John

Abby

One day this difficult week a colleague and friend approached me as I walked into the Center for Liberal Arts and asked if we could talk for a minute.  We went in and sat down and she began to apologize for not having contacted us when John died, and hoped that we could forgive her.  She told me that she has a sister with Down syndrome, and that she had found it extremely hard to approach us because she could all too readily imagine what we were feeling.

Coming two days before John’s 18^th birthday, it was hard to convey how much it meant to me to have someone speak to me this way.  Earlier in the day, another colleague and friend, Nicole, had called to wish Mary Ann and I well and to let us know she was thinking of us.  At first, I was surprised to hear from her, but then realized that she had remembered John’s birthday as well, and was calling to let us know we weren’t alone.

This birthday is especially devastating to me because I can only too easily imagine how John would have been by this point, and how proud we would have been of our emerging young man.  I can see him holding down a job that gave him great satisfaction, running in Special Olympics, and thinking about whom he would invite to the prom.  I can see us arguing about driving the car or not, about keeping on in school, and fighting our way through the Social Security system to become his legal guardians.  I can see him adding a second money box to his room, this one called his spend box (to go along with his treasure box) in which he could put a portion of his hard-earned income to spend as he saw fit.  I can see him rehearsing for the spring musical at MSHS, perhaps his last performance on that stage.  Finally, I can see him perhaps agreeing to try my sleep mask as a way to get him some rest at night; if he saw how much I liked it, maybe he would want to imitate me there as well.

The thoughts that flood my mind this week are those of failure, of having failed in the task I consider the most important in my life, to raise my children to healthy, happy adulthoods.  Courtney seems fine, Russell is at least healthy and on his way, but to have not completed the task with John is to touch a pain that is unbearable.  To have failed someone dependent on you is to fear any future responsibility.  I think of this failure every day, virtually all day in this season from his birthday to the anniversary of his accident and death.  Without denying John’s role in his own death, I cannot shake the icy cold hand on my heart resulting from my lack of judgment on that fateful day, of a one-time moment of inattention that has become eternal.  That John started home that day full of dreams and ambitions and joy that it was Pizza Day and no school the next day, and then everything was gone in an instant.  An instant when, inexplicably, he was not in his accustomed place in the crosswalk.  And I was sitting on our front porch.

And then, when I feel almost driven to the point of insanity by the nature of such thoughts, the phone rings, or a colleague with whom I haven’t spoken in two years stops me in the cold and asks to talk with me for a minute.  And in that moment, just as he did when alive, John reaches across the grief and self-absorption to bring me back to his ever-entertaining reality.  Grief is an isolating force, one that lies to you and convinces you that no one wants to be near you any longer.  John ran laughing past such nonsense and just hugged and hugged.  Grief will always be a part of me, I suspect, and it is something that I learn to live with.  I listen to invocations of Heaven with some dread because I fear grief could be eternal.  Grief confuses you and causes you to call your friend “Abby”  “Pam” throughout your conversation.  And you remember John doing the same thing and saying, “Sorry, Dad” and plunging on as if nothing had happened.  Would that my own do-overs could be so simple and effective.