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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.

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To Momo and Maja

We were making our plans for watching the Eurovision – and when I say ‘we,’ I mean, I was telling everyone what I thought we should … even as at least one other member of the family cringed and hoped I would somehow forget about the whole affair by Saturday – when the inevitable question came up of who won last time.

I have no idea. I don’t keep track of the Eurovision in terms of who won because the songs are all pretty universally and equally horrible. For me, Eurovision is a chance to watch a car wreck of a show … and I love bad TV. But still, the question lingered, so I pointed out that there was no winner last year because the show got cancelled due to Covid-19.

“They’ll have the winner from 2019,” I said. Well, of course, my inquisitorial panel wanted to know who that might be. And again, I drew a blank. I mean, I had zero memory of who this person might be. Could the winner have been so boring?

Oh, and then I remembered, I was preoccupied in 2019. We were home, trying to juggle a life and Colin’s health care and the forever quitting nursing staff. I do remember that we managed to get Colin to sleep at a halfway decent hour that night and I do remember even having a beer or two while watching the show. I also remember that, as we came upstairs, Colin woke up and Christina then spent the rest of the night helping Momo, the nurse, trying to get him back to bed.

The next morning, after Momo left, he quit. He gave a long list of reasons about why he quit, but the one that stuck with me was the fact that he was offended because, at one point, Colin told him to sit in the corner. Bear in mind, this was a panicky 5-year-old who had probably gotten about three hours of sleep being asked to sleep in a room with a man he’d met about three days beforehand. You hope your 5-year-old doesn’t go and tell people to shut up and sit in the corner, but you also realize these were probably exceptional circumstances. But, to Momo, that was a stain against his personal reputation that wasn’t going to come out with a little Tide. He used it as a reason to quit.

I mean, by that point, we’d gotten kind of used to home health care workers quitting on us – and we’d only been doing this for six weeks. It’s odd to remember the story. It’s odd to remember that Colin was still speaking at that point. It’s beyond bizarre to think that a medical professional would just quit like that, knowing full well what we were dealing with, and deciding that the most sensible course of action was to leave us as a family holding this mess with no backup.

For a while after I started this blog, Christina encouraged me to write a kind of open letter to Momo. The time didn’t feel right. Also, to be fair, the letter would have to go to Maia, who was with us for a total of two days and was present when we had our first crisis of a quitting nurse. She took Christina aside and told her how the company providing our nursing was a mess and how we couldn’t trust them and how it would not be long until the next nurse quit on us. Then she ended her shift and quit on her way home. I don’t like to judge people, but it’s kind of hard not to think of her and wonder what makes her tick. It’s odd to think that our lives had turned into such a shambles and there were still people who looked at our situation and said “You know what? I don’t need this.” And then I write that sentence and realize it was kind of only natural for people to say “You know what? I want to be far away from this.”

But the memories keep coming. Christina ordered something from Lego this weekend and realized before the order was final that Lego still had the address of the rehab clinic in Brandenburg as our destination. That was when we were sending toys there to Colin, hoping to keep him busy. Saturday night a neighbor came over for beers and I had no intention of turning it into a depressing night, but a couple of beers in, Colin came up and, honestly, I’m just blessed to have friends who are very good listeners.

So, Momo and Maja, here’s your open letter, although I doubt you’ll ever see it (and might not be able to read English, but that’s a detail). You left us in a bind and you didn’t have the courtesy to even tell us to our faces why you were leaving us in our misery. It’s not your fault that Colin eventually died, but the fact remains that from the first day or our attempts to take care of him at home, it was clear there was a good chance he was not going to make it. He should have had as happy a life as he could have had those last few months, and we did our best, but lord, it would have been easier if we’d had nurses we could rely on.

Then again, maybe you did us a favor. Your incompetence convinced us that we needed to go to the hospice, which had its pros and cons, but it means that he died there and not here. I’m not sure what I would think of this house if he had died there. Honestly, there’s already a ton of good and bad memories here and, as it is, I consciously don’t spend a lot of time in the room where Colin spent so much time while he was sick. I wonder how I would cope with the house if this is where he had died. So, maybe you did us a favor.

But we both know you didn’t. You saw a situation and you said you couldn’t cope. And there is something to be said for knowing your limits. But, instead of making sure we had someone to catch us before you bailed, you ran as far as you could as quickly as you could. And even here, I can’t fault you entirely. There were times during the whole madness where the thought of fleeing popped into my head. But I do find enough to fault you.

