family – walkwithme413

On the evening of our final end-of-year meetings, our school community gathers to celebrate. It’s been a sweet year, one marked by fewer, smaller conflicts, where our credo We will know your boys and love your boys rang spectacularly true.

I looked forward every day to seeing my students, trying to teach them skills, sharing laughs at table, cheering them on.

That night, our Head of School shares a list of milestones, and my name is read (along with his own) to commemorate 10 years of service to our school. It is, of course, cliche to say It does not seem possible, and yet, here I am.

Ten years.

Though my brain ages, I am able to command it yet to think about those first few months, ten years ago.

Shattered raw from my son’s accident, I moved into the space he had inhabited only years earlier. It was grace to be able to work alongside his former teachers, gaze at his old team photos, find his name etched in pencil on the bottom of a drawer (naughty boy).

Say his name to those who knew him.

If I were to do the math, in those ten years, I have taught hundreds of students, known thousands more.

They are men now, boys no more.

Forever 22, my son will never meet these brothers of his. Never rove his old haunts, stand at fence on the new turf field, give an alumni tie to the next class of boy.

On this day, the 28th of May, the wind swirls as I write. Seeds soar through the air outside. Papers blow to the floor.

It feels like change.

What is ahead, I cannot know.

This world – this shining, heavy, glorious world – is not my home.

It was never his.

If we are lucky, alert, we may catch a glimpse of what is to come.

Not ten years, but an eternity.

He’s waiting there now.

The other day, in a colleague’s English class, we read one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. Robert Frost – his very name evokes the natural – has a way of hooking my heart with profound confessions wrapped in the simplest of scripts.

Listen.

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Frost was only 59 when he wrote Desert Places. There was a time in my life that I considered that age to be ancient; no more.

Lately, I find myself moving things that previously occupied some cupboard space down low – the cat food under the sink, charging cords, frequently used kitchen utensils – to places up high, more easily accessible, places that require no stooping or bending on my part.

I have begun to forget words, names. Sleep poorly. Find more strands in my hairbrush that I care to admit.

I age and age and age, in one direction only, fast, oh, fast, fighting those lonely places within myself that stick like stubble out of the soil of my soul.

Some days it’s even a struggle to work up the energy to ask for help – for Him to undull my heart, offer peace, or even acceptance. Perhaps it is enough to ask Him to simply sit with me, for I know that there is no place where His love isn’t.

I learned recently that the cells of a child live on in the mother long after the child is born. There is an exchange, and it has a name.

Fetal microchimerism “refers to the transfer of the baby’s genetic material into the mother’s body long after the birth of the child” (cradlewise.org).

Whoa.

I think of my boy, the one I lost. He’d be 31 soon.

I often wondered where life went when it was all lived up. Heaven, yes, eventually, when He returns. But where is he now, my son?

To know that a part of him lives on, in me – an ever-beaming glow that never ages, coming to my rescue even though I could not rescue him – this is a gift.

Because here’s the thing: I also learn that those cells, those tiny baby cells, have the capacity to embed themselves in their mother’s tissue and actually repair harm.

Baby cells, like stem cells, can grow next to liver cells or bone cells, differentiate themselves, heal whatever’s around them.

The brain that remembers so slowly now, that jumps and skips and pauses unbidden; the heart that tears, remembering too well – bid my son’s, bid all my children’s cells, to draw near and help.