When Dylan was 10 years old, his music teacher died, succumbing to cancer that had remitted for years, before cruelly returning and finally taking her. I was preparing to teach a night class when I found out – my wife texted me – so it was after 9:00 that evening before I could talk with Dylan about it. By the time I was able to do that, he had processed the news, turning it over with his own internal logic, and had made a tenuous peace with her loss. He and I discussed it in our hallway at home; I knelt down to face him eye-to-eye, and when he was finished talking, we hugged. He held on a little longer than he usually did (he was 10, after all, and, I suspected, not far from the period of life when hugging his old man would be deemed uncool; I had already sensed it in the quickness with which he usually disengaged from an embrace).
I swear I could feel his sadness pass through him, and it chipped away a part of my heart.
Five years later, my father was diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer, and four months after receiving that diagnosis, he too was gone. This time, I was the one who delivered the news to Dylan, over the phone, the one to try to give him immediate comfort as he wept. I tried to explain to him how sick Pop Pop had been, how much pain he had been in; reminded him we knew this was coming, and this outcome, while immeasurably sad, was for the best. We talked a little bit as his tears crescendoed and reached their eventual conclusion, and even over the phone, I could feel him release his sadness like breath, one that I inhaled miles away.
Between those two deaths, I and my family had lost other friends, attended other memorials, engaged in other conversations about departed loved ones. Each time, I witnessed Dylan processing it all, dealing with the losses as they happened, turning them over in his mind and in his heart. He believes in Heaven, and holds onto the surety of seeing these people again. Still, there’s the more immediate concern of each loss, the hole in our hearts that we fill as best we know how.
We try to fill it with conversation, with stories, often accompanied by tears, but just as often accompanied by laughter and the wistful breaths that memories tend to draw from us. As we do this, it’s almost like the loved one is in the room with us, a spectral presence that we dial in more clearly with each story. Most of the stories are communal, experienced by us all as a family, but there are many others that are not – ones that belong to each of us individually, precious little gifts that grow in beauty and power as they’re shared.
As Dylan has gotten older, he has participated more in these conversations. I marvel sometimes at how much more accurate his memory is than mine, and how much more he understands as he’s grown.
And, as the curmudgeonly old guy of the family, I sometimes think about how he’ll talk about me when I’m not around anymore. I hope he remembers the good stuff. The beauty of that is, at least for the moment, I still have time to add onto the list of good things. I have to remember that more often; if nothing else, it’ll help him better process my absence one day with some positive stories.