17

There have been 17 17ths since Colin died.

I did spend the first three or four months bracing myself for the 17th of each month. October 17, 2019, was one month since his death. November 17, 2019, was two months, and so on. I don’t remember anything particularly noteworthy happening on those days, but the build up certainly kept me busy.

For months now – perhaps thanks to the distraction of the coronavirus – I honestly don’t count the minutes, moments and days until each 17th arrives. And yet, invariably, towards the end of every 17th I’ll point out how I’ve been having a bad day and Christina will remind me of the date. She knows it straight away because she’s been having a rough one as well.

This time perhaps there were extra triggers. Emma had to go to her school – despite the lockdown – to get her report card. There seems to be some tic to the German school rules that require these things be picked up in person. And her school is nowhere near the house and she didn’t want to make the trip by herself. And I’ve spent the last year trying to only leave the house when absolutely necessary, and suddenly I’m taking a trip downtown and back on public transportation so I can wait in the (mild) rain while Emma and her class run around the school because her teachers couldn’t figure out which classroom they’d set aside for the handover.

But I don’t need an event like that. I should recognize the signs by now. The flying into tiny rages because some of my clothes have been put back the wrong way. The sense of weight I feel when I’m working in my study and Noah comes in for something and I know I should turn around and be glad to see him but I know I only just have the strength to not be visibly mad that I have to deal with yet another person, even if it’s my only surviving son.

I still don’t know if it’s actually the 17th. God knows, I was pretty annoyed with things on the 16th as well. Because you can never tell when it’s going to come up. Call it the curse of Facebook, but I’ve got five years of memories saved on to it, and I’m far from a prolific poster there, but there are enough references to and pictures of Colin there that they do pop up and get me at the oddest times, especially at this time of year, when it likes to share the memories of the pictures I took and shared of him in his first six weeks of life.

Which I suppose is an awkward segue to the picture at the top of this post, which I already went on about on Facebook. Because it’s a picture of me from a year ago, when Christina humored me and took me to an exhibit on the crossbow at the history museum and we turned that into our anniversary day out. On Facebook, I went on about how odd it was that I was standing there, holding a fake crossbow, knowing what I knew then about the spread of the coronavirus and still hanging out unmasked in a museum and not really suspecting that it was going to be a little less than three weeks until I was sent home with a laptop and a monitor to run a news wire from my study with no real idea when I would ever see the inside of my office again.

But here, on this blog, what also struck me is that it was five months since our son died and Christina and I still managed to pull it together to get the kids to school and spend a day at a museum and have a coffee together (I’m not sure we managed lunch as well) and act like it was a halfway normal anniversary (of our civil, not our church, ceremony). There is a way to look at that and say “Why weren’t you in bed, just crying your eyes out.” But there is also a way to look at is and say “You did what you could with what was left.” I know which way I want to go many days. But I also know which way I’m glad I go most days.