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            I’ve had a lot of unbidden memories lately.  It’s weird, because every time I think that I’ve reached a point where “Oh yes, being the father of a dead child is just what I do,” something comes along and hits me hard.  I suppose, right now, part of it is a side effect of living with Christina’s cancer.  I suppose some of it is that we might have just had a wave of Covid wash through the house (or it might have exclusively gotten me, the signs are unclear).  Or I suppose it might just have something to do with being the father of a dead child.

            A week or so I was coming home with Murphy and I started thinking about Christmas.  It was easy to think about Christmas for the first two weeks of December, since we had unseasonable cold and snowfall.  Usually we don’t get snow – if we get any – until February or so.  This year we had nearly two weeks of sub-zero, icy weather.  It was kind of nice, except for the part where you risked your life every time you got on a bicycle.  And I was getting home and thinking something about Christmas, and maybe my current attack of Covid had already begun, and I just wondered if this was going to land Christina in the hospital.

            And then I remembered Colin in the hospital.  Specifically, I remembered him in the hospital on Christmas Eve, 2018.  He had gone in right at the start of the month – never really got to open his Advent calendar that year, never really got any of the pre-Christmas fun, except for seeing that one inflatable Santa on the way to day care, which was all the more of a pity because it turned out to be his last Christmas – and was still in the ICU for the holiday.  We split it up, so I spent the bulk of Christmas Eve there with him and then we switched in the middle of the night so I could be home for Christmas Day.  The German parent got to celebrate the German Christmas festival with the other two, the American parent got the American Christmas festival.  It’s so depressing how you have to get so practical with these things.

            He slept most of the time.  Towards evening he woke up a little, and we had one of his gifts there in the room in case.  It was a smallish Lego set which, in retrospect, is such a stupid thing to give to a kid in the ICU.  How was he going to play with it?  But he loved Ninjago and so we had a little set for him.  And I think he was excited to see the gift, but he was so out of it, it was hard to tell.  And he tried to open it but he could barely move his hands with all the tubes and wires, so I helped him.  And we looked at it.  I might have even built it for him.  But God, that’s not the way Christmas is supposed to be.

            I’ve barely thought about that in the five years since that night.  And then, in front of my house, it came right back to me.  I hate those memories.  More to the point, I don’t understand why the good memories don’t come up unbidden like that.  Facebook tries to help.  A few days ago it delivered the picture of him from when he climbed in the clothes dryer.  It’s a great picture, but I have zero memories of the event.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I photographed it and Facebook throws it back out into the world from time to time, I would not remember it.

            I didn’t expressly wonder what it would be like if Christina ends up in the hospital for Christmas.  There’s no reason to think she will.  The most recent ultrasound shows that the tumor is, functionally, gone.  She still needs to go through all the chemo and radiation that was planned for her, but they seem to have gotten the tumor.  And yet there’s this fear in my head that cancer = tragic Christmas.

            And it’s not like the Facebook memories are all great.  I took a screenshot of the one of those Then and Now memories Facebook likes to serve up from time to time (it’s actually the one at the top of this blog) and it was all I could do not to run to the cemetery and take a shot of the gravestone and send it back to Facebook with a “That’s how it’s going.  You happy now!”  Knowing full well this is just an algorithm doing its thing, not an actual ploy from Marc Zuckerberg to rub salt in my wounds.

            But it keeps hurting so much.  I keep thinking that it’s supposed to feel normal.  That I’m not supposed to be in – I wouldn’t call it constant – but recurring pain.  That other people have lost loved one and they learn to cope somehow.  And I’ve learned to cope.  I just don’t think it will ever feel normal.  Because it keeps surprising me.

            I was texting with Ricardo yesterday and it dawned on me that it would make sense if we set up a group with him, me and Christina, so I don’t have to keep running between the two of them to get things sorted out.  I went to create it and found there was one there already.  We just hadn’t used it since 2019.  When Colin was in the hospice.  The last exchanges are a long series of Ricardo trying to get back into the building with the children after closing hours.  I can imagine why I didn’t want to look at that group any more.  Then again, it would be helpful to have a chats with him and Christina simultaneously. 

            I want a restart.  I want a mind wipe.  Except I really don’t.  I want to be able to control the memories.  But I can’t. 

            The guy I mentioned last time at the dad’s group still haunts me.  He’s putting so much effort into keeping his son alive.  It keeps making me wonder if I could have done more.  Maybe we should have popped him onto a plane and flown to Boston or Zurich or wherever the one doctor in the world is who could have sliced that damned tumor out of his neck.  But I don’t think that doctor exists.  So all I’ve got it a head of memories in the wrong order and various machines that serve them up to me when I’m not expecting them.

