Five Minus One

            The trick with putting these blog posts together is that I want to be a Writer, when sometimes the real priority is just getting the information out.  Maybe I just don’t get to express myself at work enough, or maybe I do have a deep, pretentious need to put myself at the center of these stories.  But there is the fact that this blog has a role to fulfill when it comes to sharing family news and there is the fact that I like to write long essays about my condition.

            So, if you want to go to just the facts, read on.  If you want the long, moanier version, skip ahead a few grafs.

            The news isn’t great, but it’s not awful either.  Christina noticed a lump in her breast a while back and her doctor wasn’t thrilled about it either.  She got sent to the cancer center and we got the confirmation on September 22 that it is indeed a tumor.  Because, apparently, we didn’t do our family cancer penance already. 

            That said, she’s had her first two round of chemo and is doing better than I would have expected, especially if I was the one getting chemo.  The only symptoms we’ve seen so far are exhaustion the day or so after.  Also, her face gets flushed the day afterwards.  Her odds are very good.  Although the tumor is of an aggressive variety, Christina caught it pretty early.  And this kind of tumor responds well to chemotherapy, apparently.  Combine that, and it doesn’t seem hopeless.

            But still … we’re doing this again.  We’ve got six months of chemotherapy ahead of us, checking blood counts and getting nervous every time Christina’s temperature is a bit on the high side.  We’ll have to watch what we see and what we do and revolve our lives around the medical side of things.  We know the drill.  I think we had just hoped we wouldn’t have to make use of our experience again.

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            If you’re into the less straightforward version, let me go on about vacations for a while.

            It probably came to mind because, leading up to Christina’s first chemotherapy, there was, essentially, a four-day weekend here in Germany.  People drove off to visit friends and new cities.  People went to Sweden.  Or, if they stayed in Berlin, they had picnics (it’s been ridiculously warm for the start of October) or had a good time.

            We tried to avoid contact and tried to make sure we were set up for the start of this new nightmare.  We’re looking at everything from getting the guest room in shape in case I get sick and Christina needs distance to reviewing our last will and testament, which is infinitely depressing.

            But there was this lingering bitterness that, once again, everyone got to go on vacation and we didn’t.

            I know it’s ridiculous.  Some of the people who got to go on vacation just finished up their cancer treatments and couldn’t do much of anything the last year.  I know it’s the stupidest thing to focus on.  I mean, I’m still so American at the core and every now and then have to remind myself that I do, indeed, have these ridiculously long European vacation benefits.  Part of me still doesn’t know what to do with six weeks off work a year.  A lot of me still doesn’t get how central the idea of this vacation time is to the European psyche.  I’m still amazed that people couldn’t make it to Colin’s funeral because the clashed with their vacation time.  I’m not mad, it just seems like such a weird thing to prioritize.  But there you are.  They get a lot of vacation in this place and it’s not a benefit you mess around with.

            Unless you or a loved one gets cancer.  And then it all flies out the window.  We didn’t take a vacation in 2018 because we were just overworked.  Then Colin got really sick at the end of that year and 2019 was no longer a candidate for vacation and then came the plague years where we didn’t really want to risk a trip much further than southern Germany.  It was only this August that we managed to do a proper vacation in Sweden.  And we had fun and spent far too much money and now the only thing I can tell myself about not going to London at the end of this month as we had hoped is “Well, at least we’re going to save a little money.”

            It’s not much of a comfort.

            The thing is, I don’t really care if I go on an exotic vacation or not.  I’d be happy just having a week at home with someone else doing the morning dog walks and the rest of the time spent reading and watching bad science fiction.  But it bugs me that the kids are getting robbed time and again of the ability to see the world.  I grew up in Germany and my parents took every chance they could to get me to new places, even if it was just a quick weekend trip to France.  I saw so much of Europe.  And the trips to the States were weeks-long extravaganzas, where we saw Civil War battlefields and Disney World and every corner of San Antonio you can imagine.  They’re such good memories.

            Mind you, I don’t think the kids are bitter about it.  You can’t miss what you don’t know.  Right after Colin’s death, we took them on a mini trip to Leipzig and Dresden and one of the biggest clashes we had was, upon arriving at the hotel, they thought we would spend the time there hanging out.  They had no understanding that you went to a new place like Leipzig to see it, not to experience the ambience of an economy hostel that had the magic of a TV in the bedroom.

