Breakdown at the McDonald's Drive-Thru

I'm not going to lie: things have been difficult lately. Very difficult. I realize I probably seem to have everything put back together in my life and that everything's just fine. And in all reality, it is, I guess. For the most part. We've just had such a wonderful summer of family activities, and I've had numerous very special personal experiences that have buoyed my spirits (including the first completely work-free vacation my wife and I have taken together since we had our first child eleven years ago--and to Hawaii, no less!).

July in Hawaii was a dream come true.

Even so, things have been hard. There have been a great many leadership and organizational changes at my work in the last couple of months. I always thought I was a forward-thinking-lover-of-change kind of person, but I'll admit that these changes have really thrown me for a loop, more so than I initially thought they would. The result? At some point in the last few weeks I stopped being my usual, chipper self (at least on the inside). Only today, however, did I really come to understand that these issues at work are only a small part of what's going on.

It took an Egg McMuffin to help me understand that.

I feel like I've been making less progress on some of my personal goals lately, and that's sort of brought my spirits down (I'm a very goal-oriented person with a lot of ambition). To hide my misery, I decided to stop at McDonald's on the way to work this morning for a sandwich accompanied by an obscenely large Dr. Pepper (not even diet--yes, this was serious!). I never stop at McDonald's for breakfast, even though it's conveniently located on my direct driving path to work. But for some reason, today was the day; I just had to stop. And so I did. As I was pulling up, I was pondering all the stuff that was going on and why I felt so low. That's when the dam burst. The tears just started to come. (Ever since Jack died, I've been very glad I don't have to travel to work on public transport; it's often my ugliest time of day, and I'm grateful I don't have to share it with anyone.)

As I waited there in the long line at the drive-in at McDonald's, I came to realize that I'm not done grieving yet. I'm not done. This sounds really crazy, I know. "Of course you're not done," you say to me as you read this, but I think a part of me actually believed that I was done. Finished. I had closed the chapter on that part of my life (not the loss, just the grief over the loss). But just the opposite is true. I'm not done. Not done at all. I'm still in my grieving-life infancy. I may never be done. Who knows? I'm making this up as I go. I've never experienced this before. Other people have gone through this process, but nobody is the same. My wife and I do not grieve the same way. The first few months I allowed the grief to flow freely. I made no attempt to stop it (the grief, the tears, the sadness, the melancholy, I mean). But somehow, somewhere over the course of my summertime adventures when I started allowing myself to have all of these wonderfully joyous experiences, I think I made the subconscious decision to be done with the difficulty of losing my child. Even as I write this I know how ridiculous it must sound, but I've felt so good so often over the last few months that I felt like a new page had turned.

The truth is, however, that it's only been eight months and three days, so I'm a long way off from healing.

This realization came full circle just a week or so ago. I was hosting a guest at work. She was such a genuine, lovely person, who, in my private conversations with her on the way to campus or lunch spoke so lovingly of her children back home. I enjoyed hearing her talk about them. As she spoke, though, I started to feel guilty of something I had done. When we first met, I had told her I only had three children.

Backstory: both my wife and I have really struggled with how to handle the most dreaded question we now face: "How many children do you have?" Not because we don't love our children or because we don't want to talk about Jack or our other children. Just the opposite is true. We LOVE to talk about Jack. We both love it when people ask us about him, even when they ask how he passed away. Anything that starts a discussion about his short life is welcome to us, no matter how it begins.

But we also loathe the idea of ever making anyone uncomfortable. As you can imagine, telling someone you've recently lost a child is a potential conversation killer. My wife and I are similar in that we never want anyone to feel bad, sad, or uncomfortable due to something we do or say, and so we haven't known how to handle the question of how to talk about how many kids we have with people we don't yet know. Another reason it's hard to answer this question is because whenever you tell someone you have twins, it elicits such a wonderful, joyous response. I always appreciated that response--reveled in it, even--until we lost Jack. Now it serves as a reminder of the things we won't experience with him here as our other children grow up.

As a result, we started telling some people (strangers) if they asked how many children we have, that we have three of them. This sounds like the lowest of low things to do, I know, but it's been so extremely difficult to know how to handle this. I feel awful just writing it here. I love all of my kids so much. I would never want to communicate anything other than that to someone, but seriously, when you're chatting it up with the Walmart cashier, you really don't want to get into a full-on discussion about the recent loss of a child.

That happened, by the way, the discussion of our children with a Walmart cashier. To my wife. And this is what led me to my change of heart about telling people how many kids I have. Stacy told me about her experience on the night when I came home from hosting my guest and told her I felt guilty for not telling my guest that I really had four children rather than three.

You see, my wife was at Walmart recently, our little Tate (Jack's twin) in tow. They were at the check stand paying for their purchases. The cashier was chatty. She kept drilling down every time Stacy answered a question about the weather, the summer, the kids, you name it. When the inevitable question came up ("How many kids do you have?") my wife said, "Three." The cashier smiled and continued with her chatter and scanning of items. Tate looked up, confused, at his mom and to the cashier and softly said, "But actually it's four."

"But actually it's four." He said it so innocently and purely. It cut to the heart. Yes. Yes, of course it's four. This tore my wife up. And when she told me this story, mimicking Tate's sweet, innocent voice, it tore me up, too. You're right, my son, we have four children. Always.

We enjoyed a family vacation in Southern Alberta, Canada, where my wife grew up.

And that's when Stacy and I both decided that we will no longer wimp out at the question of how many children we have, regardless of who asks it. (We may sidestep the question if necessary, but we'll always be honest.)

You may be interested to know that I have since communicated with my guest and told her about what I'd done. She was incredibly kind and understanding and everything I would have expected her to be.

That's just how life goes, I guess. We get to learn all the time as we chart this path of imperfection. Sometimes it's a lot of fun. Sometimes it's really hard and miserable. Sometimes it's all of those at the same time.

The good news is that we get to keep trying to figure it out.