Five Minus One

So, we are on the tail end of our own personal family coronavirus outbreak and the general verdict is that we can’t recommend it. That said, if you are going to go down this road, do it with a vaccine. Enough cold/flu symptoms got through despite all of us having our shots that I shudder to think what this virus would have done to us had we been absolutely unprotected.

It’s weird to say that the coronavirus is special to us (I mean, really, it’s a weird thing to say), but, at least in my mind, it’s been such an extension of everything we went through with Colin. We watched him die. We buried him. We took a while to recover and slowly, slowly reintroduced ourselves to the world. We started making plans to see shows and arrange really good birthday parties for the kids – I mean, they deserved that after everything we had to set aside while Colin was sick – and then came the pandemic and locked us all inside. Like, literally, Christina had been back to work for a week when everyone was told to go home the first time, in 2020. It was like the world said to us “You’re so used to being locked inside due to health concerns … and you’re so good at it. Why don’t you keep doing that for the next three months? Or six? Or two years? Who knows?”

Everything about the pandemic makes me think about Colin in some way. All the debates about the people who are most at risk of the virus and the questions posed about whether all the healthy people (who can still get the virus and die) should be restricting their movement to make sure that the virus can’t take out all the vulnerable people who would almost certainly have no chance if they got infected … they all seem so real to me. Somewhere, probably a lot closer to you than you think, there is someone desperate to keep a loved one safe from this virus because all the tubes and wires and breathing aids are not compatible with a virus that creates a pneumonia-like disease. I mean, even the fact that the virus often presents as something like pneumonia messes with my head. Until Colin got pneumonia due to the breathing/swallowing problems caused by the tumor, “pneumonia” was something that I read about in books, that hit people in far away places and times. It wasn’t a disease that snuck up on a kindergartener in Germany. Until, of course, it was.

Every time we saw a protest by people who didn’t want to wear masks, I saw people who couldn’t care less about people like Colin, who somehow thought wearing a flap of fabric for a few hours was somehow equal to being subjugated. And then, of course, the more time we spent in the house, the more time we had to find more stuff of Colin’s. There’s the one truth that being locked in gave us all time to clean out our attics, garages and workspaces. But, for us, every cleaning adventure led to decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. There’s so much stuff of his that had only a tangential relationship to my son that we still haven’t been able to throw away. And I wonder if we would have delved into this stuff quite so quickly if we hadn’t been so desperate for something to do after the 85th round of playing Life while waiting to see what the daily case counts were.

I understand that that pandemic was not sent to test us personally and I truly understand that we survived this bout with the coronavirus with no apparent scars. I left the house yesterday to hit the post office and Noah returned to school today. Tomorrow we’ll see about reintroducing Emma and Christina to society (you’ve been warned). But it’s still odd to have now had it after having spent so long being scared about it. Because, no matter how many times people told us that the odds were ridiculously low that the virus could hurt us, especially once we were vaccinated, all I could do was ask “Shall we look at the statistical odds of Colin having gotten that tumor?” I mean, the odds of any one person getting that tumor are so comically small it’s amazing to me that I know anyone who ever had it – much less fathered one. A friend told Christina shortly after we got the verdict that we should play the lottery, because the odds of us winning a jackpot were less ridiculous than our child getting that virus. So, yes, as well as being forced to sit inside and ponder why people are happy to write off those with illnesses, there has been an element of fear about the virus this whole time.

I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad that we now have the extra protection of having recovered. I’m hoping that this is the last variant and, maybe, sometime later this year I can finally take my wife to some of those concerts and we can finally have a kids birthday party – our last one was in May 2019 and I was nearly catatonic the whole time. I can’t even pretend that maybe there wasn’t some personal growth: Maybe it was good for us on some level being jammed together into a house instead of all running our separate ways months after Colin died. But mostly I’m tired of it and am glad to have one less thing to worry about.

I’ve got a personal project going on that I’m keeping a bit close to my chest for now, but it has involved me hunting down a lot of old family documents: birth certificates; proof of citizenship; marriage certificates. The whole works. Obviously, I have all of the documents that pertain to me personally. You can’t survive in Germany if you don’t have every relevant document at your fingertips, but I’ve had to track down a lot of documents related to my mother and my German grandparents.

