Posts

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

Pathfinder

What I’ve got to do is learn to be better with street names.

Bear with me, but the story goes like this. I think I need new glasses. Since my job involves staring at a computer screen and editing text all day, my company will pay a portion of the cost of reading aids. But, to get that assistance, the company doctor needs to test my eyes and sign a form. Usually he comes to the office every couple of weeks for anyone who wants a test. Since no one is in the office these days, difficulties presented themselves.

I tracked him down and we agreed I would come to his office on Monday. He told me the address and I figured out roughly where it was and then headed off by bike, because I wanted a little exercise that day.

Now I knew as I biked off that it was further north in Berlin, in the direction of the neighborhood where Colin’s hospice is. What I didn’t realize until I was almost there was that he was just down the street. I biked down the street where we went to a street fair about a week before he died. I still can’t quite process that. My son laid dying and we went to a street fair. But he was also unresponsive at that point and I had two other kids who needed some time outside. As the nurses in the hospice pointed out, *I* needed some time outside. But still, back when people did things outside together, there were the memories of me walking down this street, knowing that while we debated with the kids about getting on the trampoline that Colin was days or weeks from dying a couple of blocks away.

Then I biked through the grounds of the small palace, where they would often send us when we needed a break and where there was a cafe/truck that served pretty good cake. Emma and Noah found a hollowed out tree on those grounds and still talk about the amazement of realizing they could fit themselves inside a tree.

Then I biked past the grocery store, which wasn’t so much a grocery store during those months in hospice, but a place you could escape to and pretend that things were a little bit normal. Because we were fed pretty adequately at the hospice. There was no need to go on an Oreo run, but sometimes that was better than being in the hospice.

And then I saw the restaurant we went to a couple of times when we got him to sleep at a decent hour and then the bookstore where Christina would buy distractions for Emma and Noah and the post office from where I mailed the never-ending medical forms while we were locked up there and the bakery where I bought a Coke the day Emma, Noah and I went into the woods with the art therapist and painted a tree.

It was quite a trip down memory lane, one which I wasn’t really prepared for. Between that and the fact that I was a touch late for the appointment, I was a bit riled up when I got there and probably TMI’ed the doctor – whom I know I’d told about Colin’s death – that the neighborhood has a lot of weight for me. He said he had no idea and gave me my form.

And I don’t know what to do with this. If I had any memory of streets, the moment he said Grabbeallee I would have known I was near the hospice. I mean, for God’s sake, that’s the name of the tram stop where I got off the tram most days when I went up there by public transportation, during that long month and a half where I was home keeping the kids in school, Christina was in the hospice with Colin and I bopped back and forth across Berlin every day.

So, I don’t know what to make of all that, other than that the memories are still very close to the surface, which I never doubted. Maybe the lesson is that I need to keep myself permanently better prepared, but I don’t know how one lives like that. So I guess the only lesson is that I need to try to remember street names and, honestly, we all know that’s now how my brain works.

Uncategorized

Taxing times

As always, I’m amazed by what sets me off and what doesn’t.

On Friday, Christina came back from a run to the cemetery to tell me that the glass globe we had set upon Colin’s grave had been stolen. It was nothing too special. It was a Superman blue bauble we’d probably spent all of 12 euros on when we took a run to Glashütte, outside Berlin, in the autumn. We’d originally wondered if we would have the vertical stones in the gravestone be this color, but then decided to go with the stones that came with the original design and to add to it.

Which we did, and now someone decided, while wandering through a graveyard, that “Hey, I’ll steal a pretty stone off a grave.” Maybe they feel they got bonus points for stealing it from a child’s grave.

It’s not cool and it’s depressing and, yet, when Christina told me, my main reaction was “Meh, people suck.”

What got to me? Preparing my 2020 US tax return.

It was the first one I’ve done since 2015 without Colin on it. And I don’t know why that would get to me so much. I remember last year it felt weird including him on the 2019 tax return, but he had been alive for nine months of 2019, so it seemed like he should be included. But he wasn’t alive for any part of 2020, so his name disappeared from the forms. I didn’t have to do the special online form for US citizens with overseas bank accounts. Just like that, the workload for this particularly annoying job shrank by a quarter.

