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I feel some days that my 11-year-old is becoming my Zen master.

We were walking near a lake in Potsdam and she said to me, “You know, today was a really good day.”

And, undeniably, from her perspective, it had been a good day. We’d woken up without much drama (and we would ultimately end the day with a great deal of drama about TV show choice). But right then, it was good. The kids and I had headed to a pool where we had a blast. Emma and I had now dropped Noah off with the birthday party that was a continuation of the pool party (Emma and I had just been along for the ride) and were walking towards downtown Potsdam with the promise of a Schnitzel dinner. I mean, that’s high marks across the board when you’re 11.

She didn’t know everything about the day, of course. The reason it was only three of us is because Christina was in Copenhagen for the weekend, destressing after our last three years. And I don’t begrudge Christina the trip for a moment – I want her to take more – but the fact that she wasn’t there was a reminder that things are off in our family.

The birthday was a big deal. We worry that Noah doesn’t get invited to enough of these things. Emma is s social animal. You leave her alone in a room and she’ll come out with five friends. During our time in the hospice she met everyone in the building. She essentially became the accounting department’s mascot. We don’t worry about her, socially. Noah is more of a loner and the birthday invitations are few on the ground, so it was important we got him there.

And yet, as luck would have it, the pool party was in Brandenburg, which is the city where Colin and Christina spent January through March last year while he was in rehab. It’s the city he was in when he had to get the feeding tube laid and it was the town where he had the first attack that led to the MRI that first indicated the tumor was probably back. So, I was already a little apprehensive about driving out there because of its history, to say nothing of the fact that it’s almost two hours away. But I had a party my son needed to attend.

There were just so many memories on the drive. Up until Potsdam, I could just pretend we were doing something else. But once we passed Potsdam and didn’t take the exit to Munich, it began to feel familiar. I noticed that the construction on the highway near Potsdam was still not done – oh, the hours we spent in traffic jams there last year. And then we neared Brandenburg and it was just like a year ago. This was the time of year last year when we were driving out there every weekend.

Taking the Brandenburg exit, I saw the construction there, which had been the bane of all those drives last year, was done, which was nice. And then I saw the first small town and the gas station and the train station and yeah, there were a lot of memories. And then I followed the GPS and, wouldn’t you know it, the pool was essentially next door to the hospital. I suppose I should be glad we didn’t end up right next to the rehab center, which is on the other side of town (and, based on their Facebook feed, under new management), but it was still a weird rush of “Oh God, this place” and “I wonder if they still have that awesome coffee/hot cocoa machine.”

I didn’t let it trouble me. We did, honestly, have a great time at the pool. And then we sent Noah on his way and Emma and I went looking for Schnitzel and now she was here telling me about what a great day it had been.

“We need more of those,” I replied.

Without missing a beat. And with only the barest undertone of “Yeah, I know,” in her voice, she replied “Absolutely.”

I had my first dream about him in weeks.

At some point yesterday, we realized it was the 17th. Since he died on September 17, that makes that day of every month more poignant. Perhaps that was on my mind as I went to sleep.

Here’s what I remember. It was his funeral. Only it was in a much more ornate church and we hadn’t had him cremated. And it was open casket. Everyone was there. And it was as nice as a funeral could be.

Then, for unexplained reasons, we had to have the funeral again five days later. Everyone was annoyed that they had to come all the way back to Berlin to have the funeral again. It was hectic. My mother was there and so was my brother Markus, but I was annoyed that “my two other” brothers weren’t there, so apparently my family tree is more complicated in dream land.

We finished the ceremony and then we had his body lying in state. We were on this enormous lawn with an artificial island cut off from the rest by two streams. His body was on the island. And then it rolled off into one of the streams and got caught by the current. So, I grabbed him and pulled him out. Which is when he sat up, looked at me and said “Soul’s in heaven.”

And then I woke up and it was 4:30 a.m. and there was no way in hell I was going back to sleep.

And here’s the thing. I know there’s a decent chance this is just the random firing of synapses in my head. I know it might just be a dream. But, in the same way that I choose to believe it’s his ghost every time a lamp goes out unexpectedly in our house, I’m choosing to believe that the dream means something. Because, as “Pet Semetary” as the dream got towards the end, a soul in heaven doesn’t sound like a bad thing. The honest truth is, as creepy as the dream got, I still enjoyed the sensation of being with him for those three seconds more than I’ve enjoyed many moments since his cancer diagnosis. So, here’s looking at you Colin. Come back to visit in Dreamworld any time you feel like.

So, I might have lied a little bit in my last post.

I didn’t write for a while. And it didn’t help that my back had gone wonky. Nor did it help that the new TV was a distraction. But, in the end, I think it came down to the fact that I had a couple of really bad days and wasn’t sure how to process them. Because they weren’t bad days in the sense that I sat around and felt bad about Colin (there was some of that too), but in the sense that I’m realizing ever more how hard it is going to be for me to get along with people.

