I suppose it’s natural to assume that your children will grow up to reflect you as a parent. I don’t think the reverse is true. I don’t think kids grow up believing that everything they will be or become is determined by their parents.  Once we flip that switch from being kids to being people, it’s not uncommon for us to blame our parents for all of our negative traits and pat ourselves on the back for overcoming bad parenting to become good people — unless, of course, we are not good people.

I have a feeling that people turn into who they are at any given time through a combination parenting and personal experience.  Kids don’t always go bad because their parents suck, nor do kids with sucky parents always turn out bad.  Given all that, I have always believed that you can’t raise a certain type of person. You can’t plan out your kid and constantly prod them into being the person you imagined in your head. What you can do is provide a safe, happy place for them to become who they will become.  You can model good behavior, and good relationships, and hope they pick up on some of it.

I say all of this to say that I was pretty sure I had it all figured out. I am, and have always been, a pretty amazing father, by current standards.  My hope has always been that my kids would become amazing people, thereby validating my ideas about parenting to the extent that I believe my provision of a safe, happy place would be influential in who they would become.  Now all of that has been thrown out the window, because I failed to keep one half of my children alive.

Even if Allie becomes a happy, fulfilled person who tackles all of life with an upbeat outlook and a winning smile, I have failed as a parent.  I had one job – keep the kids alive – and I failed. I could have been a tyrant. I could have locked them in the basement.  I could have skipped town and sent cards once a year on their birthday.  If Emmy were still alive, I would be a better father than I am today.

Of course, we can’t presume that I could have changed the circumstances by being a horrible father. I only use this as a comparison – Emmy alive with a bad dad v. Emmy dead with a good dad – to prove a point.  No matter how you slice up those two scenarios, Emmy alive is always going to win. End of argument.

Part of the reason I even use the comparison is that I am still mad at the universe for not respecting the only thing that I valued in the entire world – my family. I was going to offer some scenarios that would seem horrible but would still allow me to be happy, but I can think of nothing that comes even close to the magnitude of losing a kid. Losing all our money – who cares? Losing jobs, house, cars, pets – yeah, nothing.  What do people value other than family or money?  I guess health, body parts, marriages, stuff like that. I’d trade it all to have my kid back.  I suppose we all would, so my devotion to my family is not a novel thing, nor was it enough to keep my kid from getting sick.

I guess what I am saying is that I envy the parents who get to sit back and wonder if something they did caused their kid to become a stripper or a pot head. I envy all parents that have not lost a child, and I get extremely angry at parents who take this for granted and treat their kids like shit.  I am continually in disbelief that there are parents who neglect or beat their kids without any intervention from the universe, while my kid was perfectly safe and happy and got plucked from us without so much as a Thank You card. There are people who don’t want their kids, but can’t get rid of them. I wanted my kid more than anything in the world, and I couldn’t keep her.

That’s the shit I get to think about every day for the rest of my life.

(Originally published in July 2009. Picture courtesy of LifeTouch. (When your kid dies, they give you the digital file.))

The last six months of my life was a series of starts and stops and blank pages and new ideas that that never made it past the guards with big hats of my brain. The beginning, I thought, was the hardest part. I know now that the beginning is only so difficult because there is never any middle, or any end. When you have nowhere to go, it is stupid to get in your car and pull out of the driveway. Immediately the decision to turn right or left is meaningless and confusing. If I had a destination, the decision of where to start might not be so hard.

With the comforts of central heat and food delivery, it is the rare soul who would venture out into the world to wander aimlessly and distractedly from nothing to nothing. If lost in your own thoughts is where you want to be, then home is the best place for that. In my writing, as in my life, that is where I am right now – lost, on purpose, among the thousands of memories that were and the millions of memories that could have been. I keep thinking I should get in the car and go somewhere – just put some words down on the page and see where it leads. But there is nowhere I want to go right now, and nothing I want to do when I get there. So my keys lay undisturbed on the desk in the kitchen. I look out the window every once in a while – turn on the television or fire up the internet machine to check on the world. The world is always the same, but I check anyway, and what I see never inspires me to get out there and be a part of anything. Almost never.