            So, we’re hunkering down again and we’ll get through it one way or the other.  We’re going to do the best we can within our limitations.  But don’t you misunderstand me, Mr. Cancer, I’m bitter about it.  Once again, everyone is getting to see the world and once again, we’re sitting tight.  It’s not fair.

            But I think we all knew that already.

            Again, I find there were things I forgot in the rush of dog walking and teenage drama of the last few weeks.  One was my recent re-evaluation of, for lack of a better term, my list of enemies.

            I don’t want to have this list.  I haven’t actually written one out.  Still, I’m kind of mad at myself for even thinking of having it.  Most of the people on it are near strangers.  There’s the one wheelchair company representative who asked, right in front of Colin in the hospice, how much time he actually had anyways.  There was the festival of caregivers who showed up to our house, worked one night and then didn’t have the grace to tell us to our faces that they wouldn’t be returning.  Maybe I understand why they didn’t.  I probably would have taken it badly.  Then again, I could all too well understand not wanting to have to deal with the reality of a child dying in front of me.

            And then there are the people we actually knew.  Most of them are people who didn’t actually promise us a thing, but whom you kind of expected would still be there for us when the crush came.  Instead – and I admit, it’s all too understandable – were overwhelmed by the reality of the situation, so no longer had it in them to stop by the house or phone us or what-not.  What could they have asked?  “How’s it going?”  Man, back in 2019 you would have either gotten a monosyllabic grunt from me or I would have started talking and never shut up.  So, I understand on one level, but I can’t quite let it go.

            Shortly after Colin’s death, I bought Arcade Fire’s “Neon Bible” album.  On that album is the song “My Body is a Cage,” which makes me think way too much about Colin and there’s a line, “Just because you’ve forgotten, doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.”  I hold on to that line too much.  But there are people who now, three years out, greet me like nothing happened.  There’s none of this “remember that year or two where I avoided eye contact with you?”  There’s no mention of the promise to show up and help keep Emma and Noah busy, which was followed up by the person just never showing up.

            I still have this dream of tracking down the one caregiver, because I know approximately where he lives, and giving him a piece of my mind.  I won’t do it, but I still dream about it.  In the same vein, I’m trying to dance around the point that I recently ran into one of the people who promised to help and didn’t.  I don’t want to talk about the how and when, because I don’t want the person to be identified in any way.  But the point is, I came to realize I was going to see this person and I had a little mini quandary moment on my way to the gathering.  What do you say to a person who, the last time you saw them, told you they’d show up to help and then didn’t?  And it’s not like they promised to help you move apartments.  They promised to help you maintain a tiny shred of sanity in the midst of a terrible situation and then just didn’t show up.

            I sweated about it a lot.  There were a few scenarios where I just went nuts.  I didn’t, because that’s not me.  But also because I realize I have to let a lot of this go.  I would have given almost anything to get out of the situation back when I was in it.  How can I stay mad at someone who chose to stay away?  I mean, there will always be a difference, but I know a little about what anyone who had the choice had to go through.  The difference is that the five of us didn’t have a choice to go through it, knowing only four would emerge at the end.  The others did have a choice.  So, thanks if you stuck with us through it all and still are doing so.  If not, well, I understand a little.

            I’ll go so long without blogging I almost start to think I might be past it.  Like I might have reached the point where I can live with the loss of my child without constantly writing about it.  Like that’s an achievement.  Look, he’s doing so well with the death of his child that he doesn’t need to write about it any more.  There’s no goal in that that’s worth striving for, since you start with the point that your child is dead.  Either you write about it or you don’t.  I guess I’m still writing about it.

            And it’s true we had an exceptionally trying parenting day this weekend with the living children, and there again you see the problem: That I can divide my children into the living and the dead.  It’s become such a normal thing for me I have to remind myself that this is not how the average parent does it.  You might have the good children and the bad children.  Or the children who live at home and the children who live with their father.  But the living and the dead is a more extreme separation.

            So, we had our bad day.  And then I dreamt I was hanging out with two of my nieces.  They are actually two nieces I’ve never met (because of the size of my family and the fact that I live overseas, there are large chunks of my direct family I’ve never met) and we were in a mall or something and they asked me why I decided to become a father.  And I said “because I thought it would be fun.”  Then I paused and said “Of course, that was before I realized one of my children could die.”  Then my nieces started crying.  Then I started crying. 

