Category: Uncategorized

Taking a walk with a friend on Tuesday, I mentioned how I couldn’t remember the last time I had been sick.

Oh Niels, you silly, silly man, toying with fate like that.

The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be coronavirus. Christina and Emma got tested at the clinic on Wednesday and they both came back with negative results. And, since they’re the two members of the family who venture out the most and the furthest from home base, it seems likely (though not a guarantee) that if something contagious were to enter Casa Sorrells, they might be at the forefront. Also, let’s be real, if something does get in, we’re all going to get it.

In order of least-affected to most-affected, we would be:

• Noah, who seems to have no ill effects whatsoever;
• Me. I’ve been grouchy and anti-social, and felt what could be described as a mild head cold or maybe allergies, but I’ve been pretty functional;
• Christina, who has felt pretty rough; and
• Emma, whom, if you told me she had the coronavirus, I would believe you. She’s been pretty out of it.

So, given the fact that the two sickest came up negative, that feels like we’re on the safe side. Still, it makes a person think. We barely see anyone and wear masks all the time, and a cold somehow still snuck in. It makes you realize that it’s really only a question of luck, on some level, whether you get the executive pandemic treatment or not.

We don’t know if the church visit was the start of the cold misery. It seems unlikely. We gave ourselves a battery of quick tests in the week after that, and it was only nine days later that Emma first complained of a sore throat. That seems like a long incubation period. But it does fit in the general irony of things that that day was also Emma’s birthday, so we started with a general feeling of optimism that enough time had elapsed since the church superspreader sacrament service that things might be normal. We even let her invite a friend over. And then we got to spend three days worrying that maybe we’d been Ground Zero for a coronavirus outbreak.

I suppose this is all only tangentially related to Colin, so maybe this is a sign that the blog is slowly becoming less about dealing with his loss and more about dealing with my life after him. But there is the reality that, the longer this pandemic lasts, the more it makes me think of him. Every time I worry I’ve been exposed or feel a tickle in my throat, I wonder if it might be the coronavirus and if I might be one of those unlucky people who succumbs to it. Let’s be clear: I don’t want to succumb. I’ve got things I want to do. But it is an odd feeling, going through this experience and simultaneously wanting to live, while also thinking “If it gets me, I get to stop living without him.” Best case scenario, I’m reunited with him on the next level.

It’s not a way I would have ever thought I would spend my time thinking, and yet there it is. Death has lost so much of its scare potential for me. That said, dying in pain and living on a ventilator for weeks not knowing if you’ll make it has no appeal for me. I’m now in the group of people who may apply for a vaccine appointment (which is not the same as actually getting an appointment) and have cleared with my doctor that, blood clot issues or not, I’m good to take whatever vaccine comes my way. Christina has her appointment for Wednesday, I’m working on getting mine. If they get them approved for kids 12 and older, we’re marching Emma to the doctor first chance we get and, when Noah turns 12 in 2022, he’s got a birthday surprise waiting for him.

But still, I wish I could go back to a point when death scared me properly, like it should.

There was that phase last week where I was getting fairly worked up about the possible risks of attending a church service for Noah’s first communion, but managed to talk myself down and pluck up the courage to attend without suffering a panic attack somewhere between the gospel reading and the offering. I told myself that, statistically, 20 per cent of the people in the room have had at least one shot of the vaccine. We’d be spread out. People would have taken precautions.

Ha! Turns out the priest was coronavirus positive the whole time. We found out yesterday and are now in wait-and-see mode. This is what comes of letting down one’s guard during this kind of thing.

In the priest’s defense, he had no idea he was coronavirus positive. He had no symptoms and had only submitted to a test on the Friday because it was required before he could undergo a different medical procedure on Monday. He was as shocked as anyone else when he got turned away from the clinic on Monday because of the test.

So, here we are, shaking our fists at the universe and, to a certain degree, the Catholic Church. Emma took a coronavirus test on Tuesday because that’s school policy and Christina took one, also on Tuesday, because of a separate coronavirus scare at work. Both came up negative, though an infection on Sunday most likely wouldn’t be detectable by Tuesday. So, we’ll have another round of testing on Wednesday and then probably every two to three days after that, because that’s how you spell ‘fun’ during a pandemic.

