Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,147

going on in there is draining him. Finally he looks up.

“We talked about Gabe,” he says quietly. And then he starts crying, a guttural wail, raw and wild, and I recognize it instantly. It’s the sound I heard in the ER back in medical school from the parents of the drowned toddler. It’s a love song to his beloved son.

I have a flash to another ER, on the night when my son was a year old and he had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital after he spiked a fever of 104 and began seizing. By the time the paramedics arrived at my house, his body was limp, his eyes closed, and he was unresponsive to my voice. As I sit with John, I feel again in my body the terror of seeing my son lifeless, me on the gurney with him on my torso, the EMTs flanking us, the sirens a surreal soundtrack. I hear the sound of him howling for me as they strapped him into the x-ray contraption, forcing him to be still, his eyes open now, terrified, beseeching me to hold him as he squirmed violently to reach me. His screams, in their intensity, sounded much like John’s wail now. Somewhere in the hospital’s hallway, I remember seeing what looked like an unconscious child—or a dead one—being wheeled by. This could be us, I thought at that moment. This could be us by the morning. We could be leaving here like this too.

But it wasn’t us. I got to go home with my beautiful boy.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” John is saying through his tears, and I don’t know if he’s apologizing to Gabe or Margo or his mother—or to me, for his outburst.

All of the above, he says. But mostly, he’s sorry that he can’t remember. He wanted to block out the unfathomable—the accident, the hospital, the moment he learned that Gabe had died—but he couldn’t. What he’d give to forget hugging his son’s dead body, Margo’s brother pulling them both away, and John punching him, screaming, “I will not leave my son!” How he’d like to erase the scene of telling his daughter that her brother had died and of the family’s arrival at the cemetery, Margo falling to the ground, unable to walk in—but those memories, unfortunately, remain vividly intact, the stuff of his waking nightmares.

What’s fuzzier, he says, are the happy memories. Gabe in his twin bed in his Batman pajamas (“Snuggle me, Dada”). Rolling around in wrapping paper after opening his birthday presents. The way Gabe strode confidently into his preschool class like a big kid, only to turn around at the door and blow a furtive kiss. The sound of his voice. I love you to the moon and back. The smell of his head when John bent down to kiss him. The music of his giggle. His animated facial expressions. His favorite food or animal or color (Was it blue or “rainbow” before he died?). All of these memories feel, to John, as if they’re fading into the distance—that he’s losing the details of Gabe, much as he wants to hold on to them.

All parents forget these details about their kids as they grow, and they mourn that loss too. The difference is that as the past recedes in their memories, the present is right in front of them. For John, the loss of his memories brings him closer to the loss of Gabe. And so at night, John tells me, while Margo seethes, assuming that he’s working or watching porn, he’s hiding out with his laptop watching videos of Gabe, thinking about how these are the only videos he’ll ever have of his son, just as the memories John has of Gabe are the only memories he’ll ever have. There will be no more memories made. And while the memories might get blurry, the videos won’t. John says that he’s watched these videos hundreds of times and can no longer tell the difference between his actual memories and the videos. He watches obsessively, though, “to keep Gabe alive in my mind.”

“Keeping him alive in your mind is your way of not abandoning him,” I say.

John nods. He says that he pictures Gabe alive all the time—what he would look like, how tall he would be, what interests he’d have. He still sees the neighbor boys who were Gabe’s friends as toddlers and imagines Gabe hanging out with them now in middle school, having