Where it lands

You'd think after 5 years, it'd be a little easier, but I still haven't figured out a way to protect myself from a sudden memory that makes my knees buckle. Inside I feel myself falling to the ground in grief, but on the outside, you wouldn't see anything. It can be a spot we once passed, talking of one thing or another; someone else's child doing some cute thing he used to do; there are a lot of triggers. It can be hard to get through a day, but I do it.

I have dear friends who, after their miscarriages, couldn't bear to hear people talk about being pregnant, having children-- I know it hurts, I do. But it's the kind of pain you have to push through to stay human. You can't make life stop being about death too. You can't change the fact of your loss by avoiding other parents, nor by asking for their silence. But most of all, you can't stop your grief by stopping up your ears. I can't even imagine how the world would have to look to stop reminding me of Jesse. It hurts. But he was worth it. Every second of it from beginning to end. And I'm not saying it's ended.

HBO holds an outdoor movie festival here every summer, in a park near my office. Next Monday, it's the Adventures of Robin Hood, Jesse's favorite movie from age 3-11. ( I gave up counting after his 57th viewing.) He loved that movie so much I made him Robin Hood costumes from scratch every Halloween, and he'd wear them till they were shreds. He memorized the lines, but most of all he absorbed the idea of principled action. Of generosity to those who have little, of protecting the weak, and sticking up for your beliefs. Of loving those who believe in doing good. And having a sense of humor about yourself.

If you ever wonder who Jesse's role models were, that would be a good place to start. I didn't think of that when he wrote his personal essay for law school --scroll about halfway down). But today I did. And the moment of grief that nearly knocked me to the floor instead gave me a new insight into my son. How deep the roots were of his commitment to the good. How that small decision every day to play him his favorite movie became a building block of something beautiful and worthy in him. I am lucky I have a whole lifetime left to discover my son, even if this is the only way. And luckier still to have one more, alive and willing to tolerate his mom's slow uncovering of all that he is, too.

things you realize when you're too busy to think

Over the last say 30 years I'll occasionally recall something stupid my undergrad poetry professor said, but then I forget about it. It's not like I despised him as a professor, I looked up to him. But really. In one poem I spoke of the stars wheeling through the sky and he literally winced when he read it and said something about how everyone knows the stars don't move. Jesus. No more than the sun does but that doesn't stop you from using words like "sunset" and "the sun is out." They moved relative to the narrator, asshole.  And the cliff, and the trees, and the witless unseen stream  nestled in shadowy scrub 50 feet below.

 And I wrote a poem about a dream I had (ok just because you dream it doesn't mean it's a good poem, given), where Harry Kerry was announcing everything I did-- and Prof said no one would really be named that. There was no google at the time, and I did spell the name wrong. But come on, even if you don't understand astronomy and relativity, at least you could fucking understand baseball, right?

Mr. PuddyToddy

He's just a stupid smiling little flexible kid's toy crossing guard with no hat left and nothing in his right fist for 26 years since Jesse found it in the freebies box at some yard sale and his face lit up as he clutched it to his 2 year old chest and said, "MOMMY! It's Mr. PuddyToddy!" And I find it on the floor this morning and I cry and cry. I will probably be crying most of the day, on and off. And I don't care. Why shouldn't I cry. I will never throw that stupid  toy away. I will never forget that on that day, Jesse and I were happy, happy with life and each other, and he had put the soul of one of his three imaginary friends into this little blue wire-boned discarded bit of idiot-faced plastic. And Jesse kept it all these years, so I would find it today and realize that he really did remember.

Something fine

I've written a couple of good stories in my life. I know they were good only because of the effect they had on the people whose opinion I cared about at the time I wrote them. The first time, it was a story from the point of view of a guy in college who had been going through chemo, whose girlfriend was in the process of leaving him because he was so withdrawn emotionally that she couldn't connect with him anymore. I didn't think of it that way at the time. All I was thinking about when I wrote it, was making the room into a character in the story. The rest just came. And I could see everything in it as if it were happening in front of me. As if I were the guy, living it. That wasn't unusual, so how could I judge? All my stories seem real to me, and I can remember them visually, the way I can remember episodes from my own very real life.

I'll never forget though, what it felt like to have my elderly creative writing prof, when it was his turn to speak in the class, say, in his Truman Capote squeak of a voice, "You have written a successful story."  I don't think anything else from that month, maybe the year, mattered as much to me. Milton White thought my story a success. That it had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you the reader gave a fuck what they were. And yet when my firstborn son, the same age as my protagonist, contracted leukemia, I never once thought of that story. Not till tonight. My protagonist never once thought of his parents. All he thought of was-- how can she be leaving me?

And I know that was what was on Jesse's mind, in November of 2006. He was worried about finishing his first semester of law school. But mostly he was worried about losing L. More than one text on his phone from that month consisted of one of the most poignant two word sentences in the English language: Come home.

I'll wait for you to let that crash in on you the way it does on me. If you go back to say, March 2007, right after Jesse died, you'll see one of my first dreams of him was him saying, can I come home now?  I still hear his voice. And myself saying, Oh yes, always. Please come back.

I would shake the rafters of heaven till he dropped down.

The second story, I thought of  first, tonight. Still not sure why. Comparing not the narrator, but her boyfriend, the main character, to a pear growing inside a bottle thrust onto the branch that had created it from a blossom. I gave it to a friend to read, and he wrote me a letter, I probably still have it somewhere, identifying with that image so profoundly that I felt guilty that I'd ever asked  him read to it, even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.  I couldn't have known it would resonate like that, but it mattered to me that I could do that.

Sometimes I forget that I can write. Sometimes I think of the awful cliches that have appeared under my fingertips and despair. Here's the thing: life, for lack of a better term, is a cliche, as much as it is terrifyingly individual and strange. All that I've suffered is just the price of admission. When you look at the long arc of human history and all that has been endured, how can you dare to pity yourself? How can I?

Maybe there is nothing after this. I don't care. Maybe the last electrical, chemical impulses of your brain are all that stand behind our species consciousness of an afterlife. Maybe that brief last tour of all we have felt and seen seems an eternity, like the event horizon on a black hole, to those inside it. Does that matter? Don't you still want that to be something fine, if there's no escaping it?

Yes, I've been avoiding you. I don't want to sob on your shoulder about my job as a small overripe fruit in a very large blender full of chaos. I don't want to talk about Jesse's birthday, because I'll cry about that, too.  I can't even put my finger on what exactly sucks so much, because I've gotten in two fantastic hikes that left me exhausted and happy, without breaking a bone (for once); my coworkers are starting to like me (suckers), I'm making enough money to support us both and sock a bit away; which is good because hubby and I are tight again. He just spent Saturday spotting me on my unintentionally vertical climb up a rock face, which is definitely an act of love because I was really gonna fall pretty much most of the time. I'd think my life was going ok (considering), except that most of the time I just want to be in bed, except when I'm trying to fall asleep, not a successful project most nights. When I try to write, I mostly just stare at the screen. Pretty much everything that requires thought or planning is at a standstill. Including my

Oh well. There it all went again.