Don’t worry. I don’t wish you any ill. I mean, I have an idea of where Momo lives and am even in that neighborhood from time to time, and I have wondered how I would react if I were to run into him in the street. But it’s also not as if I’m going door to door trying to find his address so I can stand outside, screaming obscenities at his window. But it’s not going to come to that. It’s just that Eurovision is coming up and it made me think of you and I wanted you to know that Colin’s dead, and as bad as that is, you made it a little worse.

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I is for irony

Taking a walk with a friend on Tuesday, I mentioned how I couldn’t remember the last time I had been sick.

Oh Niels, you silly, silly man, toying with fate like that.

The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be coronavirus. Christina and Emma got tested at the clinic on Wednesday and they both came back with negative results. And, since they’re the two members of the family who venture out the most and the furthest from home base, it seems likely (though not a guarantee) that if something contagious were to enter Casa Sorrells, they might be at the forefront. Also, let’s be real, if something does get in, we’re all going to get it.

In order of least-affected to most-affected, we would be:

  • Noah, who seems to have no ill effects whatsoever;
  • Me. I’ve been grouchy and anti-social, and felt what could be described as a mild head cold or maybe allergies, but I’ve been pretty functional;
  • Christina, who has felt pretty rough; and
  • Emma, whom, if you told me she had the coronavirus, I would believe you. She’s been pretty out of it.

So, given the fact that the two sickest came up negative, that feels like we’re on the safe side. Still, it makes a person think. We barely see anyone and wear masks all the time, and a cold somehow still snuck in. It makes you realize that it’s really only a question of luck, on some level, whether you get the executive pandemic treatment or not.

We don’t know if the church visit was the start of the cold misery. It seems unlikely. We gave ourselves a battery of quick tests in the week after that, and it was only nine days later that Emma first complained of a sore throat. That seems like a long incubation period. But it does fit in the general irony of things that that day was also Emma’s birthday, so we started with a general feeling of optimism that enough time had elapsed since the church superspreader sacrament service that things might be normal. We even let her invite a friend over. And then we got to spend three days worrying that maybe we’d been Ground Zero for a coronavirus outbreak.

I suppose this is all only tangentially related to Colin, so maybe this is a sign that the blog is slowly becoming less about dealing with his loss and more about dealing with my life after him. But there is the reality that, the longer this pandemic lasts, the more it makes me think of him. Every time I worry I’ve been exposed or feel a tickle in my throat, I wonder if it might be the coronavirus and if I might be one of those unlucky people who succumbs to it. Let’s be clear: I don’t want to succumb. I’ve got things I want to do. But it is an odd feeling, going through this experience and simultaneously wanting to live, while also thinking “If it gets me, I get to stop living without him.” Best case scenario, I’m reunited with him on the next level.

It’s not a way I would have ever thought I would spend my time thinking, and yet there it is. Death has lost so much of its scare potential for me. That said, dying in pain and living on a ventilator for weeks not knowing if you’ll make it has no appeal for me. I’m now in the group of people who may apply for a vaccine appointment (which is not the same as actually getting an appointment) and have cleared with my doctor that, blood clot issues or not, I’m good to take whatever vaccine comes my way. Christina has her appointment for Wednesday, I’m working on getting mine. If they get them approved for kids 12 and older, we’re marching Emma to the doctor first chance we get and, when Noah turns 12 in 2022, he’s got a birthday surprise waiting for him.

But still, I wish I could go back to a point when death scared me properly, like it should.

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Transubstantiation, the revenge

There was that phase last week where I was getting fairly worked up about the possible risks of attending a church service for Noah’s first communion, but managed to talk myself down and pluck up the courage to attend without suffering a panic attack somewhere between the gospel reading and the offering. I told myself that, statistically, 20 per cent of the people in the room have had at least one shot of the vaccine. We’d be spread out. People would have taken precautions.

Ha! Turns out the priest was coronavirus positive the whole time. We found out yesterday and are now in wait-and-see mode. This is what comes of letting down one’s guard during this kind of thing.

In the priest’s defense, he had no idea he was coronavirus positive. He had no symptoms and had only submitted to a test on the Friday because it was required before he could undergo a different medical procedure on Monday. He was as shocked as anyone else when he got turned away from the clinic on Monday because of the test.

