The Sound of Loss
Nadia Staikos
“My daughter died last year,” Eduardo told us the week we moved in. “Our only child. We tried to have more children,” he said. His gaze fell on Wynn and Penny running circles around our new backyard. “But it didn’t happen. Just our Selia.”
He was soft-spoken, and English was his third language. Adam had to lean over the low chain link fence to gather each word as it passed his lips, saving them from being carried away by the warm winds that sighed through the chill, breathing away at the edges of the early June afternoon. I watched Eduardo slowly blink and wondered how many memories flash behind one’s eyelids—in any moment of fleeting darkness—when a child is gone. An infant, sleeping on your chest. Now, a little girl with chocolate ice cream dripping from her smiling chin. Now, a radiant teenager walking across the stage of the high school, black gown trailing and cap askew. Now, a grown woman laughing from across the table, asking you about your day. I watched his brown eyes, surrounded by the folds of age; once closed, how did he find the strength to open them again?
Frost was no longer a threat, and Eduardo was moving his tomato seedlings out of his sunny kitchen window and into the garden with a tenderness that could only be love. His speckled hands were a study in efficiency. The kids chased his movements up and down the fence, each trying to out-manoeuvre the other and be the first to get a reaction, any reaction, from the old man next door.
Over time, piece by piece, Eduardo offered more of his story: Selia had been fifty-seven years old. She lived right around the corner; the one with the purple door. That was her favourite colour. Alone. Well, with Rooster, the cat—a slight nod towards his house explained the small grey and white face often seen peeking out of his windows, much to Wynn and Penny’s amusement. The driver, drunk, came right up onto the sidewalk. It was eight o’clock on a Thursday morning. She had been waiting for the bus to get to work at the Cadbury factory. Selia used to bring us chocolates—me and my wife. My wife, Augusta. Without Selia’s help, I had to put Augusta into a home. She couldn’t remember things. It had been like that for a while, and she was getting more and more angry. She would run away; it happened in the winter once, and she was in her slippers. She almost lost a toe. I take the bus every day, an hour each way, to visit her. Usually, she doesn’t remember me; sometimes she does, and she wants to know why I didn’t bring Selia along. She thinks Selia is still twelve years old. It is a gift, to not remember; then, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
I would interrogate Adam whenever I saw they had been chatting in the backyard. I was hungry for more of Eduardo’s story. Adam would fill me in, and the details ached in a place reserved for crises of existence. I was searching for evidence that it is possible for time to become a cushion; that even after the worst things happen, your life strains forward, pulling you with it, until all that you can do is look back, further and further back. I would watch their faces in conversation through the streaked glass and look for glimpses of his deepest scars: the ones that cannot be seen.
When Adam and I first became parents, we had been renting the main floor of a dilapidated Parkdale home. All of that summer, we would place a sated, sleeping Wynn into his crib around eight-thirty, then sit on the front porch to play a game of backgammon and sip from sweating glasses. That was when I heard it: the sound of loss. I was horrified because it sounded exactly as I have always feared it would feel. I would have assumed, like Adam, that the startling howl that hijacked the evening was hysterical laughter, except that I felt a tingling that started at the tips of my fingers and shot noxious pulses all the way up my arms and to the back of my neck. I jumped from my seat on the porch, muttering excuses about needing a shower before bed, and cried and cried and cried underneath the stream of warm water. I had already known, but another tenant confirmed that a mother living down the street had just received the news that her son had died of a stroke. He was in his forties—one of ten children—a blow that could never be softened, even by a hundred siblings. To have a child is to remove your heart from its shelter of bones and hope for the best.
I didn’t pity Eduardo; pity isn’t the right word. I couldn’t accept the way that some stories unfold. I couldn’t accept that it could happen to anyone; that it could happen to me. I wanted to bake him apple muffins, do his groceries, have him over for dinner. I wanted to walk with him through snow-swept January mornings and have coffee in the corner bakery behind fogged windows. I wanted to drive him to visit his wife and bring flowers to his daughter’s grave. I wanted him to tease Adam about how lucky he was to have me. I wanted my kids to call him Vovo and squeal with delight when he plucked caramels from his coat pockets. I wanted to hear stories tumble from his corduroy lips at a late-night table, dirty dishes pushed to the side, and study his life’s history like a revered text. I was not sure where to start; how to initiate any of these small kindnesses that might one day lead to a comfortable familiarity. Friendship is a culmination of so many small moments, and I didn’t know what the first steps should be. I knew how to befriend peers, and even how to behave on a date, where increasing intimacy was the obvious shared objective. What I didn’t know how to do was solicit the platonic companionship of a man nearly three times my age. It was a brand of vulnerability I had never considered.
