anything? Shoot, I still store his elementary school project on chance and his high school projecton the infinity box. I had to take apart his room, but I could not do any more than absolutely necessary to displace the boy. It is easy to say that my husband and I and our three living children live in my house today, but it is more accurate to say that we house four children here.
I think at some level I also needed particular places in which to grieve. His room was one. I did not need it to feel close to Wade, I was feeling close to him everywhere (in part because I refused for a time to move out of his world), but his room was special, a refuge in my worst moments. When his absence came crashing in on me particularly hard, I would go there, lie on his bed, sit on the floor in front of his backpack, and ignore the reality of his absence. His backpack, just dropped off from school as it always was, just where it always sat. And his sheets with the smell of him captured beneath the comforter. I could pretend—for it was pretense, I knew at some level—that he was just gone, not dead. His room was where I could allow myself not to adjust to the new reality. This was the strongest medicine I had. Well, the strongest medicines—hallucinogens actually—were likely the videotapes of him, but I wasn't ready for them then or now.Wade was with me everywhere, but there was no place like his unchanged room for denying that he was forever gone.
I even saw him places he clearly was not. I looked in every black Grand Cherokee, the model of car in which Wade died, hoping to find him. It had all been a mistake, I so wanted to believe. I even followed a Cherokee one day. The young driver had his arm on the rim of the open window just as Wade used to do while driving. I followed knowing it was not him but unable not to follow on the chance that God had granted my wish but only if I showed the tenacity to find Wade myself, to follow this car when it drove by.
I wanted to scream at people who were mowing their lawns or fixing their porch. Don't build that high-rise, don't paint that store. Please. My God is just about to turn back time. But I didn't scream and they mowed and hammered and painted. Like Tecmessa I wanted it to be as it had been, and it was impossible to think that that this—the most important fact in my life—was invulnerable to my efforts, my prayers.
The movement of a bird on the mullion of the window, the fight of a butterfly or lightbulbs goingout. The ring of the phone with no one at the other end, a shiny dime on the sidewalk. Some of us who have lost our children sometimes see them there. Not all of us see them, not all of us see them in everything, but we need them in such an enormous, encompassing way that we cannot imagine that need is not big enough to bring us something, some part of him. So we look where no one who hasn't stood where we stood would look. He had to be here, somewhere here. I looked in closets, I opened drawers. Drawers! He was six feet tall. The distorted biology of a grieving mother. I knew as I opened the drawer that he could not be there, and yet I was powerless: I had to open it. What if somehow he could be there?
And then there came a time when I did not open drawers. The illogical searching did not end, but I moved through that place where I was searching for him to a place where I knew he was not there in a drawer—anymore. (Not, I have to admit, that he couldn't have been there; simply that he was not in a drawer in my house; he had, at the very least, moved on.) It was nearly a year later when I had a dream of finding him, a dream without logic, but with drawers—drawers I could not open. I wasat a beach something like Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, where we used to go with my parents. One of those idyllically remembered places, where my father would roll the children down the boardwalk in a big gardener's wheelbarrow, and we would grill corncobs and sit for hours watching the
I think at some level I also needed particular places in which to grieve. His room was one. I did not need it to feel close to Wade, I was feeling close to him everywhere (in part because I refused for a time to move out of his world), but his room was special, a refuge in my worst moments. When his absence came crashing in on me particularly hard, I would go there, lie on his bed, sit on the floor in front of his backpack, and ignore the reality of his absence. His backpack, just dropped off from school as it always was, just where it always sat. And his sheets with the smell of him captured beneath the comforter. I could pretend—for it was pretense, I knew at some level—that he was just gone, not dead. His room was where I could allow myself not to adjust to the new reality. This was the strongest medicine I had. Well, the strongest medicines—hallucinogens actually—were likely the videotapes of him, but I wasn't ready for them then or now.Wade was with me everywhere, but there was no place like his unchanged room for denying that he was forever gone.
I even saw him places he clearly was not. I looked in every black Grand Cherokee, the model of car in which Wade died, hoping to find him. It had all been a mistake, I so wanted to believe. I even followed a Cherokee one day. The young driver had his arm on the rim of the open window just as Wade used to do while driving. I followed knowing it was not him but unable not to follow on the chance that God had granted my wish but only if I showed the tenacity to find Wade myself, to follow this car when it drove by.
I wanted to scream at people who were mowing their lawns or fixing their porch. Don't build that high-rise, don't paint that store. Please. My God is just about to turn back time. But I didn't scream and they mowed and hammered and painted. Like Tecmessa I wanted it to be as it had been, and it was impossible to think that that this—the most important fact in my life—was invulnerable to my efforts, my prayers.
The movement of a bird on the mullion of the window, the fight of a butterfly or lightbulbs goingout. The ring of the phone with no one at the other end, a shiny dime on the sidewalk. Some of us who have lost our children sometimes see them there. Not all of us see them, not all of us see them in everything, but we need them in such an enormous, encompassing way that we cannot imagine that need is not big enough to bring us something, some part of him. So we look where no one who hasn't stood where we stood would look. He had to be here, somewhere here. I looked in closets, I opened drawers. Drawers! He was six feet tall. The distorted biology of a grieving mother. I knew as I opened the drawer that he could not be there, and yet I was powerless: I had to open it. What if somehow he could be there?
And then there came a time when I did not open drawers. The illogical searching did not end, but I moved through that place where I was searching for him to a place where I knew he was not there in a drawer—anymore. (Not, I have to admit, that he couldn't have been there; simply that he was not in a drawer in my house; he had, at the very least, moved on.) It was nearly a year later when I had a dream of finding him, a dream without logic, but with drawers—drawers I could not open. I wasat a beach something like Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, where we used to go with my parents. One of those idyllically remembered places, where my father would roll the children down the boardwalk in a big gardener's wheelbarrow, and we would grill corncobs and sit for hours watching the
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