Signs of Life Read online

  While this is a true story, some names and details have been changed to protect the identity of those who appear in the pages.

  Copyright © 2011 by Natalie Taylor

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from the book THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  “Picnic, Lightning” from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71751-1

  Cover design by Laura Duffy

  Front cover image: Hiroshi Higuchi/Getty Images

  v3.1

  For the two loves of my life, Josh and Kai

  acknowledgments

  Thank you Sean Perrone and Aaron Kaplan for being the magical link from lifelong dream to real life. Howie Sanders, thank you so much for reading this and handing it to the right person.

  Christy Fletcher, thank you for taking me on and sticking with me, despite the fact that I had zero knowledge in all things publishing.

  Christine Pride, my amazing editor, the best teammate in the world, thank you for helping me create the best book possible and for always appreciating the crazy thoughts in my head.

  Two Roads Books, our U.K. publisher, thank you so much for adopting Signs of Life.

  A special thank-you to my grandmother Fran “Narfy” Stevenson for her last-minute copyedits. Narf, you’re a real pro.

  Nancy and Chip, thanks for joining the Family—no questions asked.

  There are many, many other people in this world who were there for me after the death of my husband, Josh Taylor. Shortly after June 17, 2007, I fully believed my life was over. I would like to say thank you, a million times over, to those who worked ceaselessly to convince me that it wasn’t. Turns out you were right.

  More specifically, I would like to thank the following people for helping me put my life back together. This book happened only because of the love and support from the people around me.

  Thank you students of Berkley High School. Like my own son, you drive me crazy and give me a reason to live. I love you all. Please read the books we give you.

  Thank you to the staff of Berkley High School for turning a workplace into a community and for providing me with the secret ingredient of parenthood sanity: intellectual, adult conversation.

  Thank you to my friends for rescuing me from the mess of bathrobe and sweatpants.

  Thank you Chris Mathews for being Chris Mathews. If it weren’t for you, this book and my life would be horribly boring.

  Thank you Ads, Ells, Moo, Dubs, and Hales for being my life coaches in how to be a mentally, physically, and emotionally strong person. I just watch what you guys do and then try to imitate it. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that. Never in a million years would I have the guts to write this if it hadn’t been for the other Sztykiel children (plus two) cheering me on.

  Thank you Deedee, Ashley, and Chris. I love you. I am so happy I married you. Please don’t hate me.

  Krystyna and George Sztykiel, better known as Grammy and Grampy, thank you for teaching us that there is one code to live by in life: take care of your family.

  Finally, my parents, Lynn and Vito. Ever since we were little you told us we were strong enough, talented enough, and smart enough to do whatever we wanted and make every ambition come true. Thank you for always believing in your children. It is your best quality. Your love and support is the foundation of everything in my life. Because of you, I have never felt alone.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  June and July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  Epilogue

  author’s note

  While this is a true story, the names of all of my students and the individuals who participated in the single mothers’ group and the grief group have been changed to protect their identities.

  This memoir is a compilation of journal entries that I wrote following my husband’s death. It is not a reflection that was written after time passed, it is what was in my brain at that moment. While this book has been edited in the appropriate respects, the experiences and personal thoughts have remained the same since the days they were originally typed into my computer, which is not to say I am proud of all the things I say and do, but it is to say that it is real to the person I was at that time, and, for better or worse, I am still very much the same neurotic, over-analytical nut-job you are about to meet.

  prologue

  mathews walks in the door. It is somewhere in the middle of the night. I wake up. “Your phone is off.” He says something about trying to call me, that people have been trying to call me. He says something about Josh. Josh has been in an accident. No big deal, I think to myself. Let’s just go home. I picture a broken arm. I have a flash of seeing him in a hospital bed annoyed at an injury. Chris Mathews is one of my good friends—he’s Josh’s best friend. Mathews and I are in Florida visiting my sister Moo and her husband, David. Josh, my husband, couldn’t come because of work, so he’s back in Michigan. I just hung up with him right before I lay down. He was out Carveboarding with our friend Nate. We just got to Miami this morning, but I don’t care about leaving early—I had reservations about leaving Josh anyway.

  But there is something in Mathews’s voice that isn’t right. In moments, it registers. I know it’s more than a broken arm. Josh hit his head, he tells me. The back of his head. I talk to Nate. I ask if he was bleeding. He says yes. I picture a cut on his forehead. “Where?” I ask. “His mouth.”

  I lie in Moo’s bed. All of the lights are off. Mathews is in the front of the house somewhere. Every now and then my left leg starts to shake uncontrollably. I go to the bathroom. I throw up a little. I go back and start shaking again. I go to the bathroom and have diarrhea. I go back and my leg starts shaking again. I put clothes back into my suitcase. I go to the bathroom again. No puke, no diarrhea. Nothing.

