We have angels in our window. They have been there for almost 12 months now. First, a Christmas accoutrement. All the angels gifted to our daughter Jessie by grandmothers, friends, teachers, shopkeepers, carefully collected and wrapped in white tissue at the end of every season. They were going to be her own first Christmas decorations that she would take with her when she moved out. Enough to fill a box, populate a choir, create a heavenly host.
And when we most needed that heavenly host, as we planned our post-Christmas trip to Boston last year, where Jessie was to get brain surgery, I gathered them off the tree and put them up in the front window. Talismans. Amulets. Jujus.
Of course, I no longer believe in talismans. Have let go of each and every sign—the angels and the good luck charms. Have let go, even, of prayers. Because surgery in Boston stole our daughter, our lives. A post-operative bilateral stroke in the frontal cortex left her stranded in some neurological netherworld and me weeping on a meditation cushion in the hospital prayer room, no longer able to listen as students, doctors, nurses, and neurologists shouted her name, hoping to arouse her. First, I shouted with them. Then, sleep deprived and unable to eat, I would huddle in the hallway and listen to their muffled voices as they tried to bring her up out of the fog, ask her questions, light up the sparkle that used to shine from her eyes.
When we came home with a daughter gutted by stroke and newly wired for violent aggression, I was too tired to take those angels down. Too tired and bereft to do anything like clean or cook or pay bills.
So I left the angels up, out of lassitude/anomie/melancholia/acedia. We began to use them to tell stories, repopulate Jessie’s memory with the people her stroke had excised. A medieval angel with hands folded in prayer, eyes downcast, and wings tucked into the side from Janet, Jessie’s choir director and partner in planning her move from the family home. A crafty angel, salt-dough baked, fingerprinted, and hand painted with Rachel, best best bestest friend from elementary school. A fancy glittering pink angel from Liz, colleague and mentor. A simple wooden angel with brass wings from Grams, who started the angel tradition when Jessie was still in kindergarten. A lime-green felted angel with skirt ballooned around dainty dangling feet from Mrs. MacLean, a close friend of Grams’ and over years of visits, one of Jessie’s trusted confidantes.
Just as I am thinking, around April, that those angels should come down, we run into Sarah in the park with her grandson Henry. Henry who asks every morning to walk past the “angel house.” I look at her quizzically. The angel house? “Your house!” says Sarah “You are the angel house!
The next week, an elderly lady knocks on our door. “I just wanted to tell you how much I needed to see those angels today. They’re like a sign! So much joy.” she exclaims, then walks away.
Then David dies, Sarah’s true late love. And Jessie makes a paper angel for David and adds it to the window.
And now it is the first snow. And Christmas is almost here. And I have not been attacked by my daughter for 10 whole days.
And so the angels stay. We are the angel house.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work in Citron Review, EVENT, Full Mood, Literary Mama, One Art, Pinhole, Prairie Fire, and Waterwheel Review.
© 2023, Nancy Huggett
Halfway Down the Stairs 