Some of it was things others said to me. Some of it was things others didn’t say to me. There were actions that offended. There were insinuations that confused. There were posts on social media that simply weren’t necessary. There were some attempts by me to demand answers (my therapist says I handled that part very well, so gold star for me!). There was a lot of wondering if all of this is ever going to get easier.

Probably none of it was helped by the fact that I had the panic attack the day before I went on vacation and that the vacation more or less started off with Colin’s 6th birthday. There’s no way to pretend that didn’t leave us all in s state with jangled nerves. But it was still a bit of a pile-on.

I keep thinking of the one new Dad to the men’s group. He complained about anger issues, exhaustion and an inability to get things done around the house. It seems like we should be soul mates. And when he asked for tips on how to get his act together, I suggested breaking things into small pieces. Specifically, he wants to get something written. I told him to write a draft. He sort of blew me off. Later, as the session was ending, he told me that he didn’t mean to blow me off, but I had to understand that the thing he wants to write is complicated and it’s not something that you can just dash off.

Which is when I turned to him and pointed out that I write for a living and that’s why I told him to write a “draft,” not a “finished product” and that one sure way to never get anything written is to never sit down and pick up a damned pencil.

And I’ve thought about him a lot since that meeting, not in a good way. I find myself getting mad. I have actually found myself thinking “What right does he have to be so angry about thing? What makes him so special?” And then I pull myself together and realize he’s also lost a child, and this calms me down for a moment or two before I’m right back to “Who the hell does he think he is?”

And it’s not just him. A night or so I went to be exhausted and thought I’d just fall to sleep. Instead, my mind started dredging up grievances. The one Facebook friend who keeps posting political comments he knows annoy me. The people who haven’t reached out after Colin’s death. The ones who have, but did it in the wrong way. The people I feel who have wronged me by not being patient enough with me and my family. The people I think have wronged me by trying to pretend like this grief is theirs to share. It went on and on and I had quite a list of revenge going on before I, mercifully, fell asleep.

It’s not a way I like being. My therapist gave me something to read, regarding anger. One tip was to picture your anger as a person and then decide if you’re going to invite this person in. I don’t want to, but there’s a part of me that kind of does want to, just because I want to make someone else out there feel as bad as I do: whether you’re the person who annoys me on Facebook or the guy who won’t take writing advice from me. It’s not really a good feeling to have this anger on non-stop simmer inside me. And the other real problem I’m discovering is that, even if I vent some of it off – even if I do it productively like my therapist says I’m so good at – there’s always more waiting right behind. It’s inexhaustible, it seems.

And that’s pretty exhausting.

I fell off the blogging bandwagon because we had our first vacation since Colin’s death as a family of four – I don’t really count our Leipzig/Dresden trip in October because that felt more like an escape after the funeral, albeit a pleasant one – and I did want to power down. I haven’t blogged since returning home because we bought a new TV and I’ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that I own an appliance with which I can apparently have conversations. Also, my back is acting up, so that’s thrown me a bit off my game.

But the point of this entry is to mark the fact that we had a vacation without Colin. It was difficult at times. It was bittersweet at times. All of that was probably magnified by the fact that his sixth birthday fell in the middle of it. But we did it.

Because nothing is normal in our lives any more, the first thing we did upon leaving on our vacation was to return straight to the house to get a copy of his death certificate. Christina headed to her parents’ house for a solo visit after we wrapped up our vacation and she was going to speak to her Dad’s banker about breaking up an account set up there in Colin’s name.

The second thing was to stop at the drug store, but that’s a pretty mundane thing to do while heading out on a road trip. And then the third thing was to stop at his grave, because we were going to leave him alone for a week and I don’t think any of us was quite prepared to just head off without a quick goodbye.

And then we had our vacation. It was at this resort in southern Germany called the Ulrichshof, a place we’ve visited every year since Emma was born. Imagine taking a cruise: You’ve got ridiculous amounts of food and a pool and a spa and staff willing to take just about any ridiculous request you throw at them. It’s just like that, except you’re in what used to be an old farmhouse in the Bavarian woods, just one that’s been heavily renovated.

We’d been there with Colin three or four times and even celebrated a couple of his birthdays there, so it was familiar territory. I’d been there twice without him: once in 2016 when he was getting chemo and Christina decided I needed to take the kids away and once last year, when he was in therapy in Brandenburg and Christina again decided Emma and Noah deserved their winter break. But this was the first time Christina had been there without him since his birth. It was tricky territory for all of us to navigate, but probably a bit more so for her.