It probably didn’t help that “Bad” by U2 started playing in the middle of it all, because the universe likes to kick you when you’re down, and that’s one of the songs I had one of my more impressive public cries to back in 2016, right after he first got the diagnosis.

And I guess there’s the creeping foreboding that this isn’t done. Because the government keeps sending me stimulus checks, even though I live in Germany. The US government insists that you’ve got to do these tax returns even if you live in Germany and, for all practical purposes, have no financial dealings with the US. And it’s annoying and a waste of paper, but I guess the upshot is that it gets you into the system when they start mailing checks. I got one after the first stimulus about a year ago and I got a second one back in January after the second stimulus deal was finished and I can only assume that some Treasury elf is toiling away on my third check now that the final stimulus bill has been passed.

I mean, I need to be clear on this. I didn’t ask for these checks. I didn’t sign up anywhere for them. And they just arrive, with little in the way of explanation. The first one was closely followed by a letter from Donald Trump, but that was political. There is nothing explaining why I’m getting this sum of money and how the figures were arrived at. But it’s not hard maths. The numbers add up to a payment for me and then three payments for dependents.

So, four people. Except Colin was dead before anyone in China had ever developed the first signs of Covid-19. And yet he’s getting stimulus checks. Even though I sent his death certificate to the US consulate here and then, when they didn’t respond, followed up to make sure that the US government knew that my son was dead. But I guess State doesn’t talk to Treasury, or maybe the State Department uses the same mailing service that got my Christmas cards to the States just in the last week. But it’s pretty clear that the people in Treasury are still looking at the 2019 forms, with three children on it.

So, here I sit, getting money I don’t really need and certainly didn’t request and, honestly, think wasn’t handed out using the best means testing. And I don’t really have any use for it and I’m disinclined to use it because some of it was sent in error to a dead boy and I dread the phone call or email that will come at some point when the Treasury Department realizes that Colin was dead when they mailed the check. I don’t feel like explaining this to another government official. I don’t feel like having money that was meant for Colin to use to stimulate the US economy – God knows, he would have done so, purely on Lightning McQueen merchandise if he could have – just so I can go through a song and dance at some undetermined date about the wisdom of sending unneeded money overseas based on year-old tax forms.

So yeah, tax season kind of sucked this year. And I suspect it’s not done with me.

Uncategorized

Game night

You’d think that, with all of us locked in a house day and night, it wouldn’t be that hard to get the four of us to sit around a table and play a board game. But it’s Friday afternoon as I type this and we’ve been trying to organize one since Saturday.

Life intervenes, of course. Plans for a weekend game had to be rethought after a social studies project that was due on Monday was suddenly remembered after breakfast on Sunday. While I wouldn’t say that either Christina or I are slaves to our jobs, unexpected deadlines and projects do pop up, meaning the after-work game session can’t happen on this day or that because some parent is suddenly stuck working until almost bedtime. Sometimes you’re just glad when the kids are engrossed in some project that doesn’t involve maiming one another, so you forget that you’ve been advocating for game night for the last 96 hours and just sit down on the sofa and enjoy the quiet.

But there is a philosophical clash here as well, and it’s primarily between me and Emma. I like complicated games, where you have to sit and thin two to three steps into the future. Emma is certainly capable of these games – she usually wins – but she’s more of a Uno kind of gal.

It’s not that I hate Uno. It’s just that, if I’m going to get the family seated together in front of a board game, I want to actually do something together. I want to talk and exchange ideas and actually be together, not play a 15-minute round of shouting “Draw 4” and “You forgot to say Uno” before we all go our own ways. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fun, but it’s more like a starburst. I want the slow version where we talk about whether you really want to build your settlement there and reach pinky swears where I won’t wipe you out this time if you leave me alone next time. I want an actual family.

It’s becoming clear to me that my desire to get everyone down for one of the harder games is turning into a bit of a power play. I keep threatening to shut down all electronics in the household if we don’t play a game I like. Emma is fond of remembering chores or schoolwork when the other option is to play one of my games. It’s almost like a game to her, it feels, finding ways to get out of game night. And me, I’m having flashbacks to a summer where my brother forced me to play backgammon every night for what felt like three solid months and beat me every time (like, whoo hoo, Mr College Student, taking apart the second grader at backgammon!) and I hated it, so I don’t want force this king of thing on my kids either.