Some of it has been eye-opening. I found out that my parents got married in March 1959, not April. I know they always celebrated April so, in all likelihood, they had their civil service in March and then their church service in April, which became the one they celebrated. That’s fairly common in Germany: I just had no idea that they got married on March 5. Tracking down my grandparents’ marriage certificate was an even wilder ride. First I discovered that their two surviving children had no idea in which year their parents got married, which made me feel a lot better about not knowing about my parents being married in March, not April. Then, when we did get the document, it took a team of about 15 people to sort through the old-fashioned spiderweb handwriting to figure out what year they actually got married. There was a phase when our candidates were 1921, 1922, 1923 or 1931. That’s how hard it was to read the handwriting (the eventual winner was 1931).

But what really got me thinking was the series of official stamps along the side of my grandparents’ wedding certificate, marking the birth of each of their children. There are five of them. But I only ever knew my Mom and three of her siblings because the fourth child died, I believe during World War II.

What’s strange is that I know nothing about her. I feel like I have her name on the tip of my fingers. Rosemarie? But I’m also pretty certain that that’s not right. I know I’ve seen her grave and I’m pretty sure my Mom said she died of scarlet fever, but these are 30-plus-year-old memories. The sad fact of the matter is that I know nothing about this child. Of the two surviving members of the family, only my uncle would have any memories of her, since my aunt was born nearly 20 years after the rest of her siblings. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy speaking to my uncle, but we’re also not that close. Me calling up and asking him to reminisce about the sister who died nearly 80 years ago would be awkward, at best. Upsetting, at worse.

How is there so little known about this child? Who was (is?) my aunt. What does it say about my efforts to keep Colin’s memories alive? Is some grandchild of mine going to sit down in 60 years and try to remember the name of that one uncle he heard about, but really isn’t more than a ghost of a memory at that point? Then again, does it even matter? I never met either of my German grandparents. There’s one hysterical story about my grandmother tying a child to a chamber pot in a potty training episode that went horribly wrong. Everyone seems to remember my grandfather hauling away the carcass of a dog that got hit by a car. Oma was apparently very strict. Opa was apparently very nice. That’s not a lot of details to slap together a fake memory for someone like me. And they had full lives. There are days when I feel I just need to accept that Colin will be forgotten and it’s enough that I remember him.

But I hope Emma and Noah, if they have kids, talk about Colin. I hope they have some memories they can pass on. It would mean a lot to me if a little of Colin got into the next generation along the line.

His eighth birthday was this week. We trekked there as a family, as crummy as the weather was, ignoring the sign that said no dogs are allowed in the cemetery. It’s funny: I could swear Murphy grew nervous the further we walked into the cemetery, and I don’t think it’s because he can read and he was worried about getting thrown out. The mystery person who leaves a birthday candle for Colin every year showed up again: There was an 8 on his headstone. We lit candles and sparklers and tried to do some magic wish paper, but the weather didn’t really cooperate. I couldn’t do much of anything, trying to keep Murphy on a short leash as I was. But we were remembering him. And, as sad as that is, that’s about all we can do for him. We just have to keep doing it for as long as we can.

(Note: The document pictured above was not the one we were working with when we were trying to ascertain my grandparents’ wedding date, for all of you who feel the need to point out that this one clearly reads “1931.” Trust me, the handwriting was much more challenging on the document we had.)

All the time I would have normally spent with blogging these days is spent walking Murphy, which is probably a good thing. My step count is through the roof and if we go on a long walk and don’t run into too many dogs, I get chances to listen to albums which I haven’t heard in their entirety in years.

It’s both easy and complicated. He’s our dog and we have to train him. It’s going shockingly well. I’d say he’s already housebroken after two weeks, which surpassed every expectation of mine. We’re still working on making sure he’s not too obnoxious while we’re eating dinner and we have learned to keep the kitchen door shut, otherwise you walk in and find him, paws on the counter, discovering coffee or the leftover chicken curry. But that’s the kind of thing you have to work through with a new dog.

