Five Minus One

We did our first Thanksgiving in years on Friday (having a dinner of those dimensions on a Thursday that’s not a holiday here in Germany is impractical).

There’s some debate about when our last Thanksgiving dinner was. I feel it was in 2017, when we were invited to a friend’s. Christina says we must have done one since, but I can’t see how. In 2018, we would have been too distracted by Colin’s mounting health problems and, in 2019, I don’t think any of us were in much of a mood to give thanks, just two months after his death. And I’m pretty sure the logistics of trying to organize a Thanksgiving dinner during the pandemic were too daunting for us in 2020.

But this year, in 2021, we’re old hands at negotiating pandemics and lockdowns and the new variant of the day. So, with a lot of prompting by Ricardo, we went ahead and did it.

And it was good. I mean, I don’t know many better cooks than Christina, so there was never anything to worry about from that angle. And the company was great. It was a pleasant evening.

Now, we were never one of those families that set aside time during Thanksgiving to take a moment to say what we’re thankful for. Being German, my Mom went through a lot of these US holidays always a little unsure of what was expected of her. And my Dad was happy to just sit an eat. So, there wasn’t a lot of this looking back at the year and thinking about what we wanted to say thank you for.

And yet I know this is done and, even if I’m not going to make a room full of Germans participate in a tradition my family didn’t have, it’s there in the back of my head. And I want to be grateful. We’ve stayed healthy, the four of us. It looks like Noah is going to Gymnasium (the university-track education). I turned 50 without major incident and fulfilled a years-long dream of coming into possession of a lawn-mowing robot. You can accentuate the positive without forcing it.

But it was still (if I’m right) our first Thanksgiving dinner without Colin. And that stung a little bit. In the three or four Thanksgivings we had him, he managed to form some memories. I mean, in 2016, when we had our Thanksgiving and we were in spitting distance of our last major round of chemotherapy and getting the heart catheter removed, we were thankful beyond words. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t force everyone present to play the “I’m thankful” game, we were so euphoric and certain that we had gotten through the nightmare with nothing but a few scars and a reminder to be grateful for life. But there are quieter moments. I remember Thanksgiving 2015 wrapping up and, as we were all clearing up the table, finding Colin clinking sippy cups with another little boy his age, just a couple of German 1-year-olds getting ready for the day when they’d be doing the same thing with beer glasses. It’s one of the more adorable memories I have of him, moreso because that was all him and the other kids. No one set him up to create a memory so perfect. No one coaxed him into the corner and put the cup in his hand. They just did it, and I was thankful in that moment to have such a wonderful child.

So, then you jump ahead to another year where Germany seems to have gotten just about everything wrong with the virus and now we’ve got a new variant threatening to shred our lives and force us to lock away for the next couple of months, the “I’m grateful” game is hard. I can do it. I can tell you things for which I’m grateful. But everything I say is paired with – at least in my head – a “but it would be better if Colin were here.”

I say this looking ahead to Christmas, which will be our third without him. In 2019, I think we were all still shellshocked to really grasp what a holiday without Colin meant. Last year we were all disoriented by Covid-19. Now I look ahead to a month from now and it’s dawning on me that, even if there wasn’t a killer virus stalking us, none of these holidays are going to feel quite the same. They’ll be good and they’ll be fun and – at least this year – the contents of the stockings are going to be spectacular. But it’s never going to be the same.

I won the family debate about where we should go on our vacation this autumn, mostly by default, because neither Christina nor Noah made a suggestion, and partially by luck, because the only other suggestion was the Baltic Sea and none of us felt particularly warmed by heading to a northern German sea in October. So, off we went to Heidelberg.

It’s where I grew up, so I was excited. Indeed, had I not been restrained, I would have dragged the family to my old elementary, middle and high schools, which were spread out across two different military facilities in the city, and then insisted upon seeing what was left of the military headquarters where my Dad worked, followed by a side trip to the former US shopping center, which, if you believe Google Maps, is now part of the University of Heidelberg. As it was, we had to make do with the Hauptstrasse, the castle, a walk through my old neighborhood and several emotional reunions with my old school bus stop, all of which I can recommend if you ever find yourself in Heidelberg (except, perhaps, the bus stop).

