Five Minus One

            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.

            I suppose the thing they never quite prepare you for when you lose a child is the number of ways it keeps hurting, years after he’s gone.  And I’m not talking about the dull ache I feel every time I see a boy who’s about the age he would be or when I blunder across an article about the advances being made right now in techniques to cure cancer, which always send me down a rabbit hole of wondering how things could have turned out if we’d only managed to hold off the cancer for a few years.

            But that’s not what I’m talking about.  That’s the kind of stuff I sort of expected in my darker moments.  I think what surprises is the way that the reminders will come out of the blue.  Like, you think you’ve set up your life so that you can control when the memories will come up and punch you in the gut.  You schedule when you’ll go to the cemetery and you avoid making eye contact with the picture of him in the hallway until you’re mentally ready every morning to do so.  I don’t look at photos of him unless I know I’m in the right mental space and, truthfully, I avoid talking about him when I’m in certain moods.

            And then, the world decides to remind you that you’ve got a dead kid.  Like that’s necessary.

            A few weeks ago, Facebook alerted me that I had been cleared for membership in the group Family’s (sic) of children with Tracheostomy’s (again, sic).

            Lord, I’d forgotten that I’d ever signed up for this group.  Clearly, it would have been at some point between December 2018 when they gave him the damned tracheostomy and September 2019, when he died.  Probably earlier in the process, when our biggest problem was how we were going to keep the trach in place and find a way to feed him without him noticing that the rest of us all still got to eat solid food. 

            God, the trach was a nightmare.  It never fit quite right.  How could it?  He was 5 and it wasn’t as if he was going to sit still and just accept that one.  He had a tube in his throat, so of course he hated it.  And, even if he wasn’t thinking about it, until the cancer really took him down, he wanted to move and wiggle.  He probably wanted to know why he couldn’t speak properly any more.  He probably wanted to know why he wasn’t allowed to eat any more.  There are so many parts to this that I can’t comprehend, so hell knows how it hit him. 

            I mean, as I type this, I’m at a café because we’re training to stay home by himself and, every time I leave him alone (an hour and a half today), he acts like I’m stomping on his soul on the way out the door.  How can I explain to Murphy that some times he’s going to be left alone?  I had the same chances of explaining to Colin that his swallowing reflex wasn’t working and he was in danger of a pulmonary infection every time he took food orally.  I can barely think of the time without getting caught up in the emotion, because it was so stupid and horrible and never-ending, with each new doctor demanding a modification to the thing and Colin hating every one and every time the concerns growing that tissue was growing back incorrectly around the tube, and so on and so on and so on.

            So, of course I wanted to know back in 2019 what was up.  Except the group didn’t let me in until 2022.  And now I get semi-daily prayers from the group (though a shocking lack of useful information) for children suffering like Colin.  But I don’t need or want any of it.  And yet I feel churlish if I shut it down.  So, I just kind of squint at my Facebook feed these days, jumping ahead to the next article about comic book movies.

            That’s the most striking blast from the past.  Some of them are nice.  A few weeks ago, Christina got rid of the kids’ old backpacks and, when she grabbed Emma’s, found it was full of mocked-up school books and supplies for Colin, apparently from a time when the two of them played school together.  I have a hard time imagining Colin being able to play something as complicated as school, but I hope he had fun.  If nothing else, it’s a nice reminder that my kids had a whole life and a way to cope with the nightmare that didn’t always involve us.  And it’s nice to remember that we had a lot of good moments – and still do – before it all went to hell.

            And then there are the surprises.  I spent part of October 7 in a funk, but unsure why, until I remembered that it was the day of the Nobel Peace Prize.  We buried him the day that prize was issued in 2019.  I had an argument about Greta Thunberg at the breakfast table that morning.  Can you believe that?  Arguing about a Fridays for Futurer hours before I bury my son?  And there you go, the Nobel Peace Prize is now a tainted day in my lifeline.

            I imagine the next surprise memory is already lurking somewhere in our house or online.  None of them knock us over, or at least none of them knock us down to a point where we can’t get back up.  But the last three years have been a never-ending process of getting knocked down and learning to stand again.  I suppose, if nothing else, we’re getting good at it.

            I’m realizing there are some things I can’t keep doing if I want to stay sane.  Case in point, the background anger I’ve had with the world ever since Colin died needs to go away, or at least die down.

