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Taxing times

As always, I’m amazed by what sets me off and what doesn’t.

On Friday, Christina came back from a run to the cemetery to tell me that the glass globe we had set upon Colin’s grave had been stolen. It was nothing too special. It was a Superman blue bauble we’d probably spent all of 12 euros on when we took a run to Glashütte, outside Berlin, in the autumn. We’d originally wondered if we would have the vertical stones in the gravestone be this color, but then decided to go with the stones that came with the original design and to add to it.

Which we did, and now someone decided, while wandering through a graveyard, that “Hey, I’ll steal a pretty stone off a grave.” Maybe they feel they got bonus points for stealing it from a child’s grave.

It’s not cool and it’s depressing and, yet, when Christina told me, my main reaction was “Meh, people suck.”

What got to me? Preparing my 2020 US tax return.

It was the first one I’ve done since 2015 without Colin on it. And I don’t know why that would get to me so much. I remember last year it felt weird including him on the 2019 tax return, but he had been alive for nine months of 2019, so it seemed like he should be included. But he wasn’t alive for any part of 2020, so his name disappeared from the forms. I didn’t have to do the special online form for US citizens with overseas bank accounts. Just like that, the workload for this particularly annoying job shrank by a quarter.

It probably didn’t help that “Bad” by U2 started playing in the middle of it all, because the universe likes to kick you when you’re down, and that’s one of the songs I had one of my more impressive public cries to back in 2016, right after he first got the diagnosis.

And I guess there’s the creeping foreboding that this isn’t done. Because the government keeps sending me stimulus checks, even though I live in Germany. The US government insists that you’ve got to do these tax returns even if you live in Germany and, for all practical purposes, have no financial dealings with the US. And it’s annoying and a waste of paper, but I guess the upshot is that it gets you into the system when they start mailing checks. I got one after the first stimulus about a year ago and I got a second one back in January after the second stimulus deal was finished and I can only assume that some Treasury elf is toiling away on my third check now that the final stimulus bill has been passed.

I mean, I need to be clear on this. I didn’t ask for these checks. I didn’t sign up anywhere for them. And they just arrive, with little in the way of explanation. The first one was closely followed by a letter from Donald Trump, but that was political. There is nothing explaining why I’m getting this sum of money and how the figures were arrived at. But it’s not hard maths. The numbers add up to a payment for me and then three payments for dependents.

So, four people. Except Colin was dead before anyone in China had ever developed the first signs of Covid-19. And yet he’s getting stimulus checks. Even though I sent his death certificate to the US consulate here and then, when they didn’t respond, followed up to make sure that the US government knew that my son was dead. But I guess State doesn’t talk to Treasury, or maybe the State Department uses the same mailing service that got my Christmas cards to the States just in the last week. But it’s pretty clear that the people in Treasury are still looking at the 2019 forms, with three children on it.

So, here I sit, getting money I don’t really need and certainly didn’t request and, honestly, think wasn’t handed out using the best means testing. And I don’t really have any use for it and I’m disinclined to use it because some of it was sent in error to a dead boy and I dread the phone call or email that will come at some point when the Treasury Department realizes that Colin was dead when they mailed the check. I don’t feel like explaining this to another government official. I don’t feel like having money that was meant for Colin to use to stimulate the US economy – God knows, he would have done so, purely on Lightning McQueen merchandise if he could have – just so I can go through a song and dance at some undetermined date about the wisdom of sending unneeded money overseas based on year-old tax forms.

So yeah, tax season kind of sucked this year. And I suspect it’s not done with me.

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Game night

You’d think that, with all of us locked in a house day and night, it wouldn’t be that hard to get the four of us to sit around a table and play a board game. But it’s Friday afternoon as I type this and we’ve been trying to organize one since Saturday.

Life intervenes, of course. Plans for a weekend game had to be rethought after a social studies project that was due on Monday was suddenly remembered after breakfast on Sunday. While I wouldn’t say that either Christina or I are slaves to our jobs, unexpected deadlines and projects do pop up, meaning the after-work game session can’t happen on this day or that because some parent is suddenly stuck working until almost bedtime. Sometimes you’re just glad when the kids are engrossed in some project that doesn’t involve maiming one another, so you forget that you’ve been advocating for game night for the last 96 hours and just sit down on the sofa and enjoy the quiet.

