The 2/3 solution

            I know I keep returning to this, but bear with me, as I’m a little brain dead at the moment as I plow through my last week at my current job, while also trying to juggle life and the countdown to Christmas.  I can tell you this truth: If you add a dog to the mix, the logistics of leaving the Christmas cookies out to cool after baking becomes much more challenging, especially if you simultaneously want to keep them safe from the dog but also want to retain a few square inches of counter space to use in your kitchen.

            But it always comes back to the question of how to answer the question: How many children do you have?  I know this seems like an insanely simple thing to sort through in your day-to-day life, but it seems such a larger challenge to me.  Once I’ve told someone Colin is dead I can let that sink in for everyone and then we can have the conversation about how it affects me and how we deal with it.  But, by the time I’ve told someone that, it’s going to be someone whom I know somewhat well.  I’m not walking up to people on the street and telling them this.

            And it can be such a bummer.  Christina told me she nearly had a lady in tears last week.  They only kind-of, sort-of know one another and hadn’t seen one another in years.  The lady finally remembered who Christina was and asked “Your son?  He’s gotten better, right?” 

            I know.  Oh dear.

            But the real problem comes when meeting people for the first time.  Is this someone I’m going to spend a lot of time with?  Are we going to become office besties?  Or are they plotting their escape from the company and will be happier not having learned about a child dying of cancer before he got to first grade?  Why weigh someone down with this stuff?

            As it happened, the benefit of leaving your job on good terms and heading to a job full of people who seem exceptionally happy, especially at the Christmas season, is that you end up going to both Christmas parties (well, for full disclosure, we don’t do parties because of coronavirus regulations, but we had the coincidence where several of us were at a Christmas market where we chose not to talk about the fact that it was Christmas.  Is that good enough for legal?).

            I didn’t know I was going to the Christmas party with the new team.  My new boss was in Berlin and he asked if I wanted to come to dinner with the team and, while I was hanging out in the office with them before heading over, someone said that this was essentially the office Christmas party.  Which was fine.  They invited me and I’m going to be on the team, so I didn’t feel like I was crashing.  But there was the Christmas party small talk.  How long have you lived in Germany?  How did you learn German?  And, of course: How many children do you have?

            I went with two.  Every time.  I just said “two,” adding “a boy and a girl” if asked for a follow-up.  Every time I said it (and there were only six people here, so it’s not as if this went on all night), I felt like I was sticking a tiny knife in my gut.  Or in Colin’s memory.  Whichever metaphor is more apt.  But I also knew I wasn’t going to bum anyone out on first memory.  No, I’ll get to bum them out when I put up my family pictures on my desk and someone asks, upon seeing three kids, if I hadn’t said that I had two.  And then I either get to tell the truth then and bum them out, or spin a yarn about how that was a visiting nephew and really slam Colin’s memory into the ruins.

            Either way seems crummy.  I just know, in that moment, despite the stings, it seemed easier to say two.  And, since then, I’ve envisioned scenarios about how I’m going to gather the team after I’ve been there for a while and get the whole story out, though experience tells me that these things never go quite as planned.  We’ll just have to see.

            The funny thing is, the next night I went out for the not-a-Christmas gathering with my current colleagues, some of whom I’ve only known via Slack for months now, and the question of course came back up.  Some of these people I’ll probably never see again in my life.  So, when they asked, “two,” spilled straight from my lips, and I didn’t think about it at all.

            I suppose it’s all relative when you’re discussing dead relatives.  And I know that’s a horrible turn of phrase but, note the part earlier where I said I was brain dead.  It’s going to keep happening, I know.  And I’ll keep improvising.  I suppose the truth of the matter is that Colin can’t die again and his memory is there for me to share or not as I choose.  But that’s easy to write and not so easy to live.