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Hard to hold

We got rid of some old mattresses a few weeks ago. You would have thought Noah had been locked in a dark room all summer: He acted like this was the highlight of his vacation. In fairness, it was a little exciting, because the easiest way to get them out of the house was to toss them out of the guest room window, to the patio below, before transporting them to the dump. Each removal came with a satisfying thump, as we shot a mattress to the ground and managed not to flatten anyone.

So, that was fun. And no, there’s no real denying that throwing mattresses out a window isn’t fun. But then, with me, there’s always the question if I can enjoy things like this. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with tricks with gravity, but because two of the mattresses we ditched were ones Colin had used.

We weren’t getting rid of them specifically because Colin had used them. They didn’t fit into any of our current bed frames, which was a major consideration. But there was also the reality that the mattresses were unusable. He slept on them in the guest room during the two-month interregnum between therapy and the hospice, during that whole stretch where Christina was fighting with the insurance company to get us a medical bed for Colin, the insurer fighting every step of the way. It finally arrived a month or two after we got into the hospice.

Anyways, he laid on those mattresses, and it was awkward for the minders, because they had to get down on their knees to do anything for him. And the mattresses got trashed, because there was always an accident with a feeding tube or his diaper or what-not. The mattresses were trash. They had to go.

And yet, they were his.

And I’m writing a little blind here, because I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. I certainly don’t want to hold on to every little thing that he ever touched, especially not something as mundane as a mattress. But it’s also true that there’s a closet full of his clothes that I’ve only ever worked up the courage to peek at two or three times since he died. There are also plans floating out there to set up a shelve of Colin’s things in the guest room, which we’ve done almost nothing about since he died.

We also, while we were in the hospice, took a footprint of each member of the family. It was one of the first things we did in the hospice, and I remember it kind of being a fun day, given everything. Colin, of course, wouldn’t participate, so I had to wait until he was passed out one night to take his footprint. I counted that as a pretty major victory. There was talk, once we had all the footprints gathered and scanned in, that we would make some kind of wall art for our hallway. Like fireworks of footprints, which sounded kind of nice, if not something I might have thought about doing under any other circumstances.

Yet we haven’t really done a single thing regarding those either.

I think, what I’m trying to get at, is the difficulty of weighing his things. We can’t get rid of it all. We can’t save it all. I want to feel an emotional resonance every time I touch something that was his, but I don’t always get that. Today, I looked at the English-language children’s books and realized I don’t feel as much of a gut punch as I would have thought. Then again, I had the thought for this entry while I was doing my stretching exercises in the dining room and it hit me a bit in the gut that I shouldn’t have time for these exercises. I should be chasing a 7-year-old. I should have spent the last year sitting at that dining table with him, helping him with the schoolwork that he couldn’t do in school because of the lockdown. Instead, I’ve got time to write blogs and exercise and try to push ahead with a whole range of household projects that have very little to do with any memory of Colin.

I realize it’s not one of my more coherent entries. I suspect it’s because I haven’t really processed all the thoughts. It’s because I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to get emotional about getting rid of mattresses. Yet, at the same time, I wish I did. That’s about it in a nutshell.

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Essay assignments, part 3

Well, as my Dad always told me – or as I’m sure he would have, had blogging been much of a thing before he died – “If you run a blog on grief and your therapist gives you a writing assignment, well then, that’s a blog entry already written.”

So, this is what my therapist and I will be discussing during our penultimate session tomorrow:

            The more I thought about why I don’t go into our guest room, the more I realized I couldn’t think of a good reason not to go into it.  So, I decided to go to the source and spend half an hour in the room.

            I thought I would catch up on emails.  Instead, Noah showed up and wanted nothing more than a 20-minute cuddle, which was probably the best way to handle being in the room.  So, I sat there, with my surviving son, saying nothing but looking at the room.  We’ve changed some of the furniture around since Colin stayed in the room, but the posters are still up.  Those are the posters I put up in a rush in 2019 when he was coming back from the rehab facility and I thought, since he would be spending a lot of time in the room, it would be nice for him if he had things to look at.  Of course, since I didn’t have time to buy posters, I just put up old ones that we had.  Looking at it now, I wondered whether he truly benefited from an old poster of Heidelberg or a National Geographic map of the United States.  Did he ever even notice those posters during all those hours he spent in the room, since he so rarely slept?  I think not, since most of his attention while he was in the room was focused on medical care, or playing with his tablet.  I remember Christina set up a bird feeder at the window because she thought he might enjoying watching the birds.  I think the minders got more out of it than Colin ever did.

            I thought about how it must have been to lay there.  I thought about the fact that he almost certainly didn’t understand anything that was happening to him.  There were no traumatic flashbacks or unearthed memories.  But it felt like dancing along the edge of a minefield.  I think about Colin all the time and I can find a memory of him and his death forced by the strangest everyday things.  And I guess that might be the answer: I’m so prone to thinking about him and what happened to him and the ridiculous possibilities that, maybe, some of it was my fault, I don’t see the point in going into his room or intentionally translating stories about dying children and diving right into the pain.  It comes all on its own unbidden with enough regularity.  Why go hunting trouble?