But there is a philosophical clash here as well, and it’s primarily between me and Emma. I like complicated games, where you have to sit and thin two to three steps into the future. Emma is certainly capable of these games – she usually wins – but she’s more of a Uno kind of gal.

It’s not that I hate Uno. It’s just that, if I’m going to get the family seated together in front of a board game, I want to actually do something together. I want to talk and exchange ideas and actually be together, not play a 15-minute round of shouting “Draw 4” and “You forgot to say Uno” before we all go our own ways. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fun, but it’s more like a starburst. I want the slow version where we talk about whether you really want to build your settlement there and reach pinky swears where I won’t wipe you out this time if you leave me alone next time. I want an actual family.

It’s becoming clear to me that my desire to get everyone down for one of the harder games is turning into a bit of a power play. I keep threatening to shut down all electronics in the household if we don’t play a game I like. Emma is fond of remembering chores or schoolwork when the other option is to play one of my games. It’s almost like a game to her, it feels, finding ways to get out of game night. And me, I’m having flashbacks to a summer where my brother forced me to play backgammon every night for what felt like three solid months and beat me every time (like, whoo hoo, Mr College Student, taking apart the second grader at backgammon!) and I hated it, so I don’t want force this king of thing on my kids either.

So I cheated a little. I pulled Emma aside and tried to explain. Yes, I get it. These kinds of games aren’t her cup of tea. Yes, we should also play the kind of games she likes. But, I pointed out, I’m trying to get the family together. And then, maybe I opened up a little too much to my 12-year-old and told her that, look, I’m supposed to have a 7-year-old to play with right now. That was the plan. I’m supposed to be too engaged in chasing a first grader around to pester her too much. But I don’t, so maybe I’m now transferring some of that energy to her and maybe it’s holding her down a bit, but it’s where we’re at.

She’s a smart kid. I think she got it.

So, as things stand, our compromise is that we’re to play Scotland Yard tomorrow after breakfast. We’ll see. We’ve also just realized that we have to do a grocery run tomorrow and I work at 1:30 p.m. Maybe we’ll pull it off or maybe we won’t. You just have to keep trying.

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Writing it all down

So, I guess I’m branching out. After a lot of back and forth (and ridiculous amounts of moral support from Chuck McCutcheon), I got this piece published in Medium. If I even have my act together, this link will work.

I haven’t decided yet if this is going to be a one-time thing or a new undertaking. On the one hand, the writing helps me work things out and, who knows, maybe I can do a tiny bit of good in the world if I keep writing. On the other hand, writing it all down can be grueling. Throwing it out there for someone to edit can tear you in two. Having it out there and wondering if you’ll get any responses or whether some troll will turn on you or wondering whether you’ve revealed too much online … it all takes its toll.

I don’t know why, but it reminds me of the time when I decided I needed therapy and went off looking for a professional with whom I could speak. I thought I’d found a guy, but then, after I told him my story, he said, no, he didn’t think he could work with me because he had a young child and he was pretty sure listening to me worry about the health of my son would be way too depressing for him.

And now I’m trying to throw this out into the world, hoping it won’t be way too depressing for everyone else. Like, I saw this article on the Washington Post yesterday about how researchers have discovered that infrared thermometers don’t measure temperatures accurately, and I wanted to post it on Facebook and ask “Doesn’t everyone know this?” And then I realized that, no, not everyone knows this, because not everyone spent the better part of a year hovering over their son in a variety of medical institutions chit-chatting with nurses about what works and what doesn’t. It gets hard to share, because my experience set is so far removed from what is normal and because, understandably, there are people out there who don’t want to hear my depressing story.

So, yes, I got this published, but I’m hardly in the New Yorker yet, and this effort involved the following hurdles:

  • at least one agent saying he didn’t think he could work with me because it’s all way too depressing
  • one Medium channel that seemed right telling authors they would not get a rejection if their piece was not used … and then still getting a rejection
  • and, my favorite, the day I started all this, the n key on my keyboard going on the fritz, meaning I either get no n or two n’s every time I hit that key.