Then, that September, I heard Eduardo was in the hospital. Lung cancer, or heart problems; there were different stories. The thick clumps of tornado-green grapes hanging from his trellis grew heavy with summer and —victims of their own sweetness —began to rot, littering his patio stones and back steps. Tomatoes hung from their vines, bruised and blackening, and oozing toward the dirt below like Dali clocks. The neglect—which was celebrated by the agitated late-summer wasps—was something I could not bear to see, so the kids and I went over there with some tools from our shed; they scavenged for late raspberries and fought over the blue shovel while I filled buckets to the brim with squashed fruit and leaves, abuzz. I was confident we would not get stung, because it was work that had to be done. My naivety knew no bounds. I was worried he would never come home again, but I saw him through our front window after a month had gone by, his slowed, deliberate gait along the leaf-encrusted sidewalk the only clue that anything had changed.
One morning—the spring after he had returned—I hurried to catch up with the kids on their scooters, and up ahead was Eduardo, his faded black grocery trolley trailing in his shuffling wake. I couldn’t look at him without seeing the shadows of the people I knew he had lost. I often tried to put myself in his shoes, and the sadness was unbearable. I have heard people say, There are no words… but I wanted so desperately to find some. Those thoughts rushed at me at once as the distance between us on the sidewalk closed. Enter: a caricature of my heart bouncing around my ribcage, a strobing exclamation point. Cue the firing off of all coherent thoughts into the blue daylight! Disconnect intentions and actions in five, four, three, two…
“Hi, Eduardo,” I said. Some more words, and just like that, he was on his way again, and all I could recall was that my head had bobbled like a dashboard tchotchke and I had repeated thank you, thank you, while he explained that he had some extra tomato plants that he would leave in our backyard, and we had to plant them that night before they dried out. If only a smile was capable of communicating all that I was not.
Later, picking up the kids was a blur of tears and demands, followed by a hurried dinner that ended up—for the most part—on the floor, a much-protested bath, favourite pajamas that were, sigh, in the dirty laundry hamper, and one parent fast asleep in each miniature bed, curled around a child like an open bracket.
When I got home from the office the next evening, a day-worn Wynn hanging from my right leg, Penny from my left, there they were: tender green vines marooned on islands of rich soil in our otherwise lackluster plot of dirt. Shit.
A similar pattern followed. My attempts to pinch off the little suckers and encourage the growth of fruit were thwarted by Wynn trying to mimic me and snapping off half of a plant. So, Eduardo did it for us. As summer took the reins, my view of the backyard while washing dishes was a persistent reminder that the plants were creeping upwards and falling over, and I had to find something to stake them with, and something to tie them to the stakes with, and, oh yeah: the time to make it happen. I never did; and so, Eduardo did it for us. When we went camping for a week, we returned to ripened tomatoes lined up like soldiers along our patio furniture, and not a weed in sight. I used a colander to ferry them inside, reddened by my exposed inadequacy, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief within the safety of my kitchen. I wanted to be helping Eduardo, and I had somehow become a burden.
The first tomatoes of the season are an event. Everyone watches as the first bulbs of green emerge from beneath the delicate yellow flowers. We photograph these tiny miracles as if they were newborn babies and watch them get larger every day, slowly beginning to blush. The kids want to pick some today, no, today? No, we have to wait until they ripen, because that is when they will taste best. Then, when it’s finally time, two or three are gently plucked from the vine with ceremony and lavished with attention: the star of their own plate, sliced and sprinkled with paper-thin shreds of shallot, pinched with salt and oregano and kissed with olive oil. They taste like summer, and that does not last forever.
On the night the world went silent, I had been giving the floor a quick sweep after a particularly disastrous rice-based dinner, and I noticed that the kids had been playing with real, dried pasta in their plastic pots and pans. Chuckling, I bent down to sweep the shards of linguine into my hand, and began searching their little wooden microwave and cupboards for more remnants. Inside the oven, sitting in a puddle of its own reddish-brown juices, was a tomato.