            It’s gotten better, it’s true.  I no longer find myself welling up with rage and ready to tell off random rude acquaintances and people in the street (though, that said, I kind of wish I had been able to turn it on with a particularly rude cashier on Saturday, but that’s another story).  No, with me, it’s become more subtle.

            Like, a few nights ago, I was having drinks with friends and the topic of this infamous picture from 2015, of a boy who had drowned while his family was trying to cross the Mediterranean and reach the EU, showed up.  Now, full disclosure, I’ve learned since Colin’s death that alcohol and media criticism are a bad, bad combination.  So, I should have walked away.  But I didn’t, and the debate turned unpleasant.  And we kept coming down to whether there had been a need to show this particular image.  Part of the argument was: Did the world really need to be forced to look at a dead kindergartener?

            So, that might have been a second red flag for me.  And I responded by pointing out that several people in the room had already seen a dead kindergartener. 

            I’ll admit, logically, I don’t know what point I was trying to make.  Other than: They should know how it feels.  What worries me more is that I wasn’t really trying to make a point.  I was mad and I felt that gave me the right to share my pain.  Like, “Dead 5-year-olds?  I know all about that.  Come along for the ride.”

            I don’t think anything gives me the right to do that, yet I keep doing it.  I find myself bringing him up, not entirely inappropriately, but it’s definitely sometimes forced.  Just because I want people to remember him.  Sometimes because I want them to realize how lucky they are.  Sometimes, I worry, that I just want to bring people down.

            It’s not every time.  A few months ago, I was sitting outside with people complaining about the lockdowns and how they hoped those never come back, because it was awful being home all the time.  “I’m not doing it if they tell us to,” one person said.

            I sat quietly.  What I wanted to say was “Being trapped in your home feels practically liberating after being stuck in a hospice for a summer.”  Being able to sit down with my family and have a meal – instead of hiding the fact that we’re eating from Colin because we don’t want him to think about the fact that he’s got a trach and can no longer take normal food – feels like such a weight off of our shoulders.  Not having to tiptoe around the home health care worker – assuming he showed up – is great.  Being stuck in my own walls was great, because it meant we were keeping death outside, instead of watching it take Colin inch by inch.

            You see how easy that came to me?  You see how quickly I can ruin a group kvetch session about lockdowns?  You see how I just throw Colin’s death out there because I want to pass along some of the pain I still feel, because it’s too much for me?

            It’s been three years since his death and I feel it keeps on making me a worse person.  I feel people are throwing me metaphorical life preservers.  Like, here, join this conversation and be normal with us again.  And my first instinct is almost always to see if I can drag them down with me.

            Christina took me to a concert last week, a birthday gift.  The plan was that we would leave around 7, grab dinner and then head to the show.  Of course, we got started a lot later than we’d planned, so we opted for a taxi.  And then the taxi got held up in traffic on its way to us, so we were even later.

            While we waited for the taxi that never came, Christina had me look up online to see if there was an opening act.  Because, if there was one, then we’d know that we had a little extra time before we had to be at the hall.

            Turns out there was no opening act.  There had been one planned, but the lead singer of the main act has gotten embroiled in a scandal about cheating on his wife and sexual assault on others.  Lord knows if any of it’s true and it’s not my place to judge.  All I know that, in the process of learning that there would be no opening act – it pulled out in protest at the allegations against the main act – I learned a whole lot more about the main band than I ever really cared to know.

            It changed the show, I must say.  I mean, most acts will have a song or two about relationships ending or dying or what-not.  And now, watching this show (they had a DJ play music for an hour for lack of an opening act), it all got really weird.  The singer was up there with his allegations.  His wife was up there too.  And there are random lyrics about things being a big deal and where did the love go and so on and so on.  It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to watching a divorce play out in real time.

            I’m not saying I loved it.  I have to admit, for the first hour or so, there was a strong urge to just leave because it was so awkward to watch the show, knowing what I had just learned.

            But there was also a part of me that liked it.  Like, “Ha.  Let someone else have the problems for a change.”

            And that’s the part of me I’m having a hard time liking.  I notice it becoming a more and more pronounced part of me, and I really want to keep it at bay.  This need to bring others down.  This need to make sure everyone feels just a little bit awkward around me.  This tic I’ve developed where I’ll make sure to bring Colin into conversations here and there, just because I want to make sure that no one forgets him, but also because I want to make everyone a little bit uncomfortable.  After all, if I can’t be happy, why should anyone else get to enjoy their home and their children and their life.  Mine’s not a mess, but it’s not the way I envisioned it.  Why not let everyone else have a taste of that from time to time.

