Today, you would have been 23 earth years old.
There is so much I want to remember about you, so today I pull out old snapshots and try to place myself back in each scene, willing the weather, words, wisdom, and wonder to bring me back to that time when you were here and whole.
Baby-you and college-you, silly-you and sober-you, you in tubs and ties and T’s and teams, in costumes and cowboy hats, surrounded and alone.
It’s an ache-y pursuit.
I’ve been trying to throw away your old dorm fridge, the one with the Holderness stickers and the magnet that says life-is-not-measured-by-the-number-of-breaths-we-take-but-by-the-moments-that-take-our-breath-away.
Charley used it last year, and you know your brother. It came back dented and done, but still I cannot will myself to drive it to the dumpster and bid it adieu. So it rides around with me, round and round and round, until we end up where we began.
It’s crazy, I know that. It’s just a fridge, and a broken one at that.
But still.
I’ve just read C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, and the great man has me a bit unsettled.
Granted, I only understand about half of his words, but some of the things he confesses are darker than I thought him capable of.
Listen.
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any new bend may reveal a totally new landscape….sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley is a circular trench.
Or a fridge that follows you around.
But it isn’t, Lewis writes. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.
The sequence doesn’t repeat.
That I understand.
Some days I gaze at a picture of your face and I can manage. I can pick up my bag and my mug of coffee and march into that rowdy room of middle school boys and smile and laugh and almost forget that tenuous place in my heart.
Other days, though – like today – like when Coach Sink reaches out to give me a hug in the dining hall and I choke it all back, chokechokechoke back the grief, hold it in until I can scurry to the closed-door-behind-me of my apartment and give that grief my full attention until it almost breaks me.
People are nice to us, Love, since you left. They are just so, so nice.
What good is it then to think of your cold hand?
What good to remember the phone calls from police or the sound of your brother collapsed on the floor, your sister’s sobs?
Grief could so easily become the dry that wastes me, but I am not interested in its insistent, vice-y grip.
I want to remember well.
So I gather myself, meet our friends for dinner – Aggie, Zach, Ralph, Sue – and talk about heaven, of constellations and Jesus and an eternity of guilt-free gluten.
We remember you, son.
You were lovely and kind and courageous and strong, and you propped me up when I couldn’t do much more than slump through the day. You’d be so proud, now, of your brothers and sister and momma and friends.
We are remembering.
Thank you for the feather that blew across my path on the way to class this morning. The lone widening contrail pinking the sky when I woke. That fat robin singing on a dew sparkled branch.
It’s your birthday and I remember you.
How could I ever forget?
walkwithme413 