            The next day I was walking Murphy and a Peter Gabriel song I don’t know particularly well came on.  And then I was crying in the middle of the path, half-hoping that someone I knew would stumble upon us, just so I could shout to the world: “Look. I do cry about him, OK?”

            And I thought I was doing so well.

            It happened again the next day.  Same dog.  Different song.  A kid biked by and looked at me funny.  I didn’t exactly shout at him, but I know I audibly said “You’re alive at least.”

            I didn’t have a lot of time to blog after my uncle’s funeral.  It was a busy week beforehand and then I got sick the week after (though, in hindsight, I think it might have just been a spectacular case of allergies).  And then I had a crazy busy week at work.  But I did know that I wanted to talk about that week before my uncle’s funeral, while I was in Dusseldorf.

            The original plan had been to get into Dusseldorf around 4 p.m.  Then I would have had some time to get myself together before the team met for our big dinner.  Except, something went wrong on the tracks, and my four-hour train ride to Dusseldorf turned into an eight-hour one, so we showed up an hour after dinner started and, instead of sitting with people from my team, whom I was hoping to get to know better, I ended up with the CEO and some people from marketing, who were all perfectly lovely.

            And we talked.  And we mentioned if we’d ever been to Dusseldorf and how long we’d been with the company.  And then the woman across from me asked me how many children I had, and I guess because of the nightmarish train ride and the fact that my wine glass kept getting refilled, I hadn’t even prepped myself for the question, like I usually do when meeting new people.  And before I thought about it, I had answered that my children were 14 and 12 and that the youngest one was no longer with us.  When prompted, I confirmed that I meant “dead.”

            She told me that was a very nice way to say it, which I guess it was.  And then we talked a little bit about Colin’s death and, from where I stood, it didn’t feel awkward.  She said she felt bad and it was clear the news bummed her out, but she didn’t treat me like a leper and I didn’t break down into sobs.  And then maybe it was the wine, but I told at least three other people that night, several of whom being people whose role at the company I only barely understand.

            I felt like I had made a breakthrough.  I’d just start cold introducing myself that way.  At the very least it felt better than not talking about it and worrying about when it might slip out.

            But it’s not a cure.  There’s too many little shards of him in my heart and I can’t quite function the way I used to.  Last week, I saw a poster for a demonstration against pediatric cancer (I guess, thinking about it, it’s probably demanding more resources to treat pediatric cancer), with a picture of an adorable little boy, probably about 4 years old, and how he never got to graduate, etc, because he died of cancer.  I looked at the picture and all I could think was how I wish it was Colin on the poster, because then at least more people would know his name.

            I’m going for a walk with Murphy after I post this.  We’ll see how it goes.

            And now I’m back on the train to Berlin (though I’m posting this two days later).  As far as funerals go, I suppose it was nice.  And, as always, there’s that bitterness with yourself at the wake (fun fact, in this part of Germany, it’s called a Leichenschmaus, which literally translates to “Festive Corpse Meal,” so make of that what you will) when you start having a good time seeing relatives you haven’t met in years and actually have kind of a nice evening when you know you’re supposed to be mourning a relative.

            The actual ceremony got to me more than I expected.  I suppose I should have seen that coming, given that this was my first funeral since Colin’s.  I know that, in the moment when my cousin thanked me for coming, right after the ceremony, I was more choked up than she was, which is a bit of a role reversal given that it was her Dad we just buried.  It’s not as if I broke down bawling – hell, I didn’t even do that at Colin’s funeral – but just the scope of his death, all deaths really, felt so much more tangible there during the ceremony.  Like that feeling you might get if you think you’re going to pass out.  You don’t ever pass out, but you kind of skate along the edge of consciousness for a few minutes.  And I don’t think my legs were ever going to give out on me, but I felt so heavy there for a few minutes.

            When it was my turn to throw petals on the grave, I told Colin to look after my uncle.  Indeed, I told them all to look after each other.  It’s a big family grave.  I know of at least 10 relatives buried there, including my grandparents and my great-grandparents.  I didn’t meet any of them, but I also have a great-aunt buried in the grave and I can see her and Colin having a good time together.

            It just bought a lot of memories back, which I suppose is the point of the experience.  In some ways that was good, in some ways that was bad.

            But there was one thing I wasn’t ready for.