We were there almost a week and, because of logistics, almost every time we drove anywhere else, we had to go through Heidelberg first. It was on about the fourth trip through the city (and past my bus stop), that I remembered that, back in 2016, Heidelberg had been one of the proposed destinations for Colin to go and get his radiation therapy. I remember being excited at the time: “Required trip to my hometown” I thought, somehow thinking we’d be able to squeeze in a walk downtown in between radiation blasts. In the end, we ended up going to Essen, which had its own array of pros and cons.

So, as I sat at this stoplight, looking at the city, I wondered how I would feel about Heidelberg if this had been where Colin had ended up going on our futile mission to rid him of his cancer. I can’t imagine it would have turned me off the city forever, but it would have put a stain on the memory, to be sure. I mean, I can’t say I have any strong hatred for Essen, but I was only there three times, never for long. Christina seems to go back and forth. I’ve heard her talking about heading back to the region once or twice, but I imagine she’d want to keep a wide berth of the hospital complex.

The memories don’t work quite right any more. There are days where I can almost convince myself that the whole thing was a terrible movie I was forced to watch. That I never had a third child. That I, for some reason, forced myself to spend five years watching a terrible movie that ends with a child dying. But only almost. But parts of the memories are fading. I can’t remember his voice. His smell. I’ve idealized him in my mind into the child who almost made it, but never fussed or complained or misbehaved. But I only have to concentrate a little harder to remember that’s not true.

I wish it worked more like a technical manual, so I could pick it up and think about it when I was inclined to do so and not when I didn’t. Instead, the memories fade and then they’re jogged back to the front when I’m not remotely ready for them, when I wonder “what if” about Heidelberg or when I find out through Noah that Emma no longer listens to this one’s children’s story because it reminds her too much about Colin. Like when I’m working innocently, reading through the Press Association’s news wire and run across a story about a new treatment for juvenile brain tumors that is showing promise and I’m so glad I’m not in the office, because I froze for what felt like five minutes, though it was probably only half a minute. Because I didn’t know if the tumor they were talking about was the one Colin had, because I did everything I could not to know the specifics of his case, just wanting to be his Dad for as long as I could and not having to really ever 100% know what an embryonic tumor really was. Because what good would it have done if I’d known it’s cellular structure. I just knew that it was in the wrong place, in my son’s neck.

I’d like to have my memories work normally. I’d like them to work like they do with my parents, whom I remember mostly fondly, even if I make an occasional exception for my Mom’s oddities. I want to be happy when I remember him. Instead, every memory feels like an introduction to a mine field. Like, don’t take that step, because you might find something you can’t control. It might blow up and take all of you with it. But, at the same time, pushing the memories aside clearly doesn’t work, because they just pop up.

We experimented with watching Curious George a few weeks ago and it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Maybe I should just dive into it and watch old videos of him. Maybe I shouldn’t. I wish I knew.

This showed up right before we went on vacation and we still haven’t quite decided how to go about it.

In case you’re wondering, “this” is the stone angel. Wasn’t there the next-to-last time Christina went to the gravesite, was right there in the middle of things the next time she showed up.

First of all, if the person who placed it reads this blog, we want to say thank you for the gesture. Given that one of my biggest fears will be that Colin will be forgotten, it heartens me whenever I see that someone has been to the grave and left flowers or just spent some time with him. On the other hand, we’re not sure what to do with the angel. It’s not us. It certainly doesn’t feel like Colin. So, we certainly appreciate the act of leaving the angel for him, we don’t think we want the angel there. Colin was sweet and fun and a handful, but he wasn’t an angel. He’d want a bust of Superman or a Ninjago character or Lightning McQueen or Curious George. I can only imagine his reaction to an angel.