So, here we are, shaking our fists at the universe and, to a certain degree, the Catholic Church. Emma took a coronavirus test on Tuesday because that’s school policy and Christina took one, also on Tuesday, because of a separate coronavirus scare at work. Both came up negative, though an infection on Sunday most likely wouldn’t be detectable by Tuesday. So, we’ll have another round of testing on Wednesday and then probably every two to three days after that, because that’s how you spell ‘fun’ during a pandemic.

I am so mad at so many things right now, myself included. Because, ultimately, I could have chosen to be the bad guy and said “No, we’re not doing this,” but I didn’t want to deny Noah one slice of normal after the last couple of years, so I sucked up my fears and hoped that everything would be OK. But we should all know by now that hope doesn’t really get you that far when it comes to messing with medical problems.

It comes down to this. Stripped down to its essentials, you have kids because you think it’s a good idea for your genes to survive another generation or so. If you don’t manage to keep the kids alive, you’ve failed. Through no fault of our own – I mean, we did everything we could – we failed Colin. Maybe that wording is too harsh. But there’s no denying that the cancer won. We don’t even get much of a concession prize, unless you count memories. And now, because I didn’t want to rock the boat and because we trusted other people to be on top of things, we ended up taking another unacceptable risk and are once again in limbo. It’s maddening.

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Transubstantiation

Allowing for lingering bitterness based on the knowledge that this event could have easily waited until Germany had reached something approaching herd immunity, I’d say the first communion went as well as it could. Even though two families from our group showed up to plump up the crowd, the church was still pretty empty, so I’m not worried that we’re going to turn into a super-spreader event. I only wish the people in front of us had stuck to the seating charts. When I knelt during the service, I was well within 1.5 meters of the guy in front of me. And no, even though it was a first communion event, I could not bring myself to go up and take communion, even if just about everyone else who could, did.

Still, it was nice enough. I mean, if you didn’t know that commonly in Germany you have a house filled with neighbors and distant relatives, then it went great. Noah got gifts and cash, which he’s investing in Lego and had Facetime and telephone chats with his grandparents and godparents. It worked. We grilled hamburgers and had a pretty amazing cake.

If anything – as with everything – the lack of Colin cast its usual shine on the event. We discussed briefly how we would have gotten him there had he still been alive and using assisted oxygen. I winced ever so slightly during the intercessions, when each of the children put forward a prayer and, whether by design or coincidence, Noah made the prayer for those who are already dead.

And then night-time came and I insisted we keep up with our semi-regular tradition of reading Harry Potter before bedtime, because the kids have never read the books in English and I’ve forgotten most of the details of the books. We’re towards the beginning of the sixth book, and there came a reference to Harry refusing to take meals with his relatives because he was still so much in mourning at the death of his godfather.

Noah noted that a person would die after refusing to eat for two weeks.

Without really thinking about it, I countered that not taking meals doesn’t mean not eating, it just means probably not sitting down at meals with the family or eating less. It happens when you’re mourning and then, with maybe a half second’s consideration, I threw out there that I pretty much did the same thing when Colin was sick and lost a ton of weight.

The children took that in for a minute. Noah said he never knew and hugged me. Emma said she’d had the same experience, but had never had much weight to lose.

So, there you go. Noah is a step further into the Catholic Church, we all, hopefully, avoided the virus for yet another day and, as always, Colin was with us, in one way or another.

(I would share a photo, but the port I need to connect the laptop to the camera is, sadly, kaput)

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Eat this bread

The first communion is happening tomorrow. I’m a bit apprehensive to see how I get through the event.

I mean, I tend to have at least one small panic attack every time I go into Aldi. I mask up and I go in and, because I don’t do a lot of the shopping, I’ll run across “goat cheese” on the list and this starts a spiral of events. I know Aldi has goat cheese and I know which one Christina wants. I even know where the cheese section is. But it will still take me about five minutes to find it, even though this is Aldi and there’s not much of a selection and the cheese section can’t be more than 2 meters of shelf space. And, the whole time I’m staring at the cheese section, there are inevitably two older shoppers who park their carts next to me and, as near as I can tell, aren’t actually shopping, but are only there to breathe on me while I panic about a) not finding cheese and b) whether these people have been to a coronavirus hotspot lately.

So, that’s me after 20 minutes in Aldi. I can’t even imagine what a church service is going to be like. And I know the church has taken all the precautions and we’ll all be wearing masks and sitting far apart from one another. And I know there have been thousands of church services in the last year that have not led to a coronavirus outbreak. But I also edit and translate news stories all day professionally and have come across enough to know that there have also been church services that have turned into Patient Zero’s big breakout moment, so, yes, I’m hesitant.

