Making Toast: A Family Story: A Family Story – A Moving Memoir of Grief and Recovery - Softcover

Rosenblatt, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061825956 ISBN 13: 9780061825958

Verlag: Ecco, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

“A painfully beautiful memoir….Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.”

—E. L. Doctorow

 

A revered, many times honored (George Polk, Peabody, and Emmy Award winner, to name but a few) journalist, novelist, and playwright, Roger Rosenblatt shares the unforgettable story of the tragedy that changed his life and his family. A book that grew out of his popular December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, Making Toast is a moving account of unexpected loss and recovery in the powerful tradition of About Alice and The Year of Magical Thinking. Writer Ann Beattie offers high praise to the acclaimed author of Lapham Rising and Beet for a memoir that is, “written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family.”

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Roger Rosenblatt  is the author of six off-Broadway plays and eighteen books, including Lapham Rising, Making Toast, Kayak Morning and The Boy Detective. He is the recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

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From O magazine to the New York Times, from authors such as E. L. Doctorow to Ann Beattie, critics and writers across the country have hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as an evocative, moving testament to the enduring power of a parent's love and the bonds of family.

When Roger's daughter, Amy—a gifted doctor, mother, and wife—collapses and dies from an asymptomatic heart condition at age thirty-eight, Roger and his wife, Ginny, leave their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren: six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, known as Bubbies.

Long past the years of diapers, homework, and recitals, Roger and Ginny—Boppo and Mimi to the kids—quickly reaccustom themselves to the world of small children: bedtime stories, talking toys, play-dates, nonstop questions, and nonsequential thought. Though reeling from Amy's death, they carry on, reconstructing a family, sustaining one another, and guiding three lively, alert, and tenderhearted children through the pains and confusions of grief. As he marvels at the strength of his son-in-law and the tenacity and skill of his wife, Roger attends each day to "the one household duty I have mastered"—preparing the morning toast perfectly to each child's liking.

Luminous, precise, and utterly unsentimental, Making Toast is both a tribute to the singular Amy and a brave exploration of the human capacity to move through and live with grief.

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Making Toast

A Family Story

By Roger Rosenblatt

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2011 Roger Rosenblatt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-06-182595-8

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The trick when foraging for a tooth lost in coffeegrounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The onlyway to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumband index finger, which makes a mess of your hands. Forsome twenty minutes this morning, Ginny and I havebeen hunting in the kitchen trash can for the top frontleft tooth of our seven-year-old granddaughter, Jessica.Loose for days but not yet dislodged, the tooth finallydropped into a bowl of Apple Jacks. I wrapped it forsafekeeping in a paper napkin and put it on the kitchen counter,but it was mistaken for trash by Ligaya, Bubbies'snanny. Bubbies (James) is twenty months and theyoungest of our daughter Amy's three children. Sammy,who is five, is uninterested in the tooth search, and Jessieis unaware of it. We hope to find the tooth so that Jessiewon't worry about the Tooth Fairy not showing up.This sort of activity has constituted our life sinceAmy died, on December 8, 2007, at 2:30 p.m., six monthsago. Today is June 9, 2008. The day of her death, Ginnyand I drove from our home in Quogue, on the south shoreof Long Island, to Bethesda, Maryland, where Amy and herhusband, Harris, lived. With Harris's encouragement,we have been there ever since. "How long are you staying?"Jessie asked the next morning. "Forever," I said.Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old,pediatrician, wife of hand surgeon Harrison Solomon, and motherof three, collapsed on her treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home."Jessie and Sammy discovered her," our oldest son, Carl,told us on the phone. Carl lives in Fairfax, Virginia, not far fromAmy and Harris, with his wife, Wendy, and their two boys,Andrew and Ryan. Jessie had run upstairs to Harris."Mommy isn't talking," she said. Harris got to Amy withinseconds, and tried CPR, but her heart had stopped and shecould not be revived.

Amy's was ruled a "sudden death due to an anomalousright coronary artery"- meaning that her two coronaryarteries fed her heart from the same side. Normally, thearteries are located on both sides of the heart so that ifone fails, the other can do the work. In Amy's heart, theyran alongside each other. They could have been squeezedbetween the aorta and the pulmonary artery, which canexpand during physical exercise. The blood flow was cutoff . Her condition, affecting less than two thousandthsof one percent of the population, was asymptomatic; shemight have died at any time in her life.

