Five Minus One

            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.

            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.

            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.

            There comes a point where you no longer know what’s normal.  You spend your days pushing through life, taking the kids to sports and picking up shopping, but also planning that, should the opportunity ever present itself and you’re at the pearly gates, that you’ll happily hold up the line for half an eternity until someone can explain to your satisfaction why it was necessary for a 5-year-old to get a tumor in the back of his neck.

            It all ebbs and flow.  I never know when it’s going to come and get me.

            So, I’m at work last week, and it’s a lot.  There. are. so. many. numbers.  And it’s not as if I’m bad with numbers.  As journalists go, I can put numbers together in the right order more often than not, which is a pretty big deal in my profession.  But moving to energy reporting, it’s such a step change.  It’s forever checking to see whether the figure is net growth or gross growth and, if it’s a German number, if it’s 15.2 or 15,200, because they use commas and decimal points differently than we do in English.  It’s trying to understand what factors are relevant and whether I’m comparing a closing price to the real closing price or the tab on the website that says it’s the closing price, but really isn’t.

            Like, it’s not that I really think that me biffing a number is going to collapse the world economy.  But there’s a tiny, tiny chance that a good on my end could do something just like that.  It’s a bit daunting.

            So, a week ago, I started feeling really crummy at work.  Running to the bathroom every 30 minutes bad.

            To me, this was normal.  I had a miserable experience at Dow Jones 15 years ago trying to make sense of bond markets (here’s a spoiler: they don’t and they never will) and spent most of my time there in an advanced state of panic.  So, when I was tasked with sorting out energy markets and began feeling sick to my stomach, my go-to was “Yes, I’m having a panic attack.”

            I spent large parts of Wednesday and Thursday, as my entire gastrointestinal system progressed further into meltdown, convinced that I was having the jitters.  And I was so mad at myself, because I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to let this happen.  The people at this new job should receive a photo caption under the dictionary definition of ‘nice,’ so I couldn’t figure out what I was so nervous about.  But I knew I get the jitters around numbers, so it made sense.

            But I still wasn’t having it.  So many times on Wednesday and Thursday, I shut the world out and told myself “You watched your son die.  This is nothing.”  Like, having experienced my son dying should somehow make any other terror seem manageable?  Plague?  Nuclear annihilation.  Marjory Taylor-Greene?  I should be able to walk off any of those after having watched my son die. 

            And yet I kept feeling ill.  I didn’t understand.  How could I convince my metabolism that we’ve already done the worst?  How could I make my gut understand that, if I didn’t throw up every 10 minutes in the hospice, how there was no call for it now when I just had to figure out which price has the market worked up on this particular day?

            It’s such a strange go-to.  I think “I feel bad,” and my brain goes “This is nothing compared to the summer of 2019.”  Like, I’m no longer allowed to feel miserable, because I spent THAT summer initially dealing with anti-psychotics and then dealing with not being able to getting out of bed, to losing about 25 pounds to coming to terms with my son’s death, so I could then feel bad about how much of a relief it was when he no longer had to be aware of the hell he was suffering.  Can I go through the rest of my life looking at any challenge and thinking “Well, that’s not as bad as watching Colin die?”  Is that even normal.

            The kicker is that I got home on Thursday and kept feeling bad.  And slowly it got through my head that I was home and still feeling terrible.  Normally, when I’m nervous, the worst of it at least passes when I get to the safety of my house.  Not this time.  Also, it dawned on me that, while my stomach was a mess, I was still eating.  Usually the appetite is the first to dry up when I’m panicking (note the 25 pounds lost in 2019).  And then it dawned on me that I was actually sick.  In hindsight, probably with food poisoning.  And I had been so focused on making sure that I didn’t let myself be crippled by Colin’s death to allow myself to just break down and go to bed, which is what I then did for the next three days, to Murphy’s dismay.

            I’m never going to be done with this.  I probably should never be.  But I have to find a way to live a life that’s no longer ruled by the memory of my son’s death.  I need to celebrate the fun he had.  The joy he gave us.  Instead, I keep allowing the cancer to shut me down at the drop of a hat.

            That’s why I’m going to have a lot of things to say at the pearly gates.  That’s why it’s never going to be normal again.

            You’d think the world messes with me some days.

            I’m in the second week of the new job and it’s a lot.  I’m supposed to be an energy reporter, but my bosses make the very good point that, before I can be a capable energy reporter, I have to understand the markets.  So, I’m spending a lot of time trying to learn how to write market reports, which is a soul-crushing affair.  Not because of the nature of the work, per se, but more because I have a knack for always grabbing the wrong number from the charts when trying to illustrate why markets today are rising or falling or going in spirals.  Add to this that I’m meeting a group of people for the first time, so there’s all the rules of engagement you have to work out as you sort through who’s the introvert and who prefers speaking in German and who has a sense of humor and who will hold up a story to make you double check this or that fact.

            And, lest we forget, this is the first time I’ve been regularly leaving the house since March 2020.  It would be wrong to say I actively think and worry about the pandemic, but it would also be a lie to say that I crush myself into a train full of other commuters and don’t give a second thought to the chances that maybe the person to my left will cough and cover me with something that will send me to an emergency room that can barely handle something like Covid-19 on a good day.  I push through it, but it’s tense.

            Also, and this is whiny, but as little as I liked the late shifts at my old job, I did get used to not always having to start my day early.  With the new job, the “late” shift is 9-5.  Getting up early and trying to juggle the kids while making sure I’m out the door on time is a whole return to an experience I’d almost forgotten.  That said, once things are more normal, I’m probably only going to be in the office two days a week, on average.  We shall see how it all goes.

            But the point is, I decided on my second day that my two direct superiors had to at least know about Colin.  It’s not as if I have breaks from reality on a regular basis due to the death of my son – if anything, not working for a general news desk where there was always the risk of a story about a dead child peering around the corner – but you never know when you’re going to be triggered.  And I wanted them to know that.

            The thing is, I try to read a page or two of the Bible every day.  Here’s what I stumbled across the morning I decided I was going to do the big reveal.

Ecclesiasticus 38:16

Mourning

            My son, shed tears over a dead man,

                        and intone the lament to show your own deep grief;

            bury his body with due ceremonial,

                        and do not neglect to honor his grave.

            Weep bitterly, wail most fervently;

                        observe the mourning the dead man deserves,

                        one day, or two, to avoid comment,

                        and then be comforted in your sorrow;

            for grief can lead to death,

                        a grief-stricken heart undermines your strength.

            Let grief end with the funeral;

                        a life of grief oppresses the mind.

            Do not abandon your heart to grief,

                        drive it away, bear your own end in mind.

            Do not forget, there is no going back;

                        you cannot help the dead, and you will harm yourself.

            “Remember my doom, since it will be yours too;

                        yesterday was my day, today is yours.”

            Once the dead man is laid to rest, let his memory rest too,

                        do not fret for him, once his spirits departs.

            Sigh.  I guess it’s appropriate, because my life is going on.  I guess it hurts all the more, because I hate that my life just keeps on going on without him.  I’m such walking poster child for survivor’s guilt.

            They took it as well as one can.  “It’s unfathomable,” they told me, and I felt bad, because they both have young children and I hate that I had to open the window on the possibility that young children can die.  It had to come out, but I hated it as I did it.

            As it happened, less than a week later, I was in the office and one of my new colleagues got bad news about the health of a family member.  I told her I understood.  You could see the skepticism in her eyes.  “You don’t want to hear my story right now,” I said, because the hot topic right that moment was her loved one’s health.  But she asked “Horrible story?” and I told her.  She actually apologized for bringing the mood down.

            It messes with you, the grief and the pre-grief and the anticipation of grief.  As always, we just keep trying.

            I know I keep returning to this, but bear with me, as I’m a little brain dead at the moment as I plow through my last week at my current job, while also trying to juggle life and the countdown to Christmas.  I can tell you this truth: If you add a dog to the mix, the logistics of leaving the Christmas cookies out to cool after baking becomes much more challenging, especially if you simultaneously want to keep them safe from the dog but also want to retain a few square inches of counter space to use in your kitchen.

            But it always comes back to the question of how to answer the question: How many children do you have?  I know this seems like an insanely simple thing to sort through in your day-to-day life, but it seems such a larger challenge to me.  Once I’ve told someone Colin is dead I can let that sink in for everyone and then we can have the conversation about how it affects me and how we deal with it.  But, by the time I’ve told someone that, it’s going to be someone whom I know somewhat well.  I’m not walking up to people on the street and telling them this.

            And it can be such a bummer.  Christina told me she nearly had a lady in tears last week.  They only kind-of, sort-of know one another and hadn’t seen one another in years.  The lady finally remembered who Christina was and asked “Your son?  He’s gotten better, right?” 

            I know.  Oh dear.

            But the real problem comes when meeting people for the first time.  Is this someone I’m going to spend a lot of time with?  Are we going to become office besties?  Or are they plotting their escape from the company and will be happier not having learned about a child dying of cancer before he got to first grade?  Why weigh someone down with this stuff?

            As it happened, the benefit of leaving your job on good terms and heading to a job full of people who seem exceptionally happy, especially at the Christmas season, is that you end up going to both Christmas parties (well, for full disclosure, we don’t do parties because of coronavirus regulations, but we had the coincidence where several of us were at a Christmas market where we chose not to talk about the fact that it was Christmas.  Is that good enough for legal?).

            I didn’t know I was going to the Christmas party with the new team.  My new boss was in Berlin and he asked if I wanted to come to dinner with the team and, while I was hanging out in the office with them before heading over, someone said that this was essentially the office Christmas party.  Which was fine.  They invited me and I’m going to be on the team, so I didn’t feel like I was crashing.  But there was the Christmas party small talk.  How long have you lived in Germany?  How did you learn German?  And, of course: How many children do you have?

            I went with two.  Every time.  I just said “two,” adding “a boy and a girl” if asked for a follow-up.  Every time I said it (and there were only six people here, so it’s not as if this went on all night), I felt like I was sticking a tiny knife in my gut.  Or in Colin’s memory.  Whichever metaphor is more apt.  But I also knew I wasn’t going to bum anyone out on first memory.  No, I’ll get to bum them out when I put up my family pictures on my desk and someone asks, upon seeing three kids, if I hadn’t said that I had two.  And then I either get to tell the truth then and bum them out, or spin a yarn about how that was a visiting nephew and really slam Colin’s memory into the ruins.

            Either way seems crummy.  I just know, in that moment, despite the stings, it seemed easier to say two.  And, since then, I’ve envisioned scenarios about how I’m going to gather the team after I’ve been there for a while and get the whole story out, though experience tells me that these things never go quite as planned.  We’ll just have to see.

            The funny thing is, the next night I went out for the not-a-Christmas gathering with my current colleagues, some of whom I’ve only known via Slack for months now, and the question of course came back up.  Some of these people I’ll probably never see again in my life.  So, when they asked, “two,” spilled straight from my lips, and I didn’t think about it at all.

            I suppose it’s all relative when you’re discussing dead relatives.  And I know that’s a horrible turn of phrase but, note the part earlier where I said I was brain dead.  It’s going to keep happening, I know.  And I’ll keep improvising.  I suppose the truth of the matter is that Colin can’t die again and his memory is there for me to share or not as I choose.  But that’s easy to write and not so easy to live.

            A friend pointed out this article to me a week or so ago and, boy, did that prompt a complicated range of emotions on my part.