            I know most of my friends get it.  I know most of my friends know that I’m carrying a world of hurt and that, even when I’m enjoying something, there’s a maudlin aftertaste right behind the fun.  I suspect several people would take away the pain if they could.  But the only way to take away the pain would be to take away the memories, and I won’t let those go.  So, I need to find ways to share the pain.  To exorcise it.  But I have to make sure I don’t use it as a weapon.  As a downer.  As a buzzkill.

            The concert got better in the second hour and I stopped worrying about who was divorcing whom and who slept with whom.  Maybe he is a bad person.  Maybe he’s falsely accused.  I came for the music and, whatever I think of what he might have done, the tickets had already been paid for, so he had my money no matter what I did.  I might as well get a good show out of it.

            Likewise, my son is gone.  It’s made me realize a lot of things about myself.  But nothing I’m going to do is going to bring him back.  So I have to remember him in ways like this, by writing about him.  But I can’t use him as a weapon.  He deserves better than that.

I wrote this on Friday on a train back to Berlin, thinking I would post it on Saturday after giving it a quick reread. Then some kind of flu reared its ugly head and I was basically flat on my back for four straight days. So, some of the information is a little out of date but, given that the point of the post was how I haven’t posted in a long time, I guess that’s just keeping with the theme…

For lack of a photo to better illustrate the idea, I default to one of Murphy.

            Once again, we’ve reached the time of the year when the sun rises later in the morning.  It jars me a little bit every since Colin died.  That whole summer in the hospice, I got used to waking up at 5:15 a.m. and getting to his bedside, just so he didn’t have to spend any of the time he had left alone.  The fact that the sun came through the windows was my signal to get up and get up to him.  It probably helped that that was also about the time the first planes began taking off and landing at Tegel airport.  You heard every plane tearing through the sky from the window to the room they’d set aside for Christina and me.  Strangely, I don’t really remember ever hearing them in Colin’s room.

            I can’t really tell you why I haven’t posted in an age.  I’ve had a few ideas I wanted to write about.  I definitely felt a need to write from time to time.  And it’s not as if I haven’t been writing about him: I recently finished work on a novel that is – spoiler warning – based on how I might have acted if I had had an actual mental break after his death.  I don’t know if that was cathartic to write or set me back, but I needed to get that story out of me.  So, now it sits on my hard drive, while I try to figure out how or whether to publish it.

            Maybe it’s just been busy.  We had our vacation in southern Germany last month.  Then we had a barrage of visitors, which was all very pleasant, but, after two years or more of barely seeing anyone, it was an awful lot of people compressed into two weeks.  But also great to catch up with so many people from back home.  And to use them to provide us with precious supplies we can’t get here in Germany.  We are now an eastern German hub of US baking powder supplies, should anyone need any.

            There’s also been a fair bit going on professionally.  More on that at a later point.

            But I’d always found time to write before, so I can’t really tell you what pushed blogging to the back burner for the last few months.  I can’t tell you is this post is a flash in the pan or if I’m going to get back to a semi-regular cycle of writing.  I can tell you that I’ve already nearly cried once while writing this.

            We did just have the third anniversary of his death.  It’s the first time I’ve worked a September 17 since his death.  I can’t tell you why I did.  I thought about asking for the day off, but then thought that maybe I should try to treat it like a more normal day.  Everyone seemed to have plans and it wasn’t until dusk that we got our act together to go to the cemetery.  There was talk that we should make new candles for him, but we didn’t pull it together.  Even the act of going to the cemetery is different now, because I’m tethered to Murphy, who will take off if he sees a squirrel, somber moment or not.  He didn’t do anything at the cemetery, but it’s something you’ve always got to think about when you’ve got a dog of Murphy’s size and energy at the other end of a rope.

            Maybe we’ll still make the candles.  It can’t be overlooked that Christina’s going through a busy phase at work and that everyone has been sick for the last two weeks, none of which was conducive to us sitting down for a family project.  Christina and Noah are going to the hospice tomorrow to discuss how Noah’s week away with the kids group went and we’re going to get Noah started on a new rock climbing program set up by the hospice.  I am determined to be at the men’s groups meetings for the next few months after barely going to the group since the start of the pandemic.  I am facing situations where I’m going to have to tell new people about having watched my son die.  This will all be staying with us for the rest of our lives, so I don’t see the blog going away.  I’ll simply have to see how I integrate it into my life going forward.

            My laptop was out of commission for a week, which is bad for the blogging business.  And, at about the same time, the end of Noah’s grade school career came, which brought with it an insane amount of final concerts, picnics, meetings and nostalgia.  I’ve got another kid starting, for lack of a better word, high school later this year.  And I’ve got none left in elementary school, because Colin died before he could even finish kindergarten.

            Sigh.

            During my daily Bible reading, I came across this passage in Job, which is making a lot more sense to me this time around:

            My days have passed, far otherwise than I had planned.

            To which I can only say “Tell me about it, Job.”

            He goes on with “and every fiber of my heart is broken” which is probably a step further than I’m prepared to go, though, had you spoken to me in 2019, heaven knows what I would have said.  Still, it’s bad if you’re reading with the book of Job and identifying with it quite that much.  But I guess that’s what childhood cancer, followed by a pandemic, followed by potential thermonuclear war two countries over can do to a person.

            I don’t know when I last read Job.  I usually get to the end of the Bible and then pick it up from the start.  Usually I read 2-3 pages a day, so I’m guessing it was 2-3 years ago.  I can’t imagine my mindset was that much better 2-3 years ago, but maybe I’m reading it more thoroughly this time.  I could imagine that, in 2018-19, a lot of things just washed over me.

            But religion is my point today.  It’s come up a few times since we went to a neighbor kid’s first communion.  Emma did her first communion while Colin was still with us.  Noah had his in the midst of a pandemic, delayed a year and even then, in my opinion, conducted under circumstances that were less than ideal, pandemic-wise.

            Now they’re both going to Catholic school, and the topic of confirmation is coming up.  That discussion was in turn inspired by an event that was most definitely non-religious.  The girl across the street had what is called a “Jugendweihe” party.  It’s a tough one to translate.  I have no good ideas and, when I go to translation engines, I get “youth declaration,” “youth inauguration” and “youth consecration.”  None seem really right.

            What it amounts to is that religion was discouraged during the communist regime here in eastern Germany.  But people wanted to have some kind of event that marked a child’s transition to adulthood (and the kids wanted an event that came with tons of cash gifts) so they came up with this non-religious event to announce the transition into pre-adulthood.  The kids dress up, there’s a lot of speeches (this year, all on Zoom, I’m told) and then there’s a party.  This was just a garden party, but I know of people who have rented halls.  As Christina was trying to help me wrap my mind around the topic, the best interpretation we could come up with was “communist bar mitzvah.”

            So, we had kids getting first communions and kids getting non-confirmations, which all raises the question of what Emma’s going to do next year.  Like I said, it’s a Catholic school, so there will definitely be an offer to go through confirmation preparation and have the whole ceremony.

            Except Emma isn’t really sure what she believes in any more.  I can’t blame her at all.  I mean, I’d expect most 14-year-olds to be full of existential questions these days.  Emma literally watched her brother die while other people with, shall we say, more questionable claims on being deserving of a long and rich life keep on ticking.  And, as noted, she went straight from that to coronavirus to the Ukraine crisis which, admittedly, has impacted us very little at this moment.  That said, it could be a very cold winter here in Berlin.  She hasn’t quite come out and said she doesn’t believe in God, but she’s close to it. 

            I don’t really know what to tell her.  My faith remains, but it’s kind of hard to rally a family member to Team God under our circumstances.  I’ve long since reconciled myself to a God who isn’t a magic fairy godmother who comes and solves all my problems with a snap of a finger.  But I remember a time when I thought if you prayed enough you could get about anything.  Emma learned way too young that’s not how prayer works.  And if she’s having those questions, what’s the point of confirmation?  Yeah, there’s the party and all the gifts, but that’s not why you get confirmed.  There’s no point if you don’t truly believe.

            I imagine there’s numerous families who go through this kind of thing.  Churchgoing is less common than it ever was and, in Germany, people are leaving the church in droves due to disgust at the way some parishes handled sexual abuse scandals.  We’re not that unique in many respects with these family debates.  And yet, in that sad way, we have a very different problem than anyone else.  I guess this is one that we have to let Emma work out for herself.  I mean, we’ll support her and answer questions, but she’s going to have to make the choice herself, ultimately.