And this is all before I think about the rest. Do I want to be that guy? Do I want to be the guy who only writes about his son? To what end do I do it? Just to exorcise my demons? To get people to pay attention to me? Do I figure that maybe I could turn this into a book deal and make some money? Off my son’s death? As unlikely as that is? I suppose there’s the argument that I keep him alive by writing him, but we all know that’s just a thing you say and, at best, I’m just keeping a memory of him alive, one that will disappear some day when the last person who knew him is alive and long after this website disappears because the world has moved on to its next form of communications technology.

The things is, I could write about him every day. I don’t because a part of me doesn’t want to open this page half the time and another part thinks it’s just too much weight to throw out into the world and another part that thinks it’s only healthy to dwell on this so much. I always wanted to be a writer – and not just at a newspaper, where you have to write what the editors tell you to do – but this was never the kind I envisioned becoming.

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Baby steps

You know, I say a week ago that I think I’ve had this breakthrough with the fact that there are other kids Colin’s age still alive, and then….

It’s not exactly a setback. It’s far from me wishing other kids dead. It is along the lines of me thinking about writing a post-apocalyptic novel about a man who kidnaps a boy to replace his lost child. It is probably prompted by the fact that I’m trying to print out photos from the last year and, in the search, came across a photo or two of Colin in places I didn’t expect. It is probably linked to the fact that I’m cleaning out old paperwork and found things like our application for him to go to day care, or the original paperwork from his health insurance.

It all comes and goes. The babies probably add to it.

I mean it happens. People have babies. You can hardly expect that not to happen. And it’s not like I want it not to happen. (and it’s interesting that I sat on this post for 24 hours before sending it and now, reading it before I send it, noticed that I accidentally left the word ‘not’ out of the two above sentences. One does wonder what the mind is doing when you’re not paying attention) Just because things blew up in my face doesn’t mean I think people should forgo the joys (and other bits) of parenthood. I certainly look forward to a scenario where I have grandkids, even if that is planning ridiculously ahead, given that neither Emma nor Noah has shown so much as signs of interest in a first date so far. I mean, way to plan ahead, Niels. I’m having a political/meaning of life debate with a relative who recently lost his wife and the only way I can explain things to him is that, yes, there are days I think about dying, but they’re nothing more than fleeting thoughts, because I want to see how these two turn out, and that desire to see them grow up outweighs any dark thoughts I might have.

But there are babies. I found out that a neighbor is expecting. A completely unrelated neighbor told me.

“You knew, right?” he said, right after dropping the news.

“I know now,” I responded. And then I couldn’t tell Christina about it because I figured Christina would want to hear it straight from the source. And I honestly don’t know how to react to the news on some level. Because, while everyone else is all “Congratulations” my thoughts flee to “Oh, but the dangers.” And I realize that the odds were so ridiculously off with us. A friend told us when Colin first got diagnosed that we should play the lottery, if we prevailed (for lack of a better word) with odds like that. There are just so few people who get what Colin had, that the odds of my knowing anyone who develops the same or similar condition are just infinitesmal. And yet, and yet … I know the possibility is there. So every “yay,” with me is tinged with the knowledge that I might have to go through this again on some level. It’s a cliche, but it felt like a punch in the gut.

Similarly, we attended an video call baby shower last weekend. I remember attending my Mom’s funeral via Skype half a decade ago and that was novel enough of an experience that I wrote up an article about it. Now it’s just Sunday night. And it was great and we’re happy for the couple and, even though they read this blog, this is by no means meant to be a downer. But the worry never goes out of your mind. It’s like we all know that we’re all going to die some day, I just feel like I know it a little bit more than everyone else in the room.

So yes, I look forward to meeting babies still, even ones who might be related to me. I just wish I could unknow so much in this world.

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17

There have been 17 17ths since Colin died.

I did spend the first three or four months bracing myself for the 17th of each month. October 17, 2019, was one month since his death. November 17, 2019, was two months, and so on. I don’t remember anything particularly noteworthy happening on those days, but the build up certainly kept me busy.