            I think, once the Covid is gone and we get a two-week break from Christina’s chemo, I’ll feel better.  I think once I’m off work for about two weeks, I’ll feel better.  Once I can sit down in my living room without a mask and with the remains of my family and have a beer while watching “Scrooged” or “A Christmas Story,” I’ll feel better.  I’ll never feel 100% right, I’m starting to realize, but I can keep hoping that every day will be a little better.  I mean, if you look at it from the right Christian perspective – and it’s dark – every day gets me one day closer to seeing him again, which is what I believe.  I don’t think it’s how you’re meant to move through life.  But it’s what I’ve got to work with.

            As Christmas letters go, this has been pretty terrible, I do apologize.  I do get into the Christmas spirit when I’m away from the blog.  And proper cards will go in the mail soon.  But if I don’t blog again this year, I thank all of you for reading and caring.  On into 2024.

            I had my first dream about Colin in ages.  Once it became clear in 2019 that he was dying, I assumed I would have this kind of dream all the time.  Instead, they’re very much a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of event.  This one wasn’t even interesting.  It mostly involved trying to watch some city council meeting on TV.  I think Christina and I had been involved in some kind of city beautification project.  And Colin really wanted to watch the show. 

            I mean, like any kid, he did love TV.  But there are limits and I’m not willing to believe that he would have watched a city council meeting.  Then again, the last thing he said to me before I woke up was “Oreo,” which seems pretty much in character.  I had been aware in the dream that he had almost died, but we had pulled him back from the edge.  I was grateful he was there.  And then I woke up calling out “Colin, come back.”

            I could use more dreams like that.

            Instead, I have a blog that is continuously spammed by Russian and Chinese bots and now, weird memories of Colin’s sickness dredged up by Christina’s current fight with breast cancer.

            I mean, if I don’t keep my brain busy, I keep going to strange places like “Maybe there was a deal, and we had to give up Colin so Christina could survive her therapy.”  As if you can negotiate with cancer.  Like God gives and takes like that.  And all the while, the blog keeps getting hit by bots. A few weeks ago, they were from a chain of American pancake restaurants in Munich.  Sometimes it’s a random word.  Sometimes it’s porn.  Sometimes it’s a chain of Russian or Mandarin I refuse to run through a translator.  And you kind of wonder if they’re mocking your loss, even if they are just bots.

            It’s been noted once or twice that this is a blog about dealing with Colin’s loss, so it is a bit weird that I’ve shoehorned Christina’s experience in here.  And part of that is pure laziness: I just don’t want to set up another blog.  But then there’s the point that I don’t want to have to set up a five-minus-two blog, because one was enough.

            One truly familiar trend has been the bills.  Oh my god, so many bills.  Some of them are for like 15 euros.  Some of them are for 15,000.  And yes, we live in a social democratic state with lots of safety nets.  We’re not going out of pocket for these bills.  At least not long-term.  But short-term … oy. 

            You see, because of the way Christina is insured, we get the bills sent to us.  We then submit them to insurance for reimbursement.  Sometimes the bills are due in 3-4 weeks.  Sometimes the reimbursement can take up to six weeks to arrive.  It’s like a never-ending shell game of moving money from here to there, deciding which bill not to pay just yet, etc. etc., in hopes of having enough money to get through the end of the month because, honestly, I’m no longer sure how much of the money in my account is mine and how much is spoken for by some pharmacy somewhere.  We’re not broke.  We’re just in perpetual financial upheaval.

            The one pharmacy in question is relentless.  I’m not sure why they’re billing us separately.  When Colin was sick, the bills for the medications came packaged with the hospital bills.  It all works out the same.  But I guess the pharmacy is getting nervous about sitting on about €24,000 that we owe them (even though none of the payments have been late, except for the one where I got a dispensation), so they’ve started doing weird things, like checking with the hospital to see if they might be able to talk us into signing a form giving them the right to automatically pull the money from our accounts.  Like, no.  The only way I know we have enough money for groceries right now is if I keep track of this and move money when I can.  Like, I have an Excel sheet set up for this … and I hate Excel. 

            And the insurance companies try.  There are two that reimburse us.  One is run by the government and is chronically understaffed.  The other is a private company, but they run their reimbursements through a computer.  And if you send them a bill that totals 15K, but is actually made up of two bills for €5,800, three for €250, two for €750 and another two for €600, it assumes there’s been some kind of repeat glitch, and only reimburses you for one of each amount.

            It’s all administrative.  It’s all understandable.  It’s all manageable.  But it’s all so much like the pile of bills we had to go through with Colin, trying to shuffle the mail from the house to the hospice to the payment system (it was all on paper then – at least I can photograph the bills with my phone now) and then running to a post office for a few minutes while someone else was watching Colin.

            Gah.  I hate so much about the fact that we have to go through this again.