            I think it’s fair to say that my professional development hasn’t gone quite as I planned.  This is, in and of itself, not a great disaster.  For example, had I wished to have a truly stellar and non-stop-exciting career as a journalist, I probably shouldn’t have moved to Berlin.  There are plenty of stories to be found here, to be sure, but the international media, by and large, isn’t interested in quirky stories out of Germany, and German politics can be oh so dull.  No, if you want to interest the foreign media out of Germany, you’re best off heading to Frankfurt and reporting on the stock markets and the latest German business scandal that seems to shock the world, because everyone seems to have this image of Germans as upright business professionals … despite generating a new business scandal of fairly shocking proportions every five years or so.

            But that isn’t it.  Christina’s job was in Berlin, so I put my career on hold and, honestly, was lucky to find regular work here ever since I showed up in 2004.  I can’t get too grouchy that I was never an international superstar reporter and, let’s face it, my personality is not one that would have lent itself to stardom.  I’m better off working in the background, producing stuff.  My goal always was to be the reporter other reporters respected.  Like, you might not see my face on TV, but people would know to come to me if they wanted to get the straight story.

            That isn’t what happened, but I found something that was pretty close to good enough.  And then, about a year after Colin died and I was starting to get my feet under me, despite Covid, the rug got pulled out.  I still have a job.  I’m just not enjoying it the way I used to.  Plus, Covid and Colin’s death have understandably had their impact on me.  While I was out of the picture at work, dealing with Colin’s death, some decisions understandably got made and I wasn’t there to influence them.  I’ve felt a little sidelined ever since I returned.  And then we all got sent home thanks to the pandemic, so it was a sidelining on top of a sidelining.

            This is not meant to be a complaint about my job.  Besides that not being a topic for an open forum, it is important to point out that my employer has been amazingly understanding through all my health-related absences and the quirks I’ve developed in the wake of my son’s death.  I’m employed, I make enough money to feed my family and I have predictable hours that give me the freedom I need to pursue other ventures like this blog and the fiction writing I’m trying to start doing on the side.  So, I can’t complain on that front.  But some things have come to the forefront in recent weeks that, frankly, enrage me.  Maybe I’m right.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I’m overreacting.  Ever since Colin died I find there are a few people and issues with which I simply can’t react rationally.  I see myself overreacting, but I just can’t stop myself.  So, I don’t really know if there’s a problem or if I’ve just lost perspective.  The point is, it’s making me unhappy.

            Which brings me to the point.  For the longest time, even when things weren’t going great with my job, when I resigned myself to the fact that I might never be a reporter again and I probably wouldn’t get that many bylines, there was always the option to say “Well, my career might not be going so great, but what counts is that I’ve got a great family.”

            Which I do.

            It’s just that we lost a person.  And it wasn’t our fault and we did the best we can, but the whole “at least my family is doing fine” philosophy doesn’t hold up when your youngest is buried a five-minute bike ride from your home.  It’s hard.  I’ve been trying to see what I can do about my professional life for more than a year now, but things are not coming together terribly quickly.  So, I stay where I am and stew and worry that I might lash out at the wrong person at the wrong time about the wrong thing. 

That said, what happens if I do move to a better job?  At least everyone I know at my present employer knows my history.  When I panic during a meet and greet with a new colleague on Zoom – do I say why my career hasn’t advanced?  Do I follow other people’s leads and talk about my family?  If so, do I say I have two or three children? – they at least have some inkling of what I’ve been through.  In new surroundings, assuming I don’t tell everyone individually about my backstory, which I’m not sure would be appropriate, I wouldn’t get that leeway.

            So, there is this sense of either having to stay where I am and make the best of it, or making the terrifying jump into the unknown, should an opportunity ever present itself.  I keep telling myself it’s just a career.  My family should be the most important.  And it is.  It’s just that, even if everything goes perfect from here on out, it’s impossible to look back and say “that was a success” when Colin is dead.  Looking at my professional life, I wish I could get it pumped up just a bit better.  But I’m losing hope.  But, whereas before, I could turn my thoughts to home and think ‘at least my family is fine,” I know that’s not absolutely true.  We cope.  We make do.  We have a lot of good days.  But we took a hit and it’s left its marks.

            Nothing to do, I suppose, but show up to work and do the best I can and then see what opportunities present themselves.  But it feels like it should be easier than it is.  Except, I’ve learned that it isn’t.

            It’s one thing knowing it. It’s quite another saying it.

            It’s been quite a while since I had to tell anyone new that I was the parent of a dead child (those who already know probably hear me say it too much).  Pretty much everyone who ought to have known found out right when Colin died.  Since then, it’s something I kind of chose to keep to myself.  Like, why bum the room out with that information, if it’s just someone with whom I’m making small talk.

