You keep thinking, when you do this, that there will come a point where the death of your child doesn’t bother you anymore. And you know you’re lying to yourself, but you keep thinking that one day I’ll be able to refer to my dead child in the same way I refer to my dead parents or grandparents. I miss my parents and mourned for them, but I don’t feel their absence on a daily level, because I’m 53 and it’s not that unusual to be preceded in death by your parents. Colin should be 11 right now, playing Legos in the living room. Instead, we’ve got Ricardo visiting as I write this. He’s in the kitchen with Christina, preparing his belated birthday dinner, because you can’t keep Ricardo out of the kitchen when there’s food preparation to be done.
And it’s fine and it’s nice. I like Ricardo and enjoy his visits. Murphy absolutely loves Ricardo’s visits. It’s a good thing. But somewhere in there, you realize that the only reason we know Ricardo and have him in our lives is because Colin was so sick and we were so overwhelmed by running a family in 2016 and 2017 that we simply had to get an au pair. Had there been no fatal cancer, there never would have been Ricardo in our lives and we’d be having taco night with just the five of us.
It’s fine. But it’s a memory. And the memories can’t be planned.
To wit, a week or so ago the bosses at work decided that someone from the Germany team should head to Copenhagen in a week or so because there’s a big wind energy conference, and Germany is a big consumer of energy generated by Danish wind power. So yay, a trip to Copenhagen, even if it’s clear that I’m going to spend most of the time in a windowless convention center!
And then I looked up the location of the convention on Google Maps and, wow. It’s like half a block from the former hostel where we all stayed when we visited Copenhagen in 2017. That was our good year of cancer, when we thought we had a fighting chance to beat this thing for good. We still had no real idea how far the cancer had set Colin back and, had he survived, how much assistance in terms of physical therapy and what-not that he would have needed. We certainly had no idea that the cancer would come back. So, we took a family trip to Denmark. In 2018, a variety of circumstances kept us from taking a summer vacation, mostly due to finances and work schedules. Then in the summer of 2019 he was dying. By the time the summer of 2020 rolled around, there were only four of us and vacations were off the table because of the pandemic.
But we had that trip in 2017. I think we only spent two nights in Copenhagen and the bulk of our time in the city ended up being in this downtown amusement park called the Tivoli. But we stayed in this hostel. The kids were horrified by the shared bathrooms. Christina ate crushed insects in her breakfast (on purpose). And both mornings we walked right by this hotel/convention center on our way to the train.
And that’s where I’m going to be in about a week.
I don’t think I’m going to fall apart. I don’t think I’m going to have a meltdown. But Copenhagen is a big enough city you’d think I wouldn’t have to get plopped down in the one corner (aside from the Tivoli) where I have the strongest memories of Colin. And yet that’s where I’m going. Because irony seems to be a central part of any attempt to deal with my child’s death.
We’ll see how it goes.