Essaying

While at a Loss

We have been at a loss this fall. Actually we have been at many.

We’ve experienced breath-snatching news. Staggering. The kinds of tragedies the human mind denies entry, bolts every lock, tips a chair under the knob. It screams there’s no way you can fit in here.

But tragedy is a relentless intruder. And too strong. It gets in. And once inside there’s no room that can contain it, no place it might comfortably sit. It ricochets around, bouncing off walls, upsetting every neighbor below, the joints, the stomach, the heart. It opens the back door so grief can just walk right in and live here now.

Amidst all this loss, we have had to explain death to our youngest. To date, we had kept life’s worst secret, allowing him to believe in a bright, sunny world of unending good outcomes. Now, unavoidably, we must lead him out of the dark, into the dark.

Given my son’s different understanding of the world, I text his speech therapist for advice on how to talk about death and dying. She has known him for a decade. She worked with him as he was gaining words, before his brain got derailed. She worked with him as he was losing words, epilepsy feasting on all his ideas and thoughts.

For years, she sat beside him on our basement couch, he slumped onto her as they read, as she tried to untangle his tongue, help his brain find brambled-up paths for nouns and verbs. Were these lessons registering? That was not always clear. But what was clear was that he loved the hour tucked in beside her, as much therapy as it was speech.

She tells me to speak simply and honestly. She tells me to incorporate our beliefs, and I stop myself from asking what our beliefs are exactly because I know this is an answer key I’m supposed to have.

She tells me that for a learner like my son, this might be a small blip on his radar or a massive one. She tells me to expect anything.

I sit down with my youngest and explain that his grandfather, his Boppa does not feel well. I tell him what seems to be happening. Within days, we will understand that this talk was blessedly premature — the situation seeming emergent, but then resolving and settling. My father-in-law feeling much better, the timeline altogether different than we’d feared.

But once this conversation had been started, it could not be retracted or erased with changing circumstances. Life’s most private document unclassified. The shot fired. My son’s processing irrevocably begun.

His radar blazes. Radio waves bouncing off of all he had previously understood about the loveliness and safety of life hurtling back at him.

While many 14 year-olds would be stricken and quieted by this news, my son says everything he is thinking. His is an unfiltered sadness, and therefore the most purified. He is an inadvertent grief counselor, naming feelings plainly, putting them out there to be absorbed and processed.

He tells me he does not want this to happen.

I tell him I don’t either.

He asks that if this does happen, might the Sun someday return his grandfather, a hangover from a time last year when I staged a toy miracle. My son had thought the Sun had killed the toys I’d packed up and planned to purge. But his sadness over those lost toys overwhelmed me, and I returned them, letting him believe the Sun had resurrecting powers because, at the time, I thought what harm for a magical thinker. I am an idiot.

I explain that the Sun cannot return people. He doesn’t call me on it. He doesn’t ask me why I misled him. But this new information affects him physically. He slumps his shoulders, let down by the world and all its rotten details.

“But I would want him to come back.”

I fight my inner magician, the inclination to wave a wand and make this better. “I know.”

Like all the best poets, unbound by conventions, my son crystallizes emotions and often surprises. “But would there be a Spirit Boppa?” he asks a few minutes later.

When I tell him yes, he is visibly relieved. But I soon realize he’s thinking more of a clone than a spirit. He’s envisioning an exact, living replica.

I clarify. Or perhaps muddy it: we would not be able to see that kind of spirit. But we would know they were there, everywhere around us, waiting in our memories, looking down on our futures. Are these our beliefs? I’m not even sure, but the ideas seem to comfort my son.

After more minutes, my son asks what about my other grandparents? And my cousins? And my aunts and uncles? I watch as his mind loses its footing, sliding down this most slippery slope. But he doesn’t go all the way — he doesn’t mention me or my husband or his siblings. When I share this with my sister she says it is probably because that idea is too inconceivable, a bridge too far even for the mobster Life is turning out to be.

