Drop Dead Life
4. Young Children Continue to be affected by 29 Year-Old Father’s Death
Keira presses the button on my camera, her brown eyes beaming excitement when my studio strobe lights make a big flash.
"Good job," I tell her. "You got my camera in the perfect setting. Think we’re ready to go."
My daughters, Keira and Tatiana, want me to take some updated photos of them-one of the perks in having a mommy for a professional photographer.
At six-years-old, Tatiana loves to dance, sing, and act, and has been begging me to let her audition for shows and commercials. My reluctance has come from the fear of having her or Keira put too much emphasis on being pretty, but Tatiana seems fairly level-headed about it, so I finally said I would let her audition.
"Keira can go first," Tatiana says. "Keira, you want me to put some music on for you?"
Keira, only nineteen months younger than Tatiana, is usually not as level-headed as Tatiana. It was because of Keira’s attraction to all things dangerous that we affectionately gave her the nickname, "Krazy Keira".
"Yeah, number eight, Tati. Number eight." Keira says, using her petite fingers to brush her dark-brown, bobbed hair behind her ears.
My new husband, Evan, is downstairs taking a nap with our eight month-old son, Julian. Our other son, Jason, who is from Evan's previous marriage, is away for the week. Four kids and two businesses is enough to make most people want to nap.
I look at Keira through my Canon lens, surprised at how cooperative she is being.
"Like this mommy, like this?" She curls her tanned legs under her bottom, sits on her feet, and smiles sweetly at me.
Then the white backdrop paper makes a crinkling sound.
"Tatiana, what are you doing?" Annoyance seeps through my body as I watch Tatiana jump up and down on the backdrop, next to Keira, making wrinkles in the once smooth surface. "I have already told you that you have got to stay off of the paper during Keira’s turn."
"What? What?" Tatiana lifts her hands by her shoulders. "I am only trying to help."
I have heard this type of "what" many times before from Tatiana. It’s something she says when she knows she’s been caught trying to make trouble and doesn’t want to ‘fess up.
"Tat, come on, you know that getting in the way of Keira’s photos is not helping. If you want to help, than you can stand behind me and watch."
Tatiana runs around the lights, too close to the white, pointy strobe umbrellas, and stands behind me.
"What," she says. "What?"
"I need this to be about Keira right now." Poor Keira, she always seems to get lost in the middle. "Alright, Keira, baby, can you lie down on the paper, on your tummy, facing me?"
Keira lies down, seeming at ease in front of the camera, and I click away, until I feel a body bump up against me from behind.
"Tatiana, what’s going on?" I set my camera on the carpet and look back to see Tatiana bent over, flinging her long, curly, dirty-blonde hair all over the place, while making faces at Keira.
"I was trying to get her to laugh," Tatiana says, now with her knuckles up her nose.
"Sweetie, really, you’ve been acting up all morning. I just told you that you could watch, but you can’t get in the way while I’m taking pictures."
I can tell that something is going on with Tatiana because she’s usually cooperative. The times when Tatiana acts up are usually directly connected with her needing to talk about something.
"But, mommy, when is it my turn?"
Patience, Mommy, patience.
I take a deep breath.
"Alright, let’s do some of the two of you together."
"Keira!" Tatiana screams, throwing her arms around Keira and knocking her over on the backdrop.
"Honey, please do not scream. You know daddy and baby Ju-Ju are asleep. I want you to have fun, but, see that behind you?"
I point at the metal backdrop stand which holds the nine-foot-wide paper roll close to the ceiling. "If you get too crazy or go too far back on the paper, it will fall on you, and that will not be good."
They giggle and roll around.
"How about this? Tatiana and Keira, both of you stand up, and Tatiana, I want you to hug Keira."
"Come here, my little Keira," Tatiana says.
Keira reaches out to her big sister. "How ‘bout I be your baby, Tati, and you swing me around?"
I click my camera again and again, light bursting from my strobes every time.
Great shots.
They look adorable together, both in pink and orange sundresses.
I lift myself from knees to standing for a different angle. "Tat, you can pick her up as long as you’re careful."
The girls squeal as they hold each other’s waists, and Tatiana picks Keira up off of the paper. Their two bodies now attached, they begin to spin in circles.
"Slow down, girls." I say.
Keira’s bare feet spin through the air faster and faster, her hair flying out to the sides as if being blown by a fan.
"Alright, enough craziness. Let’s get some calm, sweet hugging shots."
They continue to spin and giggle, ignoring me.
"Girls! Stop!" They are spinning too far back.
The backdrop frame tilts forward, slowly diving towards them.
Oh, no!
I jump to my feet.
"Tati!" Keira yells.
They both panick.
"Keira!" Tatiana screams.
I grab the enormous white roll just as the paper envelopes their heads. Sweat bubbles up on the tip of my nose. "Now, both of you, off to the side."
I am stern with my words. "I don’t want you to get hurt while I get this situated."
They know my voice well enough to understand that they are in trouble.
I fumble with the metal poles, sliding them apart. "I told you girls not to be so crazy."
Tatiana shouts, "Mom-my, it was Keira who wanted to keep spinning!"
"I know, I saw it, but, Tatiana, you haven’t been listening this whole time either. You’ve been acting up so much."
"Mommy, you’re so mad at me. You never act this way with the other kids you take pictures of."
"That’s because the parents of the kids I photograph would never let their children go all crazy and knock over my equipment."
Keira curls up on the couch, staying quiet.
I finish rolling up the backdrop paper. "Keira, why weren’t you listening when I told you to calm down."
"I don’t know. Because I am Krazy Kiwa?"