            Now, to put this into perspective, you have to understand that Christina does about 99% of the care for Colin’s grave.  I still surprise myself at how rarely I go by the grave.  I really did think I’d be there all the time.  Then again, I didn’t think I’d be blogging about his death three years later, so you go with whatever works for you.  But when we do go together and Christina tries to get me to help with the care, there is a resentment on my part.  Not that she’s asking me to help, but that the universe has left me not with a son, but a grave to tend.  Picking flowers and pulling weeds at a mound of dirt covering my child’s ashes is no substitute at all for having an actual 9-year-old.  So, I do try to get out of grave maintenance whenever I can, which does no one any good, but feels like my little rebellion against the universe.

            And then, yesterday, I’m walking through this cemetery near the Dutch border on my own – I had about 20 minutes to myself in the cemetery before the service started – I found myself taking time to look at all the other graves I ran across while I was looking for the family plot.  Part of it is astonishment at the number of graves for people who died in 2020, another fine reminder of the pandemic.  But what shocked me most was that I was taking notes about the graves.  You know, for ideas on how to pep up Colin’s grave.

            No one warns you about this, but if you’re in charge of a grave you seem to be in a never-ending fight to keep it looking halfway tended.  Maybe not if you have a US-style grave, which is usually just a headstone in a yard so far as I know.  But in Germany, they’re often like little gardens and, I will admit, there’s almost a sense of resentment towards the families that manage to have expertly trimmed hedges and intricate arrangements.  Christina is doing her best with Colin’s grave, but first off, she has an uncooperative husband and second, I think we’re still struggling with a concept.  You want to try to arrange it in terms of what Colin would have liked, but he was 5 when he died and landscaping was never one of his keen interests, so far as I know.

            So, there I am, getting ready to send my uncle off, and I’m taking notes.  Like, “ooh, that’s cool what they did with the shrubs” and “I wonder if we could plant flowers in that arrangement.”  Effectively, I’m trying to borrow others’ intellectual property and export it to Berlin so my son’s grave will be one of the nicest.  It’s like visiting a cemetery has become a kind of shopping adventure.

            There are worse hobbies.  There are far better ones too, but there are worse one.

            I don’t know if any of this will translate into change at Colin’s grave.  I don’t know if Christina will like the idea I saw in Nordhorn, the image I attached to this post.  I don’t know if I’ll change my ways and get more proactive at the grave.  I do know I recently trimmed our hedges and, having never done that before, had no particularly high hopes about how they would turn out.  But they look kind of OK – definitely better than before – so maybe there is room to be a better grave Dad.  We shall see.

          It’s astounding how, three years after his death, Colin managed to pop up so often while I was in Oslo.  I wasn’t planning to bring him.  I wasn’t planning to not bring him.  My focus was getting some training so I could do my job better.  My personal life was supposed to be secondary.  And yet … there he was.

            I had about four days in Oslo and I was booked until 4 p.m. most days, so my Oslo experience was mostly trekking around the city as dusk crept up on us.  A lot of the time was spent marveling at how many people were still eating outdoors, despite it being nearly zero, and how I could walk for hours and hours and not see a single McDonald’s or Starbucks (which I think is a good thing, I’m just so used to seeing these stores every five steps that it’s kind of unnerving when they’re suddenly absent).

            On the second night, I went through the downtown and, after passing through the government quarter, realized I had 45 minutes until dinner and that the cemetery where Edvard Munch is buried was right in front of me.  That took me onto a fun diversion, because the path from the cemetery to the restaurant took me through this truly charming tiny neighborhood – calling it a ‘neighborhood’ is actually kind of inflationary – of old, 18^th century wooden homes that were truly beautiful but which also left me as a homeowner wondering how on Earth you can keep them heated during the Norwegian winter without bankrupting yourself.  Still, it was a nice five-minute walk, marveling that these houses were still standing, right in the middle of Oslo, and clearly occupied.  The Norwegians seem to be a trusting people who don’t batten down the hatches, letting people like me peek in as they wander through.  I finished the neighborhood and felt truly good about things.

            Then I took three more steps and crossed paths with a restaurant named “Chez Colin.”

            It’s not where I was headed and there was nothing particularly obnoxious about the restaurant.  Whoever this Colin was, I have no problem with him having a restaurant named after him.  It shouldn’t even get to me.  I am aware of multiple people named Colin, from friends to relatives to celebrities.  But something about going from this tourist high of finding old-time Norway in the middle of Oslo to a restaurant with my son’s name felt like a slap.