---

“Daddy, would you miss Boppa?” my son asks as we we walk down the back steps towards the car. We are taking my husband to the airport so he can fly to Seattle to be with his dad. Again, this urgency will end up being misplaced but we can’t know it at the time.

“Of course I would. He taught me everything I know.” It is always the simplest sentences that get you. Now my husband and I are both crying.

My son gangles along in front of us, thoughts probably as jumbled and stretched as his growth-spurted limbs.

“Yeah, but would you miss him?” Often, when we add too much color to an answer, my son asks the question again because he’s looking for something black and white, something pure.

“Yes I would,” my husband tells him.

“Would you say NOOOOO, DAD!” My son stretches his arms out, reaching. The unexpected theatrics make my husband and I laugh while crying, one of those heady mixed moments where you think this is life after all.

“What is that from?” I ask, because I recognize my son’s applied learning when I see it. I know that some of his best, most primary references draw from a deep, animated catalogue.

“Smurfs 2.”

As my husband gets out at the airport curb, my youngest asks if he will be back tomorrow. It’s October 30 and he knows what’s at stake: Halloween. He is to be Mario, my husband Luigi. When I tell him his dad won’t be back in time — that he needs to go be with his dad, but that we will do an extra Halloween, a night where they both dress up, sometime soon, my son’s shoulders slump again. Stupid, sad world.

“Aw man,” he turns his head to the queuing taxi line instead of his goodbying father. My son operates an uncalibrated hardship meter. This loss feels big.

We drive away, merging onto 101 South, planes blinking to our left, houses blinking to our right. Life unfolding all around us.

“Why is everyone dying these days?” my son asks. He asks this without knowing the extent of it, unaware of the rip current of loss our family cannot find the angle to swim out of.

“I don’t know.” Simple, honest.

“Is it a good question?” he asks, as he often does when he knows he’s given me pause.

“It is a very good question.”

---

Later that night, I am sitting on my older daughter’s bed with my younger daughter who has moved into this time capsule room for a few weeks. This is now her college application headquarters.

We are proofing her essays. It feels hard to concentrate given all the largeness looming. How can we revise a personal statement at a time like this?

But we are essaying, trying, doing the small things even during big things.

This is life after all.

My younger daughter’s nails clickety clack around on her ipad, sure swipes and selections, moving stuff around, speeding screen to screen. I feel like I need a seatbelt.

We bump into a sentence that is bumpy. As with all editing, I now can’t figure out if “gotten” is a real word that should be used in a real essay. I’ve gotten confused. I tell her she should reword and she spits out an alternative before I’ve finished saying she should reword, fingers flying, installing the new phrase into place.

“You are a sure-footed editor,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“Other possibilities come to you quickly,” A skill an application could never capture.

She asks me where more or fewer commas might go or not go, as if she’s never met me. I’m not that kind of English major or writer, I tell her. I’m sure whatever number of commas she has is just fine. Sometimes, when you’re making a great point, in an important, high-stakes piece, the commas, the separations, the pauses can just be too much anyway.

While she corrects odd spacing issues, I look around the room. It has been 6 years since my oldest sat on this bed finalizing applications. She’s graduated from the school she sat in this room and hung stars on, has sped through the galaxy she was seeking.

It has been 5 years since she lived in this room, woke up every day in this bed, got ready for her day at her school in the city, packed bags for rehearsal and practice, leaving everyday looking like she might be moving out.

Her bookshelf stands monument to the all the girls she’s been. Picture books inscribed by grandparents, middle readers she cherished like reliable little knobby-kneed friends, bound classics, editions she probably never read but which look quite pretty lined up together, pastel and embossed.

On the top shelf of her closet, a cardboard cut-out of her I’d had made for her first birthday. Crawling and bright-eyed, life-like except for the rip above her left eye, stationed above the room, standing guard over all the future selves who’ve gone by.

This is just a childhood bedroom now.

The very work we’re sitting here doing will turn another room down the hall into the same.

This is life after all.

My daughter’s finger hovers over the submit button. Is it ready, she wonders. Has she said everything she needs to say?

“Go go! It’s Done. And you’ve stuck the landing.”