I have taken to blaming the weather. Once it is warm, I say, I’ll write. There was a time in my life when spring’s warm sun shining on my face reassured me that the world was amazing and that all the birds and plants of summer would soon return to joyfully dance their way across my imagination. But I am tainted, and all that emerges from me is tainted, by the cold and deadly truth that sometimes winter steals things that he does not return in spring, or summer, or ever. What good can I bring to the world when everything that spews forth from me is toxic, sardonic sleet?

When you are indoors with the shades drawn and the shutters closed, the weather outside does not matter. If you never go out, then you do not know that the snow has given way to tulips and crocus. As long as you keep believing in winter, without refuting evidence to dissuade you, winter can last for a year or more right inside your house. But one must leave the carefully constructed cave of indifference once in a while to get the mail or replenish one’s Coke supply. It is the brief periods following these excursions where the mind tells its owner that they are living a lie. There is a world out there with birds and plants and hundreds of other good things to strengthen the body and renew the soul, and you, it says, are ignoring them all to your own peril.

Fortunately the mind is easily silenced. What the mind does not understand is that, for me, writing about the smallest of joys brings immense pain. Everything means everything. And everything is blackened. If the inside of me is exposed too long to sunlight or joy or more than two colors, it starts to smoke and the edges ignite into small bits of flame. In these times I fear if I do not sequester myself immediately I might spontaneously combust.

Of course, imagery aside, this is not what I fear. What I fear is that someday I will be happy again. I fear that with enough time and energy, I will be able to move on. Of all the fears I’ve ever had, this one makes me shudder and weep the most. I know I can’t stay inside, not writing, forever – the draw of things and their amazingness is too great to ignore indefinitely. But that first step – where I jump in the car with a destination in mind and watch the little house that holds my feelings and memories and joys and fears for a person – the place where I have lived for over a year – get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until it is out of sight and gone forever – is a very very very hard step.

I don’t want to be dead. Not today, tomorrow, or at any time in the near to distant future. But death does not negotiate, as a rule, and will come when it comes. Perhaps the time and place where death will come to me is known somewhere in the universe, but since it cannot be known to me, the information is of little value. It will come when it comes.

What I know of death, gathered by speaking with those that have experienced it, is that the dead are not super-talkative. They slip into a dream now and again, they persuade you to look at clocks at certain times of the day and they leave small tokens for you to find. The dead are also elusive and vague. The dreams never come right out and say anything. The clocks never bring any information – good or bad – other than the time, which might be bad if you are late for an appointment, but otherwise has no intrinsic sense of morality or worth relative to other times. Lastly, the tokens are never so obvious that you leap with joy or tremble with fear. A penny is a penny. You can find one almost anywhere except in your pocket when the total of your donuts and big gulp is $2.31.

No one on earth can tell you with certainty what it feels like to die. People can tell you what it feels like to get really close to death, or to sneak up on death, or to die for three minutes and live again. But, because of the aforementioned vow of silence taken by all departed souls, no one can tell you what it feels like to just die and stay dead.

So, we speculate. We read books from folks who have been close to death, and even from folks who claim to have spoken to the dead. We are so curious about how the book ends that we flip to the last page. We want to know how we will end so badly that we’ll suspend disbelief – even our strongly held beliefs – in order to comfort our minds about what awaits us on that last page. For all of us, it turns out, the end is pretty good. We go to our happy place and spend eternity being happy. All of us, without exception, prefer to believe that we, of all people, will be happy for eternity – and the degree of our unhappiness on this plane exacerbates our need for this to be true.