And then it gets complicated in my head at times, probably because I’m making it too complicated. I don’t have the feel that he’s my dog yet. Like he’s happy to be here and apparently pines for me when I’m gone, but there’s still this sense that we’re roommates, not boy and dog. There is a part of me that wonders if Colin looks on from wherever he is and wonders if we’ve replaced him. I don’t think that’s a likely scenario, but the thought haunts me from time to time.

I hug Murphy all the time, because he’s a ball of fur. Then I remember how little I hugged Colin the last year of his life. I was so scared of jostling his feeding tube or his tracheostomy. And then, just as I started getting used to those, he got really sick and it wasn’t like I was scared to touch him. God, I crawled into bed with him towards the end. But picking him up and hugging him seemed like it would be too upsetting. He so wanted to be left alone in those final months and, I’ve got to say, I kind of understand it. But I would have liked to hug. And now that I’ve got a dog I can hug I realize a little bit how much I missed it in 2018 and 2019. Maybe I just miss it in general. It’s not like Emma and Noah and Christina are unavailable for hugs, but you can’t force a hug on them the way you can your dog.

And there’s this realization that Murphy is absolutely dependent on us. If he gets lost in the woods, I don’t have a feeling he’d do well foraging for himself, to say nothing of the wild boars out there. So, we need to do everything for him, from providing food to making sure he has health care. And he knows it on some level. When I left the house last weekend to do errands – the first time he and I had been apart for any significant amount of time since he showed up a week earlier – Christina said he ran to the bedroom and took my pillow to have something of mine. I mean, heart melting, but lord that’s a lot of responsibility. And then, because I’m wired for sadness, I remember how dependent Colin was on us and how we couldn’t do anything for him other than make it less awful. We could never really make it good that last year. So, there is a part of you that wonders if you can pull this off any more. I mean, I know it sounds insane, but I worry that, should I ever become a grandparent, I’m just going to freeze around the kids. Because there is a voice in my head telling me: You can’t do this.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s mostly fun. He’s so huggable. And he’s so good. He’s picking up tricks and a blast to have around. Christina said this week that she already sees a change in me, after having had him around for two weeks. I don’t see it, but then, would I? Maybe I am sleeping better. Maybe I am a little happier.

But the old feelings are never far from the surface. This week, during a midday walk, we ran into a super friendly dog and, after he and Murphy started playing, I realized that the owners were Colin’s old physical therapists, a married couple. We had this or that misunderstanding with them, but they tried so hard for Colin. I remember them coming to the hospice for a visit – none of his other health care workers did that – and even bringing one of the toys he loved to play with from their clinic. They tried so hard for him. And there we were, talking about the dogs and how I still blog and then, because it seemed like a thing to say in the moment, I noted how Colin’s grave was in easy walking distance from where we were, like “Here’s a fun place to take your afternoon walk!”

You wonder sometimes, were you to have a breakdown, how would you know? Would you know? I left them and got some distance and knew I was close to crying because of all the memories of the physical therapy center flooding my head. I sometimes reach out for Colin’s hand – and I know he’s not there – and can pretend he’s there with me while I tell him about what’s going on or what we’re looking at. I have to adjust for the fact he’d be taller now. But this time, after meeting his therapist, I couldn’t feel his hand. I didn’t have a sense of him for a few minutes and that might be the most upset I’ve been in months. Me with my dog in the pastures behind my neighborhood asking why I can’t properly pretend to feel my dead son’s hand. That feels like a breakdown, at least a little one, right?

So, that’s Murphy. On balance, he’s good for us. But, like everything else in our lives, there’s always that chance that things can veer off course pretty quickly. I suppose we’re just going to have to see how good Murphy is at keeping us on track.

A lot of things happened as December breezed by, at least one of which I never expected to see: We got a dog.

I mean, there’s no reason my family is automatically indisposed to having a dog. We’re nice and responsible and not skittish about picking up poop, so there was nothing stopping us from having a dog, aside from long-standing resistance from one family member, who seems to have made the mistake of skimming animal shelter websites and falling in love with a picture of this particular puppy, who joined our family yesterday.

