swallowed a tangle of lights.
I cried into my mother’s shoulder. “This wasn’t Christmas at all,” I said. “Christmas isn’t supposed to be so hot.”
My khaki skort was creased from sitting on the tour bus all day. “It’s like it never even happened,” I said.
But Christmas did happen; I didn’t see it because there was no snow or strings of Christmas lights. I couldn’t recognize Christmas without giant glowing signs to guide my mind back to the season, and thus to Christ—someone’s child who also died too young.
In December of 1991, my mother and father fled the hospital after my mother fled from the abortion. Feeling like two electric bulbs, they walked around the local mall, their eyes wet and swelling with lights and love. Wreaths hung against the walls like frames without mirrors, subverting vanity. Christmas trees sat in front of department stores, pointing up. After two weeks of trying to decide whether to keep the baby, they had forgotten about Christmas. But now everything was about to happen. For unto us, a child is born.
VIIII
One morning, a few months after I moved to the town by the beach, I woke up at my aunt and uncle’s beach house early to try and catch the sunrise. This was one of the benefits of Southern beach towns. I put on sweatpants and flip flops and tiptoed down the stairs. When I opened the front door, I saw enormous grey clouds in every direction. I walked to the beach anyway, full of hope, thinking that the experience might make me feel God like I hadn’t felt them since my parents’ missionary years. God is like gurgling joy in the back of my throat. God is like a warm reassurance of life in my chest that sits right beneath my heart like a pillow.
I climbed into the lifeguard’s chair. Rain flecks flew like tiny bugs. The grey sky hadn’t changed. I knew the sun had to be there, but it was swaddled in clouds.