            I went to the men’s group on Friday for the first time in an age. We were talking about the nightmare of home health care.  I mentioned that I knew one family who had tried to do it themselves and how I had no idea how they were coping.  Two minutes later, the kid’s father walked in and my heart sank.  I mean, why else would he be there if his kid wasn’t dead?  Turns out his son is alive, but he wanted to talk to people who had suffered through childhood deaths.  It’s not the first time a guy dealing with a fatal childhood situation just joined.  All I can say is that this man is making herculean efforts to keep his kid alive.  A few bills seems like a cake walk compared to that.  His explanation of his routine left me exhausted.  But I wish I was that exhausted, caring for a living child.  It feels like, with all those bills, you should have something for it.

            First off, some good news.  Christina had her fourth dose of chemo last week.  Beforehand, she had a meeting and an ultrasound with her doctor, where they ascertained that the tumor had already shrunk by half after the first three sessions.  Loosely translated, the doctor declared that was “the bomb.”

            Also, they rejigged Christina’s therapy schedule for next week so she can participate in our Halloween haunted house, but will be busy getting chemo while we’re cleaning up the day after.  Well played, wifey.

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            And now for Mopey Writer Time.

            What gets me is how it all keeps repeating on some level, all coming together.  Which is not to say that I don’t think things will turn out better this time, but it feels like we keep playing the same notes, which stirs up so many memories of Colin and unleashes so many fears about what happens if we end up going down the same route, no matter how hard I tell myself we’re not going to do that.

            Christina pointed out when I returned to blogging that it might not be appropriate to use this site, since it was obviously focused on our lives since Colin’s death.  I can only say to that that our fight right now is to maintain the normal we have in the wake of Colin’s death the best we can.  To me, that makes sense to keep it all here (aside from my lack of necessary skills to set up a new website).  Where else do I put the moments like Facebook sending me a picture of Colin I posted in 2018 and asks me if I can tell them what’s the rest of the story now, five years later?

            I look back at Colin’s case and wonder.  I knew then what cancer can do, I thought.  Now I Know what cancer can do.  And yet I know the cases are different.  And it gets all twisted up.

             As I write this paragraph, I’m downstairs.  Everyone else is upstairs.  They just buzzed off the rest of Christina’s hair and, from all accounts, had a pretty good time up there.  There was even briefly a mohawk.  And I think it’s good they’re having fun with it.  And it’s not as if I sat down here in terror and horror.  I just couldn’t quite bring myself to be part of that merriment.  I couldn’t even tell you why.  Just, the loss of the hair makes it seem so much realer that we are fighting cancer here.  I remember when Colin’s hair began to fall out.  And, even though I had known it would happen, I remember having to take a moment or two to say “Yes, this is what we’re doing now.”

            We never could bring ourselves to shave Colin’s hair, but that left him with clumps of hair that, frankly, looked terrible.  Christina made the right choice with the shaving.  But still: Now there’s no denying to the world that this is what we’re doing.

            Not that we were denying.  But I sometimes want the option to deny.  To just say “No, this isn’t what we’re doing.  It’s another bad dream.”

            A few nights ago I dreamt about Colin for the first time in ages.  There was no sense to it.  We were at some kind of party and trying to get him to take a nap in the middle of the festivities, so demerits to us on the parenting front for that choice.  Then, today, I watched the Henry Cavill Superman movie with the kids.  Towards the end, there was a flashback of Superman as a child, running around his family farm with a cape.  I remembered how much Colin liked to dress up like Superman.  And then I remembered the situation we’re in, which doesn’t seem all that bad this time around.

            Except we’ve barely started the chemo and the really nasty stuff is going to start up in January and, what the hell do I know?  I feel Christina is going to survive this, but I also think she’s going to have to at least tour the outskirts of hell to get there.  I think I have the strength to help her.  And I’m going to help her.  I’m just so bitter with the world for asking me to do it again.  Not with Christina, the world.  Like, a friend asked me recently about belief in God, and all I could say was that I still believe, I’m just not terribly happy with how the show is being run.

            We went to church last weekend for the first time in ages, mostly because Emma is starting to take confirmation class.  I feel I have been in the church in recent years, but my last memory there is from the post-funeral service for Colin.  And my main memory from that is some guy walking up to my brother-in-law and telling him how sad he was for his son’s death, only for Tobias to awkwardly point me out as the guy who had lost a kid.

            I couldn’t remember any of the words to the service.  Not that I ever knew them in German.  But I could usually mouth along in English while the German-language service went on.  It’s all gone.  I don’t know what that means.  But it was a hard service.  One of the readings was about the rich man who throws a party and invites people in off the streets when his friends can’t make it. Yet not all of those second round of invitees got into the party, because they weren’t dressed right either.  And all I could think of was how much it would suck to almost make it into the party and then got thrown out because you weren’t dressed right for a party you hadn’t known was happening until about half an hour beforehand.