For months now – perhaps thanks to the distraction of the coronavirus – I honestly don’t count the minutes, moments and days until each 17th arrives. And yet, invariably, towards the end of every 17th I’ll point out how I’ve been having a bad day and Christina will remind me of the date. She knows it straight away because she’s been having a rough one as well.

This time perhaps there were extra triggers. Emma had to go to her school – despite the lockdown – to get her report card. There seems to be some tic to the German school rules that require these things be picked up in person. And her school is nowhere near the house and she didn’t want to make the trip by herself. And I’ve spent the last year trying to only leave the house when absolutely necessary, and suddenly I’m taking a trip downtown and back on public transportation so I can wait in the (mild) rain while Emma and her class run around the school because her teachers couldn’t figure out which classroom they’d set aside for the handover.

But I don’t need an event like that. I should recognize the signs by now. The flying into tiny rages because some of my clothes have been put back the wrong way. The sense of weight I feel when I’m working in my study and Noah comes in for something and I know I should turn around and be glad to see him but I know I only just have the strength to not be visibly mad that I have to deal with yet another person, even if it’s my only surviving son.

I still don’t know if it’s actually the 17th. God knows, I was pretty annoyed with things on the 16th as well. Because you can never tell when it’s going to come up. Call it the curse of Facebook, but I’ve got five years of memories saved on to it, and I’m far from a prolific poster there, but there are enough references to and pictures of Colin there that they do pop up and get me at the oddest times, especially at this time of year, when it likes to share the memories of the pictures I took and shared of him in his first six weeks of life.

Which I suppose is an awkward segue to the picture at the top of this post, which I already went on about on Facebook. Because it’s a picture of me from a year ago, when Christina humored me and took me to an exhibit on the crossbow at the history museum and we turned that into our anniversary day out. On Facebook, I went on about how odd it was that I was standing there, holding a fake crossbow, knowing what I knew then about the spread of the coronavirus and still hanging out unmasked in a museum and not really suspecting that it was going to be a little less than three weeks until I was sent home with a laptop and a monitor to run a news wire from my study with no real idea when I would ever see the inside of my office again.

But here, on this blog, what also struck me is that it was five months since our son died and Christina and I still managed to pull it together to get the kids to school and spend a day at a museum and have a coffee together (I’m not sure we managed lunch as well) and act like it was a halfway normal anniversary (of our civil, not our church, ceremony). There is a way to look at that and say “Why weren’t you in bed, just crying your eyes out.” But there is also a way to look at is and say “You did what you could with what was left.” I know which way I want to go many days. But I also know which way I’m glad I go most days.

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To a T

Like any family with children, we have a ton of clothes the kids have outgrown and nowhere good to send them. The problems is that ours just carry a bit more emotional weight.

The T-shirt here probably takes the case to the extreme. I purchased this in 1992, give or take a year, and gave it to my nephew Karl, then 3, as a Christmas gift. It was then worn by umpteen of his siblings before my sister-in-law mailed it to me for Noah to wear. Noah got his use out of it and then it became Colin’s. Towards the end, it was one of only a handful of T-shirts he would let us put on him. We never quite figured out why – Christina suspects he associated anything new with being bad – but he would still manage to kick up a fuss if you tried to dress him in something from the non-approved list of about five T-shirts. Anyone who has done laundry for a family of five – even in normal conditions – knows how hard it is to keep the right five T-shirts in regular circulation. It got stressful.

And even beyond Colin’s love of the T-shirt, it’s one of my favorite ones because he wore it on our outing to Irrlandia, this family park outside Berlin, in 2018. It certainly wasn’t our last time together as a family of five, but it’s the one that stands out the strongest in my memory. It was a dumb summer. We couldn’t coordinate a vacation to get away from Berlin, so we were going to do it in 2019. We made the best we could of weekend trips. Then I went away to Australia, he started getting sick and, by December he was in the hospital. But we had that day in Irrlandia and he had am amazing time. I’ve posted the picture here before of him and me in the park’s maize maze. It’s a good memory.

Anyways, the shirt is now on its way to the States. My niece, Tara, is expecting a child and I figure the kid should continue the Sorrells/Elvis tradition. And maybe Karl will have a kid at some point and then, man, that will probably turn out to be the most cost-effective purchase of my entire life.