  Moo comes in; there are a few frantic phone calls back and forth. No one gets on the phone with me. Mom and Dad talk to Moo. Moo relays words. I know. I know. No one says it, but I know.

  june and july

  Show me how to do like you. Show me how to do it.

  —“DO LIKE YOU” BY STEVIE WONDER, EPIGRAPH FROM ALICE WALKER, THE COLOR PURPLE

  we leave for the airport. I have no idea what time it is. I am on the phone with a doctor. He asks me if Josh’s heart stops, do I want to resuscitate him. I ask questions. I do not cry. He says something about severe brain damage, severe. I say no, do not resuscitate him. We hang up.

  I call my mom.

  “The dogs,” I say. “Can someone go get the dogs?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  We are on the plane. It is light out. We are sitting on the runway because the plane doesn’t have any electricity or something. Moo i
s crying. I am not. There is a man standing at the front of the plane talking on a phone with his hand on his hip. He has no idea.

  We are in the air. I get up to go to the bathroom again. I walk back to my seat. A man says to me, “You and your sister seem upset.”

  “My husband was in an accident. He’s suffered a severe injury to his head.” Just like that. I say it just like that. I am not crying.

  “Your husband? The father of your baby?” His eyes drop briefly to my stomach. My hand is over my stomach. I am five months pregnant.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, these days, I mean, what doctors can do. You shouldn’t lose hope.”

  “Thanks.” I sit back down.

  I walk through the terminal. My family is there. They hug me. Adam, my older brother, hugs me and I feel like he is acting. I feel like he is acting like a sad person. He is doing a really good imitation of a sad person. Haley, my little sister, stares at me with her big blue eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. No one really says anything.

  We have a long drive. I sit in the middle with a pillow over my stomach. I am so tired. My dad drives. My mom sits in the back next to me and strokes my hair.

  “Try to sleep,” she says.

  We arrive at the hospital. We take an elevator to the third floor. The elevator opens and dozens of eyes fall on us. I walk to his room. His aunt is in the hallway outside his room. She looks at me, shaking, frantic, her chest heaving. I walk in. Everyone leaves except Uncle Alex. I look at Josh. He has a scrape on the upper left-hand side of his forehead and there is stubble all around his face. He hadn’t shaved since I left yesterday morning. I will remember that hair, those little buds of facial hair on his strong jaw, for the rest of my life.

  “Uncle Alex,” I say. “Can you tell me,” I stop. “I don’t know anything.” I start to cry. Uncle Alex is a doctor. He actually delivered me and he delivered Josh. We thought this was such a testament to the star-aligned quality of our relationship. Now Uncle Alex is standing over Josh’s pale, still body explaining to his pregnant wife how he died. But I am happy it’s only Uncle Alex in the room. Happy? What does that word even mean now?

  Uncle Alex cries. “He fell backward and hit his head. It crushed his skull into the back of his brain. He died in less than three minutes.”

  Last night, right before I went to bed, Josh went out Carveboarding. A Carveboard is a modified skateboard. It rocks side to side and imitates the motion of a surfboard. Carveboards are used on pavement embankments. Josh was not wearing a helmet at the time of the accident. He never wore a helmet.

  Uncle Alex leaves. I cry. I cry relentlessly. My whole body shakes. I don’t touch him. I don’t hold his hand. I do not want to feel him cold.

  “I’m not mad at you,” I say. “I’m not mad at you and I will take care of our son.” Those are the two things I say to him. “I’m not mad at you. I will never be mad at you. And I will take care of our son.”

  I am in the waiting area. Adam and Moo are trying to get me to eat. I haven’t eaten for hours. I can’t eat. I can’t eat anything. I drink some water. Ads buys a granola bar and breaks it off into little pieces. He hands me one small piece of the granola bar.

  “Just this little bite, Nat,” he says. I eat it. He lets a few minutes go by and hands me another one.

  “Here, Nat. A little more.”

  There are a lot of people at the hospital. People hug and cry and stare out the window with red, swollen faces. A little after three o’clock in the afternoon the doctor comes out. Everyone sits together. I sit next to Deedee, Josh’s mom, and hold her hand. Ashley, Josh’s little sister, sits on the floor in front of her mom. The doctor says something about the injury, the trauma to the head, how they had to wait so many hours and examine it again, just to be sure. And then he says that Josh Taylor was pronounced dead at 3:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 17, 2007. He was twenty-seven years old. It is Father’s Day.

  The next morning I wake up early. I walk around my parents’ house. I sit on the couch in the family room. I get up. I try to pee. I feel like I have to pee, but I don’t. I lie back down. I get back up. I try to pee again. I look at the clock. Is it too early to go up to my parents’ room? Yes. I walk around the house some more. I sit. I stand. I open the fridge. I shut it. I lie back down. I get up. I turn on the TV. I turn it off. Finally. I go up into my parents’ room and get into their bed. I start to cry. They cry too. My mom rubs my back. A few minutes later, I get up again.

