Five Minus One

I managed to get a haircut this week. It’s not even that good of a haircut, but I’m so excited not to look like a disco vagrant any more, I don’t really care. Plus, thanks to the coronavirus, I think the mask distracts from the hair.

When it became clear that we were all going to have to start wearing masks every time we do Brötchen runs, I did wonder how I’d react. I did wonder if there would be any traumatic flashbacks on my part, now that everyone in the Aldi looks like they’re about to scrub up for surgery. I remembered an incident shortly after my Dad’s death when I was helping a friend of a friend unpack into a new apartment. This friend had a lot of health issues that required breathing assistance. So, I reached into one box and found a collection of breathing tubes, which reminded me of the tubes my Dad had to use during his later years to keep connected to his oxygen … and I just left the room. I told my friend that I didn’t think I was going to help any more and then I went out on the balcony or something.

But, so far, none of that. And, the more I think about it, medical masks are not really something I associate with Colin’s illness. During the whole time we were in the hospice, I only remember one time where a nurse wore a mask – because she had a cold – and mostly I just thought it was so strange she considered it necessary, given how Colin was dying anyways.

Masks weren’t that common in the hospital either. I know the doctors put them on in the intensive care units, but it was always a grudging kind of thing, where they’d pull on a mask and then sort of drape a gown over themselves before looking at Colin. Which is not a slam on the doctors. I’m sure they scrub up properly when they’re doing surgery. But Colin’s problems weren’t infectious and there was no global pandemic going on, so the mouth guards did seem a little over the top back then. I know, when we first started visiting oncology wards regularly, I was so glad we were spared the masks. The gowns were more than enough fuss. And at least the gowns go on somewhat easily. A month or more into this mask adventure I can’t seem to put one on without snapping off my nose or accidentally putting it on the top part of my face first.

So, I don’t like the masks, but I’m not bothered by them either.

What I realize I miss are the hugs. I remember, in one of my darker moments of therapy, I mentioned to the therapist that “Apparently, you lose a child, you get a hug.” Which is mean, but it’s true. I never got hugged so much as I did back in the autumn. I showed up for work and got about eight hugs in a row. I even went into autopilot, throwing a hug at a co-worker whom, in retrospect, really wasn’t a hugging sort of guy.

And I won’t lie, I was a little surprised by it all. This is, after all, Germany, where … well, let’s face it. We’re not Italian here. People do hug and all that, but everything is kept in limits too. But the hugs kept on coming. Not from everyone (and not people at work, because that would have gotten weird), but I had my group of close friends and man-hugs kind of became a thing. I’m going to my first bereaved Dad’s meeting since February tomorrow and I don’t know how those are going to work now, since the man-hug seems like a basic ingredient.

And now they’re not happening. And I kind of miss those. And it’s not as if I’m going to shrivel up and die now that, when I meet up with a friend, we keep a respectful distance and, if we have a beer, we either do it while taking a walk or sitting at very far ends of the table and we don’t even offer handshakes, much less a man-hug. I suppose it’s just one more thing to add to the list of things that leave me unhappy with the general situation.

Hugs to everyone.

We just had Father’s Day here in Germany. For reasons I’ve never researched, Father’s Day here involves men heading out with wagons full of booze and getting blind drunk. Apparently, being a father is completely optional to whether you participate or not. The only requirement seems to be drinking all day and spending at least part of your time in a wooded area shouting at the other members of your group.

I’ve never engaged in this particular ritual though, I have to admit, there have been years it has been tempting. It always coincides with the Ascension of Christ, which is a public holiday here in Germany. It was last Thursday and, since I was down to work that day, we marked it yesterday in this household. I got Schwarzwalder Kirsch muffins, pizza with anchovies (these were two separate meals) and a T-shirt with the Legion of Super Heroes logo which I’m told I must never wash if I want the logo not to fade away.

The main thing I wanted out of the day – aside from the anchovy pizza – was to get the kids to sit down and play a mega version of this superhero game we have. A normal game requires you to play with about two-thirds of the cards and takes an hour or so. I wanted to combine all the cards from two different games and see what happens. Neither Emma nor Noah was very enthused by the plan from the start. And then Ricardo joined us for the game and proceeded to pretty much take the rest of us apart, so their interest evaporated pretty quickly.

