Survival: An Excerpt from a Memoir: Beginning With Joshua

After Joshua died, there was no point in living. Without him I was nothing but an empty shell, or a seething mass of pain. I took the sleeping pills prescribed by the doctor, only to wake up to an even greater emptiness and the disappointment of still being alive. A small shred of me could see that Paul cared, that my mother and father cared, but they too were grieving.

Sometimes, I’d dream that there was a way to bring Joshua back, an overlooked cure or a magic trick. An improbable possibility, a budding realization that dispersed in the stark light of consciousness. I’d dream it, then wake up to nothing again.

Everyone had to do something. In between trying to work, my father wrote the terrible story of how Joshua died. It was published in Punch magazine under a pseudonym. My mother disguised her grief with an apron and dust cloth, cleaning the house, polishing the wooden floors that Joshua would never slide around on. He would never wheel his new Christmas trike, the little wooden horse I had found in the closet. All the unwrapped gifts.

Our lives were stripped to the barest of bones. My mother would cook meals that I couldn’t eat because I had nobody sitting in a high chair next to me with his spoon and bowl. The offending high chair was moved to the garage. The wooden trike returned to the closet. Christmas was over forever.

For as long as I could remember there had been music in my home. It had been a constant thread in my life. But I couldn’t hear it anymore. I would never again be able to stand the emotion it stirred, a cauldron of painful sounds. I walked in quiet misery.

Paul meanwhile, driven by a need to provide and for his own sanity, to heal, found a job at a record store in Kingston and brought home albums as perks of the job. I looked at them sideways, heard them from a distance, each note terrorizing my heart. Paul didn’t know and I couldn’t say how disturbing music had become for me.

I could only tend the grave. After the last frost I planted yellow daffodils, then purple lobelia. They would grow as the earth warmed with their color and short-lived life in Joshua’s honor.

I read books about other tragedies, sharing my own with the written pages. I read a book called Escape from Auschwitz, a true story based on the author’s near impossible escape. As I read the book, I was remembering the family trip to Buchenwald in Germany when I was nine years old, when I saw the gas chamber, the body-sized ovens, the mass graves. It was important to see for ourselves, those of us who’d lost family or ancestors. If people could find some hope of survival in that living hell, could see the proverbial light, then I must be able to as well. Throughout history, past and present, whether individual or collectively, people have survived the most dreadful conditions. That elemental urge to survive against all odds got me thinking about how I might try to be in this world, because now I had to think again of myself and I wasn’t used to that.

Quite out of character, I signed up for a typing course in town. It was a solitary thing in a room of unknown women who, I guessed, wanted to become secretaries. I just wanted to be able to type without looking at my fingers. Halfway through the course, before I mastered the technique, I saw an ad in the “Help Wanted” section of the local paper, for Surrey Sound Studios. It was a familiar place where I had recorded in pre-Joshua days.

Paul encouraging me to venture bravely into this latest version of reality meant that doing so would mean pleasing him. I used to do that and I would try to again, because maybe he had the right idea.

The one thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything. If asked to write a book on how to survive the loss of a child, mine would be a contradicting tale of total mess-ups and sheer luck. My message—there’s no clear path.

I sat in the office at Surrey Sound Studios chatting with Helen like old friends, which we weren’t. Her speech impediment was endearing, her enthusiasm for me to take over her job totally unfounded. The only experience I had was half a typing course and singing in a band. She saw past that, said I was qualified in all the right places and offered me the position of office manager, glorifying it with the addition of “in-house session singer.”

I choked back the tears not because I wanted the job but because this was a poor exchange for being a mother. I would have to learn how to engage with other humans, in person and on the phone, figuring out payroll and chasing up late payments from clients. The mundanities of daily existence and the routine of getting up in the morning and going to a job were, as it happened, just what I needed.

I slotted right into the job, though soon after, little niece Sarah, who was now three and a half, was deposited on me and Paul for two weeks. Her mother had a medical emergency and her dad, brother Jonathan, was in Boston studying jazz at Berklee School of Music. My parents had gone away somewhere and both Paul and I were working. But I took on the task because it was in my nature to say yes. Yes, because who else could love and care for her as we did? So, I took her to work with me on Monday. It was the same week that Eric Clapton and his band came in to record a new album.

Sarah was so far unaffected by stardom, and a child with her own set of principles. She ran on ahead of me down the corridor making a beeline into the circle of musicians during their tea break. This wispy blond-haired fairy, temporarily reduced a bunch of men to softer stuff while she informed them that her daddy played the saxophone. “Oh really, little girl?” one band member said. “Tell us more.” But they didn’t get to hear it. All too conscious of Clapton’s near godlike status, I cringed and tiptoed in.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized, but they adamantly said, no-no, it’s fine. I flushed red and led Sarah to the back room, where she promptly fell asleep on the plush leather sofa until Glen Johns, the band’s manager, speaking loudly on the phone, came around the corner. “Shh!” I couldn’t help saying to him, knowing that if she could sleep, I could get back to work. But man! Did I get a dirty look from him, because nobody tells that guy to be quiet—and I was a “nobody.” I left Sarah sleeping and went up to the loft with Pete the engineer to bring down some reel-to-reels.

“’Ere Pe-ete!” a cockney voice sang out from down below. “Got any cocaine?” Aargh, Sarah would surely wake up now. We peered down to see the source of the voice. It was Clapton himself.

“No, mate,” Pete said, he didn’t have any cocaine—and I think he was one of the few people working there who didn’t use it.

My new job got me out into the world, got me away from my internal agony for part of the day and I was so grateful to all the characters I met during that brief time. In the following weeks, I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, previously of 10CC. I had an uncomfortable meeting with Siouxsie of Siouxzie and the Banshees as she stood in the doorway to the main office, staring at me with those iconic raccoon eyes. I spoke to Sting very briefly on the phone when he called to speak to my boss, Nigel Grey, who produced the first two albums for the Police right there at Surrey Sound Studios. Subsequently, because of that unique sound, it had become a sought-after place to record.

Music was finding its way back into my repertoire. Like a thief, it came in through the back door, and gradually I let it stay.

In April when all the daffodils were blooming on top of the grave, I found out I was pregnant. The tiny seed of light and energy growing inside was all I needed to look ahead.