We should have celebrated instead of mourned

We should have been celebrating somewhere today.

The sense of what should have been and what is missing has hovered over my afternoon like a dark storm cloud, finally descending on me as I took a brief walk with my dogs.

As a family, we should have been gathered somewhere eating pizza and laughing at Ethan mimicking my dad, who wouldn't hear it and would have no clue what we were laughing about, or wielding our cumulative sharp wit at one another and innocent bystanders. We should have split a couple dozen chocolate-covered, cream-filled Krispy Kreme doughnuts or a big chocolate cake, and sung happy birthday.

On Tuesday, my mom will observe her birthday. There will be no celebration to speak of, because it would also have been Ethan's birthday.

My son, had he lived, would have been 25.

Ten years ago, I would have imagined a day filled with promise. A bright young man with a college degree and a wife, or at least a fiancee on his way to living his dream.

Five years ago there was still hope that the addiction had released him. He had an apartment and was being treated for the seizures caused by his drug abuse. I didn't know he was still using, and that jail time and a horrible automobile accident weren't all that far in his future.

Just two years ago, he was living sober and there was hope that somehow he'd manage to stay that way. Then he lost his support network, alienated the people who would have helped him stay clean, and withdrew into a spiral that left him alone, finally dead of an overdose.

So there was no celebration today, and won't be on Tuesday. My mom who once delighted in sharing a birthday now has an especially painful memory instead.

For the last week it seems the harder I have tried to run from the reality of what will be, the harder it has stalked me. I'm like a mouse being toyed with by a cat. I'm not really getting away, no matter how busy I make myself.

Today, I decided not to run. To sit down by the computer and once again give in to the tides of grief that I've been avoiding fairly well; to return to therapy, as it were, because I know that facing the pain, wrestling with it through words, helps me in the end.

Another Bittersweet Birthday Approaching

The biggest of the three Es will turn 5 in a few weeks.

It's no surprise it will be a "Frozen" party theme, and I'll get to paint a t-shirt to commemorate the occasion -- something I've done each birthday for several years.

But while I'll be getting the house and yard ready for the party to be here, just as it was last year and would have been the year before had E2 not fallen ill, I'm battling more than the need to get things ready.

The last memory I have of seeing my son, Ethan, was at E's fourth birthday party. In just a few short weeks it will have been a year since he swept me up in one of his big hugs, probably swinging me off my feet just to show me he could. A year since I watched him drifting around the edge of the party, talking to my cousin's attractive stepdaughter and dreaming of being that boy again (OMG that would embarrass him so). A year since he sat in a chair in my yard enjoying hot dogs and cake and ice cream. A year since he left with my parents, my dad stopping to make some smart remark about him that even then made me want to reach into the car and slap my father.

Although it was December before he was gone, he was just a voice on the phone, the one who left an empty place when he didn't show up for family gatherings, an already hard to reckon with distant presence whose life was disintegrating around him.

Four more months he was here, and I never saw him, never hugged him, smelled him, kissed him. How could that be? How could our last time together have been so vague a memory? Rushing around being hostess, just seeing him and glad he was here, stopping to exchange a word here and there?

And so this birthday looms. An anniversary I'm trying not to give too much power, but something I'm struggling with at odd moments all the same.

I'm glad E1 wants the party here. Even though it will be largely the same gathering, minus one, it will keep me busy. I won't have time to look for the ghost that isn't there. I won't have a chance to huddle somewhere trying to put my broken heart back together.

I know birthday parties will always be hard -- although I can hope they will be easier as time goes by. I'll always look for him in the background, always feel the hole left in my family by his death.

All That I Would Say

I wish you had come with an expiration date.

You know, like milk. A "Best if Used By" warning.

We all come with one, but we expect it's some 75 or 80 years away from when we're born, and the people around us who care about us have those same expectations.

When you were born shortly after midnight, 24 years ago today, I had no inkling that you would not be seeing the same 80 plus years that my grandparents had seen. There was no loaded genetic dice, nothing to warn me that you wouldn't see the time allotted to most of us these days.

I guess, in a way, it's fitting that our half-formed plans to get together yesterday to recognize your birthday were thwarted by the needs of the living -- a change in work schedule -- because the dead, after all, have no more birthdays. You're forever 23, like a dragonfly in amber from the Jurassic period. Frozen, never aging or changing, even as the rest of us go on stumbling through life.

But I find myself wishing, perhaps more often than anything else other than that you had not died, that I had known you were only around for a limited time engagement that would be up before my own.

There are so many things that I wish I'd done, so many opportunities wasted, so much unsaid.

I remember your birth so clearly, the long day of labor, the pain before the epidural, the fetal monitor indicating you were in distress and the rush to a cesarean delivery. There, hidden by a sheet from my view, I felt them pull you from my body and heard them count off the number of times the umbilical cord was around your neck. I was scared that you weren't alive, but soon they were showing you to me -- not the twin of your dark-haired sister that I expected but a big boy with fair features.

Still, I struggle to remember a lot of the years in between then and the phone call in December. They say our minds cling to the bad in the first stages of grief as a way of lessening the pain of loss, and perhaps that's it. There are days when it is easier to recall your rage than your laugh, your bitter words than your love, your clinched fists than your hugs. I wait for those better memories to return, for the balance to tip back, but perhaps I'm not ready to stand beneath those memories yet.

I do remember the preschooler who got up one night to go to the bathroom and instead peed in a trash can. Oh, that one haunted you a long time. Yes, it was about the same size, and I was in the bathroom and more than a little surprised to come out and find what you'd done in your half-waking state.