            The night before, I’d had far too much to drink and told two colleagues, who are near strangers, about Colin.  They said all the right things.  That night, after passing Chez Colin, I had dinner with more colleagues.  Sitting right next to two people whom I’ve told about Colin, a third person asked how many kids I have and, without missing a beat, I said “three,” because I didn’t want to get into it in a noisy restaurant with people I barely know.  The one guy who knew caught my eye, and I know he knew what I had done.  Another guy who had no idea said “Three?  That’s a squadron!”

            I look at these incidents and, intellectually, I realize they’re not that big of a deal.  It’s not as if I moved mountains.  But, in the moment, I feel like I’m pushing through quicksand.  But then there are moments where I feel like I’m handling well.  But does obscuring the truth about how many children actually live in my home right now a sign that I’m learning to cope with it all and, if so, should I be happy that I’m coping with it?  I still want to be a mess on so many levels.  It feels like I would be honoring Colin more if I just fell apart.  And yet I go on.

            On my final full day in Oslo, I went out to Vigeland Park, which has a series of sculptures by Gustav Vigeland.  I’ll admit: I went for the quirky thrill, because most tour guides of Oslo will tell you to go there to see his statue of a man being attacked by babies, which did look hysterical on the websites.

            A couple of things I realized after I found the statues.

            – They’re a lot smaller than I thought

            – There were a ton more than I expected

            – While the baby sculpture was kind of funny, and there were definitely a few offbeat statues, many more of them seemed to focus on family. 

            There were definitely statues of mothers playing or interacting with their children, but I was drawn to the ones with the fathers.  Playing, protecting, sheltering their kids.  It got to me.  These statues have been there for decades watching their offspring.  I only got to do it for five years with Colin and it didn’t end well.  And, while I was doing that, I didn’t have the time to do the things I want to do as a father with Emma and Noah.  Perhaps, if I had been expecting this kind of look at parenthood, I’d have been primed.  Going in expecting offbeat statuary, it took me a few minutes to process.

            There’s another famous statue there of an angry baby.  I will admit, it’s kind of charming because it’s funny to see a statue of such an angry baby, and it looks so much like a baby having a bad moment.  You can’t really decide if you should try to console the baby or have a knowing chuckle at its expense.  It’s one of the most popular ones, as you can tell from the discoloration of his hand (and his penis) from all the tourists who have touched it.

            But I was more drawn to the one across the bridge.  It was a slightly older child (and I think a girl), but this one was happy and, if you didn’t worry about every detail, looked kind of like Colin.  I was happy it was happy.  I was happy pretending that, maybe, there’s a version of Colin that gets to be in Oslo for eternity just being happy.

            I don’t know where my next trip is going to take me, but I’m at least now prepared for the fact that I’ll probably have to be ready to have Colin with me.  It’ll be good.  In many ways, he’s a great travel companion.

            I’m writing this in a Berlin airport bar, honestly unsure if the bar or the airport is the more depressing part of this experience.  But it’s a sideshow.  I’m here because I’m flying to Oslo for a round of training that’s been promised to me since I started at the company in January.

            There seems to be a bit of a rush of new workers at the company, which I’m taking as a good sign.  And, along with all of this training we’re going to get in Oslo (I might understand what “residual load’ is when this is all done and, if you’re very good, I won’t explain it to you), there’s been a certain rush of excitement about introducing all us newbies to the rest of the company.  That manifested itself in a request to shoot a three-second video of myself waving at the camera – which was about as cringe-worthy as it sounds – and then include three facts about myself, which would float up in little word balloons around the video of me waving in semi-deranged style at all my new colleagues and readers.

            Oh boy.

            Three things.  How do I break myself down into three things, when I know that what they want is “reading, travel and dog-walking” when, in reality, the answer is closer to “obsessively blogging about my dead son; being unsure if I’m happy the pandemic is kind of over, because I enjoyed the excuse to be away from society and, fine, dog-walking.”

            These things don’t play well to my personality.  Even before Colin died and the bottom dropped out, I loved giving inappropriate answers to these kinds of things.  In freshman year speech in college, we were supposed to analyze a song about a break-up and present it.  Everyone else did classic ‘boy dumps girl’ or ‘girl dumps boy’ songs.  I did a song about suicide, because that’s a break-up from everybody.  I thought I was so clever at 17 doing that.  The difference now is that, when the inappropriate answers come up, it’s because they’re the real deal.  They’re the honest truth.  It’s true to say that “I like hanging out with my kids and I like dog-walking,” but it’s more true to say that I define myself as the father of a dead child and spend so much time wondering what is up with the universe and how long we’ll be carrying the scars of Colin’s death. 