            We didn’t know any of this was coming.  I question often if we’re dressed right.  To this day, I only know the barest details about Colin’s tumor, because I figured knowing the medical minutiae was not going to be of any use to anyone and would probably terrify me.  Same thing is happening now.  People ask me about the details of Christina’s protocols and I haven’t the foggiest.  It’s not as if I could present a cogent argument to the doctor about why X would be better than Y.  But, really, it’s about protecting myself.  And Christina.  And my famiy.  Which is territory I know all too well.  Because it all keeps repeating.

            The trick with putting these blog posts together is that I want to be a Writer, when sometimes the real priority is just getting the information out.  Maybe I just don’t get to express myself at work enough, or maybe I do have a deep, pretentious need to put myself at the center of these stories.  But there is the fact that this blog has a role to fulfill when it comes to sharing family news and there is the fact that I like to write long essays about my condition.

            So, if you want to go to just the facts, read on.  If you want the long, moanier version, skip ahead a few grafs.

            The news isn’t great, but it’s not awful either.  Christina noticed a lump in her breast a while back and her doctor wasn’t thrilled about it either.  She got sent to the cancer center and we got the confirmation on September 22 that it is indeed a tumor.  Because, apparently, we didn’t do our family cancer penance already. 

            That said, she’s had her first two round of chemo and is doing better than I would have expected, especially if I was the one getting chemo.  The only symptoms we’ve seen so far are exhaustion the day or so after.  Also, her face gets flushed the day afterwards.  Her odds are very good.  Although the tumor is of an aggressive variety, Christina caught it pretty early.  And this kind of tumor responds well to chemotherapy, apparently.  Combine that, and it doesn’t seem hopeless.

            But still … we’re doing this again.  We’ve got six months of chemotherapy ahead of us, checking blood counts and getting nervous every time Christina’s temperature is a bit on the high side.  We’ll have to watch what we see and what we do and revolve our lives around the medical side of things.  We know the drill.  I think we had just hoped we wouldn’t have to make use of our experience again.

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            If you’re into the less straightforward version, let me go on about vacations for a while.

            It probably came to mind because, leading up to Christina’s first chemotherapy, there was, essentially, a four-day weekend here in Germany.  People drove off to visit friends and new cities.  People went to Sweden.  Or, if they stayed in Berlin, they had picnics (it’s been ridiculously warm for the start of October) or had a good time.

            We tried to avoid contact and tried to make sure we were set up for the start of this new nightmare.  We’re looking at everything from getting the guest room in shape in case I get sick and Christina needs distance to reviewing our last will and testament, which is infinitely depressing.

            But there was this lingering bitterness that, once again, everyone got to go on vacation and we didn’t.

            I know it’s ridiculous.  Some of the people who got to go on vacation just finished up their cancer treatments and couldn’t do much of anything the last year.  I know it’s the stupidest thing to focus on.  I mean, I’m still so American at the core and every now and then have to remind myself that I do, indeed, have these ridiculously long European vacation benefits.  Part of me still doesn’t know what to do with six weeks off work a year.  A lot of me still doesn’t get how central the idea of this vacation time is to the European psyche.  I’m still amazed that people couldn’t make it to Colin’s funeral because the clashed with their vacation time.  I’m not mad, it just seems like such a weird thing to prioritize.  But there you are.  They get a lot of vacation in this place and it’s not a benefit you mess around with.

            Unless you or a loved one gets cancer.  And then it all flies out the window.  We didn’t take a vacation in 2018 because we were just overworked.  Then Colin got really sick at the end of that year and 2019 was no longer a candidate for vacation and then came the plague years where we didn’t really want to risk a trip much further than southern Germany.  It was only this August that we managed to do a proper vacation in Sweden.  And we had fun and spent far too much money and now the only thing I can tell myself about not going to London at the end of this month as we had hoped is “Well, at least we’re going to save a little money.”

            It’s not much of a comfort.

            The thing is, I don’t really care if I go on an exotic vacation or not.  I’d be happy just having a week at home with someone else doing the morning dog walks and the rest of the time spent reading and watching bad science fiction.  But it bugs me that the kids are getting robbed time and again of the ability to see the world.  I grew up in Germany and my parents took every chance they could to get me to new places, even if it was just a quick weekend trip to France.  I saw so much of Europe.  And the trips to the States were weeks-long extravaganzas, where we saw Civil War battlefields and Disney World and every corner of San Antonio you can imagine.  They’re such good memories.

