A theme that continually comes up with my therapist is my regret/sadness/call it what you will that I have nothing of him.
I mean, that’s not true. I have pictures and videos. I have both a room full of toys and an attic full of children’s clothes that I have no idea what to do with. I have one of his old Lightning McQueen cars here on my desk. We keep putting up more pictures of him and I’m fine with that.
But I don’t have anything by him. This simply all started when he was too young. He was just 2 when he got the diagnosis. Then it was three years of medical hell and death. Yeah, there was the year he went to day care in 2018, but nothing ever came home from there. No handprints turned into turkeys (which would have been weird anyways, since we don’t do Thanksgiving in Germany). No egg-shaped pieces of cardboard that crack open to reveal a paper chick for Easter. No plaster of Paris Christmas tree.
I really want something that he did. We’ll get a gravestone some day (I feel we’re so far behind the curve on this one), but that’s not the memorial I want. I want a badly made ashtray out of clay here on my desk, even if I don’t smoke and even if it just gathers dust for the next 40 years. But I don’t.
Or at least I didn’t.
As part of my continuing lockdown cleaning project, I rediscovered this series of bins in our upstairs storage room. I set them up in 2017 because we were just drowning in art projects by Emma. Noah will pick up a pencil and draw something if there’s a lot of pressure involved. Emma will just draw on anything. Always has and always will. So we got the bins. Emma’s was packed to the gills. Noah’s had plenty of room to breathe. And Colin’s – we figured we would fill it up someday.
But then I was moving things around and found something to put in one of the bins and that’s when I noticed … Colin’s bin isn’t empty.
I discovered a piece of paper. I have no idea what it is, but it’s been scribbled on with the intensity you get when you hand a toddler a crayon. And there’s a Christmas scene with handprints. There’s no way he did this himself. Clearly someone held his hands in place to make the scenario of reindeer and clouds. But they’re still his hands.
It was like finding Sasquatch carrying the Philosopher’s Stone. Both in the sense it was amazing to find these things that I had forgotten existed – they must have been made when he attended day care in the autumn of 2015 – but also in the sense that I just had no idea what to do with them. I didn’t even call Christina because I wasn’t sure how to express the words “Hey, I found some stuff Colin made.” (I did tell her eventually).
But they’re there. And I know they’re there. And someday I’m going to pull them down and figure out what to do with them. It’s something.
It is a lot, and it is amazing. Colin left it there for you to find when you needed it most. His little hand made the imprint leaving his DNA there for you to touch whenever you need to be closer to him. One evening, as we sat at dusk on Colin’s bench in the ranch cemetery…a single firefly came flying toward us blinking its little light. It was a special moment as it flew past us. That is why we now have little solar lights at the entrance to the cemetery and on Colin’s bench cover. They are made to look like little fireflies.