Next Wednesday (Feb. 4) is the Wallaceburg Lakers’ last home game of the 2008-2009 regular season. The team plans to retire Tristan’s jersey in a pre-game ceremony that night, and I just wanted to mention it here for anyone who might like to attend. Game-time is 7:30pm at the Wallaceburg Memorial Arena (map).
The support we have gotten from the Lakers organization, the team’s fans, and from his wonderful teammates and their families has been amazing.
I am finding that grief likes to creep up and sucker punch me. I will be feeling (what passes for) “normal” (these days) and then, all of a sudden, I will be blindsided by the horror that I will never get to hear T’s infectious giggle again or that he will never get to grow up and have his own kids. It takes my breath away—both figuratively and literally—and leaves me gasping for air. It happens every day. Many times every day. I am often struck while I am alone, like on my hour-long commute to and from work, but it also happens when I am sitting at my desk at the office or standing in a crowd behind the glass at the end of a hockey rink, watching T’s team play, or at the dinner table with the rest of my family.
When it hits, I don’t fight it. I just let it take its course through me.
Back in the bad ol’ days, I’d’ve turned to booze to beat my emotions into submission. I remember, not long after I quit drinking, folks at the meetings useta ask me how I was feeling and my honest answer was “I don’t know”. I didn’t know how I felt because I hadn’t really felt anything in years. Booze is anaesthetic. Take that away and the undiluted emotions are all strange, unidentifiable.
Over the intervening years, I have come to know my emotions and can certainly understand, sometimes, why I might’ve wanted to dampen them back in the day… because they can be keen enough to draw blood.
Facing T’s death sober and unprotected by the cottony padding of drunken stupor, I have discovered that it is possible to feel worse than I did when I had become miserable enough to actually quit drinking. I didn’t know it could get worse than that. It was unfathomable until now.
But I am facing it. I’m acknowledging the horror of this loss. I am not trying to wrap my hands around its neck and push it down under the boozy surface to drown it. The terrible moments of anguish do not usually last long. They rob me of breath and blur my vision and clench my muscles but they fade almost as quickly as they attack. Grief rolls in and then rolls out again. Rolls in, rolls out.
People ask me how I’m doing. I tell them I have my moments.
Most of the regular readers of this blog know why the joint has been shuttered for the past four weeks. There is something I need to write about but I have not yet been able to face doing it. There have been moments, here and there, when I thought I might be ready but they were fleeting–they passed too quickly for me to even start to gather thoughts, build composure, and sit down here to begin. Hell, I am not sure I’m there yet. As I have said here before, it seems like the things I most strongly feel the need to write about are the things I find most difficult to write about. Just one of God’s many little jests.
Yesterday, I sat on the floor of my brother-in-law’s bedroom and cradled in my arms the earthly remains of my adored nephew, Tristan. They were in an oak box–about 10″ tall, six-sided, polished to a shine, heavy. Nothing has ever felt as heavy to me as that box does.
While it won’t be my exclusive subject, I am going to take some time to write about Tristan here. And I am going to write about my grief. I hope you don’t think it’s presumptuous that I would take my title from C.S. Lewis, but his beautiful and anguished little book means a lot to me.
