Long time coming

I wrote this on Friday on a train back to Berlin, thinking I would post it on Saturday after giving it a quick reread. Then some kind of flu reared its ugly head and I was basically flat on my back for four straight days. So, some of the information is a little out of date but, given that the point of the post was how I haven’t posted in a long time, I guess that’s just keeping with the theme…

For lack of a photo to better illustrate the idea, I default to one of Murphy.

            Once again, we’ve reached the time of the year when the sun rises later in the morning.  It jars me a little bit every since Colin died.  That whole summer in the hospice, I got used to waking up at 5:15 a.m. and getting to his bedside, just so he didn’t have to spend any of the time he had left alone.  The fact that the sun came through the windows was my signal to get up and get up to him.  It probably helped that that was also about the time the first planes began taking off and landing at Tegel airport.  You heard every plane tearing through the sky from the window to the room they’d set aside for Christina and me.  Strangely, I don’t really remember ever hearing them in Colin’s room.

            I can’t really tell you why I haven’t posted in an age.  I’ve had a few ideas I wanted to write about.  I definitely felt a need to write from time to time.  And it’s not as if I haven’t been writing about him: I recently finished work on a novel that is – spoiler warning – based on how I might have acted if I had had an actual mental break after his death.  I don’t know if that was cathartic to write or set me back, but I needed to get that story out of me.  So, now it sits on my hard drive, while I try to figure out how or whether to publish it.

            Maybe it’s just been busy.  We had our vacation in southern Germany last month.  Then we had a barrage of visitors, which was all very pleasant, but, after two years or more of barely seeing anyone, it was an awful lot of people compressed into two weeks.  But also great to catch up with so many people from back home.  And to use them to provide us with precious supplies we can’t get here in Germany.  We are now an eastern German hub of US baking powder supplies, should anyone need any.

            There’s also been a fair bit going on professionally.  More on that at a later point.

            But I’d always found time to write before, so I can’t really tell you what pushed blogging to the back burner for the last few months.  I can’t tell you is this post is a flash in the pan or if I’m going to get back to a semi-regular cycle of writing.  I can tell you that I’ve already nearly cried once while writing this.

            We did just have the third anniversary of his death.  It’s the first time I’ve worked a September 17 since his death.  I can’t tell you why I did.  I thought about asking for the day off, but then thought that maybe I should try to treat it like a more normal day.  Everyone seemed to have plans and it wasn’t until dusk that we got our act together to go to the cemetery.  There was talk that we should make new candles for him, but we didn’t pull it together.  Even the act of going to the cemetery is different now, because I’m tethered to Murphy, who will take off if he sees a squirrel, somber moment or not.  He didn’t do anything at the cemetery, but it’s something you’ve always got to think about when you’ve got a dog of Murphy’s size and energy at the other end of a rope.

            Maybe we’ll still make the candles.  It can’t be overlooked that Christina’s going through a busy phase at work and that everyone has been sick for the last two weeks, none of which was conducive to us sitting down for a family project.  Christina and Noah are going to the hospice tomorrow to discuss how Noah’s week away with the kids group went and we’re going to get Noah started on a new rock climbing program set up by the hospice.  I am determined to be at the men’s groups meetings for the next few months after barely going to the group since the start of the pandemic.  I am facing situations where I’m going to have to tell new people about having watched my son die.  This will all be staying with us for the rest of our lives, so I don’t see the blog going away.  I’ll simply have to see how I integrate it into my life going forward.