I suppose It’s normal behavior for kids in general and perhaps even more so around the holidays, but I’ve spent the last two weeks fielding a lot of questions like “Which of did the craziest things as a kid?” or “Which one of us was the easiest to put to bed?” That kind of thing. A lot of need to have the various children ranked in their own heads, so they can jot down in their mental notebooks which was the good one, which was the funny one, which was the difficult one, etc. etc. etc.
I get it. I think it’s kind of normal to know your role in the family (I was the perfect one, in case anyone’s wondering), the problem is – and I have told the children this, just not in a way that I think they truly understand – is that my memory has done a bit of a flush in the last few years. And maybe that’s also an attribute of being 50 now, but it feels more intense. Like, I have a memory of Noah at the top of the stairs the day Christina fell down the steps, pregnant with Colin, and broke her ankle. That’s seared into my brain. I have another clear memory of Emma and Noah bickering by the car outside our house. Noah had a small Playmobil toy and was pulling imaginary dust out of it that he was giving to everyone – me, the bushes, the car, the other toys – but not Emma, who was having kittens at being excluded.
And I don’t want to say I have no other memories of the two of them pre-2016. There are several more. But then came Colin’s birth in 2014, and that takes up a certain amount of mental real estate, and then came his diagnosis in 2016 and the bad news at the end of 2018 and his death in 2019 and I feel like so much of my memory was wiped. Who ate their vegetables? I have no idea. I remember more sneaking food in the kitchen because we didn’t know how to explain to Colin that he couldn’t eat solid food any more due to the trach. Who liked which story more? Most of my mental real estate now is tied up in the two or three stories Colin would let me read to him towards the end.
It’s unfair. The whole time Colin was sick, I felt bad that we were neglecting Emma and Noah, because what else could we do? And now he’s gone, and I don’t want to forget him, but so many of the bad memories are crowding my head, I feel like I might have jettisoned some really good memories in the process.
I guess that makes it all the more important to hold on to the good ones. Like, when Emma and Noah were about 5 and 3, I caught them in Emma’s room as I was heading out the door to work. It wasn’t immediately obvious they were doing anything bad … but then I noticed that each time they shifted their weight, their no-skid socks made ann odd “schwack, schwack” sound. I asked what that was and they told me that they had tried to glue their feet to the floor, which did explain noise. Hopefully (naively?) I said that surely they applied the glue up in Emma’s room. No, they told me, they had put the glue on in the living room, then walked through that room, through the hallway, up the stairs and into Emma’s room. And, as I looked down the stairs, I saw the trail of glue footprints confirming their story.
Sadly, I had to get to work, so I could leave the clean up to others.
I wish I had more stories like that. I wish I had more with the three of them doing silly things together, but Colin was still a toddler when he was diagnosed and then, it feels, like he was in a bubble for a lot of the next three years. His interactions with his siblings were so limited. His interactions with us seemed to consist so much of doctor’s runs and getting medicine in and finding ways to trick him into sitting still so we could get a little more life out of him.
There are times I wish we had never gotten the diagnosis in 2016 and we’d just gone on with our lives – we were planning to go to the States in the summer of 2016 – and then maybe he would have slipped away, and that would have been devastating, but we would have had normal family memories up until that point. And I know I don’t want that. I mean, the few times I’ve been at the bereaved Dad’s group, the guys who lost their kids unexpectedly are a whole different kind of mess than the people like me. They woke up and were missing a kid. I got two or three years to turn my head inside out while it happened. And maybe that’s not better, but I don’t think it’s worse either. It’s just the kind of loss you have.
Anyways, we tried to remember Colin as best as we could during the holidays. I might write a little more about memory soon. It’s as if my memories are working differently than normal these days. Maybe, if I try harder, I’ll be able to knock loose a few more stories for Emma and Noah about when they were kids. Maybe we’ll just have to concentrate on making the best memories we can from here on out. Maybe my memory is working just fine – does everyone remember everything about their kids? – but it all feels off because of what we went through. Maybe I’m still working on it.