I am so mad at so many things right now, myself included. Because, ultimately, I could have chosen to be the bad guy and said “No, we’re not doing this,” but I didn’t want to deny Noah one slice of normal after the last couple of years, so I sucked up my fears and hoped that everything would be OK. But we should all know by now that hope doesn’t really get you that far when it comes to messing with medical problems.

It comes down to this. Stripped down to its essentials, you have kids because you think it’s a good idea for your genes to survive another generation or so. If you don’t manage to keep the kids alive, you’ve failed. Through no fault of our own – I mean, we did everything we could – we failed Colin. Maybe that wording is too harsh. But there’s no denying that the cancer won. We don’t even get much of a concession prize, unless you count memories. And now, because I didn’t want to rock the boat and because we trusted other people to be on top of things, we ended up taking another unacceptable risk and are once again in limbo. It’s maddening.

Allowing for lingering bitterness based on the knowledge that this event could have easily waited until Germany had reached something approaching herd immunity, I’d say the first communion went as well as it could. Even though two families from our group showed up to plump up the crowd, the church was still pretty empty, so I’m not worried that we’re going to turn into a super-spreader event. I only wish the people in front of us had stuck to the seating charts. When I knelt during the service, I was well within 1.5 meters of the guy in front of me. And no, even though it was a first communion event, I could not bring myself to go up and take communion, even if just about everyone else who could, did.

Still, it was nice enough. I mean, if you didn’t know that commonly in Germany you have a house filled with neighbors and distant relatives, then it went great. Noah got gifts and cash, which he’s investing in Lego and had Facetime and telephone chats with his grandparents and godparents. It worked. We grilled hamburgers and had a pretty amazing cake.

If anything – as with everything – the lack of Colin cast its usual shine on the event. We discussed briefly how we would have gotten him there had he still been alive and using assisted oxygen. I winced ever so slightly during the intercessions, when each of the children put forward a prayer and, whether by design or coincidence, Noah made the prayer for those who are already dead.

And then night-time came and I insisted we keep up with our semi-regular tradition of reading Harry Potter before bedtime, because the kids have never read the books in English and I’ve forgotten most of the details of the books. We’re towards the beginning of the sixth book, and there came a reference to Harry refusing to take meals with his relatives because he was still so much in mourning at the death of his godfather.

Noah noted that a person would die after refusing to eat for two weeks.

Without really thinking about it, I countered that not taking meals doesn’t mean not eating, it just means probably not sitting down at meals with the family or eating less. It happens when you’re mourning and then, with maybe a half second’s consideration, I threw out there that I pretty much did the same thing when Colin was sick and lost a ton of weight.

The children took that in for a minute. Noah said he never knew and hugged me. Emma said she’d had the same experience, but had never had much weight to lose.

So, there you go. Noah is a step further into the Catholic Church, we all, hopefully, avoided the virus for yet another day and, as always, Colin was with us, in one way or another.

(I would share a photo, but the port I need to connect the laptop to the camera is, sadly, kaput)

The first communion is happening tomorrow. I’m a bit apprehensive to see how I get through the event.

I mean, I tend to have at least one small panic attack every time I go into Aldi. I mask up and I go in and, because I don’t do a lot of the shopping, I’ll run across “goat cheese” on the list and this starts a spiral of events. I know Aldi has goat cheese and I know which one Christina wants. I even know where the cheese section is. But it will still take me about five minutes to find it, even though this is Aldi and there’s not much of a selection and the cheese section can’t be more than 2 meters of shelf space. And, the whole time I’m staring at the cheese section, there are inevitably two older shoppers who park their carts next to me and, as near as I can tell, aren’t actually shopping, but are only there to breathe on me while I panic about a) not finding cheese and b) whether these people have been to a coronavirus hotspot lately.

