Hannah’s Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived

“I have no idea,” I said.

Hannah slept in her car seat in the back while I drove. Forty minutes later, as I pulled into the emergency room parking lot and shut off the engine, I realized that I couldn’t remember stopping for one light or stop sign all the way there. Either I had driven through every one, or I was simply too dazed to remember. As I unbuckled Hannah and lifted her out, a question pierced through the fog in my brain: Could a mass be cancer? I dismissed it immediately. How could I possibly think such a thing? Two-year-olds don’t get cancer. Dr. Edman had said it was a mass. We would get it out, as simple as that.

As the automatic doors to the emergency room swung open, I felt better almost immediately. A nurse bustled toward me.

“Mrs. Martell?” she asked, partly a question, partly a greeting.

I nodded. Hannah lifted her head drowsily from my shoulder.

“It’s okay, Missy,” I whispered. “We’re at the hospital. These people are going to help us figure out what’s happening with your tummy.”

“I’m hungry,” Hannah said, closing her eyes and laying her head back on my shoulder.

The nurse led us to a small examining room. I sat Hannah next to me on the edge of the padded table. The nurse took Hannah’s blood pressure and temperature and then asked me to remove Hannah’s dress.

“No, Mommy, it’s too cold,” Hannah said.

I turned to the nurse, who shrugged her shoulders.

“I guess she can leave it on,” she said.

Within minutes, a parade of doctors, nurses, residents, and technicians filed in, asked questions, took notes, and left, closing the door behind them. My sense of relief at being there was fading. I wanted Claude. I opened the door to the hall and startled a group of residents and nurses who were speaking in loud, conspiratorial whispers outside our room. I looked past them and saw Claude coming toward me, almost running, his head whipping from one side to the other as he read the numbers above the doors to each room. He looked panicked and disoriented, no more capable of knowing what to do than I was.

“Daddy,” Hannah exclaimed as Claude came into the room. He and I embraced quickly.

An efficient-looking resident poked his head into the room.

“In ten minutes, Hannah is scheduled for X-rays downstairs. An aide will be by to pick her up.”

“Mommy, I want you to come with me,” Hannah said.

“Of course, Missy,” I replied.

The resident looked at me sternly. “You can go downstairs with her,” he said, “but you can’t go in the room unless you’re sure you’re not pregnant.”

My voice sounded far away when I answered. “I’m definitely not pregnant,” I heard myself say.

What had felt like the deepest loss hours ago was now enabling me to do the one thing I wanted more than anything else: to be with Hannah. Only my perspective had changed; the truth, that the baby inside me was dead, was the same, either way.

Light in the Shadow (#ulink_55af96cc-8f59-5af3-b053-ea4ef33269d0)

THE DOCTOR CAME INTO THE ROOM, FLIPPED THE SWITCH on the light board, and slid the film under the clip. I shifted Hannah’s sleeping body to my other hip and leaned in next to Claude to get a closer look. The doctor used his pen to point to a large, dark shadow beneath the white outline of Hannah’s ribs.

“There it is.”

The pieces were beginning to fall into place. Three weeks earlier, during our vacation in Michigan, we had taken Hannah to an emergency room. She had been complaining that it hurt to lie down; she moaned in her sleep and ran a slight fever at night. The doctor told us she had the flu and sent us away with a sample-size packet of Children’s Tylenol. Two days later, when she didn’t seem to be getting any better, we took her to another hospital. The pediatrician there ordered X-rays of Hannah’s chest to rule out pneumonia, and then tried to examine Hannah’s abdomen. Hannah screamed and refused to lie down, saying it hurt too much. The doctor gave up, obviously exasperated.

“There’s nothing wrong with her; she’s just manipulating you,” the woman told us. “She’s a typical two-year-old who doesn’t want to go to sleep.”

“How can we be sure it’s not something more serious?” I asked, somewhat distracted. Will and Hannah, bored with waiting, had stepped outside the examining room and were now shrieking and chasing each other in the hall.

The doctor sniffed disapprovingly at the commotion.

“Well, look at her,” the doctor said. “She has too much energy to be really sick. A sick child would be listless and lethargic, would run a fever all day, not just at night. She wouldn’t put up such a fuss during an examination. If you want, make an appointment with her pediatrician when you get home; but as far as I can see, she’s fine.”

I felt confused and embarrassed by the doctor’s words. Every bone in my body was telling me something was wrong, and yet, perhaps the doctor was right; maybe I was just the inadequate mother of an overindulged child. While Claude rounded up Will and Hannah, I quickly collected our things. Escorting our two unruly children past the other, obviously sick children in the waiting room, I felt guilty for having wasted a doctor’s valuable time.

Now, looking at the dark shadow on the X-ray of Hannah’s ribs, I felt like a profound failure again. The doctor in Michigan had only been half right; instead of being the inadequate mother of an overindulged child, I was the inadequate mother of a very sick one. Why hadn’t I trusted myself more? The doctors knew symptoms of illness as they applied generally to children. I knew Hannah. We were authorities on different subjects. I should have insisted that the doctor’s explanation of Hannah’s behavior didn’t match what I knew to be true for her. Hannah had no interest in playing games to get what she wanted; she asked for it directly, demanding it if necessary. And why was she moaning in her sleep and running fevers at night? Even if these were unusual symptoms, surely they were signs of something more than manipulative behavior! Was I so afraid of making a mistake, so afraid of what these strangers might think of me, that I had failed my daughter?