            Mind you, I don’t think the kids are bitter about it.  You can’t miss what you don’t know.  Right after Colin’s death, we took them on a mini trip to Leipzig and Dresden and one of the biggest clashes we had was, upon arriving at the hotel, they thought we would spend the time there hanging out.  They had no understanding that you went to a new place like Leipzig to see it, not to experience the ambience of an economy hostel that had the magic of a TV in the bedroom.

            So, we’re hunkering down again and we’ll get through it one way or the other.  We’re going to do the best we can within our limitations.  But don’t you misunderstand me, Mr. Cancer, I’m bitter about it.  Once again, everyone is getting to see the world and once again, we’re sitting tight.  It’s not fair.

            But I think we all knew that already.

            Again, I find there were things I forgot in the rush of dog walking and teenage drama of the last few weeks.  One was my recent re-evaluation of, for lack of a better term, my list of enemies.

            I don’t want to have this list.  I haven’t actually written one out.  Still, I’m kind of mad at myself for even thinking of having it.  Most of the people on it are near strangers.  There’s the one wheelchair company representative who asked, right in front of Colin in the hospice, how much time he actually had anyways.  There was the festival of caregivers who showed up to our house, worked one night and then didn’t have the grace to tell us to our faces that they wouldn’t be returning.  Maybe I understand why they didn’t.  I probably would have taken it badly.  Then again, I could all too well understand not wanting to have to deal with the reality of a child dying in front of me.

            And then there are the people we actually knew.  Most of them are people who didn’t actually promise us a thing, but whom you kind of expected would still be there for us when the crush came.  Instead – and I admit, it’s all too understandable – were overwhelmed by the reality of the situation, so no longer had it in them to stop by the house or phone us or what-not.  What could they have asked?  “How’s it going?”  Man, back in 2019 you would have either gotten a monosyllabic grunt from me or I would have started talking and never shut up.  So, I understand on one level, but I can’t quite let it go.

            Shortly after Colin’s death, I bought Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible” album.  On that album is the song “My Body is a Cage,” which makes me think way too much about Colin and there’s a line, “Just because you’ve forgotten, doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.”  I hold on to that line too much.  But there are people who now, three years out, greet me like nothing happened.  There’s none of this “remember that year or two where I avoided eye contact with you?”  There’s no mention of the promise to show up and help keep Emma and Noah busy, which was followed up by the person just never showing up.

            I still have this dream of tracking down the one caregiver, because I know approximately where he lives, and giving him a piece of my mind.  I won’t do it, but I still dream about it.  In the same vein, I’m trying to dance around the point that I recently ran into one of the people who promised to help and didn’t.  I don’t want to talk about the how and when, because I don’t want the person to be identified in any way.  But the point is, I came to realize I was going to see this person and I had a little mini quandary moment on my way to the gathering.  What do you say to a person who, the last time you saw them, told you they’d show up to help and then didn’t?  And it’s not like they promised to help you move apartments.  They promised to help you maintain a tiny shred of sanity in the midst of a terrible situation and then just didn’t show up.

            I sweated about it a lot.  There were a few scenarios where I just went nuts.  I didn’t, because that’s not me.  But also because I realize I have to let a lot of this go.  I would have given almost anything to get out of the situation back when I was in it.  How can I stay mad at someone who chose to stay away?  I mean, there will always be a difference, but I know a little about what anyone who had the choice had to go through.  The difference is that the five of us didn’t have a choice to go through it, knowing only four would emerge at the end.  The others did have a choice.  So, thanks if you stuck with us through it all and still are doing so.  If not, well, I understand a little.

            I’ll go so long without blogging I almost start to think I might be past it.  Like I might have reached the point where I can live with the loss of my child without constantly writing about it.  Like that’s an achievement.  Look, he’s doing so well with the death of his child that he doesn’t need to write about it any more.  There’s no goal in that that’s worth striving for, since you start with the point that your child is dead.  Either you write about it or you don’t.  I guess I’m still writing about it.

            And it’s true we had an exceptionally trying parenting day this weekend with the living children, and there again you see the problem: That I can divide my children into the living and the dead.  It’s become such a normal thing for me I have to remind myself that this is not how the average parent does it.  You might have the good children and the bad children.  Or the children who live at home and the children who live with their father.  But the living and the dead is a more extreme separation.

            So, we had our bad day.  And then I dreamt I was hanging out with two of my nieces.  They are actually two nieces I’ve never met (because of the size of my family and the fact that I live overseas, there are large chunks of my direct family I’ve never met) and we were in a mall or something and they asked me why I decided to become a father.  And I said “because I thought it would be fun.”  Then I paused and said “Of course, that was before I realized one of my children could die.”  Then my nieces started crying.  Then I started crying. 

            The next day I was walking Murphy and a Peter Gabriel song I don’t know particularly well came on.  And then I was crying in the middle of the path, half-hoping that someone I knew would stumble upon us, just so I could shout to the world: “Look. I do cry about him, OK?”