So, that’s me after 20 minutes in Aldi. I can’t even imagine what a church service is going to be like. And I know the church has taken all the precautions and we’ll all be wearing masks and sitting far apart from one another. And I know there have been thousands of church services in the last year that have not led to a coronavirus outbreak. But I also edit and translate news stories all day professionally and have come across enough to know that there have also been church services that have turned into Patient Zero’s big breakout moment, so, yes, I’m hesitant.

And it kills me a little bit because I know I’m not taking control of this situation. I could say “No,” we’re not doing this. I could say, I don’t care what the church is doing, we’re pulling Noah out of this group and waiting for the next one. But then I have to be the one to break it to Noah that not only is he not having his biggish day tomorrow, but that, when it comes, he’ll be doing it with a different group of kids than the group he practiced with. And, somehow, I don’t quite have it in me to pull that from him. Which makes me appreciate a lot more why so many world leaders are flubbing the response to this virus. I’m caving at the potential disappointment of a 10-year-old. I could see where a politician might be nervous about cancelling the vacation plans for a couple million people.

Still, I was so sure it wasn’t going to happen. In its slow, plodding manner, the German government has been preparing us for weeks that tougher measures are coming. I can’t leave my house after 10 pm any more. I fully expect school to be shut down again in the coming weeks. I just assumed church would also not make the cut. But here we are.

Perhaps it comes back to me not having grown up in the most religious of families. I don’t remember my first communion having been that big of a deal. I don’t think my brothers even came, because they would have been away at college. The only non-family member I remember being at my first communion was Mrs. Campbell, who gave me an illustrated Bible. And I’m not even sure how close a family friend she could have been, as I remember my Mom getting pretty mad at me years later when I let Mrs. Campbell know that my Dad was dead.

And here, not only are we having this service, but all of our friends from our church group now say they’re going to try to attend, to show support. Which is super nice, but has me now convinced that, if this turns out to be the big April Super Spreader Event, it won’t only wipe out my family, but all of my friends in the neighborhood.

And I guess this is the part where I would have normally next written “Look, I get it…” but I guess I don’t. I have this one acquaintance on Facebook who has turned into something of a rant machine about coronavirus controls, most of them involving her inability to get to church the way she wants to amid this crisis. I do follow the logic to a point: If the church has to limit seating and you show up with a family of eight and can’t get a seat, it’s going to get frustrating. I don’t quite follow how that then segues into a rant about the greater privileges enjoyed by people taking flights, but whatever. What’s clear is that church is a much more important part of her life than it is to me. Very likely the same applies to everyone else who feels this first communion has to be tomorrow.

The thing is, I know a thing or two about having an important part of your life disappear. I know that you can survive it and I know that I’m not wild about putting myself in a situation where, no matter how unlikely it is, I’m risking another death in my family. There’s a difference between being asked to do without something for a year or two and with the finality of death. I guess, a year into this nightmare, I still understand that way better than a lot of people.

Which brings me to the closer I had not planned for this blog, but I opened up this site to find this gem of spam waiting for me:

The next time I read a blog, I hope that it does not disappoint me just as much as this particular one. After all, I know it was my choice to read,
nonetheless I actually believed you would probably have something useful to talk about. All I hear is a bunch of complaining about something you could possibly fix if you weren’t too busy looking for attention.

Which, I guess, is the best description I can think of regarding the current situation. Thank you very much, unknown commentator, possibly from Turkey, for your insight and your potentially virus-laden link. Rest assured, I’m trying to fix the situation, but this one is tricky. As for the attention: Darn tootin’ I want it.

To keep it simple, I really don’t know what the coronavirus lockdown/regulation situation is in Germany right this moment. It is a very fluid affair that involves a lot of negotiations between the federal government and the state governments that seems to end every time with several of the states going ahead and doing whatever they feel is right. Except case counts are going up and the vaccine situation is on the slow side, so there’s a push that could mean, theoretically, that within about five days the rules will be tightened more and everyone will be told to stay home more than we are right now. We’ll see. Given how every new rule seems to be met with a combination of half the population saying “Yes, absolutely, we’ll do that” and the other half saying “Try and make us” we’ll see how it shakes out.