So I cheated a little. I pulled Emma aside and tried to explain. Yes, I get it. These kinds of games aren’t her cup of tea. Yes, we should also play the kind of games she likes. But, I pointed out, I’m trying to get the family together. And then, maybe I opened up a little too much to my 12-year-old and told her that, look, I’m supposed to have a 7-year-old to play with right now. That was the plan. I’m supposed to be too engaged in chasing a first grader around to pester her too much. But I don’t, so maybe I’m now transferring some of that energy to her and maybe it’s holding her down a bit, but it’s where we’re at.

She’s a smart kid. I think she got it.

So, as things stand, our compromise is that we’re to play Scotland Yard tomorrow after breakfast. We’ll see. We’ve also just realized that we have to do a grocery run tomorrow and I work at 1:30 p.m. Maybe we’ll pull it off or maybe we won’t. You just have to keep trying.

Uncategorized

Writing it all down

So, I guess I’m branching out. After a lot of back and forth (and ridiculous amounts of moral support from Chuck McCutcheon), I got this piece published in Medium. If I even have my act together, this link will work.

I haven’t decided yet if this is going to be a one-time thing or a new undertaking. On the one hand, the writing helps me work things out and, who knows, maybe I can do a tiny bit of good in the world if I keep writing. On the other hand, writing it all down can be grueling. Throwing it out there for someone to edit can tear you in two. Having it out there and wondering if you’ll get any responses or whether some troll will turn on you or wondering whether you’ve revealed too much online … it all takes its toll.

I don’t know why, but it reminds me of the time when I decided I needed therapy and went off looking for a professional with whom I could speak. I thought I’d found a guy, but then, after I told him my story, he said, no, he didn’t think he could work with me because he had a young child and he was pretty sure listening to me worry about the health of my son would be way too depressing for him.

And now I’m trying to throw this out into the world, hoping it won’t be way too depressing for everyone else. Like, I saw this article on the Washington Post yesterday about how researchers have discovered that infrared thermometers don’t measure temperatures accurately, and I wanted to post it on Facebook and ask “Doesn’t everyone know this?” And then I realized that, no, not everyone knows this, because not everyone spent the better part of a year hovering over their son in a variety of medical institutions chit-chatting with nurses about what works and what doesn’t. It gets hard to share, because my experience set is so far removed from what is normal and because, understandably, there are people out there who don’t want to hear my depressing story.

So, yes, I got this published, but I’m hardly in the New Yorker yet, and this effort involved the following hurdles:

  • at least one agent saying he didn’t think he could work with me because it’s all way too depressing
  • one Medium channel that seemed right telling authors they would not get a rejection if their piece was not used … and then still getting a rejection
  • and, my favorite, the day I started all this, the n key on my keyboard going on the fritz, meaning I either get no n or two n’s every time I hit that key.

And this is all before I think about the rest. Do I want to be that guy? Do I want to be the guy who only writes about his son? To what end do I do it? Just to exorcise my demons? To get people to pay attention to me? Do I figure that maybe I could turn this into a book deal and make some money? Off my son’s death? As unlikely as that is? I suppose there’s the argument that I keep him alive by writing him, but we all know that’s just a thing you say and, at best, I’m just keeping a memory of him alive, one that will disappear some day when the last person who knew him is alive and long after this website disappears because the world has moved on to its next form of communications technology.

The things is, I could write about him every day. I don’t because a part of me doesn’t want to open this page half the time and another part thinks it’s just too much weight to throw out into the world and another part that thinks it’s only healthy to dwell on this so much. I always wanted to be a writer – and not just at a newspaper, where you have to write what the editors tell you to do – but this was never the kind I envisioned becoming.

Uncategorized

Baby steps

You know, I say a week ago that I think I’ve had this breakthrough with the fact that there are other kids Colin’s age still alive, and then….

It’s not exactly a setback. It’s far from me wishing other kids dead. It is along the lines of me thinking about writing a post-apocalyptic novel about a man who kidnaps a boy to replace his lost child. It is probably prompted by the fact that I’m trying to print out photos from the last year and, in the search, came across a photo or two of Colin in places I didn’t expect. It is probably linked to the fact that I’m cleaning out old paperwork and found things like our application for him to go to day care, or the original paperwork from his health insurance.