            There’s no way to put that into a one-word description that will float like a soap bubble next to my name.  It wouldn’t be fair to my colleagues to say that.  To say nothing of the fact that, less than three months into the job, I’d rather not be the guy causing that kind of problem for HR.

            Honestly, I just want to work from home, take Murphy for walks, keep my house in order, learn to barbecue chicken like my Dad did and somehow cure childhood cancer.  And I want to stop getting these questions that assume I’m normal any more.  But I also don’t want to wear a T-shirt saying “Parent of a Child Who Didn’t Beat Cancer.”  I want to stop living in a world where everyone assumes you’re happy.  Because, honestly, it’s exhausting to keep pretending that I’m normal any more, but the option of letting the world know how not normal I am also feels tiring.

            I rewatched the “Hudsucker Proxy” this weekend.  There’s a scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character is asked how she can be happy, to which she responds that she’s happy enough.  That sends the questioner laughing in hysterics.  It feels like my life some days.

            I ended up going with Elvis, 80s music and superheroes.  It’s not a lie, but it’s well off the whole truth too.

            I usually pride myself on the fact that I’m so organized, but I’m finding it has its downsides.

            Because, while I’m organized, I’m not a packrat.  And I keep files and documents around for a few years, but when they start getting eight to nine years old, I shred whatever could glean personal information and then get rid of it.  It’s my own little fun OCD festival I have every year, getting rid of old files and making way for new ones.

            This year it’s time to get rid of 2014.  That’s the year Colin was born.  So, I’m getting to make weirder choices than usual.  I mean, in a given year, I might come across a warranty or something and it’s a no-brainer to keep it.  What happens when I find the application for child assistance payments we made in Colin’s name?  The one that made plans for his life through 2032?  It’s not a terribly personal document.  It tells me nothing about him or my loss.  But that’s a hard one to shred.  So far, I’ve set aside a few documents regarding his birth and will hold on to them.  They’re terribly impersonal documents, but it feels wrong to ditch them.

            And this isn’t the only instance.  Again, with the organization, I keep a file with a section for each family member: birth certificates, passport photos, etc. etc. etc.  Colin’s data sits there at the end, just in case he needs to get registered for something.  Instead, a few weeks ago it became time to get new passports for Emma and Noah.  Long experience has taught me to just take the whole file with me whenever we go to something like this, because the bureaucrats love to ask things like “Can we see both the birth certificate and the report of a birth abroad,” just to see if they can trip me up.  It’s satisfying to thump down the whole binder and just say “Oh, I’ve got all that already.”

            Getting to the consulate on the day of the appointment was a bit of a hubbub, mostly because my children failed to comprehend/believe (and bilingually too) that we were supposed to leave by 8:15 a.m. latest.  So, there was a lot of chasing around and gnashing of teeth before we got out the door.  When we returned home, I found a scrap of paper under my desk and almost ran it through the shredder, because once I’m in shredding season I just go into the zone, before I realized that it was an old, unused passport photo of Colin’s, from when he couldn’t have been more than a few months old.  That felt like a near miss.

            As always, I wonder about my sanity as I go through this.  Is it quite sane to be so focused on shredding all these old files?  Is it sane to care that much about how many binders I keep in an attic that’s not running out of space any time soon?  Is it normal to enjoy shredding so much?  Is it normal to hold on to such impersonal documents when they’re all I have left of my son?

            I’ll answer my own question.  I think slipping along on the edge of sanity might be all that’s allowing me to make the necessary mental contortions to keep functioning. 

            Take this example: About a week ago, I was out with Murphy when a boy biked up to us and asked why Murphy wears a muzzle.  The boy looked nothing like Colin and is probably about three years or so too young to match what should be Colin’s present age.  However, as I shared that Murphy has to wear a muzzle because sometimes he gets surprised and acts bad, and then he shared that he has a dog who has snapped at him, I decided that I was going to believe that this boy wasn’t real and that it was Colin visiting me in some form. 

            I know this is nonsense.  But I like believing it.

            The boy told me that the only other time he’d seen a dog with a muzzle was in England.  And then he said that his trip to England had been nice, except that they either didn’t make it to Stonehenge or got there at the wrong time of day to see the rocks glow red when the sunlight hits them (I don’t remember what the problem is, nor can I vouch for any rocks turning red at Stonehenge).