            And I thought I was doing so well.

            It happened again the next day.  Same dog.  Different song.  A kid biked by and looked at me funny.  I didn’t exactly shout at him, but I know I audibly said “You’re alive at least.”

            I didn’t have a lot of time to blog after my uncle’s funeral.  It was a busy week beforehand and then I got sick the week after (though, in hindsight, I think it might have just been a spectacular case of allergies).  And then I had a crazy busy week at work.  But I did know that I wanted to talk about that week before my uncle’s funeral, while I was in Dusseldorf.

            The original plan had been to get into Dusseldorf around 4 p.m.  Then I would have had some time to get myself together before the team met for our big dinner.  Except, something went wrong on the tracks, and my four-hour train ride to Dusseldorf turned into an eight-hour one, so we showed up an hour after dinner started and, instead of sitting with people from my team, whom I was hoping to get to know better, I ended up with the CEO and some people from marketing, who were all perfectly lovely.

            And we talked.  And we mentioned if we’d ever been to Dusseldorf and how long we’d been with the company.  And then the woman across from me asked me how many children I had, and I guess because of the nightmarish train ride and the fact that my wine glass kept getting refilled, I hadn’t even prepped myself for the question, like I usually do when meeting new people.  And before I thought about it, I had answered that my children were 14 and 12 and that the youngest one was no longer with us.  When prompted, I confirmed that I meant “dead.”

            She told me that was a very nice way to say it, which I guess it was.  And then we talked a little bit about Colin’s death and, from where I stood, it didn’t feel awkward.  She said she felt bad and it was clear the news bummed her out, but she didn’t treat me like a leper and I didn’t break down into sobs.  And then maybe it was the wine, but I told at least three other people that night, several of whom being people whose role at the company I only barely understand.

            I felt like I had made a breakthrough.  I’d just start cold introducing myself that way.  At the very least it felt better than not talking about it and worrying about when it might slip out.

            But it’s not a cure.  There’s too many little shards of him in my heart and I can’t quite function the way I used to.  Last week, I saw a poster for a demonstration against pediatric cancer (I guess, thinking about it, it’s probably demanding more resources to treat pediatric cancer), with a picture of an adorable little boy, probably about 4 years old, and how he never got to graduate, etc, because he died of cancer.  I looked at the picture and all I could think was how I wish it was Colin on the poster, because then at least more people would know his name.

            I’m going for a walk with Murphy after I post this.  We’ll see how it goes.

            And now I’m back on the train to Berlin (though I’m posting this two days later).  As far as funerals go, I suppose it was nice.  And, as always, there’s that bitterness with yourself at the wake (fun fact, in this part of Germany, it’s called a Leichenschmaus, which literally translates to “Festive Corpse Meal,” so make of that what you will) when you start having a good time seeing relatives you haven’t met in years and actually have kind of a nice evening when you know you’re supposed to be mourning a relative.

            The actual ceremony got to me more than I expected.  I suppose I should have seen that coming, given that this was my first funeral since Colin’s.  I know that, in the moment when my cousin thanked me for coming, right after the ceremony, I was more choked up than she was, which is a bit of a role reversal given that it was her Dad we just buried.  It’s not as if I broke down bawling – hell, I didn’t even do that at Colin’s funeral – but just the scope of his death, all deaths really, felt so much more tangible there during the ceremony.  Like that feeling you might get if you think you’re going to pass out.  You don’t ever pass out, but you kind of skate along the edge of consciousness for a few minutes.  And I don’t think my legs were ever going to give out on me, but I felt so heavy there for a few minutes.

            When it was my turn to throw petals on the grave, I told Colin to look after my uncle.  Indeed, I told them all to look after each other.  It’s a big family grave.  I know of at least 10 relatives buried there, including my grandparents and my great-grandparents.  I didn’t meet any of them, but I also have a great-aunt buried in the grave and I can see her and Colin having a good time together.

            It just bought a lot of memories back, which I suppose is the point of the experience.  In some ways that was good, in some ways that was bad.

            But there was one thing I wasn’t ready for.

            Now, to put this into perspective, you have to understand that Christina does about 99% of the care for Colin’s grave.  I still surprise myself at how rarely I go by the grave.  I really did think I’d be there all the time.  Then again, I didn’t think I’d be blogging about his death three years later, so you go with whatever works for you.  But when we do go together and Christina tries to get me to help with the care, there is a resentment on my part.  Not that she’s asking me to help, but that the universe has left me not with a son, but a grave to tend.  Picking flowers and pulling weeds at a mound of dirt covering my child’s ashes is no substitute at all for having an actual 9-year-old.  So, I do try to get out of grave maintenance whenever I can, which does no one any good, but feels like my little rebellion against the universe.

