After our wedding, I moved to Geneva to live with Andy. Throughout our apartment, framed photos of Laurence, Evan, and Baptiste mingle with others of us. Their names come up in regular conversation. His past is always there, but it doesn’t get in the way of our future.
We were cautious leading up to the five-year anniversary of the earthquake. Andy still hadn’t done anything with his family’s ashes, wanting to include Laurence’s parents and sister in any decision he ultimately made, but he felt an obligation and a desire to commemorate the day. And so together we took the three big urns down from the shelf, scooped out a handful of ashes from each, placed them into separate containers, and carried them to the Arve River. The mundanity of the act—we used small plastic Ikea bins, which I later washed in the dishwasher next to our dirty plates and forks—was surpassed by its quiet significance. Andy took the containers out of his pocket one by one, emptied them slowly, and we watched the river take the ashes away.
Two days earlier, we had found out that I was pregnant. As the ashes mingled with the water, turning the stones underneath a foggy gray, we knew that the future held life.
I used to feel that my friends with children could identify with Andy’s loss in a way I couldn’t. I never knew what it was like to have children, to love something that much and then to imagine it taken from me. Now that I was pregnant, already beginning to feel my own protective instincts, I’d find myself staring at him, my husband, amazed all over again by what he has lived through.
About a week after we found out I was pregnant, Andy held my hand at our first checkup. As the Swiss doctor examined me, he paused. “Oh,” he said. I flinched—was something wrong?
“Twins,” he said. “You are having two.”
We stared at the black-and-white screen in front of us, at the two little blobs with barely recognizable heads. “I’m going to have two children again,” Andy said, tearing up and laughing at once. Weeks later, we found out that the twins were boys.
For a long time, Andy vowed that he would never remarry, certainly never have children—the vulnerability that kind of attachment brings terrified him. Today, he wonders at the contradictions in a world that can include both an earthquake and the improbable conception of twin boys. Andy says he has reconciled his powerlessness, his lack of control, not only over history and calamity, but also over loving again.
Andy’s family has said that there was a time they didn’t know whether the old Andy would ever reappear. But these days he’ll stop himself when we’re on a walk, or while we’re feeding the boys on the couch, surprised by joy—by the happiness he thought he’d never experience again. “I think about how much I lost,” he said to me recently, with something close to awe in his voice. “But I also think about how much I have.”
Jessica Alexander is the author of a memoir, Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid.
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