Two Years Later

A friend asked yesterday how I thought I would get through today. I responded, as I always do, that the known anniversaries are, in some ways, the easiest. You mentally brace yourself and put up your shields. You fear it’s going to be a rough ride, so you brace yourself for the worst and, so far when it’s over, you look back and wonder “What was I so worried about?”

Instead, it’s the unexpected that gets you. To prove the point, less than an hour after the phone conversation, Emma began singing “Baby Shark” and, after twice asking her to stop singing had to raise my voice just a little bit because I felt it wouldn’t take that much to turn that incident into a nervous breakdown for me.

Aside from the fact that it’s an incredibly annoying song, it’s a melody I associate with Colin’s decline. Colin was always a ridiculously early riser, and it seemed to get worse the sicker he got. Emin, one of the best nurses we had, was left one morning with Colin awake at about 4 am and, in desperation handed Colin his smartphone and opened it up to Youtube, where Colin found a seemingly neverending supply of videos about toys based on the Cars series. There were videos of people building Lego cars. There were videos of the Lego bricks stop animating themselves into their stacks of colors. There were videos of the cars being washed and sorted. There were some in English and some in Russian and some in Portuguese and so, so many of them had “Baby Shark” as background music.

Colin loved this. He also, unfortunately, had about a 75-second attention span, so as you lay with him at 5 a.m., wondering what on God’s Earth it would take to break the internet and make that song stop, you also wondered why you couldn’t possibly finish one single video. Would the stacks of Legos ever reassemble? Would the cars ever get clean? How many more languages could they do this in?

It’s odd that this is one of the strongest memories of those two months. I still can’t believe we really did it. We had been told he more or less had a death sentence, but, when the second doctor said that the results were inconclusive, we grabbed onto that wisp of hope and held onto it for dear life, no matter how bad the nurses were and no matter how many damned times it meant we had to listen to “Baby Shark.”

But I think I’m done listening to the song now. On multiple levels.

Which I guess is my way of saying, I think we’ll be OK today. We spent yesterday making new candles for Colin. We even watched some episodes of Curious George, which, despite all the hours we spent watching that while he was sick, is not such an awful memory, so long as you don’t watch the damned camping episode, because it’s not like I’m a super experienced camper, but I know it’s not camping if you basically take an apartment in a camper into the woods and, if I do that, I don’t park it under a potential waterfall.

But my dislike of that episode is neither here nor there. Today, we know it’s going to be a little rough, so we’re buckled in. On Monday, we didn’t know what was coming our way, so when Emma woke up with her nightmare, everything felt a tad off. I spent the day walking around the house, feeling like I did in September 2019 when we finally returned home from the hospice, trying to reassure myself that this is where I actually lived and this is where it happened and, for lack of a better phrase, get myself used to the place again. Like, we’d changed so much in that time watching Colin die, that the house was wrong for us, like a sweater that comes out of the wash shrunken. It felt a little bit like that on Monday too.

Today, it feels fine. I had a nice birthday, with time to sit and read, cake with the kids, an incredibly successful attempt on Christina’s part to recreate one of the dishes my Mom always made and then a few beers with a buddy. The big birthday gift – a lawnmower robot! – is on its way here, as Christina decided to hide it with her parents in advance of the birthday. Tomorrow I’ll have a party. And today, we’re going to take our candles and go to the graveyard and say hi to Colin. We might even be there at the excat time of his death: 4:50. Which makes me feel odd that I can’t remember the specific times of my kids’ births, but the time of Colin’s death is burned into the brain core. It still doesn’t feel to me like the cemetery is a place where he really is. I’m actually starting to think about finally properly setting up our Colin corner in the guest room, since I think that might feel like a better place to remember him. Then again, when he died, I was convinced I needed a spot in the cemetery to be with him, and I barely ever go there. So, who knows? Maybe today will end up being awful. Maybe it will be as good as it can be. We just take it one memory at a time.