She would have appreciated the clarity of the verdict.Amy was a very clear person, even as a small child,knowing intuitively what plain good sense a particularsituation required. She had a broad expanse of forehead,dark, nearly black hair, and hazel eyes. Both self-confidentand selfless, when she faced you there could be no doubtyou were the only thing on her mind.

Her clarity could make her severe with her family,especially her two brothers. Carl and John, our youngest,withered when she excoriated them for such offensesas invading her room. She could also poke you gentlywith her wit. When she was about to graduate from theNYU School of Medicine, her class had asked me to bethe speaker. A tradition of the school allows a past graduateto place the hood of the gown on a current graduate.Harris, who had graduated the previous year, was set to"hood" Amy. At dinner the night before the ceremony,a friend remarked, "Amy, isn't it great? Your dad is givingthe graduation speech, and your fiancé is doing thehood." Amy said, "It is. And it's also pretty great thatI'm graduating."

Yet her clarity also contributed to her kindness.When she was six, I was driving her and three friends toa birthday party. One of the girls got carsick. The othertwo backed away, understandably, with cries of "Ooh!"and "Yuck!" Amy drew closer to the stricken child, tocomfort her.

Ginny and I moved from a five bedroom house, with aden and a large kitchen, to a bedroom with a connectedbath - the in-law apartment in an alcove off the downstairsplayroom that we used to occupy whenever we visited.We put in a dresser and a desk, and Harris added aTV and a rug. It may have appeared that we were rreducing our comforts, but the older one gets the less spaceone needs, and the less one wants. And we still have ourhouse in Quogue.

I found I could not write and didn't want to. I couldteach, however, and it helped me feel useful. I drive fromBethesda to Quogue on Sundays, and meet my Englishliterature classes and MFA writing workshops atStony Brook University early in the week, then back toBethesda. The drive takes about five hours and a tankof gas each way. But it is easier and faster than flying ortaking a train.

Road rage was a danger those early weeks. I pickedfights with store clerks for no reason. I lost my temperwith a student who phoned me too frequently about herwork. I seethed at those who spoke of Amy's death in the clichésof modern usage, such as "passing" and "closure."

I cursed God. In a way, believing in God made Amy'sdeath more, not less, comprehensible, since the God Ibelieve in is not beneficent. He doesn't care. A friend wasvisiting Jerusalem when he got the news about Amy. Hekicked the Wailing Wall, and said, "Fuck you, God!" Mysentiments exactly.

What's Jessie's favorite winter jacket? The bluenot the pink, though pink is her favorite color. Sammy preferswhole milk in his Fruit Loops or MultiGrain Cheerios.He calls it "cow milk." Jessie drinks only Silksoy milk. She likes a glass of it at breakfast. Sammy preferswater. Such information had to be absorbed quickly.Sammy sees himself as the silver Power Ranger, Jessieis the pink. Sammy's friends are Nico, Carlos, andKipper. Jessie's are Ally, Danielle, and Kristie. Therewere play-dates to arrange, birthday party invitationsto respond to, school forms to fill out. Sammy goes toa private preschool, the Geneva Day School; Jessie toBurning Tree, the local public school. We had to mastertheir schedules.

I re-accustomed myself to things about small childrenI'd forgotten. Talking toys came back into my life. Iwill be walking with the family through an airport, andthe voice of a ventriloquist's dummy in a horror moviewill seep through the suitcase. Buzz Lightyear says, "Toinfinity and beyond!" A talking phone says, "Help me!"Another toy says, "I'm a pig. Can we stop?"

In all this, two things were of immeasurable use tous. First, Leslie Adelman, a friend of Amy's and Harris's,and the mother of friends of the children, createda Web site inviting others to prepare dinners for ourfamily. Emails were sent by Leslie, our daughter-in-law Wendy,Laura Gwyn, another friend and school mother, andBetsy Mencher, who had gone to college with Amy.Soon one hundred people - school families, friends andcolleagues of Amy's and Harris's, neighbors - comprisedthe list. Participants deposited dinners in a blue cooleroutside our front door. Food was provided every otherevening, with enough for the nights in between, frommid-December to the beginning of June.

The second was a piece of straightforward wisdom thatBubbies's nanny gave Harris. Ligaya is a small, lithewoman in her early fifties. I know little of her life exceptthat she is from the Philippines, with a daughterthere and a grown son here who is a supervisor in arestaurant, and that she has a work ethic of steel and theflexibility to deal with any contingency. She also showsa sense of practical formality by calling Bubbies Jamesand not by the nickname Amy had coined, to ensure the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ecco
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0061825956
• ISBN 13: 9780061825958
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland