Five Minus One

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.

It’s not that I took a break from blogging, but the Medium website, where I’ve written a thing or two, has a writing contest going and two of the fields in which one could enter were “death” and “re-entry.” So, of course, I just cracked my knuckles and dove in, because that’s the subject matter I live in these days. If you’re interested, they’re here. We’ll know in a month or so how that worked.

Of course, even if all I get is a nice “thanks for trying” note, it’s worth it. Writing about my life post-Colin is simultaneously exhausting and rewarding. After banging out the two essays for Medium, I didn’t have it in me to crunch out something new for this blog. But it remains so important to me to get his name out there. To keep his memory alive in this little way. I don’t rely on the show “The Boys” a whole lot for inspiration. Truth be told, it’s pretty damned dark, so it’s not the kind of place I would normally think about heading for inspiration. But one character had a wonderful line in a recent episode I watched. It’s to the effect of:

You die twice, once when you stop breathing and the other when someone says your name for the last time.

That’s Frenchie in “The Boys.” I can’t remember to whom he attributes the quote. Running a Google search, I’ve found it attributed to Banksy, Mackelmore and Irvin Yalom, and that’s all the work I’m going to do for a quote that I’m only using to illustrate a point. The point is, it does feel like I keep him alive in some small way doing this.

At the same time, I question the other ways I keep his legacy going. Like, right now in Germany – as just about everywhere else – you can only get a vaccine if you’re 12 and up. So, Emma got her second shot yesterday, but that leaves Noah dangling for now. I have to admit, I’m inches away from contacting pediatricians, telling them my whole story and ending with a hearty “I don’t want to go through this again. Please vaccinate my 11-year-old.” I mean, good God, he’s taller than most 14-year-olds (and yes, I know that’s not the way vaccinations work). It feels odd, even thinking about using my tragedy to get a leg up on this pandemic. On the flip side, why even risk going through another child’s death?

But it doesn’t stop there. I think about switching jobs all the time. I think about trying to get some of my fiction published. And, in the back of my head, there’s this urge to add a PS along the lines of “I’ve been through hell watching my kid die. Could you just help me out and give me this?” I don’t do it, because it’s hard to see that actually helping me. But the temptation is there. It’s really there at every point in my life. The people in front of me in line, the people dickering with me about doctor’s appointments, the people who catch mistakes in my work. “Can’t you see what I’m going through here? Can’t you just let this slide?”

Except I know that’s not genuine. That would easily slip into me abusing Colin’s memory, turning my sadness into an ice breaker to get me through any kind of problem in the world. But I can’t do that. There’s a pretty big line between remembering Colin and spending the rest of my life being the guy whose son died. So I have to find a balance.

I am going to keep an eye out though, should we get a chance to get an 11-year-old vaccinated. I think Colin could get behind that.

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.

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?

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.