And it kills me a little bit because I know I’m not taking control of this situation. I could say “No,” we’re not doing this. I could say, I don’t care what the church is doing, we’re pulling Noah out of this group and waiting for the next one. But then I have to be the one to break it to Noah that not only is he not having his biggish day tomorrow, but that, when it comes, he’ll be doing it with a different group of kids than the group he practiced with. And, somehow, I don’t quite have it in me to pull that from him. Which makes me appreciate a lot more why so many world leaders are flubbing the response to this virus. I’m caving at the potential disappointment of a 10-year-old. I could see where a politician might be nervous about cancelling the vacation plans for a couple million people.

Still, I was so sure it wasn’t going to happen. In its slow, plodding manner, the German government has been preparing us for weeks that tougher measures are coming. I can’t leave my house after 10 pm any more. I fully expect school to be shut down again in the coming weeks. I just assumed church would also not make the cut. But here we are.

Perhaps it comes back to me not having grown up in the most religious of families. I don’t remember my first communion having been that big of a deal. I don’t think my brothers even came, because they would have been away at college. The only non-family member I remember being at my first communion was Mrs. Campbell, who gave me an illustrated Bible. And I’m not even sure how close a family friend she could have been, as I remember my Mom getting pretty mad at me years later when I let Mrs. Campbell know that my Dad was dead.

And here, not only are we having this service, but all of our friends from our church group now say they’re going to try to attend, to show support. Which is super nice, but has me now convinced that, if this turns out to be the big April Super Spreader Event, it won’t only wipe out my family, but all of my friends in the neighborhood.

And I guess this is the part where I would have normally next written “Look, I get it…” but I guess I don’t. I have this one acquaintance on Facebook who has turned into something of a rant machine about coronavirus controls, most of them involving her inability to get to church the way she wants to amid this crisis. I do follow the logic to a point: If the church has to limit seating and you show up with a family of eight and can’t get a seat, it’s going to get frustrating. I don’t quite follow how that then segues into a rant about the greater privileges enjoyed by people taking flights, but whatever. What’s clear is that church is a much more important part of her life than it is to me. Very likely the same applies to everyone else who feels this first communion has to be tomorrow.

The thing is, I know a thing or two about having an important part of your life disappear. I know that you can survive it and I know that I’m not wild about putting myself in a situation where, no matter how unlikely it is, I’m risking another death in my family. There’s a difference between being asked to do without something for a year or two and with the finality of death. I guess, a year into this nightmare, I still understand that way better than a lot of people.

Which brings me to the closer I had not planned for this blog, but I opened up this site to find this gem of spam waiting for me:

The next time I read a blog, I hope that it does not disappoint me just as much as this particular one. After all, I know it was my choice to read,
nonetheless I actually believed you would probably have something useful to talk about. All I hear is a bunch of complaining about something you could possibly fix if you weren’t too busy looking for attention.

Which, I guess, is the best description I can think of regarding the current situation. Thank you very much, unknown commentator, possibly from Turkey, for your insight and your potentially virus-laden link. Rest assured, I’m trying to fix the situation, but this one is tricky. As for the attention: Darn tootin’ I want it.

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Sacramental

To keep it simple, I really don’t know what the coronavirus lockdown/regulation situation is in Germany right this moment. It is a very fluid affair that involves a lot of negotiations between the federal government and the state governments that seems to end every time with several of the states going ahead and doing whatever they feel is right. Except case counts are going up and the vaccine situation is on the slow side, so there’s a push that could mean, theoretically, that within about five days the rules will be tightened more and everyone will be told to stay home more than we are right now. We’ll see. Given how every new rule seems to be met with a combination of half the population saying “Yes, absolutely, we’ll do that” and the other half saying “Try and make us” we’ll see how it shakes out.

Which is my backdrop for next week’s big event: Noah’s first communion.

Given what a mess things are, it’s an understatement to say things are not going quite as planned. He was actually supposed to have his first communion last year, but that clearly wasn’t an option while we were in the grips of Lockdown Prime.

Now, I understand the coordinator wants this to happen. He has a group of kids who have been waiting a year for their sacrament. And now he’s got this year’s group and, if this gets delayed again, he’s going to have three years of kids at once. I could imagine that being a little hectic. At the same time, as they keep insisting that this will happen on April 25, it’s all I can do not to call him up and ask him if he’s read a newspaper yet this year. They are on track to vote on this bill in a few days. Angela Merkel has clearly had enough of people ignoring all the rules and, having once been at a press conference where she glared at the guy next to me until he put his cell phone away, I don’t want to be on her bad side. If I were the Catholic Church, I’d behave myself as well.