But then, this curiosity is what led us, as a species, to develop beliefs in the first place. That is, beliefs surrounding death, and whatever lies beyond. For a long time we didn’t know what was in the ocean, or out in space, and so we structured some plausible explanations for the things we could not explain. These were based on limited information, initially, and as our information was updated by experiences, or experimentation, we had the option of working this new information into our beliefs, dismissing this new information as false when it did not agree with our beliefs, or creating a whole new set of beliefs based on the new information.

As with oceans, and space, we pieced together a long series of facts and speculative notions to come up with some theories about death. Through some combination of the three options above, we came to where we are currently – both as a person, and as a species. Everything that you know about death, you read or heard from someone else. Every speck of every generally-held belief about the afterlife is nothing but folklore pieced together over years of late-night campfires, early-morning mountain walks and some general mischievousness within the ranks of past and present persons of influence. This must be so, because you have not died, and therefore cannot ever be an authority on death. Once you die, you become an authority, but again, that’s when most people clam up and start getting all cryptic.

I only say all of this to say that I do not like death at all. I do not like watching people die – either in real life, or for pretend in movies or television shows. I do not like that dead people have no need for their closet full of clothes, or their bed, or their bicycle, or their shoes. What am I supposed to do with these things, realizing that no one is coming for them, ever? I do not like that death silences brilliant and wonderful minds capable of years of continued contribution to life, society and general happiness – especially given that death chooses horribly and leaves criminals and ne’er-do-wells and really bad people alone while it takes new moms and saintly grandmothers and sweet, beautiful children almost every day.

In short, the personification of death is a fucking asshole – but, only because we choose to personify death. If we look at death not as an entity, or as some thing that “happened” to a loved one, or to us, but simply as the end of an existence, the time when the lights went out for our friend or family member, then we can’t assign morality or fairness or even emotion to it. It just is.

The trouble with the word “is”, at least in the English language, is that it flows pretty fluidly between “is” the temporary and “is” the permanent. “She is sick” could mean that someday she won’t be sick. So, is it possible that we sense this same ephemerality about the phrase “She is dead”? I think it is possible, and I think that’s why we continue to talk with a straight face about the afterlife and angels, and why we continue to assign meaning to trivial signs and dreams. It’s also why we keep closets full of clothes – maybe someday she’ll want to wear them.

(The following was originally posted July 20, 2010, while in St. John.)

I am sitting at JJ’s Texas Coast Café – on the island of St John in the US Virgin Islands. I am tucked in a corner of the bar just inside the garage-door sized opening. From here I can see the Ferry dock and St John Island Spice. If I lean forward and squint through the boats and taxis I can almost see the sea, but knowing that it is there is enough for me.  Though I am inside, I am wet. Not soaking wet – but I do keep having to wipe my hands on my shorts to keep the moisture off the MacBook – a gift to my daughter last summer which came in quite handy this morning when I decided to find a spot to sit and write that might have internet, and a dry seat.

On this, our sixth day in the Caribbean, I am naturally beginning to summarize the trip, though we still have four days of paradise to get through. Were I a novel writer, I would wait until I was home and back to life before I began to dissect the trip – and would actually have no need to dissect, since in novel length I would have license to describe each footstep I took this morning in my search for a connection.

“I first placed my right foot – my good foot – to the uneven pavement, inspecting the ground carefully through the rubber of my flower-print Birkenstocks. The ground was hard, and though uneven, offered a surface wide enough to support my weight and that of my bag which held, among other things, my daughter’s phone, which I took in case of emergency, and her laptop, which I carried to record my thoughts and feelings of the morning, and perhaps my dreams for the future.  Having mentally registered that the ground was, in fact, solid and acceptable, I gingerly placed my left foot in front of my right. In this way, I knew I would make The Beach Bar within five minutes, and that, barring any pot holes or tree roots, I would arrive with all the tendons of both ankles in tact”

It’s raining. Again.  I have finally had enough rain.  While searching for the prevailing theme of this trip, I dismissed the lack of Internet, because I can live without Internet for a week. I discounted the exorbitant amounts of cash I have parted with, because this is vacation, and the only shrink I ever visited – who told me I did not have ADD, but was just lazy – also told me that spending money on vacation was what made life worth living. But, no matter how hard I try, I am unable to discount the rain.  It has rained every day – some days were just a drizzle off and on during our hike or our snorkel, but there have been real-to-life downpours lasting hours – the type of rain that never happens in Colorado, and the type, until recently, I professed to love and miss.