Later, when I returned home from a rainy summer run, there was no sound. I’m not sure if the silence was exaggerated because the lights were flashing without accompanying sirens, like the power of lightning to suck everything from the world on nights when there is no thunder, or perhaps because there was simply no sound anymore. Alternating red and white flashes splattered colour into puddles, reflected in window panes and car doors, patches of shiny pavement, fragmented into a million different pinpoints on slick leaves in the darkness, and splashed into haloes in front of my filling eyes. Penny came home from school one day and told me that all rainbows were circular, you just usually can’t see the whole thing. We resist reminders that this is what happens; that one day, any day, yes, it just ends.
Of the myriad ways in which it hurt, the indifference of the garden was the most painful. It lay there, wide open, waiting for someone else to come along and have their way with it—or not—and it did not care either way. The weeds that year—mere seasonal nuisances—outlived Eduardo, and the tomato vines did not even droop in mourning, even though it was his hands that had been removing the seeds from the best fruit every year for the last sixty-one years, laying them to dry in the sun on a square cut from an old undershirt, then picking them off like tiny scabs, a hundred of them, one-by-one, and dropping them into a jar to plant next spring. Even though he was the reason for their existence.
You cannot keep tomatoes in the refrigerator—they will lose everything about them that was perfect. They burst forth in unapologetic hoards at the end of the summer, and you have to deal with them. A bounty of tomatoes beginning to rot is a reminder of the incremental failings of the best intentions. A poster in Bathurst station told me that in Canada, one-point-two million tomatoes are thrown out every day. And there they were, just swept into the bottom of my compost; doing my part, and I felt guilty that it didn’t bother me, not those particular tomatoes, because I was tired of seeing them rot on my counter, and I was the only goddamned person in
my household that even liked tomatoes, and I just couldn’t eat any more, and maybe eating them was never the point.
“Goodnight, sweetheart. I could never love anything more than I love you.”
“And what about Penny?”
“I could never love anything more than I love her, either.”
“Why do you always say that, Mama?”
“Because it’s true.”
Nadia Staikos
“My daughter died last year,” Eduardo told us the week we moved in. “Our only child. We tried to have more children,” he said. His gaze fell on Wynn and Penny running circles around our new backyard. “But it didn’t happen. Just our Selia.”
He was soft-spoken, and English was his third language. Adam had to lean over the low chain link fence to gather each word as it passed his lips, saving them from being carried away by the warm winds that sighed through the chill, breathing away at the edges of the early June afternoon. I watched Eduardo slowly blink and wondered how many memories flash behind one’s eyelids—in any moment of fleeting darkness—when a child is gone. An infant, sleeping on your chest. Now, a little girl with chocolate ice cream dripping from her smiling chin. Now, a radiant teenager walking across the stage of the high school, black gown trailing and cap askew. Now, a grown woman laughing from across the table, asking you about your day. I watched his brown eyes, surrounded by the folds of age; once closed, how did he find the strength to open them again?
Frost was no longer a threat, and Eduardo was moving his tomato seedlings out of his sunny kitchen window and into the garden with a tenderness that could only be love. His speckled hands were a study in efficiency. The kids chased his movements up and down the fence, each trying to out-manoeuvre the other and be the first to get a reaction, any reaction, from the old man next door.
Over time, piece by piece, Eduardo offered more of his story: Selia had been fifty-seven years old. She lived right around the corner; the one with the purple door. That was her favourite colour. Alone. Well, with Rooster, the cat—a slight nod towards his house explained the small grey and white face often seen peeking out of his windows, much to Wynn and Penny’s amusement. The driver, drunk, came right up onto the sidewalk. It was eight o’clock on a Thursday morning. She had been waiting for the bus to get to work at the Cadbury factory. Selia used to bring us chocolates—me and my wife. My wife, Augusta. Without Selia’s help, I had to put Augusta into a home. She couldn’t remember things. It had been like that for a while, and she was getting more and more angry. She would run away; it happened in the winter once, and she was in her slippers. She almost lost a toe. I take the bus every day, an hour each way, to visit her. Usually, she doesn’t remember me; sometimes she does, and she wants to know why I didn’t bring Selia along. She thinks Selia is still twelve years old. It is a gift, to not remember; then, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
I would interrogate Adam whenever I saw they had been chatting in the backyard. I was hungry for more of Eduardo’s story. Adam would fill me in, and the details ached in a place reserved for crises of existence. I was searching for evidence that it is possible for time to become a cushion; that even after the worst things happen, your life strains forward, pulling you with it, until all that you can do is look back, further and further back. I would watch their faces in conversation through the streaked glass and look for glimpses of his deepest scars: the ones that cannot be seen.