            I’ve heard interviews with Rob Delaney before.  His story isn’t all that different from ours.  He had a young son who got cancer.  The boy died.  I think, unlike us, there was no period between the initial treatment and the reoccurrence of the cancer where things looked OK: I think it all went in one fell swoop for them.  I’m pretty sure they also have three surviving children, as opposed to our two.  But those are just details.  If your child dies, it rips you apart one way or another, regardless of the surrounding circumstance.  And, to be honest, I don’t have it in me to go looking for details about the boy’s death.  Knowing one set of childhood cancer details is often all I can fit into my head.

            What struck me was the jealousy.  He gets to get his book about his child’s death published and I don’t. 

            Yeah, take a moment to let that wash over you.  My problem is that someone else gets to tell the story about his dead child very publicly, while I only get to to do so mildly publicly.  As if either is an acceptable substitute for actual having the child still around.

            Isn’t that insane?  I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a somewhat well-known actor and I’m … not, there’s the fact that I can’t believe I’m getting huffy that my misery doesn’t get to be sold.  And I don’t believe for a moment he’s doing it to make a buck.  The review of the book sounds like he is honestly trying to share and help people.  Which is what I want to do with my writing too.  It’s just that he has a much larger audience and, I guess, for any storyteller there’s the desire to have the largest audience possible.  But, lord, what a way to feel.

            Then, further on in the review, there’s a point made that there is no upside to a child’s death.  Which is … true.  But then I thought about how surviving all those months in the hospice as he died made the initial lockdowns of 2020 seem like a breeze.  I thought about how surviving my child dying has made me a stronger person.  Situations where, before, I would have clammed up and just wished for the situation to end now see me telling people off, they see me standing up for myself and my loved ones.  I’ve survived too much to really be impressed by what the world has to throw at me.  It takes the threat of Vladimir Putin and nuclear horror to get me worried these days.  Other everyday problems are just … blah.

            But still, that’s not what Delaney means.  And I half wonder if my mind went to thinking up “positives” just to be contrary to the guy who got published when I don’t know the first step to make, beyond this blog.  I mean, I look at my list of positive takeaways and, let’s be honest, none of them are acceptable repayment for what we had to go through with Colin, to say nothing for the fact that I would happily go back to being less selfless if I knew Colin was going to be coming home from school in a few hours and distracting me while I try to settle in for a late shift at work from my den.

            Which is all just another way of saying that, even three years later, it amazes me how much a child’s death gets inside my head.  I suppose it shouldn’t astound me, but jealousy that another guy gets to write a book about his dead kid wasn’t a path I thought I’d ever go down. 

            There’s always going to be something else, I suppose.  I just need to brace myself for it.  But I know I can’t truly be ready.  So, I just have to know that it will keep boggling me and throwing me off guard.  I don’t think getting published would make that easier, somehow.

            This is actually from a while ago, but it’s hard to find the time to sort through these moments at times, while also balancing the relative privacy of all the members of the family and just wondering on Earth what I’m going to say.  So, here goes.

            I sent the kids out to walk Murphy, because, lord, I do about 95% of the dog walks and there are moments here and there when I’d just rather sit around the house quietly.  Plus, I think I was putting grass seed down or something, so I really did kind of not need a dog underfoot.  Anyways, the kids were gone for a bit – they’re never gone all that long when dog walking is required – and it was clear that things had not gone well.  One immediately went into the living room in a funk.  The other stayed outside with me, almost in tears.  No one has ever told me the specifics of what was said but, as near as I can gather, the concepts of God and religion came up and one revealed to the other that belief levels in God and religion were shaky, at best.

            I suppose that’s a pretty normal thing to hear in any household these days, but I guess one child is more into God than the other right now and learning that the one surviving sibling didn’t believe was a bit of a blow.  We’ve lost Colin to cancer.  Now another family member is going to be lost because lack of belief does tend to disqualify one from the kingdom eternal.