The friend who seems to inspire half of these posts told me recently that a friend who had suffered a death in her family had also unexpectedly gotten a dog and how that acquisition “changed the temperature” in the family. I suppose we’ll see how our new puppy works for us.

Everyone, of course, is in love with him. After an epic debate that would have made the UN General Assembly blush, we settled on the name Murphy. Runners-up were Hobbes, Crowley, Taco and Spiro Agnew. His mother was a street dog in Romania (and she’s about half his size, so that raises some questions about family dynamics there). She was rescued off the streets and gave birth to Murphy and a sibling about 10 months ago. He was brought to Germany by an animal rescue group about four months ago and here we are, learning to integrate him into his family. We are finding that his opinions about being able to sleep on the sofa are almost as strong as our opinions that he not be allowed to. Ditto his deep-held belief that he ought to be able to launch himself onto the dining table during meals and help himself, versus our opinion that this is behavior unbecoming. It’s Day 2 of an adventure: We shall see how it goes.

There are all kinds of thoughts that hit as we go through this, and I’m only speaking about my mental processes. A month or so ago when we had to have segregated meals because we were worried Emma had the coronavirus, it upset her that we were back to separate meals, like we’d been during the worst of Colin’s illness. Getting him socialized means I’m almost holding him away from the table with one arm (great for the biceps!) while everyone else eats, after which I can have my meal (unless it’s something I can eat one-handed). It’s nowhere the same as either of the above examples, but the idea that we were keeping a new family member separate flitted through my mind at one point. I also wondered if anyone would think we were trying to replace Colin with Murphy. Then I realized that a) we’re not and b) what do I care if someone thinks that. Maybe the family needed a dog. Maybe Murphy just needed a family. It at least feels like a normal thing families do, and that feeling has been in short supply at times in our family. Welcome, Murphy.

I suppose It’s normal behavior for kids in general and perhaps even more so around the holidays, but I’ve spent the last two weeks fielding a lot of questions like “Which of did the craziest things as a kid?” or “Which one of us was the easiest to put to bed?” That kind of thing. A lot of need to have the various children ranked in their own heads, so they can jot down in their mental notebooks which was the good one, which was the funny one, which was the difficult one, etc. etc. etc.

I get it. I think it’s kind of normal to know your role in the family (I was the perfect one, in case anyone’s wondering), the problem is – and I have told the children this, just not in a way that I think they truly understand – is that my memory has done a bit of a flush in the last few years. And maybe that’s also an attribute of being 50 now, but it feels more intense. Like, I have a memory of Noah at the top of the stairs the day Christina fell down the steps, pregnant with Colin, and broke her ankle. That’s seared into my brain. I have another clear memory of Emma and Noah bickering by the car outside our house. Noah had a small Playmobil toy and was pulling imaginary dust out of it that he was giving to everyone – me, the bushes, the car, the other toys – but not Emma, who was having kittens at being excluded.

And I don’t want to say I have no other memories of the two of them pre-2016. There are several more. But then came Colin’s birth in 2014, and that takes up a certain amount of mental real estate, and then came his diagnosis in 2016 and the bad news at the end of 2018 and his death in 2019 and I feel like so much of my memory was wiped. Who ate their vegetables? I have no idea. I remember more sneaking food in the kitchen because we didn’t know how to explain to Colin that he couldn’t eat solid food any more due to the trach. Who liked which story more? Most of my mental real estate now is tied up in the two or three stories Colin would let me read to him towards the end.

It’s unfair. The whole time Colin was sick, I felt bad that we were neglecting Emma and Noah, because what else could we do? And now he’s gone, and I don’t want to forget him, but so many of the bad memories are crowding my head, I feel like I might have jettisoned some really good memories in the process.

