If you’re here, you can see that the website has gotten a little better. I hesitate to say “good,” since I still see a lot of beginner errors on this site. However, I am a beginner, so I guess that’s the best we’re going to get until I get further along my learning curve.
One of the best additions is the PDF of my Caringbridge blog . (https://five-minus-one.com/the-caringbridge-journal/) There was a lot of back and forth extracting that from the other website, but the full version seems to be 611 pages of writing by me and comments by readers.
I’m a little floored. I knew I had written a lot and it was over the course of three and a half years. But still … 611 pages. I mean, no one’s ever written 611 pages about me. Sure, I bet there’s probably that much documentation on me in terms of visa applications and tax forms and what-not, but that’s not personal. I wrote 611 pages about my son. Even if you strip out the comments – which were other people writing about my son – you seem to come down to 339 pages, which is also respectable.
It seems like the least I could have done for him. One of the many things that has troubled me since Colin’s death – and there are too many to count – is that there will be, one day, little left to memorialize him. Granted, most of us will fade into obscurity, but there will be a generation or two after I’m dead that will remember me as father or grandfather, perhaps even ‘that annoying older editor who taught me how to use semicolons.’
Colin will just have the headstone and even that is not eternal. He was too young when he died – and his level of development hadn’t advanced enough – to really give him much time to do arts and crafts. I have no plaster handprints. I have no matchstick figures he made. I don’t even have drawings. It shouldn’t matter, but I want something physical I can hold on to.
But I have 611 pages I wrote about him, even if I’m not sure when I’ll get them printed.
One of the many things I’ve learned over the years is not to compare what your friends do for you. Don’t tell your friends which birthday gift you liked best or which Christmas card touched you the most. But I have to bend the rule here a little. Of all the cards we got – and they were all touching – my friend Jen sent me one that made me feel much better. I haven’t seen Jen in a decade, forget about her having had a chance to meet my kids. She’d never laid eyes on Colin. But she thanked me for the Caringbridge entries, because she said it let her get to know him, probably better than friends of her own child whom she might encounter regularly.
Maybe, in my own way, I’ve given him a chance to have his memorial. It wasn’t what I planned when I started. I’d rather have the real thing here, not a stack of papers. But it makes me feel like I’ve done a little something for him. And that helps a little.