            There really is no preparation for this kind of thing in the parenting books.  I couldn’t even calm them down because my hands were covered in grass seed and fertilizer, so hugs were not particularly on the menu.

            Worse, I don’t know what to say to them.  It’s hard to preach in an all-knowing, loving God who cares for his people, but also lets little kids develop cancer and die.  Emma and Noah know this all too well.  It’s such an integrated part of their lives.  Like, when they come back from a program at the hospice and talk about what they did in the group of kids with dead siblings, as opposed to the group of kids whose siblings are merely in long-term care.  Like it was as everyday a distinction as the red team vs. the blue team or shirts vs. skins.

            And it makes me think about what I believe.  Like, somehow, through all o this, I believe in God.  I explained that day that I no longer believe in a God who micromanages the universe.  I just can’t.  Because if you believe God intentionally allowed a third of Pakistan to get flooded this year and is scene-setting every moment of horror in Ukraine, then it feels like you’re playing with the wrong team.  But, if you believe that God set us all up and is sitting back to see where you take it … well, I’m not saying it makes more sense, but I can wrap my mind around that more easily.

            And yet.  I have these moments where I catch myself, seeing myself post-death, standing at the gates or whatever it is they use as a system to decide who gets in, and throttling some angel demanding to know what the hell they were thinking putting a tumor in my beautiful boy.  I imagine they don’t let you get close enough to the angels to do that.  I also imagine that just thinking thoughts like that raises questions about whether you’re heaven material.  But there it is.

            I don’t think the anger will ever stop.  A few days ago – and this was a first – I was out walking Murphy (again) and I started reviewing the events of 2016-19 and I just got mad.  I wasn’t that far away from the houses of our neighborhood, but I still let off a half-yowl/half-scream.  It got Murphy’s attention, I’ll tell you what.  I don’t know if it made me feel better, but it felt necessary at that point.

            I can’t make up my kids’ minds on whether there’s a God or not and I can’t tell them which path will work out best for them.  There’s pressure building now for confirmations to happen, and part of me doesn’t want them to miss out on a rite of passage, but another part of me doesn’t want them declaring their true belief in God just because it means some relatives will hand them cash.  I want it to make sense to them.  But I’m afraid that might be asking too much.

            On some levels, this one isn’t about me.  Then again, it’s my blog, so of course it’s about me.

            A friend has come down with cancer.  I’ll say no more about that, because it isn’t my story to tell.  It was always known this would happen.  If not to this person, then to another person in my life.  Or to me.  Cancer keeps busy and there’s always someone in its sights.

            With that in mind, it’s not as if I’m having traumatic flashbacks because someone I know is fighting the big C.  Even if I were, that would not be the issue that requires focus right now.  This person has a fight ahead and needs to focus on that.  To say it’s “irrelevant” is still to assign too much weight to how I feel about knowing someone else is fighting cancer.

            And yet … it opens up odd memories.  Of course, the news of the diagnosis was couched to me with a lot of “Well, you knows…” because, well, I do know.  I know too much about survival rates and treatment options and the effects of chemotherapy and how this weighs on a family.  I know all of that.

            What I don’t really know is how to be on this side of the equation.  Until Colin, there was only one person to whom I was terribly close who had ever had a cancer diagnosis, and that was my father.  And, it sounds terrible, but he was such a heavy smoker that, when he got his diagnosis, I think most everyone in the family just thought “Well, of course.”  Even as he fought the cancer, his health mostly suffered from the emphysema and its side effects.  That’s actually what killed him though, of course, the cancer didn’t help.

            So, when I heard, I said the “I’m so sorry” and “Let me know what I can do to help,” which I meant.  Of course I meant it.  But then, what else do I do?

            And it’s started to make me realize how people I know probably had no idea how to deal with me starting in 2016.  On the one hand, I think I ought to check in every few days to see how everyone is doing.  On the other hand, I remember the annoyance with a person here and a person there who seemed to almost be vibing off or our trauma.  “Grief junkies,” I called them.