The thing about the Ulrichshof is that it’s designed for families. You can’t check in without children. That’s part of the charm as a parent, since you know there will always be at least one table of children behaving worse than yours at mealtime. Even if you are the worst table in the room, everyone else there knows what you’re going through. It takes a lot of the pressure off.

That said, I certainly forgot how many children would be there. Or I hadn’t thought about the ramifications. And, since Emma and Noah are much more independent than they used to be, I had plenty of time to sit in the lobby reading while waiting for them to finish a movie or what-not and, everywhere I looked, there were children. If you squinted, you could pretend they were Colin. Even if you didn’t pretend, you could see that there were enough of them wearing Cars or Paw Patrol of Batman shirts – any of which Colin would have loved – and playing in some of the same spots he romped in just two years ago.

I had this phase when it became clear that he was dying where I wanted to walk up to young children and their parents and just warn them to enjoy every moment they had, because who knows what might happen. I never gave in to the instinct and it’s faded in the last few months, but it was there in full force at the Ulrichshof. I found myself staring at these other children and then realizing that I was probably making their parents uncomfortable but not able to explain “Oh, the reason I’m acting so creepy is the recent death of my son.”

We haven’t decided if we’re going back next year. I’m just not sure how eager I am to go through it all again. You see the children’s room in our suite decked out with space for three or four kids and you realize we only need two of them. You see the other parents hustling with their young children and you ask yourself “How come I have the time to drink a beer and read?” and you remember, it’s because your youngest died six months ago.

At the same time, it is a very nice and easy, if expensive, vacation. Emma and Noah will be crushed if we don’t go back. We’ll have to see how the next year treats us.

The end of our vacation also had its own peculiar note.

We had the usual scramble to pack everything away and get out by checkout time. It’s gotten harder on some levels because Emma and Noah keep disappearing into the depths of the play areas. We had finally corralled Emma to get her into her boots and jacket and she was about to escape again to say goodbye to some people. I asked her if she’d had a nice vacation.

“It should have been fuller,” she said.

I figured she meant full of more fun or more food or movies or something, so I asked what she meant.

“Fuller with one more person,” she responded, then smiled and ran down the stairs.

A list of things that have made me cry/lose it as I try to reintegrate into work:

• watching a Fleetwood Mac video
• watching a Tyler Childers video
• watching Alicia Keys opening the Grammys
• watching a colleague look at a router
• having to edit a story about a nurse who poisoned newborns with morphine
• discussing the need for victims of the Wuhan virus to get breathing machines and then realizing I have one at home
• being asked by a colleague to do an assignment

Before anyone starts – I was doing a lot of repetitive work in November and December, so I had Youtube on in the background a lot, hence the video watching.

This was all I was going to write. Because, you know, I’m a writer, and I thought a short list – the kids call them listicles – would make a nice point.

Then I had my first panic attack of my life. And it happened to be yesterday at work. Which is not making me rethink my plan to go back to work, but it is making me realize that I might need to rework my coping strategies for lots of things.

To summarize radically, the primary chores of the shift I had yesterday were to do Job A and to do Job B. I was doing Job B and a colleague asked if I could do Job A instead. There was, obviously, more to it than that, but I’m not going to bore anyone with the details of running a news wire. The point is, I went into a full blown panic/anxiety attack.

Having never had one before, I can’t tell you if this was a bad one or a mild one. Honestly, it’s not as if I didn’t believe in panic attacks before yesterday, but it was – much like childhood cancer used to be for me – something that happened to other people. But, after disagreeing with the colleague about the need for A or B, I went back to my desk and realized I couldn’t really work because my eyes weren’t focused, my breathing was difficult, my arms felt heavy and, although it wasn’t quite tunnel vision, it was the next best thing. I told the others at the desk what was going on, but I don’t think any of them really had much of an idea about what to do either, so I just kind of rode it out. By the time it was suggested that maybe I should go home or lie down, I had already pulled myself together to get a glass of water.

As luck would have it – and here I am again, having a problem with the whole concept of “good luck” – I had a therapy appointment that afternoon and then a session with the bereaved Dad’s group at the hospice in the evening. My therapist did a good job of explaining the situation to me: Your fight or flight instinct is triggered, you can’t do anything about, and then all that energy stays inside you and burns you up. He told me that trying to control my breathing was about the best thing I could have done and, basically, said now that I’ve had one I should, hopefully, be readier for the next one. Like it’s a new fun activity to plan into my day.

That’s not fair to my therapist. That’s just me being mad at the world.

The men’s session was less useful. There were three new members. I knew I’d stop being the new guy at some point, but it never dawned on me that it would take only four months. But we spent most of the night learning their stories, so it wasn’t much about me, which was fine. I suppose, in many ways, the men’s group is calming just because I learn that there are lots of people doing this and handling it either worse or differently than me. I don’t know why that would make things better, but there we are.