Well, the check from Uncle Joe showed up yesterday and, as near as I can tell, there was no money for Colin in it. It’s such a strange thing. On the one hand, thank God the US government finally caught on to the fact that my son is dead. On the other hand, oh God, even the US government has realized my son is dead. It’s the nature of this game. You don’t get what you want, you hope for the next best thing and then, when you get that, you realize that’s pretty awful too.
And that’s sort of every memory of him. There’s the brief smile when you remember the cute thing he used to do and then the punch in the gut when you remember that you won’t be able to see that again.
And your logical self tells you that’s just the way it is. A few weeks ago, Facebook served me up a video I’d posted of an 11-month old Emma trying to learn to drink from a sippy cup. We watched it and then Christina said “The strange thing is, that child is gone too.” Which is true. Emma mastered drinking from a cup quite a while ago. She turns 13 in a few weeks – officially a teenager – and has learned to barricade herself in her room in a way that would make the most ardent teenager AND the most hardcore survivalist think “Damn. She knows what she’s doing.”
But we don’t mourn for her. We remember her as a baby. We mourn for Colin. And we all remember him differently. After my last post – and after she threatened me for revealing to the world her annual “Death or Easter” challenge, Christina asked where I’d gotten the picture of Colin from. It’s true, that’s a moment he and I had by ourselves, at Easter at his grandparents’ in 2018. But I thought I’d shown the picture to Christina. I thought I’d shared it with her. But no, that was a memory I only had – and in many ways still only have.
I don’t want to stop remembering him. I also don’t want the US government to send him money. I want to be able to get through a day without having a painful memory. I’m glad that the hereafter or my active imagination or whatever you want to call it makes it possible for me to feel that he stops by to see me most days. I wish more people went to his grave. I wish most conversations I had with my friends didn’t eventually turn to the fact that my son is dead. I’ll take closure wherever I can get it, and yet I keep fighting to keep the door open. It is the moments like this where I realize that I might only be on the first few steps of a miserable trip that might take me the rest of my life.
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