            I’m careful in how I start communications.  I remember that I hated it when people asked “How are you doing?” because, good lord, how on Earth would anyone have thought I was doing as I contemplated my son’s death?  So, I try to ask “What’s up?” and “What’s new?” not even knowing if the questions trigger everyone the way the did me and if this is an unnecessary precaution or something everyone goes through.

            It’s just interesting, seeing it from this side.  Wondering if I’m doing too much, or doing too little.  And it makes me wonder if I’ve been fair to all the other innocent bystanders when Colin got his diagnosis.  To this day, there are people I barely speak to.  I mean, if they address me, I say ‘hello.’  But if they’re walking up one side of the street and I’m walking down the other, it’s not as if I make the effort to cross the street to say ‘hi.’  But how could they have not been tongue-tied and useless as they watched us cope with Colin?  It’s not like I have any better ideas for my friend than “bring over a batch of cookies,” at which point I remember how useless it made me feel when people treated us like a charity case.  But I was also grateful for the food.  I ate it because I needed it.  But I also cried after it got delivered.

            Noah goes climbing now with a program run by the hospice.  I know that the one carer – Momo; the one for whom I have a special disdain – lives around there.  He bailed on us after a couple of days because he thought it was demeaning to have a 5-year-old yelling at him.  I mean, of course he got yelled at.  This was a 5-year-old who had no idea what was happening to him and didn’t understand why strangers kept showing up in his bedroom.  He was a 5-year-old who didn’t understand why he had been robbed of the ability to speak and eat.  So, of course he lashed out.  And Momo used that as a pretext to bail on us.  So now, after I drop off Noah, I have this dream of crawling the streets until I find his home, ringing his bell and, if he’s home, having a good yell at him.

            I’m not going to do it, but it shocks me that I still have these feelings.  And then I see myself kind of stammering for words when the roles are reversed and, well, I’m sorry, Momo is still a terrible person, but maybe I have to let up a bit.

            As I type this, I had my first dream in ages involving Colin last night.  Nothing much happened.  We just looked for a restaurant.  It fills me with hope that, wherever he is, he’s eating right. 

            Also as I type this, Murphy got into a crate of stuff of Christina’s and started chewing on a Cars toy of Colin’s.  It never ends.

            It’s all just going to keep going.  This will not be the last case of cancer in my circle of friends and family.  And this will not be the last time I feel helpless.  I guess I just need to think more about how all of us deal with it.

            I think I’m finally safe to put into writing the news that I’m switching jobs.  Probably the people who read this already knew that, but, on the off chance the news hasn’t filtered out there – it takes a crazy long time in Europe to get contracts signed and then finish up the old contract, so the job I accepted on September 1 I’ll only be starting on January 1 – there it is.  My days at dpa are numbered and I’m going to be an energy reporter/editor/translator with a Norwegian outfit called Montel starting in a few weeks, but here in Berlin.

            Of course, this blog isn’t for updates on my professional status.  The reason I bring it up here is because, as usual, I find myself facing the prospect of meeting several new people – people who all seem incredibly friendly, I must add – and figuring out if I need to share with them my status as the father of a dead child and, if so, how to do it.

            Now, on the one hand, it’s none of their business.  On the other hand “How many kids do you have” is such a classic icebreaker question, you just know it’s going to come up at some point.

            Which, of course, it has.

            You see, while we were in the midst of negotiating the contract, they told me they were having a big event in Düsseldorf towards the end of September.  I had a few days off, which I had planned to use for a hiking trip with some friends, but that fell through and the dates lined up perfectly, so I cleared it with Christina and then hopped a train to Düsseldorf.  Just as an aside, it was a one-day seminar on energy issues and my advice after listening to all the analysts talk about how what’s going on on energy markets right now is unprecedented, my advice to everyone living in Europe is to go out and buy as many extra sweaters and blankets as you can afford.  Do it right now, if you enjoy being warm.

