A child dies. No illness, no warning, just a passage from life to death in seconds.
The child is 38 years old, a pediatrician and the mother of three. To her parents, Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon will always be their child.
Amy dies on a treadmill in her home, due to what is called ”an anomalous right coronary artery.” Her two coronary arteries are both on the same side. They are somehow squeezed together while she’s on the on treadmill, cutting off her heart’s blood supply. The situation is extremely rare, occurring in perhaps two thousandths of one percent of the population.
On the day Amy dies in December 2007, her parents – her children’s grandparents, Roger and Ginny Rosenblatt – immediately drive from their home on the southern shore of Long Island to the Bethesda, Maryland home of Harris Solomon and Jessica, Sammy and James, called “Bubbies.” The grandparents, “Boppo” and “Mimi,” arrive and promise to stay “forever.”
Upon seeing his father-in-law, Harris Solomon says, simply, “It’s impossible.”
The blunt impossibility of losing Amy is stamped into every page of Making Toast: A Family Story (HarperCollins, NY 2010; ISBN 978-0-06-182593-4).
Award-Winning Essayist for PBS
Over the years, Roger Rosenblatt has been an award-winning essayist for Time Magazine and, currently, the Public Broadcasting System. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Book University, on New York’s Long Island. He has always been known for the elegance and eloquence of his spare and low-key style of story-telling. And in Making Toast, Rosenblatt tells this story of heartbreak simply and clearly, one moment at a time, as a family copes with grief and loss, and with creating new ways to get through one day and move on to the next.
But this time, Rosenblatt has an element in his writing that his readers and viewers have never encountered before. From the first word to the last, Rosenblatt is stunned.
Somehow, and he might not even be aware of it himself, Rosenblatt communicates his ongoing disbelief. As loving and conscientious and funny as he is with his grandchildren; as dedicated as he and Ginny are to re-creating a semblance of a normal family life; as diligent as they are with the pickups and the dropoffs, with the fetching and the carrying; behind the scenes, Rosenblatt conveys a sense of operating on automatic pilot. Some part of him is numb, and always will be.
Long Drives to Back to Stony Brook
He and Ginny take up residence in the in-law apartment of the Solomon home, where they have always stayed on their visits. They maintain their home in Quogue, on the southern shore of Long Island. Each Sunday, Rosenblatt makes the drive from Bethesda to Quogue, spending the first half of the week teaching at Stony Brook. Then he drives back.
At first, he admits, road rage was a constant concern. What else could be expected after the impossibility of the loss of Amy?
Rosenblatt is not religious. “We had something like a wake the day before the funeral,’ he writes, “and when we greeted friends at home, it was akin to sitting shiva. But these events simply fell into place and God was not with us.”
Rosenblatt curses God. A family friend is visiting Jerusalem when he receives the news about Amy. When the friend visits the Wailing Wall, he kicks it and hurls an epithet of his own at God.
No part of life is beyond the reach of the feel of death. Sammy asks “Boppo” to read to him. They begin with a story of Thomas Edison and his inventions. “I read ahead on a page,” Boppo writes, “and learn that Edison’s wife died when he was 37, leaving him with three small children. I hesitate, then read the passage to Sammy. He listens thoughtfully but says nothing.”
Establishing Routine and Ritual
The family observes the first birthday after Amy’s death with a cake and candles, as they would have if Amy were still with them. After the candles are blown out, Harris asks Sammy what he thought Mommy would wish for. “To be alive,” Sammy says.
“The dead have occupied much of my time this past year – books and poems about the dead, conversations with other families about their dead,” Rosenblatt discloses. “I read death into innocent remarks and innocent texts. At the time it feels accidental, but I know it is not. I should try to get away from the subject. It is not infinitely interesting, as thinking about it ends only with a grim shrug.”
The only way to cope is through routine, almost turning it into ritual. Like the morning toast. First he takes out the butter to let it soften. Then he places three slices of Pepperidge Farm Hearty White in toaster oven for Boppo, Sammy and Bubbies. “Bubbies and I like plain buttered toast, Sammy prefers it with cinnamon, with the crusts cut off,” Boppo says. “When the bell rings I shift the slices from the toaster to plates, and butter them.”
Impossibly, another day begins.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
Join the Conversation