  “Where are you going?” my mom asks.

  “I don’t know.” I say.

  Ads wakes up.

  “Nat. Breakfast?”

  “Sure.”

  “Eggs?”

  “Sure.”

  “Omelet?”

  “Sure.”

  He cooks. I lie on the couch.

  “Nat, what do you need? Coffee? You want to read the paper? You want to put in a movie?”

  “I don’t know, Ads. I don’t know.”

  • • •

  Chris, Josh’s little brother by less than one year, got on a plane this morning. He lives in Denver, but he was fishing in Estes Park, about twenty miles outside of Denver. The park ranger had to go and find him and tell him. He had to drive back, get a ticket. It was almost a full day before he knew anything. I try to call him but it goes straight to voice mail. I don’t leave a message. What the hell would I say?

  Deedee stays at the hospital all night. All of Josh’s organs are in perfect working order. We decide to donate as many as possible. This process will take a few days, she explains to me over the phone. Then she says, “You understand why I need to be here, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I do. And you understand why I can’t be there, right?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  We hang up.

  People come over. Tons of people. All my friends are here. Katie Battersby and Jen, whom I’ve known since the sixth grade, lie on the floor with me. Terrah, my friend from college, calls all of our friends from out of town. Everyone keeps asking, “Nat, do you need anything? Water? Food? A back rub? A bath?” I shake my head.

  I fall asleep on the carpeting in my parents’ family room. I wake up, and almost everyone is gone. I go to bed on the futon in my old room. My friend Maggie sleeps with me. Maggie was Josh’s close friend growing up, but she and I became close once Josh and I got married. We used to joke that Josh had two wives. She was always telling him what to do, pointing her finger at him. “Josh, I don’t mean to preclude you from eating these cupcakes,” I heard her tell him last weekend, “but we do need to wait until—” and then he stuck his finger right in the icing. She got all flustered. He gave her the typical, “Oh, Margaret, calm down.” She uses words like preclude. She is the only person I know who can conjugate swim, swam, swum correctly in a conversation. Now she hardly says anything. What do we have to talk about?

  The next day my mom takes a small white package from the fridge.

  “I bought these burgers on Saturday. I was going to cook them for dinner on Sunday night.” She stares at the white label on the package.

  She says, “It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  Later that night I hear the front door of my parents’ house open. Chris walks in the door. There is a small group of people around him. He has his blue visor pulled over his eyes a little. Finally, he gets to me. I hug him. We both start to cry. We hug for a long time. I cry into his shoulder. We don’t say anything to each other.

  Days pass. Josh donates seven organs. We meet with the people at the funeral home. They call us several times a day. We have to answer all sorts of questions about flowers and caskets and times and we have to pick out pictures. Pictures we just took. Someone tells me I have to go to my house to pick out clothes for Josh. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.

  But Moo and I get in the car. We stop at the light at Fourteen Mile and Woodward, one block away from my house. I start to cry hysterically.

  “I’m never going to be happy again.” I say this o
ver and over. My voice is high. There are tears and snot all over my hands and shirt.

  “I’m never going to be as happy as I was.”

  “Don’t say that,” Moo says. She looks at me. She cries too.

  “Don’t say that. Josh would hate to hear you say that.”

  I keep crying.

  I open the door to my house. I walk through the hallway. I try not to look at any of the pictures. I walk into our bedroom. His T-shirts. His shoes. Our bed. His boxer shorts. His dirty laundry. His balled-up socks. His hanging shirts. His pillows. His alarm clock. His carry-out from Friday night in the fridge. His razor in the shower. Everything. Every single thing in the house indicates that two people live here. That one should be back any minute now. I am hysterical. Moo, Deedee, and Ashley start pulling out T-shirts. We pick out clothes for him.

  We get to the funeral home in the middle of the afternoon for the first viewing. The funeral home is packed with people. I am wearing a black dress from Banana Republic. That morning I went to Banana Republic with Maggie, Battersby, Terrah, Jen, and Lauren Gentry and Angela Anagnost—my college friends. Just over a year ago, they were all my bridesmaids. Today they helped me pick out an outfit for my husband’s funeral. They all walked around me, my secret service, making sure I didn’t have to carry anything or drive or walk too far without a snack or something to drink. I bought two dresses. I spent over three hundred dollars on two dresses.

  At the viewing, people stand in small circles. They hug me and stare at me.

  “Thank you for coming,” I say. People say things like “You’re going to be okay.” “You’re strong.”

  I try not to cry at all in front of anyone at the funeral home. I say nice, comforting things to other people.