I guess that makes it all the more important to hold on to the good ones. Like, when Emma and Noah were about 5 and 3, I caught them in Emma’s room as I was heading out the door to work. It wasn’t immediately obvious they were doing anything bad … but then I noticed that each time they shifted their weight, their no-skid socks made ann odd “schwack, schwack” sound. I asked what that was and they told me that they had tried to glue their feet to the floor, which did explain noise. Hopefully (naively?) I said that surely they applied the glue up in Emma’s room. No, they told me, they had put the glue on in the living room, then walked through that room, through the hallway, up the stairs and into Emma’s room. And, as I looked down the stairs, I saw the trail of glue footprints confirming their story.

Sadly, I had to get to work, so I could leave the clean up to others.

I wish I had more stories like that. I wish I had more with the three of them doing silly things together, but Colin was still a toddler when he was diagnosed and then, it feels, like he was in a bubble for a lot of the next three years. His interactions with his siblings were so limited. His interactions with us seemed to consist so much of doctor’s runs and getting medicine in and finding ways to trick him into sitting still so we could get a little more life out of him.

There are times I wish we had never gotten the diagnosis in 2016 and we’d just gone on with our lives – we were planning to go to the States in the summer of 2016 – and then maybe he would have slipped away, and that would have been devastating, but we would have had normal family memories up until that point. And I know I don’t want that. I mean, the few times I’ve been at the bereaved Dad’s group, the guys who lost their kids unexpectedly are a whole different kind of mess than the people like me. They woke up and were missing a kid. I got two or three years to turn my head inside out while it happened. And maybe that’s not better, but I don’t think it’s worse either. It’s just the kind of loss you have.

Anyways, we tried to remember Colin as best as we could during the holidays. I might write a little more about memory soon. It’s as if my memories are working differently than normal these days. Maybe, if I try harder, I’ll be able to knock loose a few more stories for Emma and Noah about when they were kids. Maybe we’ll just have to concentrate on making the best memories we can from here on out. Maybe my memory is working just fine – does everyone remember everything about their kids? – but it all feels off because of what we went through. Maybe I’m still working on it.

A friend who’s actually inspired a fair number of these posts asked recently if I had ever looked into a kind of quiet Christmas, for people who can’t deal with the stress of Christmas for one reason or another.

It seems like a good idea. It seems like the kind of thing a lot of people could benefit from if they’ve gone through trauma. I can see it’s place in society. Yet it would never dawn on me to skip Christmas. Even given all the misery of the last few years – I mean, in 2018 we were in the hospital with him for all of December – Christmas has always managed to remain a highlight. We bounced right back in 2019, months after his death, and had a pretty decent Christmas. I mean, even in 2018, with the horror of having a kid in the ICU, we still had a good time, all of us enjoying the arrival of the taco dinosaurs, which I highly recommend.

And yet, and yet … there is something that gets to you as you approach another Christmas with a child missing. As always, it’s the little things.

The last word I ever remember him saying to me is “Weihnachtsmann,” which, to keep things simple, means “Santa Claus” (and for anyone who feels like opening a debate about the best translation of ‘Weihnachtsmann,’ I’m really not interested in having the discussion). It, of course, wasn’t the last thing he ever said to me, but communication with him became so hard once they put the damned trach in that you were usually laboring to figure out what he wanted, not taking time to savor the words.

So, this would have probably been on December 1, 2018, the day before he ended up in the hospital. I was pushing him in his stroller to day care – because he insisted on the stroller even though he was far too old and big for it – and we passed a senior citizen’s center that had put up a giant inflatable Santa on one of their balconies. They do it every year. And Colin turned around in his stroller, looked me right in the eye and said “Weihnachtsmann!” He knew Christmas was coming. I so wish we could have given him a halfway decent one. Instead we segued from that into a month of him and Christina in the hospital and a few weeks of me unable to do anything in the house because my back was out.

He really never spoke much. The people at day care had a story about the one time he said a whole sentence – telling some kid to put down a toy – because he just never spoke that much. And he seemed to understand everything we said, so we never figured out if he was just quiet or if this was some side effect of the tumor or the chemo or God knows what else he had to go through. So, having him turn around to me and say “Weihnachstmann” was kind of powerful, because not only was it a crystal clear word, but you knew exactly what he meant. You can pack a lot of meaning into that one word, especially when you’re 4.