            And then, yesterday, I’m walking through this cemetery near the Dutch border on my own – I had about 20 minutes to myself in the cemetery before the service started – I found myself taking time to look at all the other graves I ran across while I was looking for the family plot.  Part of it is astonishment at the number of graves for people who died in 2020, another fine reminder of the pandemic.  But what shocked me most was that I was taking notes about the graves.  You know, for ideas on how to pep up Colin’s grave.

            No one warns you about this, but if you’re in charge of a grave you seem to be in a never-ending fight to keep it looking halfway tended.  Maybe not if you have a US-style grave, which is usually just a headstone in a yard so far as I know.  But in Germany, they’re often like little gardens and, I will admit, there’s almost a sense of resentment towards the families that manage to have expertly trimmed hedges and intricate arrangements.  Christina is doing her best with Colin’s grave, but first off, she has an uncooperative husband and second, I think we’re still struggling with a concept.  You want to try to arrange it in terms of what Colin would have liked, but he was 5 when he died and landscaping was never one of his keen interests, so far as I know.

            So, there I am, getting ready to send my uncle off, and I’m taking notes.  Like, “ooh, that’s cool what they did with the shrubs” and “I wonder if we could plant flowers in that arrangement.”  Effectively, I’m trying to borrow others’ intellectual property and export it to Berlin so my son’s grave will be one of the nicest.  It’s like visiting a cemetery has become a kind of shopping adventure.

            There are worse hobbies.  There are far better ones too, but there are worse one.

            I don’t know if any of this will translate into change at Colin’s grave.  I don’t know if Christina will like the idea I saw in Nordhorn, the image I attached to this post.  I don’t know if I’ll change my ways and get more proactive at the grave.  I do know I recently trimmed our hedges and, having never done that before, had no particularly high hopes about how they would turn out.  But they look kind of OK – definitely better than before – so maybe there is room to be a better grave Dad.  We shall see.

          It’s astounding how, three years after his death, Colin managed to pop up so often while I was in Oslo.  I wasn’t planning to bring him.  I wasn’t planning to not bring him.  My focus was getting some training so I could do my job better.  My personal life was supposed to be secondary.  And yet … there he was.

            I had about four days in Oslo and I was booked until 4 p.m. most days, so my Oslo experience was mostly trekking around the city as dusk crept up on us.  A lot of the time was spent marveling at how many people were still eating outdoors, despite it being nearly zero, and how I could walk for hours and hours and not see a single McDonald’s or Starbucks (which I think is a good thing, I’m just so used to seeing these stores every five steps that it’s kind of unnerving when they’re suddenly absent).

            On the second night, I went through the downtown and, after passing through the government quarter, realized I had 45 minutes until dinner and that the cemetery where Edvard Munch is buried was right in front of me.  That took me onto a fun diversion, because the path from the cemetery to the restaurant took me through this truly charming tiny neighborhood – calling it a ‘neighborhood’ is actually kind of inflationary – of old, 18^th century wooden homes that were truly beautiful but which also left me as a homeowner wondering how on Earth you can keep them heated during the Norwegian winter without bankrupting yourself.  Still, it was a nice five-minute walk, marveling that these houses were still standing, right in the middle of Oslo, and clearly occupied.  The Norwegians seem to be a trusting people who don’t batten down the hatches, letting people like me peek in as they wander through.  I finished the neighborhood and felt truly good about things.

            Then I took three more steps and crossed paths with a restaurant named “Chez Colin.”

            It’s not where I was headed and there was nothing particularly obnoxious about the restaurant.  Whoever this Colin was, I have no problem with him having a restaurant named after him.  It shouldn’t even get to me.  I am aware of multiple people named Colin, from friends to relatives to celebrities.  But something about going from this tourist high of finding old-time Norway in the middle of Oslo to a restaurant with my son’s name felt like a slap.

            The night before, I’d had far too much to drink and told two colleagues, who are near strangers, about Colin.  They said all the right things.  That night, after passing Chez Colin, I had dinner with more colleagues.  Sitting right next to two people whom I’ve told about Colin, a third person asked how many kids I have and, without missing a beat, I said “three,” because I didn’t want to get into it in a noisy restaurant with people I barely know.  The one guy who knew caught my eye, and I know he knew what I had done.  Another guy who had no idea said “Three?  That’s a squadron!”

            I look at these incidents and, intellectually, I realize they’re not that big of a deal.  It’s not as if I moved mountains.  But, in the moment, I feel like I’m pushing through quicksand.  But then there are moments where I feel like I’m handling well.  But does obscuring the truth about how many children actually live in my home right now a sign that I’m learning to cope with it all and, if so, should I be happy that I’m coping with it?  I still want to be a mess on so many levels.  It feels like I would be honoring Colin more if I just fell apart.  And yet I go on.

