"I spoke about wings
you just flew
I wondered, I guessed, and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
But you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon..."
The Waterboys, "The Whole of the Moon", from the album This Is The Sea http://www.youtube.com/...
I spoke to one of my two sisters tonight, beer in one hand and the phone in the other, and where would I be without her, where would I be without my sisters and my brother and my family and my friends, where would I be in these lowest of hours, in the depths of the first few lost and broken months since we lost our beloved Lauren, since we lost the love of my life, my wife, the mother of our three children.
We spoke about our dirty old hometown, about the way it was thirty years ago, about the things that had happened here, about the little businesses that still existed, about the long-gone paper mill, about Caplan's and Pender's and Hayner's and Golden Krust and Fantauzzi's Restaurant, about the ouster of the incompetent school superintendent and the forced merger of the Italian and Irish parishes and about the shootout, and about how it all seemed larger than life through our childish eyes: we laughed about making a movie or a tv series about it all.
In the middle of this animated conversation, in the middle of an animated conversation that allowed me to forget, for a few brief and precious seconds, the enormity of the loss and the agony that I will have to deal with for the rest of my life, my nine year old son wandered into the kitchen and announced he was ready for bed. I said goodbye to my sister and he brushed his teeth and put on his pajamas, and then he delivered an unexpected punch to the gut:
Tell me a story, dad, tell me a story about you and mom.
We went into his room and he crawled under the covers and looked up at me, waiting for a story.
Today, as it turns out, is an anniversary of sorts. I asked him if he knew what an anniversary was, I told him that tomorrow (today, now) was an anniversary of sorts. Is it your wedding anniversary, he asked. No, I told him. It's something else.
April 14, 1993. I told him about that day, about what happened, about what April 14th means to me, now and forever. I gave him a little background: about how his mom and dad started "dating" on the previous December 19th, and about how two days after that, his mom had to return home to England.
I told him about how we wrote each other love letters and made the occasional phone call to each other.
Did it cost a lot of money to make those calls, he asked. Did it cost you a hundred dollars?
I told him that we did in fact sometimes make calls that cost us a hundred dollars.
How much did letters cost back then?
A dollar or two, I said.
Well, why didn't you write more letters, then?
We did, we wrote a lot of letters, Bailey. But sometimes, when you are in love with someone far, far away, there is no substitute for hearing that person's voice, and it doesn't matter if it costs you a hundred dollars to hear that person's voice.
I told him about how we talked, and about how we wrote, and about how, on this very day, fifteen years ago, we finally saw each other, after almost four months of living thousands of miles apart. I told him about how I rode the train down from Albany through an overcast early spring day, about how I rode the A-train out to the airport. About how I waited in the arrivals terminal of British Airways, about how I wandered through the terminal looking up at monitors, waiting for news of the status of her flight; about the excitement I felt when I saw, on one of those monitors, that his mother's flight had arrived, forty-five minutes ahead of schedule.
I told him about how I waited, full of anticipation, out in the arrivals area; about how I waited and about how I finally saw his mother, walking through that gate, dressed in a flower-patterned skirt and a silky white blouse and a brown blazer and a matching brown floppy-brimmed hat; about how I saw her, about how we moved toward each other, about the magic of that moment, about how when I saw her walking toward me I knew, for certain, that I would one day marry her.
I told him about the train ride back up to Albany, and about the two weeks we spent together, and about how on the day she had to go back to England, I drove her down to the airport and about how on that ride down, on a sunny and warm day, I turned to her and looked at her and said, simply, promise me that someday you'll marry me. I told him about how she didn't believe me when I said that, and about how I eventually managed to make her realize I meant it.
I felt my eyes welling up as I told him all this, and then he sat up and threw his arms around me and buried his little head in my shoulders, and, for the first time in weeks, he let himself go, he let his guard down, and he cried like the child he is.
He cried and so did I, and I could not utter a word, I just let him let it out, and I thought of the strangeness and terribleness of it all, of how he is a nine year old boy wandering through his life without his mother, a motherless child, the saddest thing in the world: I thought of how the only reason he exists, the only reason he sits here tonight and cries, is that his mother and his father ran toward each other late on one early spring afternoon, full of love and certainty and hope. He exists because we could not resist the power of what we felt for each other on that day, because the power of what we felt in that one moment left us powerless to do anything other than to one day pledge ourselves to each other forever, left us powerless to do anything other than to live as one, to live with faith and hope, that we would make each other, and those around us, and those we might create, sparkle for as long as our eyes could see.
Our eyes saw further than life would let us go, and life took her from us, far before her time, and ours. And what can we do now, but to talk about what happened, and to hold on to each other as our tears and our sorrows wrack our earthly bodies, what can we do now but to talk, and to pass on the stories of the glory we saw, and of the glory we hoped to live through, but never will, and of the glory I can only hope our children will someday live to see.