When Adam and I first became parents, we had been renting the main floor of a dilapidated Parkdale home. All of that summer, we would place a sated, sleeping Wynn into his crib around eight-thirty, then sit on the front porch to play a game of backgammon and sip from sweating glasses. That was when I heard it: the sound of loss. I was horrified because it sounded exactly as I have always feared it would feel. I would have assumed, like Adam, that the startling howl that hijacked the evening was hysterical laughter, except that I felt a tingling that started at the tips of my fingers and shot noxious pulses all the way up my arms and to the back of my neck. I jumped from my seat on the porch, muttering excuses about needing a shower before bed, and cried and cried and cried underneath the stream of warm water. I had already known, but another tenant confirmed that a mother living down the street had just received the news that her son had died of a stroke. He was in his forties—one of ten children—a blow that could never be softened, even by a hundred siblings. To have a child is to remove your heart from its shelter of bones and hope for the best.
I didn’t pity Eduardo; pity isn’t the right word. I couldn’t accept the way that some stories unfold. I couldn’t accept that it could happen to anyone; that it could happen to me. I wanted to bake him apple muffins, do his groceries, have him over for dinner. I wanted to walk with him through snow-swept January mornings and have coffee in the corner bakery behind fogged windows. I wanted to drive him to visit his wife and bring flowers to his daughter’s grave. I wanted him to tease Adam about how lucky he was to have me. I wanted my kids to call him Vovo and squeal with delight when he plucked caramels from his coat pockets. I wanted to hear stories tumble from his corduroy lips at a late-night table, dirty dishes pushed to the side, and study his life’s history like a revered text. I was not sure where to start; how to initiate any of these small kindnesses that might one day lead to a comfortable familiarity. Friendship is a culmination of so many small moments, and I didn’t know what the first steps should be. I knew how to befriend peers, and even how to behave on a date, where increasing intimacy was the obvious shared objective. What I didn’t know how to do was solicit the platonic companionship of a man nearly three times my age. It was a brand of vulnerability I had never considered.
Then, that September, I heard Eduardo was in the hospital. Lung cancer, or heart problems; there were different stories. The thick clumps of tornado-green grapes hanging from his trellis grew heavy with summer and —victims of their own sweetness —began to rot, littering his patio stones and back steps. Tomatoes hung from their vines, bruised and blackening, and oozing toward the dirt below like Dali clocks. The neglect—which was celebrated by the agitated late-summer wasps—was something I could not bear to see, so the kids and I went over there with some tools from our shed; they scavenged for late raspberries and fought over the blue shovel while I filled buckets to the brim with squashed fruit and leaves, abuzz. I was confident we would not get stung, because it was work that had to be done. My naivety knew no bounds. I was worried he would never come home again, but I saw him through our front window after a month had gone by, his slowed, deliberate gait along the leaf-encrusted sidewalk the only clue that anything had changed.
One morning—the spring after he had returned—I hurried to catch up with the kids on their scooters, and up ahead was Eduardo, his faded black grocery trolley trailing in his shuffling wake. I couldn’t look at him without seeing the shadows of the people I knew he had lost. I often tried to put myself in his shoes, and the sadness was unbearable. I have heard people say, There are no words… but I wanted so desperately to find some. Those thoughts rushed at me at once as the distance between us on the sidewalk closed. Enter: a caricature of my heart bouncing around my ribcage, a strobing exclamation point. Cue the firing off of all coherent thoughts into the blue daylight! Disconnect intentions and actions in five, four, three, two…
“Hi, Eduardo,” I said. Some more words, and just like that, he was on his way again, and all I could recall was that my head had bobbled like a dashboard tchotchke and I had repeated thank you, thank you, while he explained that he had some extra tomato plants that he would leave in our backyard, and we had to plant them that night before they dried out. If only a smile was capable of communicating all that I was not.