After an hour and a lot of whining I could tell I wasn’t going to have any fun with the game because it was rapidly deteriorating into a hostage situation, so I sent the kids away and, I won’t lie, was in a bit of a huff about the whole thing. You want some extra credit when the only thing you want for Father’s Day is time with your kids, and instead I became the bad guy for first holding them against their will and then for being grouchy when they didn’t want to stay and play. As parenting failures go, it’s not even going to crack my top 100.

And yet … there is something about failing as a parent (however minorly) and then failing as a parent on the first Father’s Day after the death of another child that leaves you thinking. And I hate to use the word, but there’s no other word for it than failure. Your job as a parent is to get your child to adulthood so he or she can be a functioning member of society. We failed in that. It wasn’t our fault. There was nothing we could do. But we got blown out of the water by that tumor. There’s no shame in failing if you never had a chance. But it is a failure nonetheless.

I don’t think we are failures. If nothing else, I keep remembering how everyone told us we were doing so good at surviving the experience, though being the best at that is hard to frame as a ‘yay’ kind of moment. It almost feels like yet another failure.

I can feel myself meandering. I don’t start every one of these entries with a direction in mind and I’ve rarely felt I had as little of a point as I did today as I started this, but I couldn’t let Father’s Day go without a comment.

I don’t write this blog to let everyone know I’m sad. I think anyone reading this more or less gets that. I don’t write it to give you hints on how to deal with the grieving, because the best advice I can give is “Every day is different.” I write it to get things out of my head. And this time I’ve got in my head that yesterday was Father’s Day, and I wasn’t quite the best father I could ever be, but there was room for a ton more failure, so I don’t feel all that bad about it. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this after all. Because I obviously think a lot about Colin and there I failed, but when I think of all the ways I could have failed him worse … well, it doesn’t make me feel better, but I suppose there is some comfort in knowing that I could possibly feel worse than I do. And I don’t. So there. I pulled a point out of my hat in the last paragraph after all. I’ve got a therapy session in about 40 minutes and then after that I’ll see what the kids are up to. The threat today is to play poker.

I finally decided to embrace working from home, since it seems I’ll be doing it for a while, and set my desk up so it’s a little bit better, though I’m still sure I’m going to need massage therapy at one point to make up for the fact that my home office is not one tiny bit ergonomic.

I have a ton of stuff on my desk. There is actual useful stuff, but there are also projects on hold and pictures and knick-knacks. It hasn’t been helped by last month’s attic-cleaning project, which means I now have the US Army award I got in first grade for a poster project that my brother Markus totally drew for me down here on my desk. Ditto the keychain that was also the ticket to my junior prom (Markus did not make that).

And I also rediscovered the pen. Which is kind of a lie. I knew it was there the whole time, I just kept stacking stuff strategically in front of it. But there’s this pen. It probably cost about 69 cents and the spring is missing, so it’s useless, so I should probably just throw it out.

Except, I bought this back in 2016, right after Colin got his first diagnosis. It’s probably for the best that I can’t fully remember that time. My brain was firing so much, trying to process all the information, trying to sort through new German words I’d never wanted to know, trying to figure out how to care for Emma and Noah while doing what I could at the hospital, and I reached a point where I knew that I just wasn’t going to be able to keep my act together and I knew stuff was coming at me far too fast to enter it into my phone in any useful fashion. So I found an old notebook and bought this pen at a kiosk in Alexanderplatz and that’s where I kept my brain for about two months, reminding myself of everything from special events at the kids’ schools to lists of things I needed to get to Colin in the hospital.

And now he’s dead and my brain is still a mess, but I’m more functional, and I have all the time I need in the world to get projects done since I barely leave the house … and here I am with this stupid pen.

It’s at least a memory I’ve chosen to keep, unlike say:

• the 2,000 euro hospital bill from 2018 that still sits here while insurance processes it;
• the US stimulus check that arrived here in Berlin (I know…), with extra money for each of my three children;
• and the bank statements that keep showing up from his college account, because the bank can’t seem to get that shut.

Those I could do without. So, I’ll take the pen. So what if it’s broken? So are most of us on some level.

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.

Remember Colin’s bench in Texas? My cousin and her husband weren’t content to stop there, as you’ll see from the picture. As near as I can tell, they’ve gone and made a regular Disneyland, Texas theme park, though I suspect this one feels more true to its roots than anything you’re likely to find at Euro Disney.