Our last trip to St John was April, two years ago, and lasted only four days. We fell in love with the beautiful weather and relaxed atmosphere of the island. There is no bustle or even much commerce on St John – in sharp contrast to St Thomas, where there is an airport and gang shootings and all sorts of real-life stuff that no one wants to see on vacation.  This small island is ¾ National Park, and in the last three days I believe we have seen most of it. Hiking is relaxing in comparison to building a stone wall with your bare hands or clearing a jungle to plant sugar cane, but when compared to laying on the beach, or swimming in crystal-blue water, hiking treacherous mountain trails feels a lot like work.  Of course, with the weather, laying on the beach is sort of stupid. You can’t spend the whole day in the condo, or in the bar, so we decided to get out and see the island, allowing the rain to cleanse our bodies, if not our souls.

On Sunday we left St John and spent the day on a boat touring the entire Island chain – from the Batholiths on Virgin Gorda to the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke. I lost my favorite hat when I jumped off the boat to begin my swim to the Soggy Dollar, so I felt it was only fair that I bought a hat from there. Thus far, this is the only souvenir I have purchased. There will be more, I am sure, but unless they sell a “It rained on me in St John” t-shirt, I fear no souvenir will capture the trip completely.

I have these big questions in my head – things that might be unanswerable by anyone. Sometimes I ask these questions aloud and people look at me quizzically – that is how I know the question is best contemplated in silence. One of those questions is – if you find a vacation spot that you love, though there are thousands of other places you have never been – should you go back to the same place again, or should you try somewhere new.  This same question could be applied to dating, but for now I’ll focus on vacation.  We could have tried somewhere new this trip. But, we decided to come back to St John because we loved it, and we felt we hadn’t seen the whole island last time.  I’m not sure how it will eventually pan out, but right now I’m not certain that was the best decision.  If we’d left St John up on its pedestal as this amazing place with great weather and beautiful beaches, it would still be up there, a little dusty but untarnished.

But then, life is tarnished, and a vacation can’t take that away, apparently. I suppose that was a lot of pressure to put on a little island – to be perfect and happy and let us forget, for a week if possible, or just a day if you can, that we are missing someone horribly.  I’m not sure that Hawaii, or anywhere really, would have been able to take us where we want to be – because that place no longer exists.

The calendar pinned to the wall above my desk has displayed March of 2009 for over two years. It is protected from the elements, and not connected to anything that might try to update it automatically, so I imagine the calendar will display March of 2009 for a very long time.

But, how long.  In a year, or five years, will I sit down at my desk and have the realization that an outdated calendar serves as neither wall art nor an appropriate souvenir of the time I spent with my child?  Will I realize that the things I’ve kept the same have morphed from comforting relics into painful reminders? Will I see that the mementos I’ve preserved are temporary and prone to erosion and weathering, and that no object I cling to in an attempt to bind my daughter to this world has the power to magic her back into my life? Will I suddenly become aware that it is perfectly acceptable for me to change things – anything – because nothing I change or do not change can affect the outcome of life?

All that I can possibly hope to last are the few pictures stored on my computer, and eleven years of memories. However, if the truth be known, I’ve never been good about taking care of my memories. I’ve never polished and wrapped them in acid-free cloth or placed them in a labeled bin in the crawl space. I’ve just sort of left them on the counter, and when folks came over they got shoved in a drawer. And now, it is common when I am searching for a memory to find that it just isn’t anywhere.  Had someone told me these would one day be important – perhaps stamped “memory of your dead kid” on the outside like they do “Important Tax Information” – then I might have at least put these things in a folder that, with effort, could be located.

