Joining the club

            My thoughts on going to the men’s group again for the first time in ages didn’t really fit into my last blog entry.  And then I wasn’t planning to write anything on Colin’s 9^th birthday, because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything extra to say about him just because we should be having a cake today, not just a handful of memories.  But things sort of came together.

            The thing I would have said about the men’s group is that it struck me, even though I’ve probably only been there about a half dozen times since Colin’s death, mostly because the pandemic made it so impossible to get anywhere, that there was once again a new Dad there, who was processing the recent death of a child.  It feels like almost every time I’ve been, there’s a new guy there (though a lot of the guys who seemed like regulars when I first started no longer seem to make appearances), processing what happened and what could have been.  Everyone is in pain, but some are functioning pretty well and some seem like they needed a miracle to get up the stairs.  But it’s like I’m in this ever-expanding club of awful, one that I would have never known existed if my son hadn’t died.  Like it’s too easy to just pretend that there’s not this group of grieving parents in the world because, honestly, why would you think about that?  It’s far too depressing.

            And that’s not the kind of thing I really want to write about on Colin’s birthday, but it just so happens that the club got a little bigger last night, and it was a bit too close to home.

            As usual, it’s not my story to tell.  The deceased is the daughter of one our friends.  I get along perfectly well with the friend, but only see them once a year or so: This person is much more in Christina’s sphere.  And the deceased … I probably hadn’t seen this kid in more than a decade.  The situations are all different.  Colin was 5 when he died, this kid was college-age.  Colin was our youngest.  This was an only child.  We saw Colin’s death coming at us like a freight car.  This death kind of snuck up on them.  There’s no way to put it in terms of which is worse or which was more awful or who’s suffering more.  It’s just nightmarish.

            So, it’s not like I’m hit on that much of a personal level, since these are people I rarely saw.  But still, I’m struck by the unfairness of it all.  I’m back to wanting to grab St. Peter by neckline and asking “What the hell is going on?” should I make it to the gates.  I want to know how this happens.

            And then, of course, I feel stupid.  This isn’t good.  This is awful.  But how do I get so upset about this, when I know what’s happening in Ukraine or Myanmar or Syria or even the streets of Memphis?  There’s so much awful in the universe and people who don’t know if they’re going to starve tomorrow or have their house blown up on top of them.  I barely give them a second thought.  These dead children weigh me down so.

            Christina and I recently watched an episode of “The Sandman” on Netflix.  It’s called “The Sound of Her Wings” and is pretty true to the original comic book.  The Sandman is the king of dreams and his sister is Death.  The catch is that Death is an extremely nice person who likes walking around barefoot and loves “Mary Poppins.”  While people aren’t thrilled about dying, they genuinely like her.  I’ve read several times that people dealing with impending death find the comic book (and I assume the TV episode) comforting.

            I’m not so sure.  In the comic book and show there’s a baby who has an unexpected crib death.  In the comic, Death tells the baby “You get the same as anyone else.  A lifetime.”  There was a time when I thought that was kind of deep.  Maybe even helpful.  Now I don’t think that five years old should count as a lifetime.  Just getting to college age shouldn’t count as a lifetime.  I want someone to explain that to me and, as always, there’s no one who can even start to put together an answer I would find remotely helpful.

            There was a phase – I guess I’m still in it – where a dark part of me just wanted everyone else to feel as miserable as I was.  I don’t think that’s ever going to go away.  But now I know of someone pretty much exactly as miserable as I was in 2019 and I know this isn’t what I want.  But it’s hard to think what I want, other than my son standing right here where he’s supposed to be, not cremated in a cemetery blissfully aware of how the world fell apart with Covid-19 and the Russian invasion.  I can’t put my hopes and desires into the shape of something attainable and what little hope I have is just too awful to really be said aloud.

            Because there are so many people in the foreign ministry and because your path might intersect with someone for a few years and then you don’t see them for a decade because they’ve been in Buenos Aires and Djibouti while you’ve been in Montreal and Jakarta, they keep people updated with some kind of internal updates.  Sadly, it also means you hear about people who have died.  Christina told me a few nights ago that she heard about a former colleague and her husband who died last month, just three weeks apart, and neither was past their mid-60s.

            She took that as a sign that we need to make the most out of the time we have left.

            I’m not saying she’s wrong.  I’m not saying I disagree.  I’m not saying I won’t try.  I think we’ll even pull it off a little.  But there’s a lot of weight binding us down.  And every new case like this just wears me down that much more.  It’s wrong for a child to die before the parent and, as awful as so many other things are, this is a particular kind of awful that just keeps hitting you between the eyes.

            And so the new parents of the dead keep coming.  One thing I notice is that Christina and I kind of held it together (I’m not saying there were days when we didn’t) through it all.  There’s research about couples falling apart, both mentally and in terms of their relationship just ending with the death of a child.  I’ve seen people barely able to speak and people who essentially pretend their dead child never happened.  I’m not judging but, based on that, it feels like we’re holding up pretty well.  But if the concession prize of your child dying is that you don’t fall to pieces, then you know it’s a crap game.