Birthday

Yesterday was a day of assault. Everywhere, everything was mortar fire. I did not come away unscathed. I was trying to keep quiet, a low inner profile because tomorrow (today) is Maxx’s 23rd birthday. I will not say “would have been.” I will not talk of him in the past tense.

The new college semester is beginning on Monday. The new Freshmen are landing on campus to move into their dorms. Young men walking in T-shirts and basketball shorts are beginning to appear. Young men with close-cropped hair and long legs taking loping strides across green lawns. Big shoes and back packs. The look of innocence and insouciance mixed with a bit of wide-eyed hesitancy. It is breaking my heart. Summer breezes blow dead leaves from the trees and into small swirling circles along the gutters.

Just at the lunch hour one of the full time professors, a Ph.D., the Co-Chair of the Psychology Department and a practicing therapist for over 20 years came into the back office to say hello. She taught Megan, she’s known me for about 12 years and she knows about Maxx. She has two grown sons of her own, one is Maxx’s age and the other a bit younger. She took Megan to dinner once during the first year after Maxx’s death to talk with her about how she had lost her own teenage brother when she was 18. I thought, given who she is, or at the least proclaims herself to be, that she knew better.

She announced to everyone that they were putting their house on the market and moving to the town in which we live—a city I would do anything in my power to leave. She comes from wealth, as does her husband. She is a well traveled woman—one who takes summers in Greece, Italy, all of Europe. She had just returned from a month in Africa. She is always tan. One of those for whom working to earn a living is probably completely financially unnecessary, but who likes to pepper her pronouncements about herself and her well-lived life with facetious remarks about how retirement, now, is impossible. One of those who chooses to cloak herself with the “salt-of-the-earth” persona when it is convenient and politically correct. “I’m a highly educated, cosmopolitan, thoughtful, professional, moneyed women who owns and wears eclectic clothing and jewelry from all over the world, with a beautiful family leading a charmed life---but I’m still “real,” a person of the earth.”

I was standing up to leave with my purse on my shoulder, ready to go to the grocery store during lunch—to test the waters of the drink and frozen food isles again—to see how much further I could go, or if I could do it at all, to subject myself to the fire of self-immolation, to withstand the frostbite of a dead heart, to walk past items I would have purchased for him, to look at packaged Sushi, to step from my ghost wasteland into the throbbing sound of people shopping, looking to feed themselves, gloating on the freefall gluttony of consumerism and all that implies in a life untroubled by suicidal gloom. I was holding my keys in my hand. My keys. I had a short list in my purse. If all went “well” in the store, I was going across the street to pick up some items at the drug store. I am patient with myself and I don’t plan too far ahead. Always, when I leave to drive somewhere alone, I am waiting for the car accident that I secretly hope will annihilate me in a violent blast of crushed metal and bone.

I was turning my back when she made this self-satisfied announcement about needing to buy a new home where it’s warmer than the foggy coastal town she lives in now, with a pool so her boys would have a place to bring their families, a party-house.

My jaw clenched. My head started to buzz. I looked at her in disbelief. Her “boys” are Maxx’s age. Did she just forget I had a son who died? Did she think because it was something that happened “a couple of years ago” that the mention of her future happy family gatherings was anything I would be interested in, or ready to hear, let alone acknowledge with pleasure at her continued good fortune? I did not respond because there were two other people to whom she was also speaking. I did not know what to do. To walk away. To run away. To scream and run. Perhaps it would have been different if we had not had some kind of semi-relationship that implied an understanding between mothers of sons, had we not had conversations in the past about our boys, (before and after Maxx became ill) had she not on several occasions presented herself as a loving mom and a caring individual. Had she not been a mental health care professional schooled and practiced in the treatment of psychic pain.

I said goodbye and left. I was artificially, superficially pleasant.

I did go to the store where I watched obsessively as a mom and her 20 or so year old son shopped for family groceries. I lingered too long in one aisle after another in a state of shock, trying to select a brand of breakfast bars, crackers, walk quickly past the juice aisle, but wait, I wanted bottled iced tea. There were new drinks he would have liked. Power drinks. I talked quietly to myself and shook my head. I haven’t purchased or eaten fish since he died, but I picked up some frozen salmon burgers. I don’t eat salmon but I put the patties in my basket anyway. I bought fresh sourdough. I looked at magazines and remembered how we tried to find something for him to read on the way back to the hospital where he was taking a 4 day chemo treatment. We never had much luck, because everything he liked to read was about health and fitness…and he was dying. I bought some low fat Swiss cheese slices because I should not be eating full fat cheese, though whether I get fat, die of a stroke, or keel over with a heart attack doesn’t make any difference to me in the least. I bought vanilla yogurt. To others it appears that I am “shopping,” reading labels, making selections on some basis of preference or information. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know what I’m doing or why. I might as well be stumbling through the always open door of Hades.

Returning to my car, I noticed the young man wheeling a full cart behind his mom. They were laughing. I got into the front seat gasping. There is an ancient rusted mechanism in the heart of a bereaved parent who finds herself stuck in the outside world—one, that if all goes as it should, would never be noticed, let alone used, that slowly, haltingly groans into the on position when the stunning immediacy of grief becomes too great to bear. It is as if all life around you grows dim, fogged through tears, though you may not actually be crying. Sight, though working minimally, is not connected to what is really there. Sound disappears, but a screaming in your brain that comes from your heart begins its piercing shriek. It is at once distant and deafening. A physical bursting within your mind that breaks over you with the force of a cyclone.

WHY IS HE DEAD???? WHERE IS MY BOY??? PLEASE, PLEASE, I WANT MY BOY!!

This is how I drove the short distance back to work. I did not stop at the drug store. The drug store where they play that horrible canned music from the 70’s and 80’s popular when I was in my teens, 20’s and 30’s and life was still ahead. “I love you more today than yesterday, but not as much as tomorrow.” “I can’t live if living is without you. I can’t live, I can’t live anymore.” “Baby, baby don’t get hooked on me, I’ll just use you then I’ll set you free, baby, baby don’t get hooked on me.

Where did our lives go? What happened? Who are these people who live? With their party-houses and plans for a future? You are dead. So am I.

Today is your birthday. We donated money to St. Jude’s hospital and sponsored 9 DogTown dogs in your name. We love you and miss you sweet Maxx. Always, always, always. Always and forever.