Maggie sings the only word she knows of a Leonard Cohen song,
"Halleluuuuja, Halleluuuuujah" over and over again into the receiver that her mother holds up to hear ear, her dark auburn ringlets laying loosely over the phone.
On the other end, her Nana smiles, least just for today. In a few months she'll be gone, but Maggie doesn't know that. She's nearly three and right now, gone is what happens to the food when you eat it and gone are the cars passing by on the street. When things are gone, they either come back or you forget.
She doesn't know everyone is eventually gone forever. She still doesn't know forever outside of cold toes in the winter, or cookies in the oven.
When she's old enough to write about what it all means, or to even come close to understanding, she'll have forgotten how sweet her nana's laugh was, or the taste of her apple pie. She won't remember the look in her father's eyes watching his own mother die, or that her mother's pregnant belly was the only thing keeping anyone going in those days.
But we'll know. And we'll remember. If I know her when she's a grown up I'll tell her that the thought of her little voice singing that song both killed and healed us. I'll talk about the scrap book that her little life is for me.
When she asks what she was doing when Franny was passing away, I'll tell her of the one day I went to visit in the hospital, and Uncle Andrew was there with us. She was pretending to be a monster, and punching everyone in their gentiles. We laughed half out of discomfort and half for all the nerves. We tried to keep spirit around a woman who knew she had maybe weeks left.
I'll tell her that she was busy being just shy of three-a high note in an otherwise cold and broken song, in an otherwise cold and broken moment in a pit at the hospital.
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