            But I digress.  Knowing that I was going into a room of near strangers and dreading the number of children question, I had gone in with a prepared answer.  If someone asked, my answer was going to be “I have three children, but only two are with me.”  It’s honest and, I figured, sounded enough like a divorce/child custody battle that no one would want to open up the can of worms and pry further.

            However, during the lunch break, I started talking with several people about the process of claiming second citizenship.  Wanting to make the point that it seems to be getting tougher, I noted that how, as an American having children in Germany, I’ve seen the rules tighten with each child.  When we claimed Emma’s US citizenship, they essentially checked my passport and then gave her one.  When Noah’s turn came, they didn’t do a lot more checking, but did caution me that, should Noah ever have children and want to pass citizenship on to them, he’d need to be able to prove that he had spent five years of his life in the States, which is why I keep the proof of his one trip to the States as a 2-year-old in his permanent file.  Three weeks down, Noah: Only 257 to go!

            And then, when Colin was born, the rules got really tough.  The people at the consulate not only wanted to see my passport, but needed proof that I had lived at least five years in the States.  As luck would have it, I had read the warnings about this online before driving to the consulate and had shown up with work reviews from my time living in DC, which made them happy and got Colin his citizenship.  And that’s why we hoard our personal papers, people.

            So, I told the story and that was that.  The seminar finished up.  Drinks were produced.  I signed my contract.  And then most of the attendees got on a boat and took a cruise, with more alcohol.

            At some point, I ended up sitting with the guy who will be my boss, I think (I haven’t fully sorted out the organizational structure yet), and he said something along the lines of “So, you’ve got three kids then, right?” because he’d been there when I told the citizenship story.  Being just drunk enough not to think it through, but sober enough to remember my plan, I defaulted to “I have three, but only two with me.”  But he was with it enough to think “that’s a strange answer.”

            And let me tell you, it’s far from the worst experience of my life, but it is a bummer being mildly drunk with your future boss on a boat and having to say “Look, this isn’t how I wanted to tell you, but…”

            I don’t know why I make this so hard.  It seems like I should just say nothing or I should let it all out.  But I’m not the kind of person to wear his life on his sleeve (says me, as I blog), but I know that if I say nothing, the truth will sneak out there.  And I’m not sure what there is to do with that truth.  On the one hand, it’s not a big deal if they know.  But, on the other hand, I don’t want to be seen as weaponizing my personal trauma.  Maybe I’m paranoid, but if I look at it from the other side, I could see it as an attempt to get sympathy points, to make sure people are nicer to me, to make sure I get a slightly easier ride during my training period, to make sure no one even thinks about not letting me finish my probation period.

            And I’m probably having thoughts like that because I’m going to a service with a financial bent and the last time I worked at a financial news wire, it really didn’t go well.  But that’s a different situation and I also now have 15 years of wire service experience behind me, which would have been really useful at that last job.  But it haunts me.  I also started that financial service job just as the housing crisis started, and not a single analyst could tell me what was going on.  I’m starting this new job at the outset of an energy crisis, and a lot of experts seem confused again.  The parallels aren’t perfect, but it makes me nervous.  And it makes me think that the last thing I need is to muff a job like this.  And I don’t want my experience of losing a child to get all mixed up in it.

            But it’s part of me.  So it will get mixed in.  And every day is going to be a sense of feeling my way.  One of my new bosses seems to have just had a child.  I’m going to have to figure out a way of saying “Oh congratulations” without also throwing in a “you know, children die too” vibe.  I mean, I wouldn’t do that.  But, you almost feel like a walking reminder of how unfair the universe is sometimes.

            There’s no point to any of this.  It’s just a ramble.  But these are the things I think about and, as always, maybe typing them out will help me not think about them quite so much.  We’ll see.  In the meantime, I’ll be figuring out how much I plan to share on Day 1 of the new job, on January 2.