"love of mine
someday you will die
but I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you
Into the dark
No blinding light
Or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark..."
Death Cab For Cutie, "I Will Follow You Into The Dark", from the album Plans
To tell the truth I hate going to my son’s basketball games; a third grader, he plays on a team of nine and ten year olds, once or twice a week.
I like basketball just fine, in fact even close to fifteen years after I stopped playing regularly if you dig hard enough around local gyms and playgrounds you can still find some people in this world who will tell you I had quite a knack for it; yeah, I like baskets just fine, and of course I love my son to pieces.
But I go to the games and what do I see but all the other daddies and mommies there, rooting their children on, and what do I think, what else can I think at this point but, damn it, my boy doesn’t have a mother anymore.
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The game, the championship game of my son’s school’s holiday tournament, gets started late after the consolation game goes into overtime, the game starts after 7:30 at night, and then the referee forgets that he has a floor full of little kids on his hands and he calls everything, I mean everything, and with kids that age of course there’s plenty to call. He calls it so tight that he manages to make four seven minute quarters last for close to two hours.
In the end, my son’s team loses a close one. Some of the parents get too upset about the officiating for my taste, and some of the kids on the team start to cry. And when I get Bailey to walk out of the gym with me and his Papa, I see that he starts to cry. We get into the car and he starts to yell.
"I HATE THAT REF! I WISH HE COULD GET ARRESTED! IT’S NOT FAIR, DERRICK GOT PUSHED DOWN AND HE DIDN’T CALL THAT..."
Bailey’s dad and his grandfather try to calm him down, we try to tell him it’s only a game, we try to explain that he’s only in third grade and that the idea is to learn how to play and to have fun, but we fail.
I realize why we fail: I realize that we need to start addressing the real issue. So I say, "Bailey, I don’t think the game is what has you so upset, I think there’s something else you want to tell us..."
And he stops yelling; and his tears of anger give way to the tears of truth and sorrow, and through his sobs he tells us, "The real reason I’m crying is because I miss my mom."
Though I am driving, I reach back with one hand and tell him to hold my hand, and he does; he holds my hand and cries. We drive on through the night, on the highway along the Hudson River between Albany and Troy, three generations, a grandfather and a father and a child, all of them with tears in their eyes over the premature death of a beautiful woman.
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We went up to the nursing home on Saturday to see Nana. Ninety seven years old, and she lived alone, on her own, all the way up until the last weekend of October, up until that last fateful weekend of what used to be a favorite month of mine, up until the end of October, when Lauren laid down on a bed and let go and with faith and hope and with conviction that she had made the right choice placed her life in the hands of people who told her they could safely remove the benign tumor from her brain.
I hadn’t seen Nana since all this went down, even though I had wanted to. She knew. She may have hit ninety seven years old but more than sixty years ago she sat in the very same house I live in now and she watched, at thirty five years old, as her husband and the father of her five children died, in a bed in the very same room where I’ll try to sleep tonight, of a heart attack.
She knew. She knows. She has suffered the ultimate losses: she lost a spouse, and then fifteen years later she lost a child, and they say she was never the same, though, as her grandchild, all I knew of her was love and smiles. She kept the unfathomable pain of those losses from the young ones, she knew we didn’t need to know, at least then; she knew we needed to believe in a benevolent universe.
She got too old to live alone there; she fell off her rocking chair one too many times, and my mother and her other caretakers came to see that she needed care that only a nursing home could provide, and they talked her into it, and she went.
And there she was on Saturday.
They brought me into something called a family room and they told me to wait. Out of nineteen grandchildren I was one of, if not the, favorite of my Nana’s. As recently as two years ago she sat in her living room and smiled as she told me and Lauren about the time I was about a year old, about the time my mother came home from New York City with me, about how she met us at the train station, about how we got off the train and about how I spotted her and yelled out, "Nana! Nana!", and about how she ran to me and hugged me as the both of us cried.
They knew she’d cry as soon as she saw me on Saturday; out of her nineteen grandchildren I was the only one who had lost a spouse so young, the only one who had lost a spouse at all, in fact; they knew I’d cry as soon I saw her, too, and they wanted us to have the space sufficient for this moment, the space where two people separated by two generations and many years could meet, joined by blood and by sorrow.
They brought her in, I actually felt her there before I saw her, and I turned to my left and there she was, my Nana, old and limping and bent half over but still my Nana, still my grandmother, still the woman who taught me so much about love, and we looked at each other and she hugged me around the neck, the way she did when she saw me get off that train from the city thirty something years ago, and I cried out, Nana, Nana, and she sobbed and held me and said my boy, my poor boy, I know, I know, my poor boy, I know.
And she begged me, David, be strong for those children, you have to be strong for those children, I know, I know, they need you, you can lay in bed and cry all night, like I did, let those tears go all night, for as long as you need to, but you get up in the morning and you be strong for those children, they need you, and I told her that even though I cry an ocean every night I try, my level best, when the morning comes, to be there for our children.