Weihnachtsmann.

I’m sure we had more touching moments and instances where we communicated more or better, but this moment is etched into my brain. There was no way to imagine in that moment – and we’d been to the hospital multiple times in the previous three months due to his breathing problems – that it would be a little more than six months until he went to hospice and a little more than nine months before he died. Eight months from that moment, I was asking if there was any way we could speed up his death, because it was such hell watching him fade away like that.

We only had him five years but he keeps coloring our lives. I recycled a gift bag today while wrapping gifts and realized his name was still on the tag. Had to make sure to remove that fast before causing a Christmas morning faux pas. Emma’s computer died and I had it at a computer shop a few times in the last week. The bike ride took me by the cemetery so I stopped, even though I almost never go there. I brought a book to read to him and, as I left, I noted to myself that I had just read a story to my dead son. That’s not part of the usual Christmas routine. But I don’t know what else to do.

The senior home puts up their Santa every year, so I see it on the rare instances I go down that street. Like so many other things – young boys his age, the guest room, the cemetery – I avoid walking down the street that took us to the day care most of the time. But it’s not a bad place to walk. And they do have a really nice Santa on display.

Merry Christmas everyone.

My phone had something like a near-death experience last week and, for a while, it seemed that the only way to fix it would be to get rid of a large number of copies of photos and videos stored there. That didn’t actually help the phone problem, but it did force me to confront an issue I’ve been dancing around for nearly two years.

Pictures of Colin throw me a bit for a loop. We do have a handful of photos we have on permanent display in the kitchen, living room and hallway … and I’ve gotten used to those, even treating them a little bit like old friends. I smile at them when I see them and tell him hello. If someone in the household is giving me attitude, I might confer with him via his photo. Maybe he has an idea on how to deal with teenagers.

But I’m leery about looking at other photos of him. Christina will, from time to time, tell me that she’s found this or that photo that she’d forgotten she had and try to show it to me. As often as not, I’ll beg off. Photos are fine. Watching previously unseen video of him comes with this bittersweet reminder of there was everything he could have been, right there on Christina’s screen, whereas the fact that he’s not there is pretty much etched into every corner of our household.

I did manage to look at one a while ago. It must have been from 2017. He was in the backyard with Ricardo, who was showing him how water came out of the house. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but there he was, in our backyard, getting his hands washed out of a house before scampering away. And then you look up into the real backyard and there’s no escaping it … there’s no Colin here.

The trip through my phone’s photo banks wasn’t so bad. Perhaps it was a good thing that I’d watched the video Christina had … the first video I’ve agreed to watch in a while. Perhaps that steeled me. But I kept noticing as the phone demanded I delete more to free up space, that I wasn’t willing to delete a single photo of Colin. And I’ve got backups of all of these photos on my laptop and a hard drive. The best ones are even printed out. So, deleting one of these images from my phone is not a big ask. And, at the same time, delete anything to do with Colin? Hell no.

But all the memories are tricky. At Thanksgiving, Ricardo told us how Colin would visit him in his room to listen to his music and then, sometimes, fall asleep wrapped in a blanket in front of the big window overlooking the back yard. I didn’t know any of my children were capable of peacefully drifting off to sleep, much less that this was something that happened with any regularity. I mean, of course, Ricardo had a whole relationship with Colin that didn’t involve me, but you also don’t expect to find out your dead pre-schooler had a whole schtick that he carried out without your ever knowing about it.

The memories are tricky. The kids are still much more prone to bring up Colin, and we can have a laugh at some old memories. And then they’ll go a step too far. Remember the time Colin got Emma in the face with the garden hose? General laughter. Can we talk about what kind of tumor he had? Stony silence. Remember how much he loved the Flash? Good memories. What would have happened to Colin if he were alive during the pandemic. Oh no, there is no way we’re having that conversation.

I suppose it’s the nature of this beast. Every time one thing starts feeling a little more normal, it opens up another chapter in the process that reminds you how off all of this is. But, for now, my phone is working again, and all the photos of Colin are still there. I just don’t look at them much.