It all comes and goes. The babies probably add to it.

I mean it happens. People have babies. You can hardly expect that not to happen. And it’s not like I want it not to happen. (and it’s interesting that I sat on this post for 24 hours before sending it and now, reading it before I send it, noticed that I accidentally left the word ‘not’ out of the two above sentences. One does wonder what the mind is doing when you’re not paying attention) Just because things blew up in my face doesn’t mean I think people should forgo the joys (and other bits) of parenthood. I certainly look forward to a scenario where I have grandkids, even if that is planning ridiculously ahead, given that neither Emma nor Noah has shown so much as signs of interest in a first date so far. I mean, way to plan ahead, Niels. I’m having a political/meaning of life debate with a relative who recently lost his wife and the only way I can explain things to him is that, yes, there are days I think about dying, but they’re nothing more than fleeting thoughts, because I want to see how these two turn out, and that desire to see them grow up outweighs any dark thoughts I might have.

But there are babies. I found out that a neighbor is expecting. A completely unrelated neighbor told me.

“You knew, right?” he said, right after dropping the news.

“I know now,” I responded. And then I couldn’t tell Christina about it because I figured Christina would want to hear it straight from the source. And I honestly don’t know how to react to the news on some level. Because, while everyone else is all “Congratulations” my thoughts flee to “Oh, but the dangers.” And I realize that the odds were so ridiculously off with us. A friend told us when Colin first got diagnosed that we should play the lottery, if we prevailed (for lack of a better word) with odds like that. There are just so few people who get what Colin had, that the odds of my knowing anyone who develops the same or similar condition are just infinitesmal. And yet, and yet … I know the possibility is there. So every “yay,” with me is tinged with the knowledge that I might have to go through this again on some level. It’s a cliche, but it felt like a punch in the gut.

Similarly, we attended an video call baby shower last weekend. I remember attending my Mom’s funeral via Skype half a decade ago and that was novel enough of an experience that I wrote up an article about it. Now it’s just Sunday night. And it was great and we’re happy for the couple and, even though they read this blog, this is by no means meant to be a downer. But the worry never goes out of your mind. It’s like we all know that we’re all going to die some day, I just feel like I know it a little bit more than everyone else in the room.

So yes, I look forward to meeting babies still, even ones who might be related to me. I just wish I could unknow so much in this world.

Uncategorized

17

There have been 17 17ths since Colin died.

I did spend the first three or four months bracing myself for the 17th of each month. October 17, 2019, was one month since his death. November 17, 2019, was two months, and so on. I don’t remember anything particularly noteworthy happening on those days, but the build up certainly kept me busy.

For months now – perhaps thanks to the distraction of the coronavirus – I honestly don’t count the minutes, moments and days until each 17th arrives. And yet, invariably, towards the end of every 17th I’ll point out how I’ve been having a bad day and Christina will remind me of the date. She knows it straight away because she’s been having a rough one as well.

This time perhaps there were extra triggers. Emma had to go to her school – despite the lockdown – to get her report card. There seems to be some tic to the German school rules that require these things be picked up in person. And her school is nowhere near the house and she didn’t want to make the trip by herself. And I’ve spent the last year trying to only leave the house when absolutely necessary, and suddenly I’m taking a trip downtown and back on public transportation so I can wait in the (mild) rain while Emma and her class run around the school because her teachers couldn’t figure out which classroom they’d set aside for the handover.

But I don’t need an event like that. I should recognize the signs by now. The flying into tiny rages because some of my clothes have been put back the wrong way. The sense of weight I feel when I’m working in my study and Noah comes in for something and I know I should turn around and be glad to see him but I know I only just have the strength to not be visibly mad that I have to deal with yet another person, even if it’s my only surviving son.

I still don’t know if it’s actually the 17th. God knows, I was pretty annoyed with things on the 16th as well. Because you can never tell when it’s going to come up. Call it the curse of Facebook, but I’ve got five years of memories saved on to it, and I’m far from a prolific poster there, but there are enough references to and pictures of Colin there that they do pop up and get me at the oddest times, especially at this time of year, when it likes to share the memories of the pictures I took and shared of him in his first six weeks of life.