But to find the Elvis shirt we had to find the other clothes. It reminded us that we still have a fair number of his clothes stored in the closet in Noah’s room, since the boys ostensibly shared a room (even though Colin ended up in our bed every night). It feels unfair to Noah to have Colin’s clothes still there, perfectly visible each time he goes to grab one of his T-shirts. At the same time, I wonder if Noah will be upset if we try to remove the clothes. You never know how these things will play out. He might like having the memory there. Maybe so long as the clothes are there, it’s still the room he shares with his brother. Every step of this path, even 17 months after his death requires so much negotiation.

It also reminded us that we still had at least a box of his clothes upstairs in the attic and that, if we want to preserve them, they probably need to be stored better than tossed into a box in the attic. And then there’s the question of where to put them. And then there’s the question that the guest room – which was his room for the two months we were all here between the rehab therapy and the hospice – remains stuck in this halfway state between the room where he was when he was sick and a guest room and none of us really with the energy to rearrange things so it’s a room we can use. And that’s assuming any of us want to use the room. We barely ever go in it.

The truth is, the lockdown has given us a lot of time to work on household projects, but in some ways it traps us inside with them too. There are a thousand good reasons to sort through his clothes and his room. But there’s also one good reason not to: We might still not be ready.

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Harden My Heart

Christina and I sat down last night to watch the latest season of “American Gods.” A few minutes in, I turned to her and said “Look at us, watching a show that’s current!”

And, indeed, this is the first time in years Christina and I have watched anything that’s new. Most everything we’ve watched has been a season or two old, at least, as the time demands of my shift work, the exhaustion of parenting, technical problems, and then the nightmare of living through cancer have rarely left us with any energy to watch something as a couple. Still, the moment I said it, I wondered if this is how other people feel when they wonder if they’ve put their foot in their mouth around me. Because – Yay! – we’re watching a show with a glass of wine but the reality is that one of the reasons we have time to sit down and watch a show is because the older two kids have already sulked off to bed and because we don’t have a 7-year-old who requires multiple stories, kisses, hugs, etc before ever so slowly going to sleep. We had time during the day to take care of the laundry and the dishes because our child care responsibilities become less time-intensive with each passing month. Even though we’re all locked down together, hours can pass without seeing either Emma or Noah as they get engrossed in books or art projects. (And then there are the times you see them for what feels like hours on end because they’re monopolized the TV, but that still frees up a person to wash the dishes).

If it rankled, Christina didn’t say anything. But still…

Several people have asked how Colin’s 7th birthday went and, I have to say, it was mostly notable in how unremarkable it was. We went to his grave and spectacularly failed to light sparklers. Ricardo came over and we had dinner. But that was about it. For all the mental bracing, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

It makes a person start to wonder if he has accepted his son’s death and, if so, what that means. Eighteen months (not even) and then one moves on. I don’t think so. I had to find a picture of him this week and that was a fraught process. So, it’s still there, but it’s not as sharp a pain any more. It’s like a wound I’ll just carry with me.

And then again, maybe moving on isn’t the worst thing. I called an old friend a week or so ago to catch up. He was with his little boy, so we had the best conversation one can have with a 3-year-old and all the attendant distractions in the background. And, after about the 12th interruption, it dawned on me that I kind of would like to meet the kid. There was not the usual “How dare you be alive” vibe I had towards other kids. I even found myself noting how advanced his speech capacities were compared to Colin at the same age … and that didn’t elicit more than a “huh” on my side. Yes, I feel disloyal to Colin a bit, but it’s still better meeting a kid (so to speak) and not wondering why he’s alive and your child isn’t.

So, we got through the birthday and then, on Friday, we watched Star Wars. And, since then, it’s been frigid here in Berlin with the snow, so we’re making the most of it. And again, it’s a blast having enough snow to make a snow monster that will impress and slightly creep our your neighbors. But you also remember while you’re making it that it would have been hard to do a project like this with a much smaller child.

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7

I wonder if this is how veterans feel on Veteran’s Day or those who lost loved ones to war feel on Memorial Day? I don’t know how to put this any other way: It feels like a holiday.