            So, I’ll go into the room when I have to and I’ll translate stories about terminally ill children if that’s what the job requires.  But I’m not going to seek out those experiences, because I don’t enjoy the sad memories.  I’m just reaching the point where I can look at pictures of him and smile and remember the fun moments without having them weighed down by the awful events of 2019.  I’ll take more of those any day.  Why do something that will almost certainly dredge up bad memories when those come all the time anyways?

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Essay assignments, part 2

Well, the writing assignments from the hospice and my therapist weren’t the only thing I had to write up. The problem is that I’m turning 50 this year.

And yes, that’s a problem on multiple levels, because I’m still mentally stuck in 1987, but the specific problem coming up here is that it’s a little traditional – I mean, not an absolute must – but a little traditional to throw a big party for yourself in Germany when you hit a big birthday like that. And, after the last year or so of hell, a party seems really nice.

Now, there is, of course, the question of whether it will be wise to have a party given how coronavirus case counts are going: We’ll cross that bridge when we get there and reschedule as necessary. Our issue is the date. Because, due to whichever forces you want to blame, Colin died two days after my birthday in 2019. So, the for the rest of my life, there will be this extra mini cosmic reminder of my son’s death.

  • Everyone else: “Looking forward to your birthday?”
  • Me, trying not to bum the world out: “Oh, you know…

So, it is odd writing up a save-the-date/invitation with this double whammy of global pandemic and personal loss. We think we’ve gotten it, but it’s hard to say “Oh, this is the perfect invitation” when you know you’re planning a party for the day after the anniversary of your son’s death. Then again, one of my favorite pieces of fiction is the Sandman comic in which, the main character, talking to his son, whose wife recently died, tells him: “You’re alive. So live.”

I don’t take this to mean I can’t be sad about Colin, pretty much all the time. But I can still take what life gives to me. I mean, I hate to say things like “Colin would have wanted you to have fun,” because I don’t really think any pre-schooler – let alone one who had to go through what Colin did – really thinks much about other people’s happiness. But I also like to think there’s some version of Colin out there who is simultaneously capable of wanting to be remembered, but also wants me and Christina and the kids to still do the best we can with what we’ve got left here.

So, if you’re thinking about being anywhere near Berlin on September 18, do let me know.

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Essay assignments

I’m being asked to write down a lot of my thoughts these days, which is a bit of a challenge, because I find my thoughts are a bit more all over the place than usual. Maybe it’s just the shock of returning to work after nearly three weeks away. Maybe it was the distance I had without any kids in the house for more than a week. Maybe it’s the thoughts that go through one’s head as one approaches one’s 50th birthday.

I mean, the problem isn’t that I don’t enjoy writing (Example 1: this blog), it’s that I’m being asked to answer such specific things regarding Colin and our life without him.

So, in our final two sessions, my therapist and I are going to look at a writing assignment I was given. On the one hand – yay! – I get homework from my doctor that doubles as a blog entry. On the other hand, I actually have to do it.

He knows me well enough to know that I’ll forget an assignment if he only give it to me orally, so he sent me this email a day or so after our last session, changing the project from what we’d originally discussed, but at least putting it down so I couldn’t forget it. Here’s the questions I’m supposed to answer.

What am I afraid of when I fear I get triggered (like with the translation of the acrticle) In yourself that is, not what others might feel, but what are you afraid could happen within you or to you. What feelings might come up (the ones you said could be unpleasanr). Why are they unpleasant? What would you feel about having these emotion?

What am I afraid of happening or feeling when I have to go into te room C. used to be in? Why do I avoid it?

The article refers to an assignment at work where I sent back an item to the desk, saying I wasn’t up to translating a German-language article about a critically ill child. The room is a reference to the fact that I don’t particularly enjoy going into the room Colin stayed in for the two months he was here before we took him to hospice.

I’m still trying to figure out the answer. The best I have right now is “Why put myself through it?” but that seems like a weak answer. And it’s not as if I haven’t translated terrible stories since Colin’s death and just gotten through it. And it’s not as if I never go into the guest room. I’m contemplating just sitting in it for an hour or so sometime in the next day to see how I feel. Perhaps I’m just worried that I’ll realize it doesn’t feel any different than an average Thursday.

Meanwhile, before the kids went off, we were supposed to fill out a questionnaire, which the chaperones would then share with the kids at the end.

The questions, translated from German are:

We think it’s good that you’re going on the sibling trip because…

My hopes for you are…

During the week you’re gone, we are going to…

The thing about you I’ll miss most…

The thing I most value about you is…

The thing it’s especially nice to do with you is…

The one other thing I want to say is….

I’m not going to share how we filled out the form, partly because the forms should probably be private and partially because the answers weren’t all that exciting. Like, I wanted to write something deep and touching. And my motivations were deeper than “I want you out of the house for a week so I have one week less of summer break dragging you out of bed before noon.” But it was hard to answer some of the others.

