Intros

One of my doctors is Spanish. Or at least he’s from a Spanish-speaking country. It really doesn’t matter. The point is that his German is iffy.

I had to see him because my leg was acting wonky and, even though I didn’t think I had a blood clot, I wanted to rule it out. The main reason I didn’t think I had a clot (and there wasn’t one) was because I had engaged in no behavior that could have resulted in a clot. Except for a rough-housing incident with Noah about a month ago. Of course, I told the doctor about this.

“My son jumped on my leg,” I said. “Mein Sohn ist auf mein Bein gesprungen” is what I said in German.

Except he heard: “Mein Sohn ist gestorben,” which is German for “My son died.”

And he repeated this at me, which had this perfect dark humor moment of me trying to figure out if my answer was “No” or “Yes” or “Yes, but not that one” or, really, any of the above. I eventually clarified that the son who had jumped on my leg was still alive and glossed over any other talk about dead children, because this was not the time or the place.

But yeah, these moments of having to face Colin’s death keep hitting when you’re least expecting it. I still don’t know how to introduce myself when people ask about my life or if I make contact with a friend who’s been out of my loop for years. I recently listened to a David Sedaris spoken essay in which he discussed meeting a man who introduced himself as the father of a certain number of children – I forget how many – but quickly added on that one of the children had been stillborn. “What do you do with that?” asked Sedaris, who was himself discussing his sister’s suicide.

So, I still don’t want to be the guy laying my troubles at the feet of strangers. But I also don’t want to meet someone and then, five years in, tell them that, by the way, the reason I get weird sometimes is because of the death of my 5-year-old child in 2019. There’s no real good options. A colleague at work who started in March, about two weeks before we were all sent home for lockdown, found out from other colleagues. And there’s a part of me that hates the fact that my loss is a form of office gossip. And there’s a part of me that’s glad I didn’t have to deal with the reveal.

Last week, an acquaintance I hadn’t heard from in a decade emailed out of the blue. Of course she asked how I was. And what do you answer? “Fine” seems like such a lie, but answering “I spontaneously started crying while mowing the lawn last week” is far too much information.

It’s hard because I feel like there are at least two or three versions of myself trying to figure out which is the true Niels. There is still a Niels that, pandemic notwithstanding, still wants to go out for a beer and a concert and genuinely enjoys life. He shows up on Facebook from time to time. But there is also the part that second guesses every decision I make and really wants to find someone to blame – even myself – for what happened to Colin, even if I know that there is, ultimately, no one to blame. There’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to do any of this any more, that thinks those movies where you can brainwash yourself and erase the bad memories doesn’t really seem like such a bad idea. I try to keep that version of me locked away, but he’s never entirely gone.

I had a little epiphany while I was setting up for Halloween this year. Germany is about to go into another lockdown-like situation starting on Monday. Was it really the best idea to set up our haunted house in the carport and send the kids out trick or treating? We’d set up the haunted house so there was no contact between us and visitors and we told the kids to only take candy put out in bowls, not to ring any doorbells. It felt like we were doing this as safely as we could under the situation, but it still felt like we were bending the rules. Like people might walk by and roll their eyes and say “You’re doing a haunted house? Under the circumstances?” And then I realized I’m not doing this for other people. It didn’t matter if not another soul showed up (in the end, people showed up to take selfies with our witch), because I was doing this for us, to make us happy. In the same way, I’m not writing this blog for any of you reading it. I’m writing it for me, because I need to figure out how to shuffle what’s left of me after Colin’s death back into a form that is functional and capable of happiness, while still remembering Colin.