Which does not mean it’s fun. Which does not mean we’re celebrating. But nor does it mean that we’re any gloomier than usual. It’s like we’ve taken a day where we can think about him a little more intensely, because, in a normal world, we’d be having a birthday party today.

My employer is generally pretty good about making sure I don’t work on days like this (I make up for it on the weekends). Christina took the day off. We’re in the middle of the winter break, though, given that we’re all home full time, it’s not really that much of a difference from the new norm in that respect. In some ways, it’s another day during the coronavirus crisis.

Like so many other things since his death, I’m not at all sure how I should be behaving. It’s not going to be a yippee-skippee day, but I’m also not wracked with mourning. Last night, Christina went to bed on the early side, so I got the TV to myself and watched an episode of “Game of Thrones” and, honestly, I’m spending far too much time today obsessing what happens next. I’m wondering why I biked downtown twice this week and my body hasn’t realized that this is it’s cue to spontaneously lose five pounds. I’m wondering if the fact that we’re not at our usual vacation retreat in Bavaria – where we spend most of our time grazing at a buffet – means I’m on a technical diet this week, at least in comparison to the last 10 years we’ve headed down there.

As is so often the case, it doesn’t feel quite right. There is this urge to be more sad, but I’m not going to force it either – God knows, it sneaks up on me enough that I don’t have to go looking for it. We’re getting our usual flurry of concerned emails and text messages – and they’re all appreciated, but it’s weird to answer the “How are you doing today?” question with “We’re thinking about watching the final installment of Star Wars later.”

I think of the one guy in the support group – which I haven’t been to since May – who said he hasn’t gone in his daughter’s room once in the years since her death. And there’s a part of me that thinks this guy has to come to grips with his grief. But I realize it’s not my place to tell anyone how to do this. Maybe I take the edge off of my problems because I have my writing. Maybe – and this wasn’t really a conscious decision – but I don’t tiptoe around Colin’s death with friends. People ask me how I’m doing and I’ll say if his absence is weighing me down or if I’ve just found a keepsake ant it’s gotten me thinking or if the reason I’m not working today is because I told the guy who does the schedules that it’s Colin’s birthday and I’d rather not spend the day worrying about Covid-19 and Myanmar’s coup, if it’s OK with everyone. I sometimes worry that it makes me, at the very least, a bit of a bummer to be around. Then I realize that I’ll go nuts if I try to censor every bummer of a thought I have and, honestly, I think by this point I’ve weeded out the people who can’t bear the weight.

So, how are we doing? We had a nice breakfast. We sent the kids upstairs to finish up some school projects. We’re getting ready to go to the cemetery, to see if the mystery person left Colin another birthday candle. I’m sending emails to handymen (you haven’t lived until you’ve seen me trying to communicate in German about house repairs … and by “lived” I mean “enjoyed tragicomedy”). I’ve heard there might be chocolate chip cookies later. And then we’re going to either watch Star Wars or play a new game (or do both). Maybe I’ll get everyone off to bed and figure out what happens on the next GoT episode.

Happy Birthday, buddy. We’re living as normally as we can.

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Just ‘kid’ding

So, we knew the day would come. And, honestly, it wasn’t that dramatic. But still, it’s happened.

About a week ago, Noah was out with a buddy. We’ll call him A. They encountered a second buddy – a kid who had been in day care with Colin. We’ll call him B. Given that Noah, so far as I know, knows next to nothing about B, I think he was just collateral damage in all this. But A and B had some kind of issue and, when things got heated, B laid into Noah with comments along the lines of ‘Well, your brother is dead and you deserve it.’

Things, of course, then got more heated. Noah said he chased B, who made it home. And when B’s dad came out to figure out what all the fuss was about and heard what B said, apparently laid into him. He told B to apologize, which B did, but Noah said he didn’t accept the apology.

Sigh.

The excitement died down pretty much as soon as it happened. Noah came down and was pretty riled up but, once I told him he was under no obligation to accept an apology and that it sounded like B’s dad already taken care of the problem, seemed OK. We had a round of hugs and then we moved on the best way we know how. It sucks and it’s miserable but that’s how kids are and that’s how our life is. You just keep on moving through.