Turning to Tatiana, I say, "You know, you wanted me to do these pictures of you, and I told you that you have to listen, and have you been listening? NO!"
"Mom-my!" Tatiana begins to cry. "I’m not talking to you. You are making me so sad."
She runs into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
Tatiana’s sobs grow louder.
Keira crawls into my lap. She still loves to pretend she is a puppy, so I pet the top of her head and whisper in her ear. "Honey, I really want to hold you, and I will in just a minute, but I need Tatiana to come sit in my lap while I talk to her."
Keira lets her tongue hang out, as if she is panting, and nods up and down. "Ruff!" She scoots her body, on all fours, back over to the couch."
I call through the bathroom door. "Tatiana, come out here."
To my surprise, she comes out of the bathroom right away, continuing to cry harder than I have ever seen her cry before.
"Come sit here," I tell her.
Tatiana sits in my lap, making her lanky body compact. She wipes her nose on her dress.
"I know we’ve all had colds and that you’ve been worried about daddy being sick, and mommy being sick, and I know it’s been a big change for you having another baby and mommy working more."
Tatiana breathes deeply, trying to talk. "That would be, um, three things, but there are really four, and not really, um, four, cause the fourth thing is like one million things-Daddy Erik dying-that is like one million things, so it’s like there are one million and three things to be sad about."
"You’re right, Daddy Erik dying is like one million things all in one, because that’s the worst thing that could happen, and I am so sorry that he died."
She cries even more.
I feel awful. The irritation that I had towards her for not listening completely disappears.
It has been five and a half years since Erik’s death and Tatiana’s sadness over her deceased father has caught me completely off guard.
"It’s good to cry about it," I say. "It’s good to let out all of the sad so it doesn’t stay in you forever."
Primal instinct takes over every cell in me and I just want to hold her, and protect her, to ward off anything bad from ever happening.
"But, uh, Mommy? When will I see Daddy Erik again?"
"Not until we die, sweetheart. But we can look at him in pictures, and you can dream about him."
"But it’s not good when I dream about him, cause it feels like he is there, in my dream, and then I wake up even more sad, cause he’s not there."
"I know that is hard. I know. Do you want me to put up some bigger pictures of him so we can look at them more?"
"No, I want to take all of the other pictures down. They just remind me that he died."
"I know it’s so sad. I wish there was something I could do to make you feel better, honey. I really do."
But the truth is that I am not really sure what to say. This busy new life of ours has distracted me from the fact I still don’t even know how to make myself feel better about Erik’s death most of the time.
"I know what to do." Tatiana says.
She jumps up from my lap and runs into the dining room, grabbing a piece of paper and a red marker out of the art drawer.
I follow behind her, and sit next to her at our round marble table.
She writes in thick red with her most focused intention: "I MISS YOU SO . . ."
"How do you spell ‘much’, Mommy?"
I tell her. "M.U.C.H."
What I notice most while I watch her form her letters is that my stare is blank.
I am there, but not really there. I am back on that Easter Sunday, when I turned to see my beloved Erik, his back against the kitchen cabinets, sliding down to the white, tiled floor. Tatiana’s seventeen-month-old cries, "Uh, uh," pointing at her motionless daddy, next to her high chair. My pleas with 911. Erik’s cold, dead eyelids against my lips when I kissed them for the last time. The nausea that consumed my body when I touched my seven-month pregnant belly, knowing that Keira would never meet her incredible father.
None of it had seemed real.
And now, one of my babies is six years old and writing a letter to her dead father, and it still doesn’t feel real.
Tatiana squeezes the last few letters into the right lower corner of the paper. It reads: "DADDY ERIK, I MISS YOU SO MUCH. PLEASE CAN I SEE YOU AGAIN?"
"There," she says. "I’m all done. Now I want to make sure he gets this."
She stands up and walks toward the sliding glass door. She yanks on the handle.
"What are you doing?" The door is jammed, so I help her unlock it.
"I’m going to let this letter blow off of the balcony and fly up to Daddy Erik in heaven."
"Uh," I think about not wanting to litter, but then figure it’s much more important, in this case, to let Tatiana feel she is sending a message to Erik, and open the sliding glass door.
I follow her out onto the balcony, in a sort of disbelief that this is really happening. Tatiana is now of the age to write her own letter to Erik.
She lets the white paper slip from her hands, over the balcony’s white wooden railing.
One minute I’m watching my girls spin each other around on my backdrop; the next, I’m witnessing this emotional purge from Tatiana.
This is life now. It is wonderfully rich with love and bright crayon colors and longer hugs and baby Ju-Ju’s slobbery open-mouthed kisses, and then, wham, there are these reminders that, yes, Erik really did die, and yes, it is something that will keep affecting our lives during unexpected moments-hopefully shaping us into better people.
Tatiana’s letter lands, beneath us, on the shingles of the lower level of our house.
She looks at me, and I am worried she will be disappointed to not have the paper magically lifted to the sky.
"Hmm," she says, shrugging her shoulders, "You know, mommy, it might just land in our backyard."
I reassure her. "Oh, no, look! It’s blowing again." I imagine a celestial hand parting the clouds, its long fingers reaching down to bring her words to Erik.
The paper sails down the side of our house, out of our sight.
Tatiana smiles a little, and says, "It still might just end up in the backyard, but it doesn’t matter. As long as Daddy Erik sees it, so, you know, so he can write me back."
I give her a big hug, wishing, more than anything, that he could write her back. I know what it feels like not to have been able to say goodbye.
My hopes are that writing this memoir of mine will help her feel like Daddy Erik is writing her back.
You can follow Hyla at Drop Dead Life on Blogspot.