Dream Home

Melissa Coleman — Dream Home

I had just moved into my dream home. It was bright and beautiful, with solar panels on the roof for electricity and hot water. It had well insulated walls and triple glazed windows. In short, it was everything that a girl who’d grown up as a back to the land hippie child could wish for. [audience chuckle] Not to mention indoor plumbing and dual flush toilets. [audience laughter] 

See, I was born at home with no electricity or running water in a small cabin on the coast of Maine that my father and pregnant mother had just built by hand for $680. When we wanted to go to the bathroom, we would walk out to the little A frame outhouse and use dried sphagnum peat moss for toilet paper, seriously. [audience laughter] If we needed water, my mother and father would walk out a quarter of a mile down a path in the woods to a spring, and they would fill buckets that they would carry back on a wooden yoke that fit across their shoulders. 

When my little sister Heidi and I wanted a snack during the day, we would wander out into the gardens to see what was ripe. It might be cherry tomatoes, still warm from the sun, fresh strawberries, peas in the pod that we would eat right there on the spot. And invariably there would be a group of nude farm apprentices [audience laughter] harvesting vegetables and weeding without any clothes on. And at the first sign of a car, one of them would stand up and yell, ​“Pants dance.” And they’d all scramble into their clothes and someone would go down and greet the customers at the farm stand, which was our primary source of income. 

So, it was on a day like this, a hot, humid day in July, that I was seven years old. My little sister Heidi was three, and my baby sister Clara, who is here tonight, had just been born. My father was out in the garden working, and he– oh, and my grandmother was coming. My father was working, and he said to the apprentices, ​“Could you please keep your clothes on today? My mother is coming.” And my mother was in the farmhouse trying to clean her $680 home for my proper grandmother from New Jersey. [audience laughter]

But my sister Heidi and I, we just wanted to play. We were running around. We’d already woke up the baby. She was crying. My mother was like, ​“Please. Just please, can you let me clean the house in peace? Go outside.” So out we went, and I climbed up the ladder to my favorite place to play, which was this loft above the woodshed. And Heidi came to the bottom of the ladder, and she looked up at me with these big blue eyes and she said, ​“Uppie, help me up.” And sometimes I would help her up the ladder because she was afraid to climb it by herself. But it was really hot that day up in the loft, and I was irritable. And I said, ​“No, you go play.” 

And a little while later, my mom came to the bottom of the ladder, and she looked up and she said, ​“Lissy, is Heidi up there with you?” And I said, ​“No.” And she said, ​“Well, come down. Your grandmother’s here. Come say hi.” So, I climbed down the ladder, and the next thing I heard was my mother’s scream. She had found my sister floating face down in the pond with her little red boat, toy boat floating nearby. And I no longer can see clearly what I did or didn’t see that day. Part of me thinks that I was there at the pond and I somehow didn’t save her. But all I can see are these big blue eyes looking up at me from the bottom of that ladder.

And my grandmother, she wanted to say, you know, if only you’d had electricity and a phone. But I knew that if only I had helped her up the ladder that day, then my father wouldn’t be sitting behind the woodshed with her in his arms, rocking back and forth and crying in a way I’d never seen him cry before. My mother wouldn’t be walking down the paths in the woods calling her name. And I wouldn’t be sitting there in the loft at the end of that day, watching the light stream, the low afternoon sunlight stream through the window, full of this dust that seemed as heavy as the weight of that shame settling on my shoulders.

And so, you can imagine how strange, difficult, hard it was, the fact that my new, perfect, grown-up home with its guilt-free electricity, also happened to have a pond that was very similar to that pond we’d had as a child. The way the cattails punctuated the slippery clay edges, the way the peepers were so loud at nights in spring, it felt as if I was praying for sleep in the center of that pond. And most importantly, the fact that my own daughters, three years old, Emily and Heidi, had not yet learned how to swim.

And so, I did the things we do. I talked to my husband about planning a big hedge to block the view. I took the girls to swimming lessons. But every day, that weight on my shoulders only seemed to get heavier. And so, I began to talk to my parents, imagine that, about what had happened and trying to understand it. And finally, one day I was driving with my mother and I told her that I’d always felt that it was my fault, that if only I had helped my sister up the ladder that day, I just knew that things would have been different. And my mother said, ​“Oh, God, it wasn’t your fault.” She said, I was the last one that saw Heidi that day. And I never told anyone this because I didn’t want your father to blame me, but I sent her out to play with her little red boat. And I had always wished, you know, that I just stopped cleaning the house and took her in. 

And when she said this, it was as if she had just lifted that yoke that we use for carrying water right up off my shoulders and put it on her own in this sort of ultimate maternal gesture. And it was so liberating. I was not to blame. And I was so grateful to her for that. But I could see that she was still struggling, and it was heavy for her to carry it alone and I didn’t know what to do. And not to mention the fact that I went and wrote a book about it. And I still didn’t know what to do until preparing for this Moth, I remembered something that I had forgotten. Not long after I spoke to my mother, I told my father we were on a hike, and I told him what she had said and how liberating that was for me, but how much he still struggled. And he said, ​“Oh, she wasn’t to blame. I was the last one to see Heidi that day. I was working in the garden, and I saw her go down to the pond with her little red boat. And if only I had stopped working and gone down with her, things might have been different.”

And when he said this, it was so similar to what my mother had just said. And I was so caught up in my own guilt that I didn’t realize how important it was that he had taken that yoke off my mother’s shoulder and put it on his own, but neither is it his weight to bear. He had never told my mother this because they had only spoken for a handful of times. A handful of times since they separated after my sister died. We all think that we need to carry these things alone and somehow that will make it different, but we don’t need to carry them and we are not alone. The death of a child is probably one of the hardest things that can happen to a family, but we don’t need to make it sadder. What we can do is help each other to love each other during this time we have together today. Thank you.