            Now I’ve gotten to bring it up three times in just a month.  It’s an odd sensation.  I mean, there’s no good way to present the story.  There’s no “Here’s a funny anecdote lead-in.”  There’s no way to soften it all.  I try to say “This is going to be heavy,” but “heavy” doesn’t really do justice to a kindergartener dying of cancer.  But you also don’t want to bludgeon your way into the conversation that way.

            I suppose it comes down a bit to how I think others view me.  I’ll catch us in the backyard, when we’ve tempted the kids outside and Murphy isn’t actively barking at a neighbor and we look like a happy family.  We are a happy family.  We genuinely enjoy each others’ company.  But I can’t help but think how someone looking in from the outside would act.  Should we not be dressed in black?  Should we not be having a moment of silence for Colin at every family gathering?  Should we not all be openly weeping?

            The radio show I listen to on my phone while making the kids’ lunches each morning keeps coming up unexpectedly with shows that touch on death, which is always an unexpected kick to the gut.  Just a day or so ago, I listened to one about the parents of one of the victims of Sandy Hook taking on the internet trolls who insist that no children died that day.  In this instance, the trolls had latched on to the fact that the dead boy’s mother seemed so composed in a TV interview.  Shouldn’t she be crying?  How could she have had time to get her nails and makeup done?  How come she’s not a complete mess?  Those were the questions they asked as they sought to prove she was an actor.

            It’s because you have two choices when a child dies.  You can crumple up into a ball or you can choose to keep on living.  And if you have other surviving children, you really need to pick the option where you keep living, because someone has to care for them.  That’s what it comes down to.

            And then, after you’ve lived a while longer, you run into new people who don’t know you spent a summer in a hospice and that your wife spends part of every weekend tending to your son’s grave.

            The first case was a professional one.  Not to get into details, but I’m exploring my options professionally.  And it became necessary during this Zoom call to find out how much time any new options would give me for my surviving children.  I didn’t want to beat around the bush, so I laid it out there.

            Then, this last weekend, I was at the school where Emma goes and where Noah is going to start in August.  I remembered that, although we told the head office about Colin, the news never got to Emma’s classroom.  So, when everyone introduced themselves and Emma got up to talk about her dead brother, the poor teachers never had a clue what was coming.  I wanted to avoid it, so I pulled aside the English teacher and asked what I should do.  Not that the English teacher has anything to do with any of this, but because I didn’t want to go through this in German.

            And then a friend I hadn’t heard from in years emailed out of the blue.  And asked how I was doing.

            You can tell when you break open this news that you’ve ruined their day.  You could tell the Zoom lady was happy not to be in the room with me.  You could tell the old friend by email was happy to quickly change the topic to the nightmare of work and home repairs.  The English teacher was the hardest, since I was right there.  I could tell as I told her that I was breaking into my nervous laugh, because it’s the laugh I do when I’m nervous, but what a bad time for it.  She teared up and asked out loud why she was getting so sad.  She had the good graces to not ask why I was acting like I was sharing a knock-knock joke.  Like wandering around telling people about Colin’s death is just something I do.

            It’s going to happen again.  It probably would have happened a lot more in the last few years if not for all the lockdowns.  Christina recently had to tell someone and worried for a few weeks after that this person was going to cut us out of her life, due to the sheer surprise (she didn’t).

            Another of those radio shows I listen to involved people who were fat.  This one woman, who is apparently fat (it’s a radio show … I can’t say) had started telling her friends and acquaintances that she was fat.  The general reaction was that, well, um, they had noticed.  But it was still a different vibe in the air.  There was a transition from “Everyone knows, but we don’t talk about it” to “Now we have talked about it.”  On some level I get it.  It’s one thing that I act weird when the topic of sick and dying children comes up.  It’s quite another when I’ve told a person to their face why it’s a tough topic.

            It comes down to this: I look too normal.  There’s no warning bells that I’m a little broken inside.  For instance, the new dog-walking friend I have has no idea what’s gone wrong with my life up until now.  Then again, I have no idea what’s up with him.  And maybe that’s the trick to it.  I can’t tell everybody.  And the people I do tell won’t have fun while they’re being told.  And maybe it’s good being anonymous every now and then and not having to share the weight of Colin’s death with just anybody.  But sometimes, maybe it is good to get it out.  As usual, there are no good answers.  There’s just getting through it all.