I say this because the last line is so good. It is a haunting little sentence that I wish I’d written. When I tell my daughter this, she tells me, like a true third born, that I can have it. But we both know I can’t — it’s hers and I’m happy it’s hers. And I can’t claim to know what that sentence will go out in the world and do. But I do know that her putting that sentence out into the world makes me just as proud as any shiny outcome could.

---

A day later I am in my husband’s childhood bedroom in Seattle. I have flown up here with my youngest. We overlap for a few hours with my older son who’s come from Vermont. These are just visits now, not lasts. Bonus time together that we’ll take because hugs are hugs are hugs.

His bedroom feels like a guest room. It has had a queen bed for years at this point, but when my husband was younger, it had two twin beds. My husband didn’t have a brother, but he had a best friend who was like one, and that other bed was for him.

The bedroom also has a door to the outside, something I found unlikely as an east coast girl when I first visited this house. But the weather! The bugs! Something that later as a parent I was sure I would’ve bolted shut because the risk! How dangerous to let a kid just step out into the world whenever they wanted.

But when my husband was young, that door wasn’t bolted, it probably wasn’t even locked. So he and his friend snuck out, if it can be considered sneaking to open and exit an offered door.

They walked out and did god knows what for seasons and years on end.

And they were always fine.

This beloved friend, this wonder years companion, this healthy, vibrant, loving and sparkly-eyed husband and father died unexpectedly earlier this fall.

There’s no way you can fit in here.

While we are in town, our friend’s obituary runs in the Sunday paper. We sit at breakfast, open to the page, gaping at his picture. He wears a baseball cap, his ready smile. He looks like a guy who’d be in the news for coaching a Little League team to a tournament victory. He should not be on this page.

We are at a loss.

---

I’m not sure I’ve ever been to Seattle in this season. We usually visit in the summer or at the holidays.

Now, outside this house, the barbecue is under cover, like a meteorologist bundled in a storm whose lone job is to just stand there and prove it is miserably rainy out today. Experience the weather, mark it.

The cocktail glasses, once busy citizens of any time after 5pm, stay stowed in their cabinet apartment. Night falls and my father-in-law does not ask What can I getcha, Jenny? I hadn’t understood quite how I’d loved that.

At the kitchen window, camellias, blooming of all things, press their faces to the window, children at a closed storefront who know there’s something special to see inside.

There is — our time feels cozy, even beautiful. Nothing to expect of the day beyond being together. Chilly and wet outside, inside a fire and TV blazing in every room. College football games in perpetuity. My youngest, who doesn’t leave home without his Hot Wheels cars, narrating an equally perpetual race along the perimeter of the family room rug.

At night, we light candles, roast vegetables, eat and talk. And we listen. We listen to a story we’ve heard before that we’ve never heard before.

The next morning, my son walks by his grandfather’s room, spots him on the bed and yells, “Good morning, Boppa! You’re alive again today!”

This is life after all.

Later, my son, husband, mother-in-law and I go for a walk to earn more football games, iPad and fireside time.

It is gray and has rained or will rain. We walk out on a long pier, my son stomping on the grated metal underfoot because he loves any feedback, the world’s return receipt.

“But where are the boats?” my son asks, looking for the water scene he’d seen on this lake in July.

“It’s not summer anymore. It’s too cold for the boats.”

“Yeah, but where are the planes?” He is thinking of the sea planes that dot the sky here like confetti in the long days of a northwestern summer.

“They are also resting. It’s not their season.”

He stares out at the gray water and I stare at him staring, a way I commonly intake the world. I know he’s probably not thinking what I’m thinking — even the lake looks depressed — but I wonder if he is just the same.

He looks up at the sky and spots one helicopter, an aircraft of traffic-reports and medivacs, so much more serious than a happy seaplane.

“Yeah, but will the planes come back in the summer? With the boats?”

“Absolutely. Of course they will.”

At this, he brightens.

And we will wait for whatever the sun returns.

Jen.

❤️PDM

❤️HMG

❤️BCD