            On my final full day in Oslo, I went out to Vigeland Park, which has a series of sculptures by Gustav Vigeland.  I’ll admit: I went for the quirky thrill, because most tour guides of Oslo will tell you to go there to see his statue of a man being attacked by babies, which did look hysterical on the websites.

            A couple of things I realized after I found the statues.

            – They’re a lot smaller than I thought

            – There were a ton more than I expected

            – While the baby sculpture was kind of funny, and there were definitely a few offbeat statues, many more of them seemed to focus on family. 

            There were definitely statues of mothers playing or interacting with their children, but I was drawn to the ones with the fathers.  Playing, protecting, sheltering their kids.  It got to me.  These statues have been there for decades watching their offspring.  I only got to do it for five years with Colin and it didn’t end well.  And, while I was doing that, I didn’t have the time to do the things I want to do as a father with Emma and Noah.  Perhaps, if I had been expecting this kind of look at parenthood, I’d have been primed.  Going in expecting offbeat statuary, it took me a few minutes to process.

            There’s another famous statue there of an angry baby.  I will admit, it’s kind of charming because it’s funny to see a statue of such an angry baby, and it looks so much like a baby having a bad moment.  You can’t really decide if you should try to console the baby or have a knowing chuckle at its expense.  It’s one of the most popular ones, as you can tell from the discoloration of his hand (and his penis) from all the tourists who have touched it.

            But I was more drawn to the one across the bridge.  It was a slightly older child (and I think a girl), but this one was happy and, if you didn’t worry about every detail, looked kind of like Colin.  I was happy it was happy.  I was happy pretending that, maybe, there’s a version of Colin that gets to be in Oslo for eternity just being happy.

            I don’t know where my next trip is going to take me, but I’m at least now prepared for the fact that I’ll probably have to be ready to have Colin with me.  It’ll be good.  In many ways, he’s a great travel companion.

            I’m writing this in a Berlin airport bar, honestly unsure if the bar or the airport is the more depressing part of this experience.  But it’s a sideshow.  I’m here because I’m flying to Oslo for a round of training that’s been promised to me since I started at the company in January.

            There seems to be a bit of a rush of new workers at the company, which I’m taking as a good sign.  And, along with all of this training we’re going to get in Oslo (I might understand what “residual load’ is when this is all done and, if you’re very good, I won’t explain it to you), there’s been a certain rush of excitement about introducing all us newbies to the rest of the company.  That manifested itself in a request to shoot a three-second video of myself waving at the camera – which was about as cringe-worthy as it sounds – and then include three facts about myself, which would float up in little word balloons around the video of me waving in semi-deranged style at all my new colleagues and readers.

            Oh boy.

            Three things.  How do I break myself down into three things, when I know that what they want is “reading, travel and dog-walking” when, in reality, the answer is closer to “obsessively blogging about my dead son; being unsure if I’m happy the pandemic is kind of over, because I enjoyed the excuse to be away from society and, fine, dog-walking.”

            These things don’t play well to my personality.  Even before Colin died and the bottom dropped out, I loved giving inappropriate answers to these kinds of things.  In freshman year speech in college, we were supposed to analyze a song about a break-up and present it.  Everyone else did classic ‘boy dumps girl’ or ‘girl dumps boy’ songs.  I did a song about suicide, because that’s a break-up from everybody.  I thought I was so clever at 17 doing that.  The difference now is that, when the inappropriate answers come up, it’s because they’re the real deal.  They’re the honest truth.  It’s true to say that “I like hanging out with my kids and I like dog-walking,” but it’s more true to say that I define myself as the father of a dead child and spend so much time wondering what is up with the universe and how long we’ll be carrying the scars of Colin’s death. 

            There’s no way to put that into a one-word description that will float like a soap bubble next to my name.  It wouldn’t be fair to my colleagues to say that.  To say nothing of the fact that, less than three months into the job, I’d rather not be the guy causing that kind of problem for HR.

            Honestly, I just want to work from home, take Murphy for walks, keep my house in order, learn to barbecue chicken like my Dad did and somehow cure childhood cancer.  And I want to stop getting these questions that assume I’m normal any more.  But I also don’t want to wear a T-shirt saying “Parent of a Child Who Didn’t Beat Cancer.”  I want to stop living in a world where everyone assumes you’re happy.  Because, honestly, it’s exhausting to keep pretending that I’m normal any more, but the option of letting the world know how not normal I am also feels tiring.

            I rewatched the “Hudsucker Proxy” this weekend.  There’s a scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is asked how she can be happy, to which she responds that she’s happy enough.  That sends the questioner laughing in hysterics.  It feels like my life some days.

            I ended up going with Elvis, 80s music and superheroes.  It’s not a lie, but it’s well off the whole truth too.