Fourteen

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

-Wendell Berry, Sabbath 1998.VI

I keep telling myself that this will be the last year I do this.  I thought Ten years seemed like a nice round number, but I guess not.  July 23rd comes and with it thoughts that are beginning to seem like a well worn stone that I carry around in my pocket.  I thought perhaps I could leave it at the foot of Cruz de Ferro on the Camino, but I did not.  Sometimes I think I have laid it down or lost it, but I have not.  Sometimes I almost panic when I think it's gone, because it is all I really have left of my brother.

But it always comes back on this day, I can still remember the defeated sound of my father's voice when he said, "We lost Jonathan."  Tears still come when I think of that moment, the shock comes back again and again and again. Grief is that smooth stone.  The rough edges are gone, and it has become familiar and even comforting in a strange way.  Jesus did say, in his famously puzzling way, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."  At times it's hard to believe that, other times it seems like a truth that should be entirely self-evident.

This is why I know better than to ever assume I'm just going to "get over it." And it's why I try very hard to give others the space they need to grieve.  So much of our approach to stuff like this wants to rush in and help, to try and smooth out that stone quicker, but it's not possible, and it wouldn't be healthy even if it was.

I guess that's why I keep doing this year after year, because it's not for anyone but me.  If it helps someone else, so be it, but chances are it will not, their stone will be their stone, I can't give them mine, but I can tell them about mine.

Here's one of the last rough spots on my stone: this day the anniversary of Jon's passing, July 23.  It comes in the middle of the summer, when everyone and their brother is going on vacation, many of them are literally going with their brother.  People my age are usually teaming up with siblings to get a beach house or something like that.  I don't know for a fact that we would do that.  I don't know how broken or healed Jon would have been by the time he was pushing 40. It's the unanswerable nature of that question that jags me in the feels.  A wash of sentimentalism comes over me like a crashing wave.  I hear Bruce Springsteen's song Highway Patrolman, "Nothing feels better than blood on blood."

I don't know if you can understand that, I don't know if I'm adequately expressing what exactly plucks that heart-string.  Maybe I'm just whining at this point, after all I look at my daughter who was born less than a month after Jon died.  She's in high school now, her entire life happened in the wake of this disruption of our family.  My son has only pictures of his uncle holding him to even know that they met. In my better moments, I hope that this stone somehow makes me a better father to them, but I know that it has definitely cost them something too.  I have used it as an excuse not to do certain things, not to go certain places.  I have pointed to it's incontrovertible existence as a reason for many things, some good, some bad.  But sometimes I wonder if they really should have even known it existed from the time they were old enough to understand the word death.

These questions have no answers, and these ramblings have no end.

Still, I keep coming back to them on July 23.