But this isn’t supposed to turn into a public service announcement of what people should leave at the grave and how. Heaven knows, adding decorations to the site is preferable to subtraction: We still wonder what happened to the glass bauble that disappeared a few months ago. I think, in all fairness, if something gets left there and it doesn’t 100% agree with us, we might just move it to the side. We don’t aim to hurt anyone’s feelings, just sometimes we put our feelings first when it comes to Colin.

No, I’m writing because the act of an unknown party leaving something for Colin really got me thinking again about the places where we remember him. I still remain unmotivated to go to the cemetery, to be honest, so it’s almost hypocritical of me to care whether there’s a stone angel there or not. Christina tries to go once a week, but it’s not for me to write how she feels about the place.

What did strike me is that we were at the hospice at the weekend for an event and, as I always do, I took a moment to visit his stone at the pond. It looked strange this time, because they’ve covered the pond with netting to keep off leaves. From a distance it looked as if it had been filled in. But, upon closer inspection, everything is as it should be. Indeed, some gardener came through and fought back a big-leafed plant that had been threatening to cover the stone entirely.

I went twice. Once by myself while Christina was still parking the car and once with Christina. I think, mostly, I was astounded by how little out of the ordinary I felt at the site. When I was on my own, I even made a point of moving from bridge near his rock to the benches where we would sit with him to see if that would spark a feeling. But there was nothing special about the place for me, which struck me as strange. Which is not to say that I don’t miss my son, I just didn’t have that spike in emotions I’ve come to associate with the place. The first time I left after just a few minutes because it seemed like I should get back to the group. The second time we were called away within moments of arriving at the rock by the housekeeper, who wanted to say hi and bemoan to us the fact that she’s being kicked out of her apartment in a few days. That news prompted a bigger emotional reaction out of me than the act of visiting the stone.

Is this what time does to the mourning process? All the emotions are still there – I heard a podcast about a woman with terminal cancer today and all the emotions welled up just like they always do – but I find it’s become more of a numbness in the background. Even when it does perk up and hit me between the eyes, the sting only stays for a few minutes, not taking me to the depths like it used to.

I suppose, looking at it positively, he’s become more of an everyday presence, someone I think about multiple times a day. Looking at it negatively, I feel like it’s disrespecting him to lose my grief. And I can’t even say “Well, that’s what he would have wanted,” because he was too young to understand the concepts of death, grief and loss. He just showed up and burned out before the world could get its hooks into him, which is also sort of a reason to be happy sometimes.

So, maybe I’m moving beyond the markers – which feels really stupid, given the time and money we invested into finding a plot and a headstone – or maybe it’s just an evolving journey and, in a few months, I’ll be telling you a completely different story. He deserves to be remembered: That’s what I do know. A gravesite is a good way to do it. And everyone deserves a chance to go there and remember him in their own way. And, as his parents, we reserve the right to take charge of the site every now and then. But that said, thank you to whoever thought of him. It is appreciated.

For the first time in a while, I’ve not been sure what to add to this blog, as might have been obvious by the more than two weeks that have passed since my last post.

Some of it might be professional pride. There are only so many variations I can use to write “I miss Colin” or “It would have been better if he hadn’t died” or “It’s very hard to keep on going without him.” As a writer, I want to do something a little different every time I sit down. And yet, it’s only been weeks since I wrote that I need to keep this blog going. Not for the couple of dozen of people who follow it. Not even for me. But for Colin. He only got five years and almost two of them were spent with his illness hanging over him like a dead weight. So, I have to keep trying.

And it’s not as if nothing new has happened. The apple in the photo is from Colin’s tree, the one his day care gave to us after he died. It still barely comes to my waist, but it produced five fairly big apples this year. None of us has trusted ourselves to cut into it and taste it, but, from appearances, it’s nicer and bigger than most of the apples that come off of our significantly taller and older apple tree in the same yard. It is coincidence? Is it a sign? you know that we choose to go with the version of the story that makes this a sign of Colin looking down on us.

