Yesterday, it was creamy oatmeal with butter on a cool,
almost-fall morning.
The day before that, it was the sound of your Uncle Andy
quietly playing guitar in the other room while I was working.
Today, it was the warm, sloppy morning kisses from Muffin,
your furry Boston terrier cousin.
These are the kinds of things that catch me off-guard and
break my heart a little more each day since you left us.
They're simple, everyday things that I never thought much
about before, never paused over, never really appreciated as much as I should
have. But now I think of you constantly, and these tiny facets of life
overwhelm me as the things you never got to experience. This is
incomprehensibly unfair.
When I notice these things, my sorrow bubbles up and often
spills out of my eyes, and I feel a thick lump in my throat. Sometimes it's a
wonder to me that I can continue standing when there is obviously a bowling
ball in my chest that wasn't there before.
But underneath all that sadness, Luke, there's something
else I didn't expect, and I know it's a gift from you.
A sense of peace.
The days after your death were the darkest our family has ever
experienced. We all felt lost and desperate. Not only did we each feel a very
personal loss of our son, grandson, nephew, but we also had to witness the
terrible grief of the people we loved the most in the world. It was double-stuffed
grief. I wished for Doc Brown to show up with his DeLorean and take us back to
September 7, when your mom was at the doctor and you were simply, perfectly,
alive! Maybe we could've warned someone, Luke, so that all of us could've
experienced your birth the way we had imagined it instead of the way it turned
out to be.
(Doc Brown, by the way, is a character from the popular '80s
movie Back to the Future—he turned a
funny-looking car into a time machine. I know you would've liked this movie,
and your daddy would've bought you Converse sneakers like the ones the other
main character, Marty McFly, wore. Those are your daddy's favorite shoes.)
There are no time machines outside of Hollywood movies,
though. So we found ourselves stuck here in the present, with our hearts ripped
out and our arms achingly empty and our minds completely incapable of believing
what had happened to you. I am trying to put it into words but there's really
no way, except maybe to say it was H-E-double hockey sticks.
I know you're probably wondering where the sense of peace
comes in. Hang on; I'm getting there. In case you haven't noticed yet, your
auntie is verbose.
A couple of days after your mom and dad came home from the
hospital, I was driving over to their house in Grandma's old Caravan. It was
about 100 degrees, and her car has no air conditioning, so I had the windows
down and the hot Southern California air was blowing on my face. While sitting
at a light, I was distracting myself by punching the radio station buttons,
trying to find something decent to listen to. And on the third station I tried,
I heard Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (aka Iz) strumming his ukulele and singing
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow".
I couldn't believe I was hearing it at first. It's not a
song that often gets played on the radio, in my experience. In fact, I can't
recall ever hearing it on the radio before. It was like someone had just turned
on the soundtrack to the movie of my life, and I knew instantly that I was
meant to be sitting in the hot, old car at that moment hearing that song. It
was like a big, warm hug from the universe. I finally felt permission to let go.
My stomach and heart had been in knots ever since I got the
call about you on Sunday afternoon. It seemed each moment that followed brought
a new trial that I just couldn't believe I would pass. I wanted to collapse and
disappear, and yet I knew I had to be with my sister (your mommy). So there was
the phone call to the airline, throwing clothes in a suitcase, frantically
driving to the airport, saying good-bye to your uncle, going through security,
getting on a plane. That part felt hard because it involved a lot of activity,
but the two-hour plane ride was a million times harder because all I had to do
was sit and think about you and what had happened and how everything was
suddenly, painfully, different.
And that was only the beginning.
Then there was the hospital, and the heartbroken faces of
everyone I love, and your mommy having to do something nobody should ever have
to do in a just world. There were crying nurses and doctors, and a chaplain in
his uniform, and finally you in your mommy's arms, perfect but still. And there
were your daddy's eyes, which should have been filled with pride, but they were
filled with tears instead. None of it seemed real, but it hurt for real, until
it seemed I couldn't feel anything anymore.
But then Iz was singing about trouble melting like lemon
drops, and even though nothing was okay, I suddenly knew that somehow, everything
would be okay. I don't know how, and I don't know when. I just know that this
grief-filled place is not the end, and I believe you're the reason this peaceful
feeling washed over me.
No, there's no time machine so that we can go back and keep
you from getting tangled up in your cord. There's no way to give you the life
you should have had. There's no way to erase the pain your mommy and daddy, and
all of us, will live with for the rest of our lives. There's no going anywhere
but forward now, and forward sometimes feels like a big, black hole full of
unknown monsters.
But maybe there is peace simply for the reason that the
worst has happened, and we're still here. It feels like the peace that washes
over the battlefield when the battle is done, or the stillness that fills the
sky after an explosive thunderstorm, or the quiet that follows a great
earthquake.
This doesn't mean that there won't be aftershocks. I know we
will feel those all the time, for a long time to come. We'll still cry for you
every time we see something that reminds us of you. We'll think of you on holidays,
when you should've been with us, and on regular days, when you really should've
been with us. We'll wonder why, and
we'll be afraid, and we'll long for ourselves the way we were before this
happened, all full of hope and naïve trust in our charmed lives. We will be
crazy people, because, as the pastor said, this is crazy-making stuff.
Still, I can't shake the feeling that you're just somewhere
over the rainbow, and it's not so terribly far from where we are. And birds fly
over the rainbow…so why, oh why, can't I?
Tears.
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