All Aboard

There’s a quotation that circulates around from time to time, the kind where someone picks a background image – maybe the outline of a grove of trees with a moon sketched above, or a retreating wave on a beach that left a whole sand dollar in its haste to depart – with words positioned just so, for that aha moment effect. The author is never credited. Mostly, when I’ve seen this image, it just says “unknown” where the name should be. Junior detective that I am, I can tell you, based on my research, it was penned by author Jay Neugeboren. The quote is this: “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” Jay and I seem to agree on a lot.

We could stay right here, ruminating, marinating. I could write volumes about this crappy train depot, the one I’ve become stranded at on timeless occasions in this grief journey. You’d politely listen, too, even though you’d tire of the gloom, because we’re genuinely good at our core, all of us. But, you’ve become my therapist over the last couple of years and to sub ject you to that behavior would color you a really crappy therapist befitting that really crappy train depot. And, you’ve proven to be an amazing counselor, so I’d rather not do that to you. Besides, life is unfair to us all, not just to me. My mom has a cousin who, due to separate tragedies, has outlived two of his children. And, I’ve grown. I can now hear the crackle of a fire and feel the warmth of hot tea and smell the inside of a pumpkin scented retail store, with the full realization that the seasons are changing and the holidays are upon us – understanding I am forever one screen door slam away from a full nest, without being reduced to emotional pulp. Nevertheless, Joni Mitchell never lies and you really don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. There are things that break my heart in this world. You probably wouldn’t know unless I told you. That’s what I plan on doing. Now.

I cry huge, public, alligator tears, instantaneously, when I see children handled too roughly. I don’t mean that time where your kid acted so badly in the grocery store that you abandoned your cart on the soap aisle and fled the building, or the time you pinched the back of your son’s arm for knocking down that end cap display. I mean the arm yank that made the little girl yelp with pain. I mean the time you saw the parent, post confrontation when everyone was marching in a straight line again, push too hard with the foot in the back or forcefully thump a little boy’s head. I mean the time you saw that woman ask her “can I buy this” teenage daughter, with too high volume and a too scathing tone, why she was so (use your favorite vile word). It feels like a punch to my own gut. This moment, where you might assume I suffer from bad seasonal allergies that make by eyes water profusely, is where my insides implode like a badly aimed Molotov cocktail. I’m the one who flees, cartless. I sit in my car and cry, thinking about all the things I wish I’d said, like, “How dare you hurt that child. I woke up and realized my child was gone and all I can think about are the mean things I said over the years. You have no right to touch your child in anger when I don’t even have mine any longer.” I want to scream, “What right have you to berate your beautiful daughter when I don’t have a daughter any more. You’d better start appreciating what you’ve got before you wake up one day and it’s all been ripped away from you, too.” They never hear me. It’s an insane monologue for one.

It’s been a rough year. In parts of the country, the kids who were once able to have some blessed respite at school each day are cooped up with the one(s) they needed respite from. The holidays are approaching and all Santa seems to have in his bag is more uncertainty in the form of financial peril. I fear for everyone involved, but as this train finally leaves Depression Depot, headed for a brighter tomorrow, I’ll leave you with another favorite Jay Neugeboren quote. “I remain curious about all the lives I can’t have – and about the lives of others, real and imagined, past and present, and how people came to be who they are…and who they might yet be. I am enchanted by the landscape of possibility.” Indeed, Jay. Indeed.