Which I suppose is an awkward segue to the picture at the top of this post, which I already went on about on Facebook. Because it’s a picture of me from a year ago, when Christina humored me and took me to an exhibit on the crossbow at the history museum and we turned that into our anniversary day out. On Facebook, I went on about how odd it was that I was standing there, holding a fake crossbow, knowing what I knew then about the spread of the coronavirus and still hanging out unmasked in a museum and not really suspecting that it was going to be a little less than three weeks until I was sent home with a laptop and a monitor to run a news wire from my study with no real idea when I would ever see the inside of my office again.

But here, on this blog, what also struck me is that it was five months since our son died and Christina and I still managed to pull it together to get the kids to school and spend a day at a museum and have a coffee together (I’m not sure we managed lunch as well) and act like it was a halfway normal anniversary (of our civil, not our church, ceremony). There is a way to look at that and say “Why weren’t you in bed, just crying your eyes out.” But there is also a way to look at is and say “You did what you could with what was left.” I know which way I want to go many days. But I also know which way I’m glad I go most days.

Uncategorized

To a T

Like any family with children, we have a ton of clothes the kids have outgrown and nowhere good to send them. The problems is that ours just carry a bit more emotional weight.

The T-shirt here probably takes the case to the extreme. I purchased this in 1992, give or take a year, and gave it to my nephew Karl, then 3, as a Christmas gift. It was then worn by umpteen of his siblings before my sister-in-law mailed it to me for Noah to wear. Noah got his use out of it and then it became Colin’s. Towards the end, it was one of only a handful of T-shirts he would let us put on him. We never quite figured out why – Christina suspects he associated anything new with being bad – but he would still manage to kick up a fuss if you tried to dress him in something from the non-approved list of about five T-shirts. Anyone who has done laundry for a family of five – even in normal conditions – knows how hard it is to keep the right five T-shirts in regular circulation. It got stressful.

And even beyond Colin’s love of the T-shirt, it’s one of my favorite ones because he wore it on our outing to Irrlandia, this family park outside Berlin, in 2018. It certainly wasn’t our last time together as a family of five, but it’s the one that stands out the strongest in my memory. It was a dumb summer. We couldn’t coordinate a vacation to get away from Berlin, so we were going to do it in 2019. We made the best we could of weekend trips. Then I went away to Australia, he started getting sick and, by December he was in the hospital. But we had that day in Irrlandia and he had am amazing time. I’ve posted the picture here before of him and me in the park’s maize maze. It’s a good memory.

Anyways, the shirt is now on its way to the States. My niece, Tara, is expecting a child and I figure the kid should continue the Sorrells/Elvis tradition. And maybe Karl will have a kid at some point and then, man, that will probably turn out to be the most cost-effective purchase of my entire life.

But to find the Elvis shirt we had to find the other clothes. It reminded us that we still have a fair number of his clothes stored in the closet in Noah’s room, since the boys ostensibly shared a room (even though Colin ended up in our bed every night). It feels unfair to Noah to have Colin’s clothes still there, perfectly visible each time he goes to grab one of his T-shirts. At the same time, I wonder if Noah will be upset if we try to remove the clothes. You never know how these things will play out. He might like having the memory there. Maybe so long as the clothes are there, it’s still the room he shares with his brother. Every step of this path, even 17 months after his death requires so much negotiation.

It also reminded us that we still had at least a box of his clothes upstairs in the attic and that, if we want to preserve them, they probably need to be stored better than tossed into a box in the attic. And then there’s the question of where to put them. And then there’s the question that the guest room – which was his room for the two months we were all here between the rehab therapy and the hospice – remains stuck in this halfway state between the room where he was when he was sick and a guest room and none of us really with the energy to rearrange things so it’s a room we can use. And that’s assuming any of us want to use the room. We barely ever go in it.

The truth is, the lockdown has given us a lot of time to work on household projects, but in some ways it traps us inside with them too. There are a thousand good reasons to sort through his clothes and his room. But there’s also one good reason not to: We might still not be ready.