Like, the question about what we’ll do while they were gone was simple: We went to Saxony for a few days. What we value about them was also easy: They’re great kids. But what did I hope for them out of this? I don’t know. What can one gain from being with a group of other kids who have also lost siblings? Do you share stories about the misery? About the deceased? How can I expect my kids to process these emotions with other kids when I find it so hard myself to say what I’m thinking about Colin’s death?

I might go on a trip with my men’s group in October and I wonder if it will really be helpful, or just an excuse to drink beer? Granted, I’m a little intimidated by doing this all in German: I do grief better in my native language. But the few visits I attended before the pandemic struck left me uncertain if this group – or any group – was the right one for me. One guy lost his kid 20 years ago and he’s pretty much come to terms with hit. The other guy lost his daughter a few years ago and says he refuses to go into her old bedroom, which makes me feel good about my relationship with Colin’s old room, but doesn’t really get me anywhere. One guy I can barely understand when he speaks and another seems permanently angry, but never seems to follow through on his plans to change his life.

So, what do I say to Emma and Noah as I send them off to grief camp? “Hope you unpack the emotions I’m still working through?”

The thing is, we still don’t understand what’s going through their heads. On the surface, they seem to be pretty normal and at ease with the situation. But you can’t help but think they’re like a duck, paddling furiously beneath the still waters. I just listened to an episode of “This American Life,” in which a woman talked about the death of her twin sister when she was 9. Meghan, the survivor, said she then spent the rest of her life doing everything she could to have a life twice as good, since she now had to live for Sybil, the deceased. Sybil had loved dance. Meghan hated it. So, Meghan signed up for dance class for Sybil. Meghan wasn’t athletic, but she felt she owed it so Sybil to run a nine-minute mile to win a presidential academic achievement award. She made sure she got into the best college possible, for Sybil. I’m not saying my kids are doing any of this, but you wonder.

I think that’s the thing I keep trying to convey to the rest of the world. I might look like I’m doing great six days of the week, but the seventh is a doozy. And, even if I’m doing good on a particular day, I can’t guarantee you that the rest of my family is on that day, so that counts as a down day for me. The proper response when a family member tells you “I’m grieving Colin especially badly today” is never “Yeah? Well, I’m doing spectacularly well today!” So it’s a lot to hold together and a lot to write about.

The kids are back and have already read their letters … and given us zero feedback. My writing assignment for Dr. Kehrer is due a week from Friday. We’ll have to see how that goes.

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Empty house

A full day after sending Emma and Noah off on what would feel like a normal summer camp – except it’s run by the hospice and for children who have either lost siblings or are living with siblings with long-term special needs – it seemed like a good time to write this entry that has been knocking around in my head for a long time, looking for a point when it would be good to write it.

I think one of the biggest trials we face as parents after Colin’s loss is making sure that the other two turn out OK. And it’s so hard to gauge how they’re doing. They seem OK. So, does that mean they’re good at rolling with the punches? That they should be acting more upset and their relative normalcy is in itself a sign we should worry? Two years ago, while we were in the hospice watching Colin die, I would have assumed they’d be emotional messes after his death. As it is, I can count on one hand the times either of them has had a meltdown about it.

At times, it veers into dark comedy. A scene from Emma’s first week in her new high school last year. We opted to send her to a private Catholic school, so it’s a bit of a hike from our house and she doesn’t know a soul at this school. There might be some kids who came over together from the Catholic elementary school, but, in general, this new group of kids is a group of strangers.

Now, Christina had warned the school’s administration about Colin’s death when we enrolled Emma, but the head office never bothered to tell her homeroom teachers. So, like, on day two of school, the kids were assigned to write up a little introduction to present to the class. Emma was, like, the second kid to go, and led straight out the door with the death of her little brother.

This is the moment when I wonder if I’m damaged goods, because I see this scene and it feels like the darkest, dark comedy I can imagine. The poor teachers have not been prepared for it at all. There must have been about 20 kids sitting there, looking at their notes, thinking “Um, can I not be called on next? Because I do not feel good about talking about my Star Wars collection after THAT.” From what we’ve been told, the rest of the class rose to the challenge and quickly gave Emma a lot of support. So, that’s great. But what interests me about it is how this has just become such a simple fact to the kids’ day-to-day existence. No lead-up. No warming up to the topic. Just ‘my brother’s dead and that’s who I am.’ This is reality to them; everyone else has to figure it out.

I suppose I’m a little jealous about how black and white it is for them. During a medical checkup two weeks ago, the question of “how many children” came up and I must have hemmed and hawed through the answer for two minutes. Friday I went to the flower shop to get a bouquet for Christina’s birthday and the sales lady asked how old my kids were. When I said 11 and 13, I could see the surprise in her eyes, because I never took Emma and Noah there. I was always there with Colin, and he’d only be 7. So, I had to explain that and, even though this was the easiest ‘My son is dead’ reveal I’ve had in an age, it was still awkward.

