Everything Happened | vol. 222

Sharky is not okay

Sharky had gone missing. Sharky is a Squishmallow with an overbite and holographic eyes that turn into drunken spirals at the right angle. He was a gift from my brother to Jane for her first birthday, he is a boy shark. When Jane was 2, Sharky developed his own distinct speaking voice, kind of a reedier Groucho Marx. The stuffing settled completely into either fork of his caudal fin, making his tail looks like a set of saggy TruckNutz. On long car trips, Jane can sit Sharky on her lap and fall asleep with her face pressed into the soft orb of his body.

My kids’ stuffed animals go missing all the time but they usually turn up.. A big gray blob is hard to hide and our house is small. We try not to bring stuffies out of the house with us, and when we do, we usually have the stuffies “wait” in the car for us. I was sure Jane had done the car-stashing thing in my parents’ vehicle when they visited over Christmas. They could retrieve it from the trunk, post it back to us, and the whole thing could be spun as Sharky having an “adventure” within the logistics maze of the USPS. My parents didn’t have Sharky though. I was stumped.

Jane was devastated. Desi, like most eldest children, is the Sun King. He experiences disappointment as a failure of his staff to anticipate peril. When he was a toddler, he would scold me if we got caught in a rainstorm. “You should have brought an umbrella.” Jane turned her disappointment inward, which felt worse for me. “I always take care of my things, but I still lost Sharky.” I didn’t know what to say, because it was true. She did always take care of her things. She did lose Sharky. 

“I’m sure Sharky will turn up soon” is what I said to her over and over but I was not sure. His absence fell out of focus. When she was really exhausted, she would remember. “Wherever Sharky is, he is okay,” I would say. “He’s not okay! He can’t get to sleep without me!” Sharky was alone, she told me. He was scared.

Jane learned to go to sleep without Sharky, though. I found a ringer on eBay and sent Nick the link but he told me not to buy it. She’s too old for a lovey swap. She’s not stupid!

I couldn’t accept that this was it for her shark. In my desperation, I posted a photo of Jane and Sharky to the town Facebook group. People hearted the post, sad-faced the post, but no leads. A week later, when the post should have been pushed to low-engagement purgatory, a comment surfaced that IDed his location. I stood up from my desk and drove directly to Jane’s pediatrician. “We were just about to throw it out,” the receptionist told me. Sharky had been there 8 weeks. My entire body buzzed like old neon. I was high on my competence, I was vibrating from proximity to tragedy. There are things you cannot save. There are disappointments you cannot swat away.

But I found the shark. I was a god.

I’ve long had a fear that I’d die with shoes on. My friend died wearing shoes, smashed up in her car. I’ve had a fear, in the past few years since he’s been sick, that my father-in-law would die alone in his house, in pain, frightened. He was peaceful, pain-free, holding the hands of his sons when he died. He wasn’t wearing shoes.

Did you know that you might die with $31 cash and a Little Caesar’s receipt in your wallet? Did you know that one day your groceries will outlive you? Did you know that you can anticipate death for years, and still feel shocked by it? It feels fake, like when midnight is a new year. Then it feels so real you cannot take a full breath.

I should not have weaned Polly the week before my father-in-law died, but famously you don’t get a push notification for these things. I was in the hormonal funhouse when Nick cancelled his last class and drove through the night with his brother to get to the hospital in time. Do you know what being immediately post-lactation at a funeral feels like? It’s worse than being drunk at the gym (unsafe, I know from experience) and worse than being stoned at church (paranoid, I know from experience.) Or maybe it’s the truest way to stare down death, bobbing in your own wake.

Nick had to do so much of it alone, because I was with the kids at home, because his parents are divorced, because he and his brother would tag-team their visits so as to stretch coverage. We barely talked the week that he was in Ohio after his dad had died but before I came out with the kids for the funeral. He was busy with the work of it all, the choices, the arrangements, cancelling cable.

At the cemetery, I forgot myself for a moment and as my husband’s shoulders quaked with sobs, I said, “Who picked yellow?” The spray on the casket was cheerfully, willfully yellow: sunflowers and yellow gerbera daisies and yellow chrysanthemums, the dramatic, leggy kind you see in Japanese tattooing. Nick lit up. “I did!” He didn’t connect his dad to the fussiness of roses, the formality of spiky greenery like a prom corsage. “You did great,” I told him.

Nick did so great.

yr mate,
Evie
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