Beyond the blog (and updates about Christina … who’s doing better, but is still going to be in the hospital for a few nights) I’m still working on my fiction writing goals. As such, I’m going through a book I wrote about two years ago.
I had written everything down while Colin was dying – from the awful first intake lady at the hospital to the nightmares of the home health care work – and had actually sent that around to a few people. But no one knew what to do with it. I mean, fair enough. Who wants to publish a story about someone being sad about their son’s death? I’m no celebrity. No one outside of my circle of friends is terribly interested in this.
So, I cheated a little bit and wrote a fictionalized story about a man going a little bit nuts after his son’s death. I’m not sure what to do with it, because it starts off a little rough but, man, when I get to the part where the son dies… Suffice to say, I had those memories clear in my head. I had forgotten what I wrote, but reading it again hit me pretty hard. Not every detail was straight from Colin’s death, but a lot of it was. And it upset me.
Which would have just been another day in my life – I mean, “Duh Niels, if you write about your son’s death that is, of course, going to be upsetting – except I was also working on my annual filing project on the side. I pull together all of the documents we need for our tax return at the beginning of the year and hand it off to Christina so she can then crunch the numbers. And I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me in 2020, 2021, 2022 or 2023, but I pulled out our accident insurance policy and noticed that we were still insured for all three children. I called the insurance company and double-checked and, yep, we’ve been paying an extra 100 euros or so a year since 2020 to make sure my dead son doesn’t come over to your house and break things (or maybe that’s a different kind of insurance; there are so many kinds to have in Germany).
You could tell the guy I had on the phone was not ready for how calm I was talking about my dead son – no one ever is – but he handled it well. All I had to do was pull out a copy of my son’s death certificate and scan it in and they would take care of it. I might not get all the money back, but at least we’ll stop paying for Colin to stop having mishaps.
All I had to do was pull out his death certificate. God.
I don’t suppose I actively avoid looking at it, but God, it’s not like I want to stare at it. And then I still have a permanent section for him in our family file, with his old passports and his birth certificate. There are unused passport photos. It’s like he has a whole life waiting there just to pick up when he decides to roll back through and go backpacking to Argentina or what-not. We have small shrines to him all over the house, so it’s not like I never see pictures of him. But I hadn’t looked at this stuff for a while – and I had just been reading about the death of a boy very much like him – and it hit me hard.
He’s gone. I know this. And yet he still keeps lingering. And I keep worrying he won’t be around once we forget him. And I don’t plan on forgetting him. But one day I’ll have an accident, or I’ll just die and then a large chunk of the memories of him will just vanish.
We were talking about relatives during the school holidays. Somehow my kids had no idea my Dad was the youngest of nine. Oh yes, I assured him. He had eight siblings. And then I stopped, and in an offhand way noted that he had a few more, because I knew there had been stillbirths and kids who died as infants, but no one remembered them.
That’s true. Everyone from my Dad’s generation is dead. Maybe some of my older cousins remember a story about a dead sibling here or there, but they’re more memories of memories at this point. And I said it in such an offhanded way. Like, yes, once there were people and now there aren’t any. And that’s what I worry so much about happening to Colin. But I can’t do much about it. Except I write, and hope that maybe that will be enough.
I wish I had done more for him. I keep thinking about the Dad from the hospice who is moving heaven and earth to keep his son with the disability here and in this world, despite so many diagnoses that the kid should be dead. I don’t really believe it, but it always makes me think I should have maybe fought more for Colin. But I know that’s not true. He’s fighting a really debilitating disorder. That’s hard. We were fighting a brain stem tumor. We never had a chance.
Maybe he will if I keep writing. Maybe he will if I keep finding documents about him. Somehow or another, I have to fight this my way.