None of that for Emma and Noah. It’s not as if they’re in denial. They’re just so matter of fact about it. As we left their grandparents’ on Thursday, Noah said he would wave like Colin, which involves only bending the top two knuckles of each finger, no wrist movement whatsoever. And it’s great that he has this memory of his brother, but it always takes me by surprise that he doesn’t feel this need to warn us that “I’m going to bring up a memory of Colin now, so brace yourself.” And why should he? He knows his brother is dead, but he’s still part of his life. I notice, when the kids talk about Colin, it’s always in the present tense. If we find one of his toys, it’s always “Oh, that is Colin’s,” never “Oh, that was Colin’s”

A while back, after we got our Switch, and when they were obsessed with this Mario racing game, I noticed that they had created a new avatar. Looking more closely, I realized it was named Colin. I asked and, indeed, they had created a Colin avatar with which they race. So, on some level, their dead brother is living, digitally, racing against Mario and Wario in a game that makes my thumbs hurt if I play it for more than one round. Yes, I fought back some questions about whether they thought this was a good idea and whether that was the best way to remember their brother when I noticed it, but mostly, it felt good to have him here on some level.

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All y’all

There was an informal family reunion on my wife’s side in Bavaria this weekend. Among the people I’ve barely seen in the last year due our never-ending lockdown was a relative who’d recently undergone a heart procedure and is still in recovery mode. He’s actually younger than me, so it was a bit of a shock to be reminded that I’m well into the demographic where this kind of thing can happen to a person and that there are no guarantees these kinds of things turn out OK.

Bear in mind, I live in a world where I’m perpetually 27. Yes, my eyes have gotten worse and I realize that I go full “old man” when I try to bend down to pick something up. Then again, I wasn’t in great shape for a lot of my 20s, so, relatively speaking, things are kind of OK. So, it’s still kind of eye-opening to remember that health problems do happen. And, of course, after what happened to Colin, I should be more aware than most that health problems can come out of the blue and hit those whom we’d least expect to get smacked down.

But I recently heard a radio show with an interview with an actor whose son had also died. His son, I think, was younger than Colin when he died and I think a brain tumor was also involved. I have to admit, I only half-listened and then tried to shove the information to a further recess of my mind almost as soon as I heard it, because I don’t like dwelling on other people’s dead children any more than I like thinking about my own. But I remember this actor saying how unbelievable it was, this knowledge that your child was going to die. He said he’d have been less surprised by aliens landing on his front yard, because that seems less strange than hearing “Your son is going to die, and there is nothing you can do but watch and make sure he gets to watch Curious George right up until the moment he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.”

So, of course, I worry about my health, but I also don’t spend any more time than necessary thinking about my own mortality or that of my loved ones.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself, because when you’re shoved back into a room full of relatives, it’s hard not to think of the ones who aren’t there. My father-in-law is focused on having photos of all his grandchildren. And I get it and I get that he’s not consciously forgetting Colin when he decides to get a photo with all the grandchildren on one of the rare occasions that they’re all in the same place. At the same time, there’s the realization that they’re not all there. I had worried that I would make a scene if he tried to take the photo and then got secretly excited when it sounded like one of the grandkids wouldn’t make it after all. But then they were all there and they got lined up for their photos and, it was painful enough to see them all there without Colin, so I stayed inside while they did their photo shoot on the lawn, but it was still nice enough to see them all together that I watched with half an eye the whole time they posed. It’s hard to say: Does the sadness that Colin wasn’t there at the end when they lined up from oldest to youngest – that spot now taken by Noah – get blunted somewhat by the fact that, thanks to my genes, when they line up from tallest to shortest, Noah moves to the middle of the group? I suppose it’s something.

The relative with the heart problem spent some time telling me how his convalescence comes and goes in waves. There will be days and days of feeling better, and then along comes a day where he can barely get out of bed. It didn’t sound all that dissimilar from coping with grief, where I’ll have days and days of feeling like I’m functioning normally, only to run across that one picture or old toy or whatever it takes to leave me near sobbing for a half day.

Of course, as we were talking, one of the nephews showed up to ask our heart patient how his heart was doing. Which was a very nice thing to do. But you also notice that no one asks you how you’re coping still, surrounded by his absence. Maybe it’s assumed that, almost two years down the road, this is just what you do. Maybe people just don’t want to talk about it. But still, you at least feel that grief is most appreciated if you just keep it to yourself. I had to make a point, kind of loudly once or twice, to point out how Emma and Noah are going away with others kids from the hospice who have lost siblings next week, just to get it out there that we’re not a whole family any more. And I know that they know. But I also know they weren’t going to make any reference to it, so I had to at least put it out there.

I’d found myself a few weeks ago wondering why I didn’t dream of him more often. It seems like the least my subconscious can do is let me pretend I’m hanging out with him from time to time. Then I had two dreams about him in a week. The one was utterly banal: We were sitting at our table, eating. I think he asked for ketchup. The other was more involved. My subconscious had aged him to make him look like he was 7. And I only remember Ricardo showing up and giving him a hug, which Colin didn’t want. It was confusing, but it felt good to see him, whatever the dreams meant.