&&&&
Bailey turned nine today.
For me, it was the single worst day since Lauren died, back on November 20th.
Bailey is the oldest of our three children. I can remember all their births vividly, but then, he was the first, and like it or not, there’s something about that; you remember the first of anything important just a little bit harder.
&&&&
Last night in bed I decided to dig out some of our old love letters. I debated the wisdom of this for awhile. Over the first two and a half years of our courtship and marriage, me and Lauren spent a great deal of time apart; she lived in northern England and I lived in upstate New York, in the early and middle 1990’s. We wrote each other a lot of long, long love letters, and at some point a few years ago, back before we even had three children, back before we could have ever dreamed our beautiful love, our beautiful marriage, would die an unholy death in some filthy hospital, we gathered all those letters together and put them in one place, in a long airtight plastic box.
I found the box about two weeks ago, out in the garage. For a few days I stared at the box, looking forlornly at those white envelopes, wondering when I might have the nerve to look at the words within those envelopes.
A few days ago I thought, to hell with it, everything else makes me cry, if the letters make me cry too, so what? Since then, I’ve read a few here and there. And last night, I decided to read a few more.
I came across one from March of 1995, just a few days before she finally got her green card, and just a few weeks before she finally came her to America to live and to love as my wife for twelve gorgeous years.
In the letter, and I apologize for getting so personal, but she talked about – and remember, when she wrote these words, we had not seen each other even once for over seven months – how she couldn’t wait to lie down in a bed with me, to, well, you know.
Barely three years after she wrote that letter we spent a week in Maine, in early April of 1998; we had the place to ourselves, we had an entire floor of a hotel to ourselves, hell, it felt like we had the entire state to ourselves, and we walked along misty beaches shrouded in early spring gray and drizzle, we ate alone in restaurants, and we made love like there was no tomorrow, and from that week came Bailey.
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And like I said, today was his ninth birthday, and it was tough. We had a big bowling party for him, that’s what he wanted, but all day long I had to find reasons to escape to private places, to bedrooms and bathrooms and cars, to shed my bitter tears.
Around nine this morning I snuck out – don’t worry, either my mother or my mother-in-law, or usually, both of them, are there to watch the three kids when I need to get away – putatively to get some bread, we did need some, but of course, I wanted something more than that, I wanted to go to the cemetery and stand upon my wife’s grave for a few moments.
In the market I picked up a cantaloupe, the young ones love it, and the melons felt soft and ripe, so I picked one up for them and then I walked over towards the bread aisle, but on my way there I passed the flowers.
A middle-aged woman with black and gray hair stood arranging some floral displays. She sang as she did her work. I approached and she spotted me and sang even louder. She saw me and asked, so, how ya doin’ today, hun?
I ignored her and looked around.
Early in our marriage, before Lauren had finished turning me from a boy into a man, she had explained something to me very clearly: better the ten dollar bouquet from the supermarket every week than the hundred and ninety dollar bouquet from the "real" florist three times a year.
Standing there in the market this morning my heart broke yet again as I thought back to all the cheap market bouquets I brought home out of the blue over the past ten years or so; I couldn’t help but think about walking in the door, so many times, with these little cheap surprises in my hands, and of how she smiled when I did.
She loved white carnations, for some reason. I mean, she liked white roses too, and I got her a dozen and a half of those, from a real florist no less, the day after she had Bailey, on December 23rd, 1998; but she loved when I came home from the market, after a trip ostensibly for oatmeal and eggs and bread and milk, with a few flowers from the supermarket.
So this morning I picked up a bunch of white carnations to go with the bread and milk and the yoghurt.
I picked them up and then I drove them up the cemetery.
It was our eldest son’s ninth birthday, and I remember it like it was yesterday. She had it in her head she wanted to do it au natural, sans medication of any sort, and she had it in her head she wanted to give birth to our child in a birthing tub, and because I believed in her and trusted her and loved her beyond belief I went right along with her plans. We went to classes to prepare, though nothing can prepare anyone for something as wild and miraculous as the birth of a child.
The last three hours or so, she had a rough labor; absolutely no break between the contractions, just wave upon wave upon wave of contractions, and I thought, well, she tried, but they did tell us that a hard labor with no break between contractions is unusual, and she’ll be asking for some meds soon, and so what if she does.
But of course, she didn’t ask for meds, or anything other than a bath to give birth in and a husband who loved her to hold her while she did; and she did, and her courage and bravery and strength as she did amazes me to this day, it awes me, truly. What she did that day I shall never forget.
I wish I could match that courage but I am weak, I have always been the weaker of the two of us, so all I can do now is cry, all I can do now is mourn her passing, all I can do now is bring a humble bunch of white carnations to her gravesite on the ninth birthday of our eldest child; all I can do now is to stand those flowers in the dirt of her grave, to pack them in place with the remains of the snow, and to water them with my tears. All I can do now is to think back to what was, and to what we had hoped for and to what we had dreamed, what we had dreamed for ourselves and for our son and for all those to follow.