At certain times in my life, I have gazed upon the people around me and the time that we were having and said to myself “this is memories in the making.”  This was so rare that I could count the number of times on one hand, even if I didn’t have thumbs.  But, with my wife and kids, the times were different.  We were not making memories as much as we were living life. The things we did and the places we went were just part of being a family. Perhaps in the back of my mind, I knew that someday, when the kids were grown, these times would seem special. But, in the here and now of daily life, none of it seems all together extraordinary.

Ask me what I’d give to have an ordinary day with Emmy right now – just a day where we see each other at breakfast before she was off to school and I was off to work, then again at dinner time.  Ask me what I would trade for a day where we talked about meaningless daily stuff and then maybe, if the weather was right, go for ice cream.  But, of course, there is no answer, because there is nothing I have that I would not give, and there is nothing I have that I could give, and no one to give it to.

If it were my intent to write a cautionary tale to other parents, this is the point at which this would turn into a preachy, hug your kids sort of piece. That is not my intent. I have come, through experience, to understand  that no one ever heeds the warnings of others, no matter how strongly presented the warnings, or how desperate and sincere the presenter. We are never cautioned by the mistakes of others. Also, I don’t think the way we lived before was a mistake. Yes, I wanted more time, but I had the time I had, and I didn’t squeeze every last drop of life out of every single moment, but no one wrings the rag all the way dry – whether or not they know those moments may be limited. The fact is, all our time with every single person is limited – a finite and unknown number of days before one of us is gone. But, I don’t think that thought changes the way we live.

This picture was taken by Emmy – a self-portrait of a fun kid with big eyes and big ideas. I’m presuming that, because I was not there. The girls went by themselves to Seattle to spend a week with our friends. We thought it would be a good thing for the girls to travel without us – to see the world on their own terms and begin to piece together some things about what makes their lives the same or different than other people. For us, it was a week with no kids. We stayed out late, we did nothing if we wanted, and we acted like newly-weds. It was nice.

If we’d known Emmy would be dead eight months later, would we have sent her away for a week? I doubt it. More likely, we would have spent every waking moment, and most of the sleeping ones, trying to soak in as much of her big, beautiful personality as we could manage. But that would not have eased by even one degree our suffering, or taken away even the littlest bit of sadness. And, truth be told, it would have probably annoyed her greatly. So, in some respects, I’m glad it we didn’t know. I’m glad that it was sudden, and that we had no time to prepare ourselves, or her, for her departure.

I wonder now what memories Emmy made during the trip pictured above – what memories she carried with her up until memories were no longer necessary. She possessed better tools for memory retention and recall than me. But then, in all matters of the brain she was superior to me and many people. All the more reason, I think, that I’m glad we let her grow and explore and create things on her own without fretting over her inevitable departure. Not that her death was inevitable, though that is arguable, but all children grow up and leave, eventually. Carrie and I have but three short years before our nest is emptied and we are but two lonely, purposeless souls taking up space in the world. I think we’ll travel.

Every family since the dawn of time has known that their kids would up and leave them – that is the end result of all our hard work. And yet, while we are constantly reminded to cherish these times, it is difficult to cherish every moment of every day. I don’t think that is wrong, I think that is just human nature. To paraphrase the band Cinderella, we rarely realize the joy and value that others bring to our lives until those people are no longer in our lives, and then we are tempted to regret not spending more time with them. But, as I said before, the time we have is the time we have, and the way we spend it is the way we chose to spend it. There can be no regrets, only memories.