Maybe getting together with all the family kicked that loose. I don’t have a ton of memories about him from here in Bavaria. It’s almost like a reverse memory: Me sitting around here trying to figure out how I have so much time to read and be social. Most of my memories of my children here when they were younger involved the endless child safety routines of getting them up and down the stairs of this townhouse and trying to get him to lie down to sleep in an unfamiliar bed and then, once he was asleep, spending every minute downstairs with the adults terrified that he’d wake up and start goofing around and slipping down all those stairs, beacause it’s a townhouse that feels like it’s made of 80% stairs. Maybe I needed to force a few memories to the surface.

Because you do wonder what memories will remain and which will prove important. As the whole family gathered here in Bavaria, my eyes were drawn to a family photo of one group. I know for a fact that the photo was taken in Berlin and I know they took that the day after Colin’s funeral, because we all had to get out of the house, so they took their kids downtown. And I can’t fault them for that and, God knows, if you get a picture where everyone is looking halfway normal and at the camera, that’s what you use for your Christmas card photo that year. So, I don’t judge. But I know when that photo was taken, and I wonder why we don’t talk more about Colin when we all get together.

Then again, while we were in the train on a side trip to Regensburg last week, family came up and I was reminding Emma of my aunts and uncles and stopped myself when I said my mother had three siblings because, of course, she had four. It’s just that one sister died as a young child during the war – I believe of scarlet fever – so she wasn’t much more than a memory by the time I came along. I don’t remember my mother ever talking about her that much or showing much in the way of sadness at the death of this sister, whose name I can’t even remember.

It worries me that that’s what’s going to happen to Colin. His will be the sad story of the little boy who got stuck with an incurable tumor, but people will start to forget his name or the fact that he was obsessed with Fireman Sam. We’ll always have the relatives’ great family photo in front of the Brandenburg Gate. How long can we keep alive the fact that, as long as he could, he knew which Cars cars were allowed by his bedside and which weren’t?

Christina mentioned to me a few weeks ago that I should maybe think about making the blog about other things, other than Colin. And there’s a point to that. There are only so many variations of the sentence “It’s hell to lose a child” that you can write and only so many ways to repeat the obvious truth that it’s hell to go through it. I notice that this is about the longest gap I’ve had between entries in an age, which was partly a function of Noah’s birthday, the end of the school year, our trip to Bavaria and a lot of appointments coming together to take away all of my free time. But it also felt good to not think about the blog. But I also can’t imagine that I’ll stop it, not because I feel I have an adoring public that is hanging on the words I write, but because I think I need my moments with Colin and, even if I only write here once a year, it’s something I’m doing for Colin and it’s one little thing I can do for him to remind the world that he was here and he was special and he was pretty fun. That’s not going to get him back into any of the grandkid photos, but it’s better than letting him get forgotten.

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Milestones

This week feels a little different. Like a lot of things are coming together and maybe next steps are becoming possible.

Because it’s me, I remain most excited about tomorrow’s haircut. But that’s probably far from the most significant step. First off, I got my first dose of vaccine on Tuesday. So far I’ve noticed no complications, aside from the fact that, the way I understand the calendar, I won’t be fully vaccinated until Friday the 13th (in August), which seems like a weird coincidence that I’m just not going to overthink.

I will also meet with Dr. Kehrer on Thursday to start the final sessions in my therapy, which will be bittersweet, but it’s at least motion in a direction.

And, as of this weekend, I’ve stopped wearing compression stockings full-time.

These fashion accessories were thrust upon me way back in 2016 after I had my first embolism. I had to wear them on any day when I was sitting for a long time, ie working or traveling. By the time the new embolism struck last year, I had reduced my time wearing them exclusively to time working or car trips of more than an hour. I had grown so lax in my mind that we were several months into the pandemic when Christina pointed out that even if I was only sitting around the house doing my job, it still counted as ‘sitting at work’ and I should probably have been wearing my stockings that whole time too. Oops.

Anyways, the new rules after the new embolism required six straight months of the stockings, taking them off only for showers. You get used to them. They’re billed as being like a second skin and, honestly, now that I get whole days without them, I can’t say that I notice their absence particularly. The main thrill is skipping the nuisance of putting them on.

That said, it is nice not to have them, especially as it gets warmer. When I only had to wear a stocking on one leg, as was the case from 2016 to 2020, I didn’t let it bother me. I walked all over the place in shorts with one stockinged leg. Somehow, having both legs in stockings made me self-conscious. I’ve caught myself more than once in the last month or so turning about as I’m about to leave the house in shorts and opting for jeans instead. Somehow, letting the world know I have both legs in compression stockings is a step I’m not in the mood to take. So – yay – now I’m free of that for my free hours.