I remember you as the little boy who got a pony for Christmas, and swapped her to his sister for a video game. The middle schooler who discovered dirt bikes at a friend's house, but would never ride the one we went to Westfield to buy for you. Rushing to the hospital when you broke your leg on your skateboard and how desperately you needed a bath that you couldn't take for such a long time. The boy who alternately closed the door to shut me out, and called me at work needing me immediately. You were always at extremes -- overly cautious or a daredevil -- you never seemed to learn to live life within the lines.

We were so close, so alike, and yet there was that one glaring difference that I could not see through the male image of myself. While I was the brainy outsider comfortable with the role, happier with my books and dogs, you wanted so desperately just to be part of the crowd. I often thought your change from who you were meant to be to who you wanted to be was behind your discomfort with yourself.

I wish I'd understood your addiction better and been able to reach you, to show you somehow that life was worth living and that you were wonderful, special and beautiful beyond compare, without any mind or mood altering substance to change you. I wish I'd been able to drag you out of the cocoon in which you wrapped yourself to show you that life, stripped down and bare of anything between you and the world that God gave us, was worth living. I wish I'd called and beat down your door and somehow forced you to be with us more.

I wish I'd seen the work you did at church. I know it was great, but I thought you were on the right track and would be there longer. I wish I'd made you play your guitar for me. Made you share those things you kept to yourself. Talked to you and touched you and held you more. Made you live.

I'm reading a book written by a woman whose first child, a beautiful boy, was born dead, and it's fitting that I was reading that chapter this weekend. I'm so thankful that despite the pain of loving you and losing you, I had you for over 23 years. I'm thankful that while you were in the hospital after your wreck, all beat up and forced to listen, I told you that I would always love you no matter if you were an ass or not. I wish that had been enough to hold you.

I wish I knew you didn't want me in your final moments. That you weren't like E2 when she fell at gymnastics the other night and just wanted her mommy to hold her, even though the pain wasn't that bad. I wish I could have touched your wonderful hands and ran my fingers through your hair and held you and kissed you goodbye. Instead, I keep your old sweatshirt in a freezer bag so it will hold your scent, and I wear a few of your old t-shirts, loaded with memories and holes.

Last year, the family was together to celebrate and somehow I never got a good picture of you. I never thought when my mom asked for pictures of her family, to ask someone to shoot one of us -- me and you and your sister -- maybe because we've always been a broken family. I'm sorry your dad was such an asshole and never came around and honestly, staying married to him would not have made him a better dad because he didn't have it in him and that's one of the reasons we didn't last.

I think of a story a friend told me about a woman whose daughter told her that she had a sister, while the toddler was an only child. The little girl said her sister was with Jesus, but she'd be meeting her soon. The little girl drowned before her mother learned she was pregnant, with a little girl. I think you've gone back to the home you left 24 years ago today. You've returned to a bright, timeless existence and I'll join you again in what, to you, will be the blink of an eye.

It's hard down here without you, marking this birthday alone. Still, I'm happy for you, that I know you've found the peace that eluded you for so long. I feel you sometimes in a sunset or a song, and I know that just as you were before you were born, you're only a heartbeat away.

Bracing for a Pending Birthday

Ethan's birthday is a week from today. While I don't know how I'm going to handle it I can no more avoid it than I could his pending birth 24 years ago.

For my entire life April 14th has had meaning -- it's also my mother's birthday. While she has said she wants no observance of the day for the anniversary of her birth, I don't think I can ignore the day completely. I can't pretend Ethan never happened and that the day doesn't hold meaning for me.

I also don't go for the first birthday in heaven idea. I'm pretty sure this earthly observance would have no meaning once such things as age, time, life and death are just abstract concepts.

Those who have walked this path before me have told me holidays and anniversaries, times we mark here in this life as meaningful are hard. Those will be the times we come together as a family and feel the absence of Ethan like a jigsaw puzzle carefully put together, except for that missing piece that we've somehow lost despite all our care and work. Those will be the dates ultimately inscribed on a grave marker, the parenthesis around an earthly life when our souls are bound by a fragile shell.

Twenty-four years ago I was big as a house and full of life. Today I feel withered and at times empty, not of just the baby I carried, but my own spirit as well. People were insistent that I was having twins and I had no ultrasound to prove them different. Now my daughter is an only child, not remembering a lonely childhood, but looking at a future where she will be the one alone to care for me should I age less than gracefully.

I remember the anticipation 24 years ago, as the due date approached, my eagerness to meet the unknown life I'd carried inside of me for nine months, the little person who'd been barely an uncomfortable bump when we huddled by the wood stove after Hurricane Hugo had blown through in September, sleeping on the floor in the unseasonable chill. I remember how much better the winter pregnancy had been than the summer one leading up to my daughter's birth. I remember those last few weeks out of work because of complications after my daughter's birth, waiting for labor to begin and not knowing exactly what to expect this time around.

This week is much the same, although instead of anticipation there is more of a sense of dread. Instead of some unknown date bringing life, I know that next Monday will dawn marking what should have been the anniversary of a birth, but instead will just be a day of memories and regrets.

I don't think his sister and I can ignore it, but right now I'm not sure how we'll recognize it either. It's just a part of this year of firsts that we have to get through somehow and perhaps, in doing so, find a way to get through these days as they roll around in the years to come.

At the same time, I don't want to burden the day before it arrives and give a date on the calendar too much power. So this week I'm treading cautiously around the past and the future, trying to carefully touch my memories of birthdays past in the hopes that they don't all come hurling at me next Monday and knock me flat with the reality of untasted birthday cake and candles never burning.

Perhaps instead I'll find some completion in this time as I realize that Ethan once again lives in my body and in my heart as he did 24 years ago, before pulled forth in a tangle of umbilical cord and smacked by doctors into a life that he ultimately could not handle. Here, within me, he's still as safe and loved as he was 24 years ago, but this time I never have to let him go as long as there is breath in my body.