            About this point, he started biking away, but then he’d stop every meter or so to tell me, from increasingly distant points away, the he’d learned a lot of this about Stonehenge from some audio CDs he has, which are very nice except for a discrepancy about facts shared and the number of facts promised on the label. 

            And then from a bit further away he told me that he had also learned about bacteria from these CDS. He stopped a few more times to shout other information back at me, but I couldn’t make his voice out any more.  That’s about when I decided this was probably Colin visiting me from the other side.

            Quite sane?  Not really.  Better than the alternative.  Definitely.

            The visits to the cemetery are never “Yay!” moments in our lives, but they have a certain routine.  Usually, Christina goes by herself.  If she gets the rest of us to come along, she has a series of jobs for Emma and Noah – changing the batteries in the lanterns, putting out food in the bird feeder, etc – while I keep Murphy under control and try to keep myself composed.

            Last week’s visit was not routine. 

Christina and Emma got to the grave a few beats ahead of me and Noah and, when we got there, they told us that Colin’s bench was missing.  I mean, I probably would have figured that out on my own eventually, what with no place to sit, but it was important information that they wanted to share right away.

            Sigh. 

            I mean, I just don’t get people.  At this point, we’ve had the following removed from the grave site:

• the glass bauble
• a watering can
• and now the bench

            I guess we could also include the plants that were removed by the freelance gravesite gardener, though that does seem to fall into a different category.  But the larger point is: Which percentage of people were raised so improperly that they think it’s OK to mess with a grave? 

            I asked around.  A friend told me that a family grave often has stuff removed from it.  The relatives of the deceased will leave chocolates on the grave, still in the packaging.  I guess that is tempting fate a little bit.  Also, if you’re so desperate that you can’t afford 3 or 4 bucks for pretty generic chocolate, then maybe you have bigger problems than your grave thieving ways.  But still.

            I mentioned it in my men’s group on Friday.  Everyone instantly went “Oh yeah.”  Even if it hadn’t happened to them, they’d heard of other cases involving people they knew.  One of the Dads, whose dead child stories scarily parallels Colin’s in terms of the year of the diagnosis, the kind of cancer, the brief period of convalescence and even the location where they got radiation therapy, also reported a stolen watering can.  Like all of our lives just keep moving in the same cycles even after our children are dead.

            I just…  I mean, I have strange thoughts some times.  But it has never occurred to me to run by a graveyard and see what I can pick up, either in terms of home decorating or snacks.  It makes me think people are worse than they actually are.

            Christina took it in stride, though I think she was secretly plotting someone’s death as she went about tending the grave.  She sent me and the kids out on search parties, but we all came back empty.  Conspiracy theories started up.  I figured the people in Hippie Hollow* must have taken it.  Noah went full Encyclopedia Brown as he began developing theories about how they would have gotten the bench out of the place.

            After a few minutes of this, it dawned on me that my kids are ridiculously bad at finding things.  Like, if you ask them to pick up something that’s right in front of them, they’ll tell you half the time they have no idea how to find it.  So, I went off with Noah and Murphy and cased their part of the joint anew.  I saw two or three benches that looked promising, but none of them had the marker we had placed on the bottom of the bench.  And then, just as I was about to give up, I decided to try one more bench, even though Noah insisted that one didn’t look at all like Colin’s bench.

            Except it was. 

It was probably 50-80 meters away from Colin’s grave.  Christina’s theory makes the most sense to me: There was probably some kind of gathering at a grave with lots of older people, so they pulled together a variety of benches for seating and then, when it was over, either didn’t care or couldn’t remember where the bench came from.  Maybe they thought it was a bench that belonged to the cemetery.  It is still a mystery to me, because there were at least two or three benches closer to the site where we found it, any of which could have been picked up with less carrying time.

            I guess it doesn’t matter.  I think the main lesson is not to take things from graves.

            We carried it back.  I’m amazed how the mood lightened.  It was the first time I can remember talking out loud to Colin at his grave (I speak inside my head all the time), admonishing him for not taking care of his stuff and then telling him he had my permission to go and haunt the bench thieves.  I don’t think I’ve joked with Colin once since his death.  I mean, there aren’t a lot of opportunities like that with your dead child.