It feels like a slow return to normal. Then again, every time I start thinking about getting back to normal, I find myself asking what on Earth that even means any more. The normal before Colin was born? Before he was diagnosed with cancer? Before he relapsed? None of those times are coming back, so it’s time for a new normal. It’s going to mean meeting new people in new situations and there are going to be those awkward moments where I have to say “Oh, I HAD three kids.” I don’t want to say that I’m not looking forward to it. It would be a lie to say I’m not getting sick of lockdown. But it’s going to be scary negotiating this new post-Colin world we barely got to know before we were all sent home to hide from the virus. But all you can do is take it a step at a time and take whatever little victories you get.

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Fools for rules

Feeling ever more brave about heading out into the real world, as more people I know get vaccinated and as my appointment for my BioNTech (Pfizer to you Americans) shot nears on Tuesday, I’ve started checking about getting out of the house a little more. Perhaps the second-most therapeutic thing I’ll try to do next week will be trying to get to see my therapist for the first time since October (the most therapeutic thing will be getting a haircut for the first time since December).

Clearly, I’m surviving OK despite six months of not meeting with a therapist. At the same time, there has been a certain lack of, shall we say, course-correction without regular meetings with my therapist. I fill the gap with these blog posts, turning all y’all into honorary therapists for me, but you still kind of want a paid professional sitting down with you from time to time, because he’ll tell me when I’m being an idiot. OK. Several of you will as well, but you sugar coat it nicer.

And you do want to know what’s going on. And I know that Dr. Kehrer isn’t going to solve all my problems or answer all of my questions. I’m having random moments where, out of the blue, I’ll feel on the verge of crying. If there’s a link to Colin, I haven’t figured it out yet. There might be a link to moments when I’m editing a particularly depressing story at work, but I can’t be sure of that either. And, given everything that’s happened, I don’t know if a momentary feeling of sadness is all that strange. But you still want to know what a person thinks about it. And why those are happening more often, but actual dreams where I’m hanging out with Colin – I had one this week: He was filthy, in a good way … like we were walking down a dirt road and, like any pre-schooler, decided to bring half of it home with him – why are they so rare?

So, it’s good that I’m going to see Dr. Kehrer, assuming I’m not one of those lucky ones who gets the vaccine and then spends half a week feeling like I just got a flu and a half. But it also reminds me that our time is limited.

Dr. Kehrer had told me last year that the insurance company was only going to pay for a few more sessions and, more importantly, it was probably time for me to move on. So, we’ve got like three sessions left. By all rights, we should have been done months ago, but then I started having breathing problems in the autumn and we decided to give it a rest so as to risk the chance of me infecting him (though it just turned out that I was having a pulmonary embolism, not Covid-19 (and I suppose it’s a good sign that I just had to look up the word for ‘pulmonary embolism, so maybe that trauma is at least fading)), and then Covid-19 case counts in Germany went through the roof and it just seemed safer to forgo in-person meetings and, if we only had three left, I was going to do them in-person, and not online.

So I contacted him and he set the appointment, and then told me how lucky it was that I had thought to reach out since, by German law, had we gone two full quarters without meeting, all the rest of our appointments would have been nulled and voided. Oh Germany: There are always rules here and, it would seem, no exceptions, even for pandemics. So, I sidestepped that problem, but it means I’m stuck with the new problem.

Three sessions left. And again, I don’t know why I’m letting it weigh me down, because I just did fine for six months without a single session. But still. Having a therapist feels like it’s become almost part of my identity.

“Oh, your child died.”

“Yes, but I have a therapist working with me,” seems like a good response to that. Like it’s the responsible way to be.

“Oh, my sessions ended” or “I’m back on the hunt for a new therapist,” just doesn’t feel like an adequate enough answer. And then there’s the fact that I really do like Dr. Kehrer, and I imagine professionalism will require that we don’t meet up for beers in a few months, so it’s sad to contemplate another friendship ending.

But at least I’ll get three more sessions. I suppose you take what you can get.

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That feeling of feeling

We got the first piece of mail for Colin in months this week. I promptly hid it in the den, because I didn’t see why Christina had to have that “Oh God” moment upon finding the letter in the mailbox (and yes, she reads the blog, so she’ll be finding out this way).

It was a catalogue/newsletter, I’m pretty sure from one of the suppliers of some of his breathing equipment. I don’t have it in me to read it, but a lot of the articles seemed to be about how people with tracheotomies are surviving the pandemic. How some people, despite having serious breathing impairments during a pandemic that seems to give many people something like pneumonia are surviving, and even finding ways to get married. There’s also ads and a crossword puzzle and, somehow, the newsletter smells vaguely medical. But there it is.

I’ve sneaked a peek or two at the people talking about living in fear of the virus, perhaps even in more fear than you or I might have done. And it makes me realize once again, how much I miss the feeling of empathy. I mean, I get it. They need tubes and suction attachments to breathe and keep their breathing passages free. A common cold is a big deal for these people, forget whatever the coronavirus does to you. They are legitimately living in terror. And yet, I look at the pictures and think “You’re alive. You don’t get to complain.”