Someday I will write the story of our lives and give it a Hollywood ending – the one where Emmy has a close call, but comes out just fine and goes on to do amazing things while her family watches on in pride. That’s the version I write in my head every night as I try to fall asleep. In this version, we don’t spend every waking moment basking the glory of one another. We take trips alone, we spend time without each other, and we don’t worry that every moment might be the last. When we are together, we are loving, but sometimes we annoy each other, and sometimes we argue. Upon reflection, I would say that this version is exactly the same as our real lives, except none of the main characters die. With just that small change, it is the perfect story.

I have been to Chicago three times, and while there I am unapologetic about my tourist status. The city is so foreign to me that, were it not for the English, I’d feel like I’d traveled to another country. It is a good feeling – a positive feeling – knowing that when I wake up in Chicago with nothing to do, there is more than I could do in a week just outside my hotel.

On this trip, in March of 2010, we road the train to Chicago from St. Louis, where we’d spent a few days watching volleyball. The train ride was peaceful, and inspiring, and some day I hope to finish the short story/novel/epic tome that I started that day. Downtown St. Louis was sort of like a post-apocalyptic city from a Stephen King novel, if Stephen King wrote post-apocalyptic books. But Chicago, as always, was teeming with life, and perfectly vibrant and fulfilling in every way.

Allie had never been to Chicago, so Carrie and I wanted to “do it up right.”  We shopped, went to the art museum, ate, went to Navy Pier, ate some more, and, of course, road the train to Wrigley.  It was, by all accounts, a pretty fantastic trip, and began what I hope will become a tradition – getting the fuck out of town in March every year.

I took a few hundred pictures with our Sony point and shoot. I took pictures in the art museum, at Navy Pier, from the top of the John Hancock building, and almost everywhere in between. I discovered a few months later the reason people take pictures. When the trip is but a memory, the pictures can bring back all the details, and give you a sense of reliving the trip.

At the time I did not know it, but this trip to Chicago, and the pictures I took, would be the catalyst for what is becoming the second half of my life. I went all out on this trip, and instead of taking a few portraits here and there, and some poorly-lit shots of the more famous paintings in the museum, I got creative, and allowed myself the time to set up some shots that I really wanted to take, but that were not that easy to get. Upon reviewing the pictures from this trip, I realized that maybe this was something I enjoyed, and that I was sort of good at naturally.

For instance, in the picture above, I just saw red – lots of red. So, I snapped this picture. In times previous to this, I would have never taken that picture, because I didn’t want to disturb the guy, and it seemed a little foolish, and I had nowhere to put things like this, other than on my hard drive, so it didn’t matter if I let it slip by. Now that I have a place to share pictures, and have overcome some fears of putting things out into the world that I enjoy, I think I’ve opened up some great new roads that were unavailable to me before.

The first picture – the one of Navy Pier – is an oddity, and that is why I chose to write about it.  I have written a little about Flickr, and how sometimes the behavior of people there confuses me.  This is a good example. I posted this picture on October 7th of 2010.  As of this writing, no one has ever looked at it. Not one single person.  To me, that means that it must be very special and people are afraid to click on it, or it must be very bad. It is not amazing, but it is not bad. To me, it is perfectly in the middle, which might mean it is perfectly boring.

Regardless of the appeal of this picture to the masses, I like it, because it brings back memories of a trip that I really enjoyed. That in itself is a miracle. We had just “celebrated” the one year anniversary of our kid dying. We were up to our ears in a volleyball season that was anything but pleasant. We were sad, and frustrated, but the three of us sort of bonded in our shared experiences, and made the most of some much-needed time away. I can’t remember much of the last two years where my emotions are concerned, but I would feel safe in saying that this might have been one of the first times we were all happy since Emmy died.

On the road to recovery from anything, there are always forks in the road – decisions to be made about which path to take. On this trip, we chose to be happy and have some fun. We could have chosen to just get through it, but that seemed like the wrong road. I am discovering that, as the months go by, it actually takes more energy to remain sad. People who stay sad their whole life have lots of will power, because the world continually offers up enjoyment. I do not have that sort of will power. That does not mean I do not wish with all my being that my daughter was still alive and smiling. It just means, sitting here thinking about it hasn’t changed anything, and futility is futile. (by definition.)