Which is my backdrop for next week’s big event: Noah’s first communion.

Given what a mess things are, it’s an understatement to say things are not going quite as planned. He was actually supposed to have his first communion last year, but that clearly wasn’t an option while we were in the grips of Lockdown Prime.

Now, I understand the coordinator wants this to happen. He has a group of kids who have been waiting a year for their sacrament. And now he’s got this year’s group and, if this gets delayed again, he’s going to have three years of kids at once. I could imagine that being a little hectic. At the same time, as they keep insisting that this will happen on April 25, it’s all I can do not to call him up and ask him if he’s read a newspaper yet this year. They are on track to vote on this bill in a few days. Angela Merkel has clearly had enough of people ignoring all the rules and, having once been at a press conference where she glared at the guy next to me until he put his cell phone away, I don’t want to be on her bad side. If I were the Catholic Church, I’d behave myself as well.

Which leaves us with the option of either no communion now or a very sad communion this year. I’ve got to say, I’m fully on team “no communion now.” And this is not just about the fact that I can almost guarantee everyone that I will have a very quiet and controlled panic attack, but a panic attack nonetheless, if I’m expected to go to church with dozens of other people in a week.

This is about the fact that it’s yet another thing that won’t go quite right. And I know, no one’s had things go right for the last 15 months or so. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be selfish. But I keep thinking, Emma’s first communion was a pretty nice affair except, that day, Colin’s balance seemed off and, by the end of the day, Christina and I were convinced that something bad was happening with his tumor. We had an MRI shortly thereafter and were so relieved when it came up negative. Which goes to show what we knew since, a year after that, we were full on in hell.

But, going through something like childhood cancer, when something leaves a taint on an occasion like that, you at least console yourself with the fact that there will be two more first communions that hopefully won’t be disrupted. And then Colin died and we realized we only have the one left. And now this one has been delayed and is starting to sound like it’s going to be a rushed, nervous, mask-covered affair to which Noah will be able to invite neither his grandparents nor his godmother nor any of his aunts and uncles or anyone else.

Sure, we can have a celebration with the family later down the road, but maybe this is the point where I want to put my foot down and say, no, I’m not really willing to have a sad facsimile of a major way station. We’ve already lost our third first day of school and our third set of baby teeth coming out and all the things Emma and Noah might have been able to do with a baby brother were he still around. I’m not really prepared to start sacrificing any of our seconds just because someone in the church hierarchy feels there’s a schedule to keep. I’m also not wild about taking my chances with the virus in a large room. I realize the odds are small if we follow procedures and I realize the chances are high that, if we got it, we’d survive. Then again, the odds were pretty small that Colin would ever get the virus, so I don’t really like playing with odds. I get other people are braver about things – about taking flights or going out when the rules allow it. I get it and I am a bit in awe of all of you, but I am not ready to mess around.

I imagine I don’t have much of a say in the matter, so this is me investing a lot of hope into Angela Merkel getting this measure passed and then giving everyone her sternest look when she tells everyone to just stay the hell at home for a few more weeks. I’d rather be behind schedule than run the risk of putting anyone else into a coffin prematurely.

Well, the check from Uncle Joe showed up yesterday and, as near as I can tell, there was no money for Colin in it. It’s such a strange thing. On the one hand, thank God the US government finally caught on to the fact that my son is dead. On the other hand, oh God, even the US government has realized my son is dead. It’s the nature of this game. You don’t get what you want, you hope for the next best thing and then, when you get that, you realize that’s pretty awful too.

And that’s sort of every memory of him. There’s the brief smile when you remember the cute thing he used to do and then the punch in the gut when you remember that you won’t be able to see that again.

And your logical self tells you that’s just the way it is. A few weeks ago, Facebook served me up a video I’d posted of an 11-month old Emma trying to learn to drink from a sippy cup. We watched it and then Christina said “The strange thing is, that child is gone too.” Which is true. Emma mastered drinking from a cup quite a while ago. She turns 13 in a few weeks – officially a teenager – and has learned to barricade herself in her room in a way that would make the most ardent teenager AND the most hardcore survivalist think “Damn. She knows what she’s doing.”