I don’t like the fact that, time after time, this is my first reaction when I hear about other people’s problems. We’re coming up on two years since Colin’s death and I would have thought the empathy would kick in a little bit. It’s not. Someone I know just had a miscarriage. From the little I know – I never officially knew she was pregnant – it was pretty bad. Here’s the point where I’m supposed to write “I can’t imagine what they’re going through.” But, of course I can.

But then I think of this one guy who showed up at the bereaved Dads meetings a few times last year and, from what little I worked out about his back story, was there because his wife miscarried too. And I remember the first time I caught the story, I was thinking “Oh, you’re not like me at all.”

I’m not proud of that thought. What I wish I had immediately said to myself was: “No Niels, you at least got to know and have your child for five years. He didn’t even get an introduction.”

But that’s not what I thought. And, I have to admit, with this new tragedy, I somehow turn it all upon myself. The thoughts are less “Oh, how terrible for them” and more “Oh, I hope I’m not expected to be the one in the group who knows what to say, because I already lost a kid.”

I see this happening again and again. A friend is having a health scare and my thoughts are not enough “Oh, I hope it turns out to be just a scare” and more “He’s really good at listening to me talk about my problems since Colin’s death. I hope he doesn’t die so I have to find someone new.”

Don’t misunderstand. I want to feel the sadness and the horror and the loss. No, scratch that. I’d like to skip all of that. But, if it’s going to happen, I’d like to react like a normal person. Instead, I seem to keep reverting to a range of “Meh, I lived through worse” to “But how will this affect my grieving process?”

I don’t care for it. But, as with so many other things, I don’t know what to do about it. Everything about this remains a mystery to me. Last week, I found a list I’d made of questions for the doctor after we got Colin’s initial diagnosis. My reaction was “Huh. Look at that.” A few days later, at work I was asked to translate a story about a 5-year-old survivor of a cable car crash in Italy and, after skimming the German-language story about a 5-year-old boy in the hospital, I told the person running the desk that day that, thank you very much, I’ll translate any other story but that one. I brushed both of those off without really much of a reaction at all. I let this item sit overnight so I could think about it and, between the time I wrote the rest of this and the time I’m adding this line, I turned on an episode of “This American Life” to find they were talking with a comedian … whose 2-year-old son died of a brain tumor. And my only thought is: That’s something to add to the blog.

But then, one other day that week, I dropped a jar of honey at breakfast and absolutely demolished a drinking glass. Not a special glass. It’s from IKEA and probably cost 39 cents. But I convinced myself that this was going to be a problem because we always tell the kids to make sure that the tops of jars are screwed on properly, and I hadn’t check this one and then I picked it up by the jar top and it fell down. So, I was going to get called out for not securing the honey jar, and then I was going to have a fight with a colleague about a months-old disagreement and then I was mad at the world and convinced that Colin’s death was somehow something I deserved. You explain that to me. List of questions about my dying child: my heartbeat barely elevates. Broken IKEA glass: The bottom drops out from under me. Acquaintance has a miscarriage: I go “I’ve seen worse.” Friend ends up in the hospital and I think “Well, it’s about time someone else goes through this for a change.” And now I’m looking for an example where I react halfway normally to something sad and nothing whatsoever is popping into my head.

Maybe I was always a little off. To get all pop culture, there’s a Barenaked Ladies song about a guy who always laughs at a funeral and, it’s true, my sense of humor has always been a bit off. To get even more pop culture, I recently got started on “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and there’s a point where a character muses that there’s the words “widow” and “widower” and “orphan,” but no word for a parent who’s lost a child, because that’s the worst thing ever. I don’t seek inspiration from superhero movies normally, and especially not Marvel ones, as I’m a DC man, but I think there might have been a lot to that. I’ve had something happen to me that people can’t bring themselves to name. Even Germans – who have words for everything (and it’s always just one, ridiculously long word) – don’t have a special word for surviving the death of a child. And yet here I am. Surviving, for sure. But you can’t entirely shake the sense that that’s just not quite the same as living a normal, happy life.

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Whatever you call ‘normal’

The hospice pulled together a weekend music program for siblings of deceased children this weekend. Emma bailed after Saturday, but Noah is there as I type this. From what I’ve gathered, amid the post-session bickering, is that they’re creating a dramatic story with sound effects revolving around a squirrel – or maybe a unicorn – that emits rainbows. And, when I saw “emits,” I actually mean a much grosser verb, because this is being stylized by children with hyperactive imaginations.

It felt almost normal to go there. We rented a car to get them there and back and, heaven knows, just being able to drive through Berlin for the first time in six months felt shockingly normal (our old car died in December and we have not made getting a new one much of a priority). The simple act of driving to the hospice feels excessively normal. I’ve known my in-laws for nearly 20 years, but I still have to think hard every time we go to their town to make sure I’m on the right street and taking the right exit, etc. etc. I feel I could find the hospice in the dark and after being spun around a few times, much like I could find my parents house. No one I know has lived at 12 Kensington Drive for more than 15 years, but I could home in on that without a problem. Getting to the hospice is almost the same.