This weekend we have another trip planned. I’m taking my camera, and I hope that in a couple of years, I can look back at the pictures from this weekend – just a few weeks after the second anniversary – and realize that I was working on becoming a whole person again.

I think the theme here is pretty obvious. When we hang out with people that are just like us, the world sees us as all the same. When we are the only Ross’s goose among hundreds of Canadian geese, we just stand out.

But, I sort of feel guilty about taking his picture, because he is different, and we are not supposed to draw attention to differences. Except, that usually only applies when the differences are perceived as a deterrent to leading a normal life. When the difference is being especially pretty, especially brave, or especially brilliant, we make a point of noticing. So, maybe this guy is at an advantage for being different, and that makes this picture okay.

Last thing. I think this would make a good animated film. What were the circumstances that led this guy to start hanging out with his cousin’s flock, instead of his own flock? How do the others treat him? Does he miss his family, or is he on the run?  I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and might write it soon. I’ll keep you posted.

My family has been burying the departed in the same cemetery since before I can remember.  The majority of my great-grandparents are there, along with three of my grandparents, a few aunts and uncles, and my dad.  Until very recently, it held every dead person I knew. But then, half of Houston must be buried there, and you need a map to find anyone, as the sea of headstones, twisty narrow roads and endless rows of old trees can be disorienting.  Until 2009, this cemetery was what I knew of death. People died and went to Brookside. Once in a while their family would visit, but otherwise, they had only the ducks to keep them company.

We didn’t bury Emmy. Up until the moment we had to decide, relatively quickly, what to do with the remains of our daughter, the only option I’d ever been associated with was burial, and everything else seemed foreign. I had always assumed that my wife and daughters would bury me, and eventually they would join me – wherever my final resting place might be. But, that thought alone was enough to give me pause. If I died today, I’m not sure I’d want to be buried in Denver. For one thing, it gets cold here. Secondly, I’m not sure there are cemeteries here – other than the big one off of Hampden which seems a little too cemetery-like for me. I have no connection to any places of final rest here in Denver, so to think that my body would spend time in a foreign place seems odd.

With Emmy, it came to this – we weren’t sure we wanted to put Emmy in the ground in Denver, because we don’t know how long we’ll be here. What if, when Allie graduates, she moves far away, and we chase after her, and none of us ever return to Denver? Could we ever leave Emmy alone like that – just a historic blip in our lives? The answer, obviously, was no, we could not. Additionally, I think as a parent, we could not imagine putting her anywhere except in our house where she belongs. So, today, that is where she is.

The picture above is from Brookside cemetery in Houston. I was there to bury my grandma, who lived a long life and who, in January, joined my grandpa at Brookside, and in the beyond. After the service my mom drove me to the duck pond to take pictures, and there I saw this scene. I snapped this photo because I felt a great sense of longing when I saw “Happy Birthday” next to someone’s grave. I don’t know whose grave it was, or how old they were – and in honesty, I did not want to know, because what I’d immediately imagined was the image I wanted to carry with me.

I imagined someone just like me visiting their child’s grave on her birthday. I needed this to be true because I don’t want to be the only guy in the world living through this. I don’t need to know the person, only that they exist, and that they are thinking the same thoughts I am thinking. I know it may seem odd, but if this balloon were on the grave of a grandma, I just couldn’t bear it. Yes, when old people die, we miss them. But, I’ll never be able to equate the two events in my mind. I’ve buried a few grandparents, a parent, and a child. There is no comparison.