Which leaves us with the option of either no communion now or a very sad communion this year. I’ve got to say, I’m fully on team “no communion now.” And this is not just about the fact that I can almost guarantee everyone that I will have a very quiet and controlled panic attack, but a panic attack nonetheless, if I’m expected to go to church with dozens of other people in a week.

This is about the fact that it’s yet another thing that won’t go quite right. And I know, no one’s had things go right for the last 15 months or so. So, perhaps I shouldn’t be selfish. But I keep thinking, Emma’s first communion was a pretty nice affair except, that day, Colin’s balance seemed off and, by the end of the day, Christina and I were convinced that something bad was happening with his tumor. We had an MRI shortly thereafter and were so relieved when it came up negative. Which goes to show what we knew since, a year after that, we were full on in hell.

But, going through something like childhood cancer, when something leaves a taint on an occasion like that, you at least console yourself with the fact that there will be two more first communions that hopefully won’t be disrupted. And then Colin died and we realized we only have the one left. And now this one has been delayed and is starting to sound like it’s going to be a rushed, nervous, mask-covered affair to which Noah will be able to invite neither his grandparents nor his godmother nor any of his aunts and uncles or anyone else.

Sure, we can have a celebration with the family later down the road, but maybe this is the point where I want to put my foot down and say, no, I’m not really willing to have a sad facsimile of a major way station. We’ve already lost our third first day of school and our third set of baby teeth coming out and all the things Emma and Noah might have been able to do with a baby brother were he still around. I’m not really prepared to start sacrificing any of our seconds just because someone in the church hierarchy feels there’s a schedule to keep. I’m also not wild about taking my chances with the virus in a large room. I realize the odds are small if we follow procedures and I realize the chances are high that, if we got it, we’d survive. Then again, the odds were pretty small that Colin would ever get the virus, so I don’t really like playing with odds. I get other people are braver about things – about taking flights or going out when the rules allow it. I get it and I am a bit in awe of all of you, but I am not ready to mess around.

I imagine I don’t have much of a say in the matter, so this is me investing a lot of hope into Angela Merkel getting this measure passed and then giving everyone her sternest look when she tells everyone to just stay the hell at home for a few more weeks. I’d rather be behind schedule than run the risk of putting anyone else into a coffin prematurely.

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The Remembering

Well, the check from Uncle Joe showed up yesterday and, as near as I can tell, there was no money for Colin in it. It’s such a strange thing. On the one hand, thank God the US government finally caught on to the fact that my son is dead. On the other hand, oh God, even the US government has realized my son is dead. It’s the nature of this game. You don’t get what you want, you hope for the next best thing and then, when you get that, you realize that’s pretty awful too.

And that’s sort of every memory of him. There’s the brief smile when you remember the cute thing he used to do and then the punch in the gut when you remember that you won’t be able to see that again.

And your logical self tells you that’s just the way it is. A few weeks ago, Facebook served me up a video I’d posted of an 11-month old Emma trying to learn to drink from a sippy cup. We watched it and then Christina said “The strange thing is, that child is gone too.” Which is true. Emma mastered drinking from a cup quite a while ago. She turns 13 in a few weeks – officially a teenager – and has learned to barricade herself in her room in a way that would make the most ardent teenager AND the most hardcore survivalist think “Damn. She knows what she’s doing.”

But we don’t mourn for her. We remember her as a baby. We mourn for Colin. And we all remember him differently. After my last post – and after she threatened me for revealing to the world her annual “Death or Easter” challenge, Christina asked where I’d gotten the picture of Colin from. It’s true, that’s a moment he and I had by ourselves, at Easter at his grandparents’ in 2018. But I thought I’d shown the picture to Christina. I thought I’d shared it with her. But no, that was a memory I only had – and in many ways still only have.

I don’t want to stop remembering him. I also don’t want the US government to send him money. I want to be able to get through a day without having a painful memory. I’m glad that the hereafter or my active imagination or whatever you want to call it makes it possible for me to feel that he stops by to see me most days. I wish more people went to his grave. I wish most conversations I had with my friends didn’t eventually turn to the fact that my son is dead. I’ll take closure wherever I can get it, and yet I keep fighting to keep the door open. It is the moments like this where I realize that I might only be on the first few steps of a miserable trip that might take me the rest of my life.