To quote my cousin: “Note Colin’s name in royal blue on the roof’s edge…made with a 3D printer to look like LEGO blocks. … I also took a pic so that you could see Colin’s bench from his grandparent’s graves.”

There’s also apparently a Lego play area and, as you can see, shade, which should never be underestimated in Texas.

Heaven knows when we’ll get to Texas. We couldn’t really make any travel plans for the Easter break before Covid-19 struck. There’s not a lot of reason to believe that a summer vacation is in the cards (and Texas in July would probably end me). We’ll have to see what the autumn break holds. But I look forward to seeing it some day.

The unavoidable truth of a blog like this is that it’s mostly going to be exercises in either depression or avoiding depression. But I also think it’s important to make clear that the four of us don’t sit around the house moping and being sad. Yes, there are certainly moment – even long stretches – like that, but we also have plenty of moments where we watch dumb movies, experiment with exciting cake-baking strategies and try to teach the children poker. All in all, we do pretty well.

Also doing well is this little apple tree. It was a gift from Colin’s old day care. The administrator brought it over a couple of weeks after the funeral. Due to a combination of disorganization and my general laziness when it comes to yard work, we probably got it into the ground about two weeks later in the year than the average gardener would recommend. However, it was a mild winter and the little guy is now blooming like crazy, which is nice. I’d much rather have Colin, but there’s a small solace in having this apple tree growing up sheltered by our shed, giving us the hope we’ll be able to move it to a more prominent part of the yard once it can better fend for itself.

Today’s the last day of my 2019 vacation, so I’ll go back to working from home tomorrow, hopefully discovering soon what the plan forward it. I don’t know if it was the best use of my vacation time, but I went through everything in our attic and then I went through and organized all of our baby and young children’s toys. That was not fun work. There were a lot of memories. At the same time, the toys aren’t lying all over the house, waiting to surprise me with an unexpected memory, as happens every time an old Lightning McQueen rattles out of the woodwork. I know my children: There will be more toys surprising us. But at least I’ve gotten some control of the bulk of the situation.

I had planned to blog in the days leading up to Easter, but the combination of allergies, a mania for tidying my attic, the arrival of a large load of comic books and sudden access to all the Marvel superhero movies on Disney+ has left me focused on things other than my writing. That said, I’m making amazing progress through the Marvel movies and it’s possible I have the tidiest attic in Germany.

It’s something, I guess, but still not what I really want.

I’ve been dreading the arrival of Easter for a while. My family certainly had an Easter celebration when I was a child. I remember enjoying Easter. But then my brothers moved out of the house and I got older and we weren’t that religious and, honestly, from my mid-teens until I had children in my 30s, Easters would come and go and I would have no idea that it was the Easter season at all or that I had missed it.

That, of course, changed when the kids showed up. But it was still always a distant second place to Christmas in my mind. And then, in 2016, we had to send Emma and Noah away to their grandparents because of Colin’s initial cancer diagnosis, meaning Christina, Colin and I had our Easter in the hospital. Last year we had it at home during those two short months between rehab and the hospice, but it was a stressful affair, like everything else back then. I was trying to keep count as April started, but I can’t do it from my memory any more. All I know is that, two weeks into April 2019, we had probably seen about five nurses quit on us. I know we were without a nurse during the day on Easter Sunday and I know that I ended up eating Easter dinner with Emin, the nurse, late Sunday because there had been no way to keep Colin distracted while everyone else had dinner without me being upstairs with him. I know we still had hope last year at Easter, but it was so exhausting.

And now we’ve got this Easter, in the middle of a lockdown that shows no signs of ending. And, so long as I’ve got comic book-based movies to download, I’ll be fine, but it’s just another strike against the day in my book. Because, no matter what, Easter is know forever bound up with Colin and cancer for me. But it’s even worse than that. I hate that part of our Easter tradition will now be going to his grave and I hate the fact that my children, who literally watched their brother die a half year ago, are now having to spend their time worrying about this coronavirus. They don’t act scared. Maybe they’re not consciously scared. But they ask questions about my cholesterol and my pulmonary embolism and I can’t help but think they’re trying to figure out if I have a pre-existing condition and how vulnerable i am. Noah said last night that he hopes the lockdown doesn’t stop him from getting the second shot for his HPV vaccination because he doesn’t “want to die from cancer.”

It’s too much to take in sometimes, what these kids have to work through. So, we had as nice an Easter as we could have. But I’m afraid it’s never going to genuinely be a nice holiday for me.