If B is who I think he is (Noah was a bit unclear on details), he and I have history. Like I said, the kid knew Colin. I remember him showing up at our doorstep while we were home for those two months with home health care, peppering Christina and Ricardo with question about Colin. Will he be OK? Why does he have a breathing machine? Is it strange he gets his food that way? Will he be able to go to school? He never set a foot past the door, but he saw it all from the front door and seemed to have a never-ending string of questions. As a reporter, I had to admit a grudging respect. As a parent, I wished someone would come and take him home.

After Colin died, I ran into B again. B had since made it to first grade and I must have been at the school dropping off something for Noah. I ran into B and he must have had a whole interview segment on Colin prepared. So I had to confirm that Colin had died and that we didn’t think it had been painful and we’d all been with him when he die and yes, it was very sad. I thought that would be that but, maybe 15 minutes later, as I was finally leaving the school grounds, I ran into B again, who now had yet another kid in tow. And this new kid wouldn’t believe anything B told him, so I had to confirm yet again that, yes, my son had a brain tumor and, yes, it killed him. The whole time, B smacking his friend in the chest and giving him “I told you so” looks. You expect a lot of things after the death of your child. You don’t expect that you’ll be using the story to clear up schoolyard bets.

What can I say? I still think adults act strangely around me. I can’t expect much more out of kids.

Anyways, it took me a week to get this written down, mostly because I’ve been working on a different writing project (no, it’s not my novel causing the problem and no, Diane isn’t dead yet) that I hope to post in a day or so. And, amid all this we’re getting ready – I suspect ‘bracing ourselves’ is the better term – for Colin’s 7th birthday on Wednesday.. We’ll see what the next few days bring.

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Killing Diane

I’ve meant to kill Diane just about every day for the last week now, but I keep finding ways not to.

Back in June, my neighbor listened to me complain about how I was losing my mind with boredom amid the first lockdown and about how I never get around to doing any writing and pointed out the flawed logic there. Since then, I’ve been writing this story on a daily basis. With 2-3 exceptions, I’ve written a page a day since then.

I’ve had the story knocking around in my head for ages. Probably decades. So, this is not coming out of the blue. I have the overall story worked out: I know who’s going to start the story and who’s going to be standing at the end. The details do surprise me from time to time, like I hadn’t expected to give the main character a girlfriend, but it seemed natural at one point. And lines that I’d never thought about seem particularly appropriate when I sit down to right. There is an overall roadmap, but I am surprised by how much of the writing is on-the-spot improvisation.

But, pretty much since I first had the idea for this story, I knew that Diane was going to die. For the story to unfold the way I want it to go, Diane has to die. This is not negotiable for me and my story.

Yet, as I write every day, I keep finding ways not to kill her. Right now, the characters are, essentially, doing a drug bust. They drive up in their car, run down a short hallway, and arrest the bad guys (there’s more to it than that). You’d think this would take me a page, so Diane could get into that room and get shot. But first I opted to have Diane stay in the car (she’ll join them in the room later). Then, even though I describe the hallway as short, I managed to take 3-5 pages to get the group from one end to the other. They’ve been running since January 16, people. Now they’re in the room, I’m finding every way I can to draw out the moment until Diane joins them in the room and then, once she gets there, who knows what I’ll do to draw out the final moment.

I wasn’t aware I was doing this at first. I think, maybe on the second or third day or trying to get down the hallway, I thought to myself that I was drawing this out. Now I’m pretty sure I’m doing it on purpose, because even though this is just fiction, I’m not wild about letting something that I created die.

It’ll ruin the story if I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t approach it with trepidation. When you create a story like this, you create a universe. I’ve created one where people have superpowers. I can tell you this though: No child is going to die of a brain tumor in my universe. I have that much control.

It is odd. I’m sure writing is therapeutic for me. I imagine it gives me back some control, especially in this nightmare of a pandemic. But, even with that control, Colin keeps slipping into my universe and makes sure things don’t quite work how I’d planned. It’s how things are.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with this story. I’m going to see what happens if I send it off to a publisher or an agent, just because I want to know if I can do this. But first I have to kill Diane. And she’s not in the room yet.