While there, I ran into Eva, who runs the program. She thinks that, starting in two weeks, the kids will be able to meet for a normal rock climbing session, ie indoor with he whole group. They did meet this week, but only half the group and at an outdoor site. But the case count in Berlin and Germany has collapsed in the last few weeks. It’s been just a month since I was obsessing about going to Noah’s first communion and getting the news that – SURPRISE – the priest had coronavirus the whole time, like we were busy playing the worst whodunnit of all time. It felt so normal to think that we were going to be locked away for months more.

Now, Germany has suddenly discovered how to get vaccinations distributed and, if you read the Washington Post rankings, is actually doing a lot better than most of Europe. Christina and I got tests yesterday, which authorized us for a day of activities. We even took the kids to a restaurant (we sat on the terrace). If you squint, you can start seeing the outlines of normal. As I’m typing this, a friend is texting me about his progress through his vaccination. I mean, it feels like we might survive this.

Of course, this being us, that presents a whole new set of problems for me. I took a moment to go the memorial pond at the hospice while I was there. It felt like there were so many more stones than there had been the last time I was there, but I imagine that’s my memory playing tricks on me. Then again, I did run into the chief custodian while I was there. She is about the most grandmotherly lady I’ve ever met in my life, and she remained super friendly. But she looked so tired. Maybe it was because she was working on a Saturday, but I imagine that her job isn’t easy on the best of days. She doesn’t provide any direct medical care, but she still has to be upbeat while she’s delivering new linens and making food for people who are watching their kids die. I never saw that in 2019. This weekend, she looked tired and she said it’s been a bear, keeping everyone as safe as possible in the house. It scares me a little to ask if any of the families we knew in 2019 – the ones who were there with long-term patients – are still there.

But that was a diversion. Because I so rarely go to Colin’s grave, I spoke to his stone and told him what he’d missed and how we were going to have to try to get back to normal now. Which then brought up the question – what is normal any more? I guess everyone else pops back to life, but now with restaurants and time actually spent in the office. But, even for me, it’s easy to forget that we went from Colin’s death in September 2019 to this lockdown world in March 2020. In there we had a small side trip to Leipzig and Dresden, a few awkward months of getting the kids back into school and me back into work. Christina returned to the office less than two weeks before everyone got sent home. We’ve all found ways to work and go to school since then, but this isn’t normal. But the six months we had before lockdown weren’t normal and the 10 months we had before that were near utter hell. And we can’t go back to further before that, because we’re missing a person. So, I don’t know which normal we’re going to pick.

I suppose we’ll just get on with it. I mean, at the hospice, I could see into the dining area and saw that they had broken up the community table in favor of a series of smaller nooks. You adapt. You learn. We have and we will. But there’s such a sense of trial and error. How many arrangements do you think they’ve tried in their dining room since March 2020 until they have what they’re doing now? How long did Eva and her team have to work on plans for this weekend until they came up with the program going on right now? How on Earth do you run a climbing center amid all this? You figure it out, I suppose. I know we do, but things do go a little off. A few weeks ago I had a buddy over for beers, and I wanted to have a good time. A few beers in, something clicked and I went into full-on depression mode, talking about my dead son and trying to survive it. It’s not who I want to be, yet it’s who I am now. I suppose, given what we have to deal with, it’s normal.

I think I’m going to still need a little time to adjust to it. I’m not entirely sure I know what normal is any more.

In the weeks before we moved into the hospice, Christina hatched a never-realized plan that we would pack the kids, a nurse and all of Colin’s gear into the car and go to Legoland. The plan terrified me. Was it normal that I wasn’t up to one big last outing as a family of five? Was it normal that Christina wanted to try it, despite all the hurdles we’d have to jump?

The first night in the hospice, the kid next door had 80s music on the radio. I texted a friend in a frenzy. “We’ll do good here,” I seemed to say “They have Culture Club.” Was it normal to think that this could possibly be a good sign? Was it normal to try to turn a miserable situation into something a little bit better, me in a room with my dying son, listening to music played for a boy who, as near as I could tell, was non-responsive?

We got to the hospice with days to go until Noah’s 9th birthday. He handled that relatively well, with the promise that we’d make the next birthday better. Then, along came the lockdown. Is it normal that we’re now going to try to have a birthday for him at some point? Do we have one party for him? Three? Is it normal to worry about that detail when a couple of million people are dead because of a virus?

I see normal coming down on us and, as much as I want to get excited about haircuts and going back to the gym, I see a minefield ahead of me of not wanting to bring the room down by talking about my dead son at the wrong time or heading on our next vacation and having that brief moment where I catch myself and say we’ll be a party of four, not five. I think I’m only just realizing that we kind of got to segue from our nightmare into a protected bubble – and you can argue whether that bubble was good or bad for us – and only now, if things go well, do we really and truly have to think about being normal again. Except we’re not and I don’t think we’ll ever quite be. We can pretend at it very well, but a few of the basics are missing and it’s not hard to notice if you know what you’re looking for.

So, bring on normal. Just understand that we’re going to need a lot of practice at it, I think.