It’s gloomy here today. A tree crew will arrive shortly to tend our maples, black walnuts, and catalpa trees (or not? It looks like rain).
On our dog walk yesterday, just as I was hearing the words in my head, “it’s not likely a residential program would’ve saved him, even in the short term,” I found this feather.
The feather wasn’t lying flat. It was sticking straight up as if placed there, stuck in dried mud next to the curb.
Confirmation? Communication, as in permission to release blame, coming from the other side? Maybe.
I’m planning to give my grief talk a rest here, but I wanted to share this first.
even when the rubber bands drive me nuts, snapping and twisting the wrong way.
I’m okay
when I forget to change into my crap sneakers before dyeing and drip dye on my feet, turning some of my toes blue.
Seriously, who cares?
When my chest hurts remembering the suit that Danny dropped off to be tailored and then never picked up
because he died, I’m okay.
When I recall how strenuously we hoped that dropping off a suit to be tailored meant he wanted to live, grief grabs my throat and gives it a squeeze, but I think
I’m okay.
I’m still breathing aren’t I? Even if it hurts to breathe, I’m still breathing.
(It’s still there, I think, Danny’s suit, at that store in Boulder).
When I’m torn up trying to compose a eulogy — wondering how you sum up a person? — wondering how to introduce the adult son to folks who only knew him as a child or teen — as hard as it is, I’m okay.
What I share to others will be okay and when the time comes if I can’t get through it, that’ll be okay too.
I don’t want to cook. For days now. Even though food usually offers grounding movements, decisions, anticipations, all driven by a healthy hunger
I’m okay.
When I couldn’t focus on pricing for lenses at the eye doctor on Friday I left, knowing it was okay,
knowing I didn’t have to tell him why.
When I cry reading a text from one of Danny’s friends out loud, I’m okay. They love him too.
They love him too.
When I go to bed, exhausted but unwilling to surrender to the night, I’ll manage. I’ll read a little longer.
Find entertainment that’s sufficiently engaging, but not triggering
Stay awake between 7 and 8 p.m.
Untie knots
Figure out what’s appetizing
Read any book of any length of any genre
Think about the holidays
Think about tomorrow
Think about last March
Think about next March
Witness the savaging of our hostas by rabbits
Sit with all that trump is ruining
Determine if my husband’s listening to Insta reels through his Bluetooth hearing aids or to me
Read about drought and wildfires
Come across even casual references to Colorado, Boulder, Denver, or Longmont
Wonder what he might’ve been doing today if he were alive
Listen to train whistles
Listen to sirens
Stop crying
Comprehend the permanence of his being gone
PS We decided to have a very small gathering in Danny’s honor in a couple of weeks. Here. Wine and cheese. No officiant. I’m aware that it will distract me for a time and then be over. I try not to get ahead of myself.
We can’t rely on the next breath or the one after that.
Every breath requires a pair of lungs talking to a brain
resting in a cranium
that has not been violated by a wayward but intentional bullet.
“Death within seconds” said the autopsy. For that, at least, we are grateful.
But the details pick and pick at me. Is this part of grieving a violent death? Did he fall forward or backward or to the side? Were his eyes open?
It was a surprise to learn that the bullet had not exited.
On the day of, we drove to the “scenic area” by following the geographical coordinates supplied in his final note.
He wanted his body to be found. He spared us a crime scene clean up and a horrific discovery. The choices show care. He was considerate, our boy.
It took a while to come to those conclusions. To appreciate the way he chose to exit.
We arrived. Emergency vehicles lined the road, lights swirling and flashing. Not allowed to walk downslope to where his dead body lay, we paced in the lot at the trailhead and cried. One of the sheriff’s aides wrapped a sleeping bag around my shoulders.
The wind picked up, the temperature was plummeting and the light faded fast. It was as if the landscape at 7,000 feet outside of Boulder on the day my son killed himself, which was also the day he was born, responded. A world going cold and dark, turning inhospitable.
My mother. What did she say to me last week at the cemetery, you might have wondered.
My first questions was, “I couldn’t save my boy. What kind of mother does that make me?” Mom was characteristically blunt. “You were blinded by hope.”
It’s something that hadn’t quite occurred to me and I found it a little freeing. It twists blame with the light of positive mothering. How we always hope for what is best for our children can never be counted as a fault or a weakness.
While I knew Danny was suicidal in those sixteen days of March, I clung to his life-affirming acts as proof of something.
Fishing, working out at the gym, corresponding with potential roommates in Boulder.
Though panic laced the days and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness colored everything back then, we hoped.
A few days after hearing my mother’s opinion, synchronicity afforded confirmation with a pithy post on Instagram.
My second question to my mother concerned the future. I asked her how I’m supposed to go on. “Dare to live,” she said. “Dare to live large. Dare to not give a fuck.”
She lived large. Me? The hemming and hawing middle child? Less so.
I guess I can let loose with my surviving son and send him funny memes when I know he’d probably prefer I didn’t (I’m not really kidding here).
On a Boston Duck Boat tour last year
This morning on a podcast, I heard the Irish poet David Whyte utter these words:
“The world was made to be free in… Anyone or anything that does not bring you alive, is too small for you.”
Earlier in the interview, he quoted an Irish saying: “The thing about the past is that it’s not past.”
Danny sleeping, a peony, and Browning quote
All of this by way of saying, I’m wondering in what ways my past might afford some answers. By the past I don’t mean my childhood in the suburbs of Schenectady or Pittsfield, but the past in the hills of my ancestors in Ireland.
What do some of my old books have to say about grief, about love, about living large?
If you gave yourself permission to live large, what would you do differently?
Danny’s record of catch and release from last year
