Fear itself

We just came off a week that would have been busy in the best of times, but had the added punch of carrying the weight of a dead child with it.

The short version is we’re all fine.

But we did get a call from Emma’s school around 9 a.m. on Tuesday that she had tested positive for the coronavirus, which is not the call anyone ever wants. Christina rushed off to collect her and we got her to a PCR test that afternoon. By dinner on Wednesday we had the results telling us it was a false positive, at which point we could all talk about whether we had really believed she had it or not and how we would have coped if we’d indeed been locked up for two weeks or if Emma had indeed gotten sick. You can talk about these things much better once they’re no longer really a threat.

But that was some 36 hours. Just the fact you have to wear a mask in your own home feels too much like a hospital, even if we never had to wear a mask around him.

You know, you keep telling yourself that she’s 13 and all the indications are that most younger people walk off the coronavirus without ever really noticing it. The odds were on our side. And that feels good until you realize that the odds should have been on our side with Colin as well. The odds of him getting that tumor in that spot were so small we should never have had to think of it, much less experience it. Instead … well, we know how the story ended.

And then Christina mentioned Noah, who remains unvaccinated, and suddenly the risks seemed much realer and I did start wondering for a while how many children I was going to be expected to lose. Still, I don’t think it got to me too much. And then Christina mentioned to me how it was messing with her head that we were eating separately: Emma in the kitchen, the rest of us in the living room, because we had to do that the whole time Colin was home in 2019. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t eat any more, that he was getting nourishment straight into his stomach, which is nowhere near as good as tasting it. So, one of us would keep him busy while the rest of us ate and, honestly, I’d forgotten about it until Christina mentioned it.

“We all have something that triggers us,” she said, and there’s no arguing with that.

We got the all-clear on Wednesday and figured we’d return to as normal a life as this pandemic will let us have. Then, on Friday, Noah came home in tears. He’s watching “Luther” in religion class. Apparently there’s a scene where a boy kills himself followed by a funeral. The teacher knew this and had meant to get him out of the room before the scene came on, but missed her cue. So, there was Noah, who usually only talks about his great memories of Colin, on the sofa crying for about 20 minutes. And there’s nothing you can say. “How does this make you feel?” or “Well, we all have to deal with this from time to time” or “What did the teacher say?” – None of those really cuts the mustard in that moment, does it?

We all have something that triggers us. Worse, we never know when those triggers are going to be pulled. And that all seems so painfully obvious. But you kind of keep hoping that these triggers will become less powerful over time, but, instead, you just realize they’re going to be there for the rest of your life, just waiting.

Like I said, we’re fine. But, as always, we’re never going to be quite right either. We just start each day and see what’s coming our way.