Perhaps the gap in writing can be attributed to my 50th birthday. And it’s not as if I feel much older or wiser (certainly not much wiser, when I think about certain irresponsible behavior with alcohol on the night of my party), but I find myself getting hit with the idea of my age that much more often, in ways I don’t really remember since when I was about 7, and had a week of sleepless nights when I finally had the realization that I would grow old and die. Notice that, when I was 7, the possibility of a young death didn’t even enter my mind. I tried to picture how I would look when I was old and remember being terrified by the idea that I would be frail and helpless. And it’s not quite as bad this time – honestly, I’m in far better shape than I would have ever expected at age 50 – but there are the moments. It probably didn’t help that, in the week before my birthday, I had to write or translate accounts of people dropping dead at 54 or 57, which feels very close. And, true, I shouldn’t lose sleep when thinking about the case of Michael Williams – I have no plans to pick up a drug dependency in the next four years – but then there was a recent case of the German ambassador to Beijing who dropped dead about a month ago. If there’s been a cause of death, I still don’t know it. And he was 54. And I suppose things like that freak me out a little bit more than they did pre-50.

I keep coming back to the idea that so many people are freaking out about the pandemic because it’s made it so clear to so many people in denial that we’ll all die some day, and it might not be peacefully in bed when you’re 90. It might be a truck or a stupid virus or it might be cancer. I hate how well we’re aware of the fact. My children know they’re not mortal. Aside from that weird week when I was 7, I spent most of my childhood thinking I’d live forever. Now I feel like a harbinger of death most days, always reminding everyone that their kids might be the next to die and that, yes, they too, will also die.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think people dread my presence. If you squint and apply enough alcohol, you can forget the worst of it. But it will just keep coming up at the moments you least expect it and then I’ll have to be the one reminding everyone that you’re going to die, because my son did, so I’m well aware these things are going to happen. And I know you all know that. All I can say is that my awareness of death now versus how I felt before Colin got his death sentence has been pretty radical.

So, I guess, reading this, I know why I’ve been avoiding another blog because, this is some depressing stuff. But, then again, I don’t suppose anyone tunes in here for their daily dose of positivity.

Life goes on. Perhaps in turning 50, I’ve decided to resist the virus. In the last two weeks, aside from my party, I’ve been to: a bar; a restaurant (actually, the same restaurant twice); a sauna; and a house party. Precautions were taken each time, but we still went. So, I don’t think anyone is laying down and waiting to die. At the same time, at the bar, which was a work event, I finally met a colleague I’ve only ever gotten to know via Slack. And I couldn’t help myself. At some point, pretty much out of the blue, I found myself telling her about Colin, because I thought she should know. Because if I keep telling his story, then he’s not quite 100% dead. I suppose it all flows together, moving on with my life and holding on to his life and death at the same time.

Hopefully the next blog will be more of an upper. Perhaps we’ll try the apples and I can give an update on those. Take care everyone.

A friend asked yesterday how I thought I would get through today. I responded, as I always do, that the known anniversaries are, in some ways, the easiest. You mentally brace yourself and put up your shields. You fear it’s going to be a rough ride, so you brace yourself for the worst and, so far when it’s over, you look back and wonder “What was I so worried about?”

Instead, it’s the unexpected that gets you. To prove the point, less than an hour after the phone conversation, Emma began singing “Baby Shark” and, after twice asking her to stop singing had to raise my voice just a little bit because I felt it wouldn’t take that much to turn that incident into a nervous breakdown for me.

Aside from the fact that it’s an incredibly annoying song, it’s a melody I associate with Colin’s decline. Colin was always a ridiculously early riser, and it seemed to get worse the sicker he got. Emin, one of the best nurses we had, was left one morning with Colin awake at about 4 am and, in desperation handed Colin his smartphone and opened it up to Youtube, where Colin found a seemingly neverending supply of videos about toys based on the Cars series. There were videos of people building Lego cars. There were videos of the Lego bricks stop animating themselves into their stacks of colors. There were videos of the cars being washed and sorted. There were some in English and some in Russian and some in Portuguese and so, so many of them had “Baby Shark” as background music.

