All y’all

There was an informal family reunion on my wife’s side in Bavaria this weekend. Among the people I’ve barely seen in the last year due our never-ending lockdown was a relative who’d recently undergone a heart procedure and is still in recovery mode. He’s actually younger than me, so it was a bit of a shock to be reminded that I’m well into the demographic where this kind of thing can happen to a person and that there are no guarantees these kinds of things turn out OK.

Bear in mind, I live in a world where I’m perpetually 27. Yes, my eyes have gotten worse and I realize that I go full “old man” when I try to bend down to pick something up. Then again, I wasn’t in great shape for a lot of my 20s, so, relatively speaking, things are kind of OK. So, it’s still kind of eye-opening to remember that health problems do happen. And, of course, after what happened to Colin, I should be more aware than most that health problems can come out of the blue and hit those whom we’d least expect to get smacked down.

But I recently heard a radio show with an interview with an actor whose son had also died. His son, I think, was younger than Colin when he died and I think a brain tumor was also involved. I have to admit, I only half-listened and then tried to shove the information to a further recess of my mind almost as soon as I heard it, because I don’t like dwelling on other people’s dead children any more than I like thinking about my own. But I remember this actor saying how unbelievable it was, this knowledge that your child was going to die. He said he’d have been less surprised by aliens landing on his front yard, because that seems less strange than hearing “Your son is going to die, and there is nothing you can do but watch and make sure he gets to watch Curious George right up until the moment he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.”

So, of course, I worry about my health, but I also don’t spend any more time than necessary thinking about my own mortality or that of my loved ones.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself, because when you’re shoved back into a room full of relatives, it’s hard not to think of the ones who aren’t there. My father-in-law is focused on having photos of all his grandchildren. And I get it and I get that he’s not consciously forgetting Colin when he decides to get a photo with all the grandchildren on one of the rare occasions that they’re all in the same place. At the same time, there’s the realization that they’re not all there. I had worried that I would make a scene if he tried to take the photo and then got secretly excited when it sounded like one of the grandkids wouldn’t make it after all. But then they were all there and they got lined up for their photos and, it was painful enough to see them all there without Colin, so I stayed inside while they did their photo shoot on the lawn, but it was still nice enough to see them all together that I watched with half an eye the whole time they posed. It’s hard to say: Does the sadness that Colin wasn’t there at the end when they lined up from oldest to youngest – that spot now taken by Noah – get blunted somewhat by the fact that, thanks to my genes, when they line up from tallest to shortest, Noah moves to the middle of the group? I suppose it’s something.

The relative with the heart problem spent some time telling me how his convalescence comes and goes in waves. There will be days and days of feeling better, and then along comes a day where he can barely get out of bed. It didn’t sound all that dissimilar from coping with grief, where I’ll have days and days of feeling like I’m functioning normally, only to run across that one picture or old toy or whatever it takes to leave me near sobbing for a half day.

Of course, as we were talking, one of the nephews showed up to ask our heart patient how his heart was doing. Which was a very nice thing to do. But you also notice that no one asks you how you’re coping still, surrounded by his absence. Maybe it’s assumed that, almost two years down the road, this is just what you do. Maybe people just don’t want to talk about it. But still, you at least feel that grief is most appreciated if you just keep it to yourself. I had to make a point, kind of loudly once or twice, to point out how Emma and Noah are going away with others kids from the hospice who have lost siblings next week, just to get it out there that we’re not a whole family any more. And I know that they know. But I also know they weren’t going to make any reference to it, so I had to at least put it out there.

I’d found myself a few weeks ago wondering why I didn’t dream of him more often. It seems like the least my subconscious can do is let me pretend I’m hanging out with him from time to time. Then I had two dreams about him in a week. The one was utterly banal: We were sitting at our table, eating. I think he asked for ketchup. The other was more involved. My subconscious had aged him to make him look like he was 7. And I only remember Ricardo showing up and giving him a hug, which Colin didn’t want. It was confusing, but it felt good to see him, whatever the dreams meant.

Maybe getting together with all the family kicked that loose. I don’t have a ton of memories about him from here in Bavaria. It’s almost like a reverse memory: Me sitting around here trying to figure out how I have so much time to read and be social. Most of my memories of my children here when they were younger involved the endless child safety routines of getting them up and down the stairs of this townhouse and trying to get him to lie down to sleep in an unfamiliar bed and then, once he was asleep, spending every minute downstairs with the adults terrified that he’d wake up and start goofing around and slipping down all those stairs, beacause it’s a townhouse that feels like it’s made of 80% stairs. Maybe I needed to force a few memories to the surface.

Because you do wonder what memories will remain and which will prove important. As the whole family gathered here in Bavaria, my eyes were drawn to a family photo of one group. I know for a fact that the photo was taken in Berlin and I know they took that the day after Colin’s funeral, because we all had to get out of the house, so they took their kids downtown. And I can’t fault them for that and, God knows, if you get a picture where everyone is looking halfway normal and at the camera, that’s what you use for your Christmas card photo that year. So, I don’t judge. But I know when that photo was taken, and I wonder why we don’t talk more about Colin when we all get together.

Then again, while we were in the train on a side trip to Regensburg last week, family came up and I was reminding Emma of my aunts and uncles and stopped myself when I said my mother had three siblings because, of course, she had four. It’s just that one sister died as a young child during the war – I believe of scarlet fever – so she wasn’t much more than a memory by the time I came along. I don’t remember my mother ever talking about her that much or showing much in the way of sadness at the death of this sister, whose name I can’t even remember.

It worries me that that’s what’s going to happen to Colin. His will be the sad story of the little boy who got stuck with an incurable tumor, but people will start to forget his name or the fact that he was obsessed with Fireman Sam. We’ll always have the relatives’ great family photo in front of the Brandenburg Gate. How long can we keep alive the fact that, as long as he could, he knew which Cars cars were allowed by his bedside and which weren’t?

Christina mentioned to me a few weeks ago that I should maybe think about making the blog about other things, other than Colin. And there’s a point to that. There are only so many variations of the sentence “It’s hell to lose a child” that you can write and only so many ways to repeat the obvious truth that it’s hell to go through it. I notice that this is about the longest gap I’ve had between entries in an age, which was partly a function of Noah’s birthday, the end of the school year, our trip to Bavaria and a lot of appointments coming together to take away all of my free time. But it also felt good to not think about the blog. But I also can’t imagine that I’ll stop it, not because I feel I have an adoring public that is hanging on the words I write, but because I think I need my moments with Colin and, even if I only write here once a year, it’s something I’m doing for Colin and it’s one little thing I can do for him to remind the world that he was here and he was special and he was pretty fun. That’s not going to get him back into any of the grandkid photos, but it’s better than letting him get forgotten.