So, given that scenario, the balloon takes on a sense of almost sweetness. I imagine the person crying as they gently placed the balloon on the grave. “Happy Birthday sweetie,” they whispered.  After a while, lots of stuff melts away. It doesn’t matter how they died, or how many days it’s been since you hugged them. It doesn’t matter that nothing matters, because stuff starts to matter, and then everything is normal, because normal is wherever you are. What doesn’t melt away is the fact that every birthday brings another tragedy – another age they’ll never be and a whole list of new things they’d be doing that they’ll never do. The balloon represents a lifetime of little future tragedies wrapped in rainbow-colored Mylar. I doubt the inventor of this particular balloon design ever thought it would end up on a grave. I doubt the person that placed the balloon here ever thought that someone somewhere would ever write about it. But, unimaginable things happen all the time.

I said above that, in addition to ducks, the departed had but one thing to count on – once in a while, family would visit.  I’ve been to my dad’s grave twice – in 2008 when my grandpa died, and in 2011 when my grandma died. Both of those visits occurred after he’d already been dead 20 years.  While it is true that I don’t get to Houston often enough, I still had plenty of opportunity. I just never went, and I’m not sure I can tell you why – at least, not succinctly.

What matters is the contrast. Emmy’s remains are sitting in our loft, and I pass them every time I go up or down the stairs. Each and every time, I blow her a kiss, and tell her I love her. After two years, I’ve probably been on those stairs a couple of thousand times. That is way more than two times. Of course, I’d visit Emmy much more often than I’ve visited my dad, if she were buried somewhere. But, probably not a few thousand, which is why I’m glad she’s here.

Of course, she is not here, and my dad is not in Houston. The one thing that believers and agnostics agree on is that the body is not the person. The 42 grams that represent my sire and my offspring are long gone, so what I do, or don’t do to remember them is likely just for me.  I have not bought a happy birthday balloon for Emmy, but we do put flowers next to her remains every month or so.  When you promise your child the moon if she wants it, and then she dies before you can get it for her, flowers seem sort of like a fifth-place ribbon. But, along with the sadness, and the longing, I live with a sense of powerlessness every day.

On our last visit to Dallas an older woman who we’d never met, but who’d heard our story from friends, baked us a cake and brought it by to tell us she was sorry. She lost her young daughter many years ago – thirty years, or maybe forty. To think that in forty years my wife might bake a cake for some as-yet-unborn people who just lost their child is unimaginable, and yet, likely. Children are supposed to bury their parents – it is the natural order of things. When that gets out of whack, it is out of whack for the rest of your life.  Time might take away the utter sadness. Time might put a smile on our faces and give us many joys. But, time can never undo the unnaturalness. Time can never eject us from this horrid fraternity that we were inducted into one unbelievable morning in March. Only death can do that.

Which is why, I think, I want so badly for this balloon to be from one of my fraternity brothers or sisters. We are a sort-of secret society – we don’t often wear lapel pins or sport bumper stickers on our cars. But, when new inductees reveal themselves, we share an unspoken understanding.  A thousand times, while working in this god-forsaken trench, I’ve poked my head just above the edge and seen nothing but barren landscape. But, every thousandth time, I’ll look up and see someone else looking up from their spot a few hundred yards away. It is a short encounter, with just a nod, and then we both go back to work, knowing that we are not alone. I can’t see them, but I know that there are people out there doing the same things I am doing – thinking the same things I am thinking. The likelihood that we’ll both pop our heads up at the same time is really slim, which is why I need this balloon to be one of those times.

Despite being mostly about death (given that it is a picture of a cemetery) I like this picture because of the limited depth of field. The tree in the foreground is out of focus, as are the trees in the distance. The focus – both of the camera and of the subject matter – is squarely on the birthday balloon.  I took a little time to get this shot just right, and I think it paid off.  If I’d used a different lens with a larger aperture, I might have been able to exacerbate the restricted focus, but I was working with limited tools (as I was there for a funeral, and not for a photo shoot) so, as it is, I like it. This is one of those shots that I knew, even before I took it, that I would write about. In that respect, it could have been more something, but I’m not sure what.  Whatever it is, I know I’m not in any hurry to rush back here and try the shot again.

Coming Soon

Coming Soon