Colin loved this. He also, unfortunately, had about a 75-second attention span, so as you lay with him at 5 a.m., wondering what on God’s Earth it would take to break the internet and make that song stop, you also wondered why you couldn’t possibly finish one single video. Would the stacks of Legos ever reassemble? Would the cars ever get clean? How many more languages could they do this in?

It’s odd that this is one of the strongest memories of those two months. I still can’t believe we really did it. We had been told he more or less had a death sentence, but, when the second doctor said that the results were inconclusive, we grabbed onto that wisp of hope and held onto it for dear life, no matter how bad the nurses were and no matter how many damned times it meant we had to listen to “Baby Shark.”

But I think I’m done listening to the song now. On multiple levels.

Which I guess is my way of saying, I think we’ll be OK today. We spent yesterday making new candles for Colin. We even watched some episodes of Curious George, which, despite all the hours we spent watching that while he was sick, is not such an awful memory, so long as you don’t watch the damned camping episode, because it’s not like I’m a super experienced camper, but I know it’s not camping if you basically take an apartment in a camper into the woods and, if I do that, I don’t park it under a potential waterfall.

But my dislike of that episode is neither here nor there. Today, we know it’s going to be a little rough, so we’re buckled in. On Monday, we didn’t know what was coming our way, so when Emma woke up with her nightmare, everything felt a tad off. I spent the day walking around the house, feeling like I did in September 2019 when we finally returned home from the hospice, trying to reassure myself that this is where I actually lived and this is where it happened and, for lack of a better phrase, get myself used to the place again. Like, we’d changed so much in that time watching Colin die, that the house was wrong for us, like a sweater that comes out of the wash shrunken. It felt a little bit like that on Monday too.

Today, it feels fine. I had a nice birthday, with time to sit and read, cake with the kids, an incredibly successful attempt on Christina’s part to recreate one of the dishes my Mom always made and then a few beers with a buddy. The big birthday gift – a lawnmower robot! – is on its way here, as Christina decided to hide it with her parents in advance of the birthday. Tomorrow I’ll have a party. And today, we’re going to take our candles and go to the graveyard and say hi to Colin. We might even be there at the excat time of his death: 4:50. Which makes me feel odd that I can’t remember the specific times of my kids’ births, but the time of Colin’s death is burned into the brain core. It still doesn’t feel to me like the cemetery is a place where he really is. I’m actually starting to think about finally properly setting up our Colin corner in the guest room, since I think that might feel like a better place to remember him. Then again, when he died, I was convinced I needed a spot in the cemetery to be with him, and I barely ever go there. So, who knows? Maybe today will end up being awful. Maybe it will be as good as it can be. We just take it one memory at a time.

A friend visited a few weeks ago and, coming across our Shelf of Colin in the kitchen asked “Who’s this?”

I think we forget how few people actually met Colin or the last 2-3 years of his life, because we were so busy whisking him from hospital to hospital or keeping people at bay while he was recovering from chemotherapy. I imagine, for some people, they know much more about him through my blogging than through any actual contact they ever had with him. How would they have?

Nonetheless, my eyes met Christina and, speaking only for myself, there was a range of emotions that began with “This can’t be for real” to “Dear God, people are forgetting him already.”

That quote from “The Boys,” about people only finally dying when their name is spoken the last time, sticks with me. And I suppose the idea that his memory is fading is a slight reason to panic. Like I have to fight that much harder to hold on to him.

Of course, the wrong people remember. It’s also been a few weeks since we got a letter from the bank, urging the heirs of Colin Christop Sorrells (why they couldn’t manage the ‘her’ to complete his middle name is beyond me) that a superior court ruling had rendered null and void parts of the contract governing his bank account, the account I closed nearly two years ago with some red-eyed teller whom I’d never seen before who, like so many other people, felt the need to tell me that he also had children and couldn’t imagine losing them. And I’m not mad at him for saying that, but one gets dulled down by that particular line. Like, it’s not something you want to imagine, so don’t try, OK?