Later, picking up the kids was a blur of tears and demands, followed by a hurried dinner that ended up—for the most part—on the floor, a much-protested bath, favourite pajamas that were, sigh, in the dirty laundry hamper, and one parent fast asleep in each miniature bed, curled around a child like an open bracket.
When I got home from the office the next evening, a day-worn Wynn hanging from my right leg, Penny from my left, there they were: tender green vines marooned on islands of rich soil in our otherwise lackluster plot of dirt. Shit.
A similar pattern followed. My attempts to pinch off the little suckers and encourage the growth of fruit were thwarted by Wynn trying to mimic me and snapping off half of a plant. So, Eduardo did it for us. As summer took the reins, my view of the backyard while washing dishes was a persistent reminder that the plants were creeping upwards and falling over, and I had to find something to stake them with, and something to tie them to the stakes with, and, oh yeah: the time to make it happen. I never did; and so, Eduardo did it for us. When we went camping for a week, we returned to ripened tomatoes lined up like soldiers along our patio furniture, and not a weed in sight. I used a colander to ferry them inside, reddened by my exposed inadequacy, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief within the safety of my kitchen. I wanted to be helping Eduardo, and I had somehow become a burden.
The first tomatoes of the season are an event. Everyone watches as the first bulbs of green emerge from beneath the delicate yellow flowers. We photograph these tiny miracles as if they were newborn babies and watch them get larger every day, slowly beginning to blush. The kids want to pick some today, no, today? No, we have to wait until they ripen, because that is when they will taste best. Then, when it’s finally time, two or three are gently plucked from the vine with ceremony and lavished with attention: the star of their own plate, sliced and sprinkled with paper-thin shreds of shallot, pinched with salt and oregano and kissed with olive oil. They taste like summer, and that does not last forever.
On the night the world went silent, I had been giving the floor a quick sweep after a particularly disastrous rice-based dinner, and I noticed that the kids had been playing with real, dried pasta in their plastic pots and pans. Chuckling, I bent down to sweep the shards of linguine into my hand, and began searching their little wooden microwave and cupboards for more remnants. Inside the oven, sitting in a puddle of its own reddish-brown juices, was a tomato.
Later, when I returned home from a rainy summer run, there was no sound. I’m not sure if the silence was exaggerated because the lights were flashing without accompanying sirens, like the power of lightning to suck everything from the world on nights when there is no thunder, or perhaps because there was simply no sound anymore. Alternating red and white flashes splattered colour into puddles, reflected in window panes and car doors, patches of shiny pavement, fragmented into a million different pinpoints on slick leaves in the darkness, and splashed into haloes in front of my filling eyes. Penny came home from school one day and told me that all rainbows were circular, you just usually can’t see the whole thing. We resist reminders that this is what happens; that one day, any day, yes, it just ends.
Of the myriad ways in which it hurt, the indifference of the garden was the most painful. It lay there, wide open, waiting for someone else to come along and have their way with it—or not—and it did not care either way. The weeds that year—mere seasonal nuisances—outlived Eduardo, and the tomato vines did not even droop in mourning, even though it was his hands that had been removing the seeds from the best fruit every year for the last sixty-one years, laying them to dry in the sun on a square cut from an old undershirt, then picking them off like tiny scabs, a hundred of them, one-by-one, and dropping them into a jar to plant next spring. Even though he was the reason for their existence.
You cannot keep tomatoes in the refrigerator—they will lose everything about them that was perfect. They burst forth in unapologetic hoards at the end of the summer, and you have to deal with them. A bounty of tomatoes beginning to rot is a reminder of the incremental failings of the best intentions. A poster in Bathurst station told me that in Canada, one-point-two million tomatoes are thrown out every day. And there they were, just swept into the bottom of my compost; doing my part, and I felt guilty that it didn’t bother me, not those particular tomatoes, because I was tired of seeing them rot on my counter, and I was the only goddamned person in
my household that even liked tomatoes, and I just couldn’t eat any more, and maybe eating them was never the point.
“Goodnight, sweetheart. I could never love anything more than I love you.”
“And what about Penny?”
“I could never love anything more than I love her, either.”
“Why do you always say that, Mama?”
“Because it’s true.”