            We’re probably going to chain it to the closest tree, which is unsightly, but might give us some peace of mind.  We’ll probably also put a second, more visible, marker on it explaining that this bench belongs to this grave.  I’m also toying with the idea of putting a GPS tracker on it, but one or two people have suggested that I might be overreacting.  We’ll see.

            As always, I just understand so little.

* Hippie Hollow (not its real name) is a settlement in the woods behind our neighborhood and is only a stone’s throw from the cemetery, which is also in the middle of the woods.  I thought for ages that Hippie Hollow was a squat of people refusing to be bound by society’s rules, but Christina told me last year that the tenants actually have to get permits and licenses to live there, which makes them seem a lot less rugged and independent in my eyes.

Anyways, it’s a big fenced compound (though the gate is always wide open), subdivided into a lot of smaller lots where people have set up some pretty primitive structures.  A couple look like they might be made of the kind of flimsy wood you use in theater sets.  Some have campers.  Other homes look pretty improvised.  The people I’ve seen coming and going don’t look any more or less counterculture than other people I see roaming around Berlin.  Basically, it’s just a hodge-podge of weird structures in the woods. 

I thought hard about how to describe it.  In the end, I truly think that, if you stumbled across it unprepared, your first thought would be “Who put the set from Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ video in the middle of a German forest?”

            I keep thinking about the friends of Christina who lost their daughter.  I’ve had no direct contact with them, though I did happen to be in the room once when Christina had her friend on speakerphone.  It’s terrible.

            The phrase “I can’t imagine,” has accompanied me pretty regularly for more than three years now.  So many people want to make it clear to me that they can’t possibly understand what it’s like to lose a child, to which I usually respond that I’m glad they don’t have to understand it.  I mean, it’s enough that I do.  No one else should have to carry this.

            And now someone else understands.  And I realize that I don’t actually understand at all.

            We were talking about the friends a few days ago and Christina and I told each other – I want to say we “confided,” but it was a pretty open secret – that a lot of the reason either of us found a way to get out of bed on September 18, 2019, and then all those other days after that was because we had two other children who needed us.  Giving up into sadness wasn’t an option, because of Emma and Noah.  And trust me, there were times I thought about giving up.

            I wonder if it’s part of the reason I’ve become such an enthusiastic dog owner.  Emma and Noah are diving into teenager-ish activities and, yes, they still need me, but the need is not as all-encompassing as it was three years ago.  They’re so much more independent.  And now I’ve got a dog who knows that I have a near total household monopoly on dog treats.  It gives me a reason to keep myself going, because if I don’t feed Murphy and take him on walks, there aren’t a lot of other people who will do it.  He needs me and it feels good and it’s a reason to keep going.

            Because there are times I don’t want to keep going.  I’m not talking suicide: That’s really never crossed my mind.  But I read about the shootings and the disasters and I wonder sometimes, if I was on the train and a guy walked in with a gun, would I panic?  Most likely.  But there’s a part of me that likes to think I would simply say “I get to see Colin now” and be a little bit happy about it.

            If I didn’t have anyone left, I might even look forward to a moment like that.  But I do, so I don’t.

            These friends of ours.  They’ve lost their only child.  And, if I were to speak to them, I think I would have to say “I just can’t imagine,” because my experience, as miserable as it is, just isn’t the same kind of miserable as theirs.  I don’t truly understand.

            I’ve often wondered why I didn’t just go a little nuts when Colin died.  I mean, sure, I was in therapy and I had/have the rage issues, as I can ascertain after a ridiculous fight about the use of ‘that’ versus ‘which’ at work, but it didn’t feel like I was truly losing it.  I’m not saying these people will have a break with reality, I just wonder if we ever truly know how close we are to the edge.

            My cousin Susie (not her real name, but it’s the one I use) is in the process of writing up a biography, which I helped edit.  It’s fascinating, because so much of the book focuses on her as a 20-something in the 1970s.  She married young and her husband had a break with reality.  But she’s writing it from today’s perspective, when she’s been a medical doctor for decades, noting things that she wishes she had seen all those years ago, but which she couldn’t have possibly understood when she was in the thick of it, with no training and, honestly, fearing for her life from time to time.  He had serious mental health problems and it’s kind of terrible to read about everything he went through (and put his loved ones through). 

            I’m glad that didn’t happen to me.  I hope it doesn’t happen to our friends.  I’m sorry for anyone who’s struggling with mental health issues.  There’s some things we just shouldn’t imagine.