Firsts

On Sunday, we’ll spend Easter together… without him. Exactly twenty days later, we’ll celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday…but he won’t be there. Mother’s Day will be different this year.

And so it begins…our year of “firsts”. Life moves on, marked by all the times we stop to celebrate. And we will celebrate. We might even celebrate exactly the way we have always celebrated. And it will still be different.

This Easter we’ll have ham. I don’t usually, but a church group gave me a gift certificate I never got around to using at the time. Jennifer has requested green bean casserole. Joshua looks forward to deviled eggs, and Shane loves strawberry salad. I always made macaroni and cheese for Trey. I cooked the onions right into the cheese sauce so that he never knew they were there. Trey had a thing about onions. This year I’m making bacon/maple scalloped potatoes. I’m sure I’ll make macaroni and cheese again…one day.

Now that it’s almost here, I wish I’d planned something different. I wish I’d invited more people who might have made more noise and filled more space. It’s going to be quieter. Trey loved to laugh…loudly…and it was contagious. Trey was big. He took up lots of space. Come to think of it, Trey took up more space than any number of guests could fill. The space he left cannot be filled and it can’t be covered up by a pretty throw or an extra piece of furniture. It’s a space we’ll have to get used to. We’ll have to move around it…always aware of it…never quite sure what to do with it.

Several times this week, I’ve thought about how much more fun Easter is when spent with children. That’s what we need! We need more children! The wonder and joy of children could fill that space! I’ll share this with my kids. If they start now, we could have one heck of an Easter egg hunt in just a couple of years!

And then the pain flows back in…unexpectedly…on a wish that goes against everything I ever taught my children about safe sex. Trey’s face…his baby face…fills my mind as my heart fills with regret that he left nothing behind.

What I wouldn’t give to see that face again.

Unchosen

You don’t get many choices at birth. Nobody asks what you want to be. Take birth order, for example. I was the first-born of four girls. Given what I now know, I might have chosen to be born last, but nobody asked me. You don’t get to choose gender either, or hair color, or shoe size. Siblings, it seems, are left to chance. If you happen to click, that’s great! If not, you’re stuck with them, like them or not.

One of the best…maybe even THE best thing about aging is that the older you get the more choices you have. By the time you become an adult, you get to choose most things. You choose a career. You choose your lifestyle. Heck, you can even choose your hair color! By the time you get to be my age you might have chosen several different hair colors!

No one ever chooses to be the mother of a dead child.

And yet, here I am. It’s as though life started, for me, all over again on February 26^th just before 11 pm. All the other choices I’ve made take a back seat to the one no one would make, ever. Decades of living life on my own terms ended with a single gunshot, because no matter what else happens from here on out, I am the mother of a dead child.

I can sell my house and buy that loft I’ve had my eye on…the one downtown, right in the middle of everything. And, I’ll still be the mother of a dead child.

I can quit my job in order to pursue a life-long dream. And, I’ll still be the mother of a dead child.

I can learn a foreign language, lose 20 pounds, and even dye my hair the only color I’ve never tried. Then I’ll be the raven-haired mother of a dead child.

At a time in my life when who I am should be up to me, it’s not. Because, nothing I am matters as much as what I’ve lost.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…Osama-style

It was a Tuesday.

I had already worked long enough to induce desperate glances at the clock in hopes that it would soon be time for lunch.

My desk phone rang.

Ann calling to say she’d be late wasn’t unusual. The frantic tone in her voice was. It took several minutes and many incomplete sentences, for me to realize something truly terrible had happened.

The need to call my husband was visceral, not so much to relay the news as to hear his voice.

I would have given anything to call my son. I fought the urge to pick him up at school, take him home, lock the doors, and hold him…forever.

It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

The world had just tilted on its axis.

I shared the small amount of information I had gleaned from Ann with my husband who, in turn, filled in with what he’d heard on the radio. As he spoke, images of other recent acts of terrorism flashed across my brain. When he finished I said, “It was Bin Laden. I know it was. He’s the only one smart enough, evil enough. This has his fingerprints all over it.” And, it did.

I felt a sense of triumph when the Bush administration announced American troops had entered Afghanistan in search of Bin Laden…until they didn’t. The subterfuge began. Personal agendas superseded national security, and suddenly Sadam Hussein was painted as the new face of the Taliban.

And they believed.

People I know to be intelligent, successful people, learned people, people who contribute to their communities, people who knew better, believed. Even now, as I attempt to write about it, nausea threatens and a whirring begins inside my head. Everything about that time defied reason. Everything.

It took decades for me to learn not to worry about things over which I have no control. The lesson came in handy as I read a memo, circulated by two vice-presidents of our company, forbidding negative commentary about the Bush administration and/or its policies. The directive was, of course, couched in language less than direct, but the message was clear. I turned off the television. I removed NPR from the pre-sets on my car stereo. I pushed the newspaper out of the way when I sat down to eat lunch. I dropped out.

To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to Osama Bin Laden. Oh, I paid attention when he released videos. Well, they said he released them, I was never quite sure.

At one point, I heard he had kidney disease. Soon after that, I began to imagine him dead. It was a coping mechanism, I’m sure, and goes a long way towards explaining my shock upon hearing he really was.

But, not really.

The shock came with the words, President Obama’s words, “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden…”

It was the word “killed”.