As the doctor peeled the film from the light board, I knew one thing: I was going to have to start speaking up, before it was too late for Hannah. Before it was too late for me.

Just One Thing (#ulink_d1a53210-159f-5993-ab03-d19b691ef1f3)

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, BUT NOT DARK OR QUIET. THE hallway’s fluorescent light spilled into the room through the half-open door. A monitor beeped; the IV pump clicked. If I lay still enough, I could almost hear the whoosh of the pain medication pulsing through the line that fed a tiny vein in Hannah’s hand. Because of it, Hannah was sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks.

Although my eyes were burning with fatigue, they wouldn’t stay shut. I began to wonder if I was caught in one of those dreams where you think you’re awake but you’re not. Hannah, curled up on her side next to me, stirred. I sat up, peering at her face in the half-light. Her skin was so pale. I ran my finger along her cheek and brushed a few strands of blond hair away from her lips. Rearranging the blankets, I smiled to see that her new red shoes were still on her feet. Ever since we’d bought them two days before, she had refused to take them off. As I lay back down, Hannah lifted her arm and dropped it lazily across my chest.

I couldn’t remember if I had ever lived a day as never-ending as this one. After more than seven hours of tests, questions, and examinations, the emergency room doctors had finally moved Hannah into a room on the pediatric floor. At first the nurses had said I couldn’t stay overnight; there was nowhere for me to sleep. When Claude and I insisted, they agreed to make an exception and let Hannah and me sleep together in her twin-size bed.

Before Claude left, I handed him a list of things that Hannah and I would need in the coming days: Hannah’s pink-flowered nightgown that she called her “robe j’s,” a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt for me, underwear, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and Hannah’s pink blanket. In the midst of a crisis, our needs were surprisingly simple.

Later, I sat on the edge of the bed and dialed a series of phone numbers I knew by heart. First I called our parents, Claude’s and my own. I told them briefly about Hannah and the miscarriage and asked them to call the rest of the family. My mother agreed to come as soon as possible to help with Will. Then I called everyone I could think of who was expecting me to do something for them in the coming year: church committees, the PTA, Will’s school. I told them that Hannah was sick, that I would be devoting all my time and energy to being with her and our family, that I was no longer available for anything else. I felt as if I had lost a thousand pounds.

I realized that for years I had been measuring my worth by being involved, important, and indispensable, saying “yes” to things not only because I wanted to be helpful, but because I wanted to be looked up to, admired, and loved. I had poured myself into maintaining an illusion of perfection in every aspect of my life. And I had been so busy “doing the right thing” for the benefit of everyone else that I had lost track of what really mattered to me.

Now, lying in the half-dark, my priorities seemed incredibly clear; this was where I wanted and needed to be. I felt so certain about it that, for the first time in a long time, I forgot to worry about what anyone else thought.

Respect (#ulink_0df02edd-aa30-5361-b608-916713367893)

I STRUGGLED TO ROUSE MYSELF FROM A DENSE, DREAMLESS sleep. My alarm clock was beeping. Reaching for the snooze button, my arm brushed against a cold metal rail. My eyes flew open. The beep wasn’t coming from an alarm clock; it was coming from the pump of an IV.

I sat up slowly, feeling as if I had passed through an invisible fold in the universe and landed in some altered state of reality. Hannah was still asleep. I glanced around, wondering what time it was. The light coming through the slatted blinds looked early-morning gray, but the clatter and conversation in the hall suggested it might be later than I thought.

A nurse strode purposefully into the room, followed by a heavyset young woman in blue carrying a tray of flying saucers. While the nurse busied herself with the beeping IV, the young woman set the tray down and lifted the flying saucers to reveal our breakfast: colorless oatmeal, lukewarm scrambled eggs, and cold toast.

“The first day of meals is the worst,” she explained apologetically. “Since you weren’t here yesterday to choose, we have to give you what’s left. Tomorrow’s menu is under the plate. Circle what you want. I’ll be back in a while to pick it up.”

She glanced at Hannah’s sleeping form. “We can only bring one tray per patient, so you might want to circle extra items. We’ll do our best to bring what we can.”

She turned to leave, squeezing through a crowd of white-coated residents that had congregated in the hallway outside our door. Three of them came in. Each wore a stethoscope and carried a clipboard. As they approached Hannah’s bed, two of them cleared their throats at the same time and then laughed self-consciously. The nurse, who was finished with the IV pole, nodded to them as she left.

I eyed the residents suspiciously. One of the things I was beginning to understand about the hospital was that we rarely saw the same person twice. It was disconcerting, too, that while they knew so much about us, we knew almost nothing about them. Hannah opened her eyes and sat up.

“Mommy, who are all these people?” she asked, frowning.

One of the residents spoke. “We need to examine her,” he said efficiently. “It’ll only take a minute.”

“My name is Hannah,” Hannah said quietly.