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And that’s that

I’m probably just going to have to come to terms with the reality that I just don’t like Easter.

It was never one of my big holidays. Certainly not as exciting as Christmas or Halloween when I was a kid. Certainly not as personally rewarding as my own birthday. I mean, after I moved to DC in the 1990s and got into the Independence Day rush, I think there was even a period when I was more excited about July 4 every than I was about Easter. Essentially, I remember some pleasant Easters as a kid. The one that really stands out is the one where we fled to Germany to put distance between us and Three Mile Island. Then I spent about two decades never having any idea when Easter was in a given year and then I met Christina, who introduced me to the annual tradition of planning an Easter meal and then spending the night before Easter obsessing about whether your yeast dough is rising or not.

I suppose that’s normal when you’re a teen and a single. If you’re not terribly religious – and we didn’t have terribly close ties to the church growing up – Easter kind of comes and goes because there’s not a lot in it for you if you’re not pious or obsessed with eggs. Even if you like chocolate I mean, once you’re an adult, you’re allowed to buy chocolate whenever you want. You don’t have to wait for Easter.

But you get kids and suddenly you’re aware of Easter every year. I mean, Noah – who can’t even eat eggs because of his allergies – made an Easter countdown calendar this year. And maybe it’s Germany or maybe it’s the passage of time, but it’s become like a mini-Christmas. The gifts are nowhere as plentiful or good, but there are still gifts, which I certainly don’t remember as a kid. And, assuming the bread doesn’t backfire, it’s a perfectly nice family celebration. As a bonus, during this never-ending pandemic, you can do most of the celebration without ever leaving your property.

Except, you know, it’s never that easy with us. Easter 2016 was Emma and Noah sent to the grandparents while Christina (I was useless) tried to create something like Easter cheer in a room in the children’s ward. Easter 2019 was one of the first times the nursing service left us high and dry, while we were busy trying to pretend that a doctor hadn’t told us just weeks before that he was pretty sure the tumor was back. It’s just a lot of memories.

But my kids are excited. The little girl next door is excited. The boys across the street are excited. You get caught up with things a little bit. Christina is planning a giant feast and I can’t say “You know what, I think I’d like to sit quietly in the den and read while you all do the holiday.”

So, I did what I could. I helped with the shopping. I had the Thursday before Easter off and I went to the cemetery by myself for the first time in ages. Of the four of us, Christina is, by far, the one who goes there the most and tends to the grave.

I don’t want to take care of the grave. I know someone has to and that someone is me and Christina, but it doesn’t change the fact that, in my mind, the only fair resolution is for the graveyard elves to come and tend to the grave. I want to go there and talk to Colin for a few minutes, which is, in and of itself, dumb, because I talk to him all the time, everywhere I go. I don’t need the grave to talk to him. And if I go with Christina, I get wrapped up with grave tending. And if I go with the kids, I get caught up with whatever nonsense might strike their fancy at that moment. And I never get there by myself, because it feels like we’ve been together in the house for 10 years now and I have a hard time abandoning the living – even if it’s only for half an hour, and especially if they’re the children I’m supposed to be minding – so I can go and sit in the cemetery by myself for 10 minutes and read “Green Eggs and Ham” to him.

I went secretly, because I didn’t want Christina to give me chores to do or batteries to change. I just wanted to go and sit and read. And then I realized that I was going to blog about it and she was going to find out, so I told her after I went. And I suppose it was nice, but it didn’t make Easter that much easier. We went through the motions the next few days and, like any big event, I’m spending too much time noticing not my children who are there, but the one who isn’t. I should have had one more child to put to bed the night before Easter. There should have been one more Easter basket. I should have had to put out some easier to find Easter eggs, instead of the pretty tough-to-find hiding spots we picked out this year. It’s never exactly right. To top it off, Facebook sent me a picture of him from Easter 2018, at his grandparents’ house, as a memory to share with everyone.

But we got through it. And then, when all the egg coloring and food preparation and temper tantrums and the backyard bonfire and the decorating were done, Christina turned to me, and I don’t remember the exact words, but it was along the lines of “I’m glad that’s over, because this is hard to get through.” And I was a little surprised, because she seemed so excited about it in the lead-up to Easter. But I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised. After all, if there’s one other person who’s going to have as hard a time as me with these holidays, it’s going to be the person who had to go through all those Easters with me from a parent’s perspective.