I wrote this on Tuesday, May 12, two days after Mother’s Day, my first Mother’s Day without Danny.

I did not think of my mother on Mother’s Day, though now two days later I do. I can picture her in her 50’s, say, pulling me close by putting an arm around my shoulder. I can hear her saying some version of, “It’s not your fault.” She would’ve expressed the sentiment emphatically and unambiguously. She might’ve resorted to hyperbole to make sure I got the point. She would’ve risked being offensive even, to make sure I got the point. “He was pigheaded, Dee, you know that. That Mallon trait, God help us. Not as bad as your sister, but bad enough. No one was gonna talk him out of it.”

It’s a noisy day in the neighborhood. Jackhammering earlier. Some goddamn humming machinery now. I want to disappear.

At Wegmans this morning, it’s as if I shop in two places at once. Part of me is here in Newton and part of me is transported back to Colorado (which, by the way, I have taken to calling the “Land of Death”). Danny is with me in the King Soopers. He had to ferry me that day because Ken was still driving from Boston and I had no car. It’s one of the last things we did together. 

I’m not hungry. He’s not hungry. Neither of us, in fact, can imagine ever being hungry again. Still, up and down the aisles we go.

He chooses self-checkout. I generally avoid it. I resent corporations laying people off and making their customers do the work, all while not adjusting prices downward one iota.

Danny makes it seem easy. Even knows how to cancel out the cauliflower that I somehow rung in twice. 

Today I looked at the Wegmans new space-hogging zigzag lane for self-checkout and briefly considered using it — “in Danny’s honor” — except fuck that. The clerk at register 12 is wide-open. Why would I do it myself?

All through the store, I struggle not to cry. Danny is both there and not there. Memory as a transparent overlay.

This grocery store wasn’t even here when he was growing up. There was a fire near this site, I now remember, and two or three people died. The boys and I sat in the green Odyssey minivan in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot across Route 9 and watched for a while. I didn’t know anybody was going to die. I was simply taking advantage of a spectacle that suited the boys’ high octane interest in emergency and construction vehicles.

I take my receipt this morning and see that the bag of cherries cost $12. Twelve dollars? Exiting, I contemplate making a count so I can determine the price per cherry, but then the exterior speaker plays something – I don’t even know what song or with what lyrics — but it’s nostalgic and makes me cry.

Now back home, whatever is happening outside requires vehicles to repeatedly back up. That shrill beep that saves exactly no one’s life infiltrates. This is home.

The starlings have arrived. They’re about jay-sized. Their black feathers shine blue like an oil slick. One hopped into one of the bowls of water and I am, for a moment, delighted. Not sure what the sparrows think of them, but that’s OK, they have the other bowl. 

One of the two lupines that I planted yesterday has been felled already. Squirrel? Bunny? It’s enough, all the casualties in this yard, to make me consider giving up gardening.

This came to me recently: I remember being in a Ropes & Gray conference room having snacks with some guest. This woman had lost a child. I approached her near the end of the gathering and asked (I was not yet married), “How do you go on?” And she answered simply, “What choice do I have?”

That echoes now, though in the shuddering turmoil of post-suicide trauma, it’s clear we all actually do have a choice. But I got her drift then and I get it now. If one does choose to live, then what choice does one have but to go on?

I look forward to letting go of blame.

Yesterday I wrote:

I couldn’t save my baby.

I didn’t save my baby.

I let my baby die.

The slide to the third conclusion is involuntary and swift, like going under a fast moving stream.

I hear Mom again (the same woman, recall, who died a month before Danny was born). “Listen. You did a good job. You gave that kid time and attention, you arranged endless interventions, you gave him tons of material support. You loved him, Dee, and still do. You did not do this to him. And trust me when I tell you, he would not want you to blame yourself. So get over it. Just stop.”

Yeah, that sounds like Mom. Clapping hands in a dirt-freeing gesture, as if my grief was a clump of garden soil stuck to her fingers. Clap. Clap. And I hate her a little for squashing the complexity of my nature, something she used to do with some frequency, even as I trust the soundness of her advice.