And then the right people remember, but when you don’t expect it. I’ve written before how I envy the kids for being able to speak about Colin in the present tense and to still laugh about his memory. But also worrying that it means they’re letting him go to quickly. But then Emma woke up crying today after a nightmare about Colin. She was shaken so badly we kept her home from school. And I can’t tell what’s worse, then seeming to forget him or them going through the hell of remembering him.

And then, when she said the dream had started with good memories of Colin and then turned into bad ones, I told her to focus on the good ones. But I don’t even know what I’m talking about there, because it’s so hard for me to remember the good ones. It’s like they’re locked in a box and I can’t get to them until I wade through all the memories of the chemotherapy and the useless nurses and my trepidation about going to his grave. So, how can I get mad at people for remembering him wrong when my memories are so out of whack?

I suppose it’s the week for this. Because it’s the way the world works, I turn 50 on Wednesday, then we hit our two-year mark since Colin’s death on Friday and then I’m having a birthday party for myself on Saturday, which feels weird every time I write the sentence down and realize what this sequence of events means. I’m ambivalent about turning 50: I thought I’d look older at this point. I’m not thinking about the two-year anniversary. I’m throwing the party because it’s sort of what you do when you turn 50 in Germany and because, after this nightmare pandemic, I think we all deserve a breather. And I guess I wish we could have the party a few weeks or months later, to give us some space from the anniversary of Colin’s death, but who knows when this pandemic will end, and the later we push it, the more likely we are to end up having a party indoors and risking becoming a superspreader event. That’s just the way the world works. You take the good and you take the bad and you try your best to remember it all in a way that doesn’t wreck your head.

This guy showed up on top of our mailbox a day or so ago. In all likelihood, some neighborhood kid dropped it in front of our house and someone else, assuming it belonged to this household, put it on top of our mailbox so that the owners could reclaim it.

I’m opting to believe something less likely. I can choose to believe that someone out there knew of Colin’s brief obsession – none of his obsessions really got to play out, to be honest – with “Ninjago.” If I’m not very much mistaken, these are the bad guys from season 1, the snakes. It was one of the few shows Colin would watch happily during the two months he was at home on the feeding tube, which was critical, since we had to more or less immobilize him in front of the TV while the food was going in. In one of those “I can’t believe this is a problem moments,” he first became obsessed with season 1 and then with only a few select episodes of that season, leaving me there to watch with him, wishing – on top of my wishes that the cancer would go away or that the nursing company would turn competent – that we could just get to season 2 so I could see how the story went on, or at least see a new episode, with new material and jokes, as repetitive as they might be from episode to episode and season to season.

Suffice to say, I got to know the snakes very well. But, since we watched most of season 1 out of order, it took a very long time until I sorted out why there were so many different ones, which was the real problem, why some of them had legs, etc. etc. It was a way to pass the time during those two months of worrying, not eating and wondering if he was really going to die.

And then one of the snakes appears on our mailbox and, why not let it be a kind memory of someone thinking about Colin? Why let it be as mundane as a dropped toy?

For a year and a half now, I’ve sat in this den facing the street, doing my day job while we all wonder when we’re ever going to get back to the office regularly. I must admit, my goal is to never go to the office, but that’s a different story. And I sit here, looking out onto the street and have become pretty familiar with which neighbors jog and which neighbors walk dogs and which kids come by regularly and even which one has a unicycle. I’ve noticed of late that people seem to be stopping in front of the house and pointing. Christina will probably obsess that our front yard is so ugly it’s making people stop and point, but I would submit there’s at least one yard on our street uglier, so I don’t think that’s it. What it is, I have no idea. A part of me fears that it’s children and parents stopping to point at the house of the dead child. More than once I’ve thought about popping out front and just asking “What are you talking about? What is so interesting that you’re stopping and pointing?”

I don’t really believe they’re talking about Colin. Just like I don’t really believe some kid sacrificed his Lego toy as a memorial to Colin. But I also don’t mind a world where people offer up a toy to remember Colin every now and then. It might be the best version of the world I can summon up these days.