Wednesday October 5

Wednesday is Jason's birthday.  It is a big milestone - 16.  Except we won't be celebrating it with him and his Mom and brother, he will not be blowing out the candles or ordering his favorite meal, dessert first.  He will be a hole in our hearts that we can never fill.  In My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult writes, In the English Language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parent who loses a child.  Through her character Kate, There should be a statute of limitation on grief.  A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call your name.  That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork form the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it.  That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.  See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it.  And the very act of living is a tide; at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.  

I wonder how he keeps tabs on us.  Was he sad that he missed us and sorry for the hurt he brought to his Mom and brother? Was he happy to see us talking to each other? Does he check up on us? Or has he taken on a new role of looking after other children who are hurt and afraid, children who feel that no one hears them.  If there are better angels, wings that brush against the faces of people so they instinctively know something or someone is there, I would gladly mourn him without any comforting breeze if I thought he had moved on as another of the better angels to comfort a child at risk so that one less mother or brother counts the days he has been gone like they used to count his birthdays.

Jason, in your honor I will eat dessert first on your birthday.  I will wish that you would wrap your Mom and brother in the shelter of your wings and when they laugh and feel guilty, remind them that you would have thought it was funny too.