Inside my head, the sentence compressed, and I heard “…the United States killed Osama bin Laden…”. Even now, I get stuck on the word “killed”. Perhaps his speechwriters could have chosen more carefully?

“Killed” is raw. “Killed” is brutal. “Killed” is harsh, and cold, and violent. On “24”, Jack Bauer might have used the word “marginalized”. That’s a good word…

I’m not comfortable with killing. I don’t kill bugs. Okay, I’ll kill a cockroach. But that’s it. Well, and a bee, but only if he’s expressed an intent to get me first.

And then, there’s the other side, the side that says, “We created him, and now we’ve destroyed him.”. I can see justice in that.

I go in late on Mondays. By the time I get to the office, everyone else has been there for hours. Even so, I thought someone would say something. When Joe Biden commits a verbal gaffe (which is, admittedly, almost every time he appears in public) the talk is incessant.

No one said a word.

I breached the office door of the only other non-dyed-in-the-wool-republican in the building and asked, “Have they talked about it at all?”. He shook his newly hairless, Carvillesque dome from side to side while wearing a look of reluctant resignation.

Sometime around ten yesterday morning, I felt relief. By noon I was ready to admit it. An older woman, the mother of one of the memo-writing vice-presidents, finally tossed it out there just before she left for the day.

“What do you think about our troops killing Bin Laden?”, she asked, loudly, as she reached for her $400.00 handbag with one hand while flipping the light switch with the other.

An officemate who had recently declared her intent to vote for Donald Trump in 2012 spoke first. For the first time in a long time, she was proud to be American. (Cue the fireworks…has anyone seen Lee Greenwood?)

I admitted feeling relief in knowing Bin Laden was gone.

No one else said a word.

>Garaged

They were garage smokers. We could gauge when they woke and what time of night they went to bed by the rise and fall of the garage door.

Joe spent lots of time sitting in a kitchen chair just inside the door. It was an older chair, probably maple, judging by the color of the wood and the half-moon style so popular thirty years ago. Next to the chair sat a tall, gray file cabinet of the same era. I always wondered what was in that cabinet. I wondered if it was happenstance, or the result of a purpose-filled decision that the cabinet was in easy reach of the chair in which Joe spent so much of his time.

I never saw him open the cabinet, but he did other things in that chair. He smoked, of course. Sometimes I saw him raise a beer with his left arm. He’d sacrificed his right to Vietnam. It was there, but half the size of the “good” one. Contracted muscles had rendered his hand useless. Sometimes it twitched when he talked

He talked in that chair, mostly to my son, and mostly about cars; specifically, the 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They both drove one. Josh built his from the ground up, painted it silver, and referred to it as “Girl”. Joe’s was navy blue. Both were pristine.

Sometimes, he had his hair cut in that chair. He sat with a white towel draped over his bony shoulders and smoked with his good arm while Brenda, his wife, sheared him using electric hair clippers. She finished before he did. There wasn’t much to cut.

While spring air still carried winter’s bite, Joe sat several small, plastic greenhouses just outside the garage in the morning sun. He took them inside at night, repeating this ritual for weeks until the ground had warmed enough to plant. His gardens always flourished. Mine paled in comparison.

Their mowers woke me on Saturdays. Joe rode. Brenda pushed. Sometimes they wore pith helmets.

On Sundays, sometime after lunch, they emerged from the open garage carrying sudsy buckets. Hoses were unwound. Thus began a laborious process that entailed spraying water followed by endless circles made by soapy white towels. They used real chamois to dry their cars before opening all four doors to admit the vacuum. Slamming car doors punctuated our dinner conversation before they emptied their buckets on the lawn.

Brenda filled buckets with bleach water. Steam enveloped her hand as she carried a bucket across the lawn towards a park bench that sat between a large pot of silk sunflowers and a birdhouse on a tall, white pole. Once a month she dusted the garden hose with a feather duster, while Joe struggled, one-handed, to control the telescoping pole he used to dust the rafters. She mopped, first the front porch, and then the garage.

Their ritual went unbroken. No visitors interrupted their dusting. They never came home from a long vacation to find their lawn had gone to seed. They didn’t sully their freshly scrubbed front door with a Christmas wreath or mar the freshly mopped porch with a pumpkin. Nothing interfered with their quest for extreme cleanliness, not even Joe’s illness.

Sometimes, as he sat in his chair, a clear, plastic bag of urine peaked out beneath the hem of his khaki shorts.

The procession of cars in a driveway blown clear of autumn debris could mean only one thing. The emergence from the garage of a portly woman wearing a black picture hat over an unflattering black dress left no doubt. An older man joined her. They stood just to the left of the open garage, in front of a carefully maintained flower bed, and waited. Brenda emerged, also in black, and the three left in one car.

Two days later, Joe’s bedroom sat in a pile in front of the open garage. A large, red Salvation Army truck backed up the driveway, and as fast as the two young men loaded items onto the truck, Brenda brought more. Joe’s chair was the last piece loaded.

The Cutlass disappeared, as did Brenda’s Buick. Her shiny new Civic took up very little room inside the empty garage through which an assortment of craftsmen beat a path to Brenda’s door. Custom cabinet makers were followed by electricians who gave way to plumbers who were supplanted by painters who were replaced by roofers.

I watched as she purged him. Immediately, methodically, purposefully, Brenda removed every trace of Joe from her life.

And, the garage door rarely opens.