But we don’t mourn for her. We remember her as a baby. We mourn for Colin. And we all remember him differently. After my last post – and after she threatened me for revealing to the world her annual “Death or Easter” challenge, Christina asked where I’d gotten the picture of Colin from. It’s true, that’s a moment he and I had by ourselves, at Easter at his grandparents’ in 2018. But I thought I’d shown the picture to Christina. I thought I’d shared it with her. But no, that was a memory I only had – and in many ways still only have.

I don’t want to stop remembering him. I also don’t want the US government to send him money. I want to be able to get through a day without having a painful memory. I’m glad that the hereafter or my active imagination or whatever you want to call it makes it possible for me to feel that he stops by to see me most days. I wish more people went to his grave. I wish most conversations I had with my friends didn’t eventually turn to the fact that my son is dead. I’ll take closure wherever I can get it, and yet I keep fighting to keep the door open. It is the moments like this where I realize that I might only be on the first few steps of a miserable trip that might take me the rest of my life.

What I’ve got to do is learn to be better with street names.

Bear with me, but the story goes like this. I think I need new glasses. Since my job involves staring at a computer screen and editing text all day, my company will pay a portion of the cost of reading aids. But, to get that assistance, the company doctor needs to test my eyes and sign a form. Usually he comes to the office every couple of weeks for anyone who wants a test. Since no one is in the office these days, difficulties presented themselves.

I tracked him down and we agreed I would come to his office on Monday. He told me the address and I figured out roughly where it was and then headed off by bike, because I wanted a little exercise that day.

Now I knew as I biked off that it was further north in Berlin, in the direction of the neighborhood where Colin’s hospice is. What I didn’t realize until I was almost there was that he was just down the street. I biked down the street where we went to a street fair about a week before he died. I still can’t quite process that. My son laid dying and we went to a street fair. But he was also unresponsive at that point and I had two other kids who needed some time outside. As the nurses in the hospice pointed out, *I* needed some time outside. But still, back when people did things outside together, there were the memories of me walking down this street, knowing that while we debated with the kids about getting on the trampoline that Colin was days or weeks from dying a couple of blocks away.

Then I biked through the grounds of the small palace, where they would often send us when we needed a break and where there was a cafe/truck that served pretty good cake. Emma and Noah found a hollowed out tree on those grounds and still talk about the amazement of realizing they could fit themselves inside a tree.

Then I biked past the grocery store, which wasn’t so much a grocery store during those months in hospice, but a place you could escape to and pretend that things were a little bit normal. Because we were fed pretty adequately at the hospice. There was no need to go on an Oreo run, but sometimes that was better than being in the hospice.

And then I saw the restaurant we went to a couple of times when we got him to sleep at a decent hour and then the bookstore where Christina would buy distractions for Emma and Noah and the post office from where I mailed the never-ending medical forms while we were locked up there and the bakery where I bought a Coke the day Emma, Noah and I went into the woods with the art therapist and painted a tree.

It was quite a trip down memory lane, one which I wasn’t really prepared for. Between that and the fact that I was a touch late for the appointment, I was a bit riled up when I got there and probably TMI’ed the doctor – whom I know I’d told about Colin’s death – that the neighborhood has a lot of weight for me. He said he had no idea and gave me my form.

And I don’t know what to do with this. If I had any memory of streets, the moment he said Grabbeallee I would have known I was near the hospice. I mean, for God’s sake, that’s the name of the tram stop where I got off the tram most days when I went up there by public transportation, during that long month and a half where I was home keeping the kids in school, Christina was in the hospice with Colin and I bopped back and forth across Berlin every day.

So, I don’t know what to make of all that, other than that the memories are still very close to the surface, which I never doubted. Maybe the lesson is that I need to keep myself permanently better prepared, but I don’t know how one lives like that. So I guess the only lesson is that I need to try to remember street names and, honestly, we all know that’s now how my brain works.