It's Like the Waves of the Crashing Sea

It's hard to put into words the way I feel, the way any of this entire experience of losing a child feels. All I can come up with is that it's "weird." It's just plain weird. Weird, as in unfamiliar. Weird in that it's caused the straightforward motion of my life to veer off course and, in some ways, to forge a new path. And that just feels foreign to me and to the way my family has been living. It's abnormal. It's weird.

There's a way to describe the way the grief comes now, though, because it's no longer constantly bearing down on me at every moment. This description really fits perfectly. I didn't come up with it myself. A couple of different people described it to me this way (perhaps even the same person, but many things from the past few weeks are blurry to me now). The grief comes and goes many, many times in a single day, interrupted by moments of normalcy. I go from calm and peaceful to overwhelmed with sadness and frustration and then back again. It's like the waves of the crashing sea. They are mighty and forceful, but they eventually subside and give way to peace and calm again.

This takes me back to a time a few years ago when Stacy and I took our kids to the beach in Encinitas, California (a really great beach), as part of a family vacation. As I walked out into the surf and felt the salty spray lick my legs and feet I was surprised by its power. Those little rolling swells of water, seemingly harmless, had great power. Tremendous power. My children wandered out to explore them, too, and as I stood there watching them from behind I remember thinking how easy it would be for them to get swept away into the ocean by those powerful, crashing waves of the sea.

Fortunately, they didn't. I kept them close to me after that. But that's what grief is like for me now. Great big, intermittent waves threatening to drown me, followed by the regular happy, normal, and boring moments of everyday life.

Surprisingly, I need the crashing waves. They remind me that my wounds are still fresh and that I need to take time to tend to them. They remind me how recently this "thing" happened. They connect me to Jack and to the time Before. It may sound strange that I need to feel the waves of grief, but as I've mentioned previously, I worry about moving forward too quickly. Life wants me to go too fast. It demands it. When I dip my toe into my work life again, it's like stepping onto a bullet train. But this big change in my life has all happened so suddenly that I've got to be able to maintain as much of a connection as I can, through a slower speed (at least for now), because it's all I have left.

I quite literally find myself driving more slowly and patiently that I did Before. I'm not as much in a hurry to get things accomplished as I used to be. I'm sure that will fade with time, but for now I'm kind of enjoying it, this reduced pace of life. The trick is to not let it get away from me.

Oftentimes the waves are caused by remembrances and moments of recollection. They are especially prominent at times when Tate (Jack's twin brother) is doing something and the realization comes to me that Jack should/would be doing it, too. Twins do everything together, so you can imagine this happens a lot.

The first and most dramatic realization of this occurred to me when Tate went back to school for the first time a few days after the funeral. The twins ride/rode the bus to preschool together. They both toddled out the front door, their oversized backpacks bouncing on their backs and bums as they trounced down the sidewalk and climbed the giant steps of the bus to take their seats. It was really the cutest sight to see, those two little innocent boys braving the big bad world together. I wasn't often home when they left for school in the morning, but when I was, I loved to watch them go. Yet this source of happiness has become a source of sadness, too. When I watched Tate go by himself for the first time, it really broke my heart. I felt so alone for him as he walked to the bus, no brotherly companion by his side. I felt the loneliness on his behalf. He didn't seem to notice at all (he is so very resilient) but I felt the pain for him, the pain he didn't know he was supposed to be feeling. Jack wasn't there beside him, and his absence cut me to the core.

That was a big wave.

Other waves erupt at times like when Stacy went out last night for a couple of hours, leaving me to put the kids to bed by myself. I've done this many times before, but this was the first time I had done it since Jack's death. As we went about our business and busyness of getting ready for bed, I came to the realization that there were only three kids to put to bed now instead of four. Just three.

Big, crashing wave.

And so they come and go, these waves. Then I pause and think about how weird this all is, losing a child and experiencing his absence. The absence is vast. And loud. It turns out I now know that I took his presence for granted a lot of the time. How could I not? That's just how life goes. I'm sure all parents do that. You just never expect that your kids won't always be there.

Lest you think I'm in the depths of despair all the time, I can most assuredly tell you that I have so many fond memories of Jack and they keep me going and make me strong. Like this one:

I like to be silly with my kids. A few weeks ago we got a remote control for the floor lamp in our family room. (Yes, a remote control for a lamp. Definitely a first-world luxury. Thank you very much, Costco.) Before telling my kids we had this new gadget, I put the remote in my pocket then told them that I could turn on the lamp by sneezing. Each time I sneezed I pushed the on/off button on the remote control in my pocket with my hand and--voila!--the light obeyed. A magical, sneeze-controlled lamp! They thought this was really cool, of course. Dad could control the lamp with his sneezes! Then I told them how I was working this magic and they all wanted to try it, too. And so we took turns doing that for a while.

Or this one:

Several months ago we were driving north on I-15 in Utah, returning home from a road trip somewhere. As we turned a bend in the road and entered the central valley just south of Nephi, I saw a large factory in the distance. The smokestack from the factory was pumping puffy, white plumes of smoke into the sky. I called out to my kids who were watching a movie to pass the time, to tell them that I had spotted a cloud factory. A cloud factory! The huge, pure white vapors were being pumped out of the factory and reaching all the way up into the heavens. The sky above was somewhat overcast at the time and because of the way the smoke from the factory reached into the blue expanse and connected to the layer of clouds above the earth, it quite literally looked as though the factory was filling the sky with beautiful cotton-ball clouds. My kids thought this was great, and Jack in particular believed my story with the full enthusiasm of his five-year-old youth.

Well, just a few weeks ago, prior to his death, we were driving from our home to northern Utah County. As we sped along the freeway near Lehi we followed the bend in the road and came upon the sight of a different but similar factory ahead of us pumping white puffy clouds into the sky above, just as we'd seen before. Jack immediately called to me and pointed ahead, "Dad, look! A cloud factory!"

I was so thrilled he had remembered and that he still cared. It was our thing, this funny little fiction about the source of the puffy clouds. The fact that he had embraced it made it something even more special between us.

Last week as Stacy and I drove that same stretch of road again we saw that same cloud factory hard at work just as before. Of course we immediately pointed it out and snapped a photo, taking comfort in knowing that Jack had seen it too and wasn't too far away from us. Our moments of silliness from Before have now become sacred moments of wave-battling tender mercies in After, which are far more powerful than any force of the crashing surf I have yet to encounter.