In My Bones

            A friend who doesn’t read this blog asked, after she and I went through the whole “How many children do I say I have” debate,” what seems to be an straightforward question: “Why should you rush to tell them about Colin, as if his fate somehow defined you?”

            It wasn’t meant meanly.  It wasn’t taken meanly.  It was just such a surprising statement to me that it took me a day or two to process it properly.  I can see where she’s coming from.  I can see how one would think that it’s not a point that needs to be made over and over to anyone I run into because there’s more to me than being the father of a dead child.

            I could tell them I like to read comic books (I don’t share that with just anyone).

            I could tell them that I’m an Elvis fan (I share that one a bit too widely, I’m afraid).

            I could just say that I’m an aspiring novelist.

            I could tell them I’m half-American or half-German or a 20-year-long resident of Berlin or a dog owner or a husband or an editor.  There are so many ways to introduce myself.  But the question of whether or not to mention Colin is the one I get hung up on.  If I blurt it out, it’s awkward.  If I keep it to myself and it trickles out later, it’s awkward later.

            But I think it was the argument about whether it defined me that made me think the most.  It’s just that, I can’t think of an event that has defined me more than anything else in my life.  I want to say that it was my decision to marry my wife or being there in the room as my children were born or having interviewed Charles Schulz or standing in the US Congress as decisions were made that still affect the world in general.  But those all are important, but they haven’t lodged in my mind the way my son’s death did.  I find myself almost entirely defined by Colin’s death.  I can’t decide most days if that’s a good or a bad thing.  It’s just there.

            I don’t want to be morbid about it.  I don’t spend every moment thinking about him.  I don’t construct elaborate shrines to him (unless you count blogs).  I’m not going to go out and say that I’d sooner cut off my arm than pretend my son didn’t die.  But it’s there.  It’s so seeped into my pores and ground into my psyche.  I wasn’t there when either of my parents died and I miss them, but their deaths seem natural to me.  They lived – perhaps my Dad didn’t live quite long enough – but they had a life.  Colin had barely lived and I had to hold his hand while he passed away at 5 ½, having probably not even been aware of the last month before he died.  I can’t let that go.  I can’t not think about it.  I see people in politics or business I don’t like and all I can think is “He gets to make it to adulthood, and not my son?”  I see kids not appreciating what they get in life and I wish Colin could have the slightest taste of it.  I still listen to people complaining about lockdown and am so tempted to tell them to spend a summer in a hospice and see what heaven being trapped in one’s own four walls can be.

            It’s more than missing him.  It’s that his life ended before he could really do anything with it, so I feel this need to keep it going in whatever symbolic, threadbare way I can.  And that’s probably going to mean uncomfortable encounters as I tell people about him, but I can’t pretend he wasn’t there.

            Maybe I want to mention him because people should wish they got the chance to meet him.  He was that amazing.  I couldn’t have done half of what he went through and still found the strength to smile as my cancer was returning and taking my legs and my ability to speak and my power to breathe.  I would have been fetal in my bed asking for morphine.

            Maybe the world just needs to know about Colin.  Maybe the world needs to know that things aren’t always fair.  Maybe the world needs to know I’m not over it yet.  Maybe the world needs to know that I still don’t see how this could have happened.  I just know I’m not done with it.