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.