Everyone You Know
In the small diary where we took turns writing a few sentences after our children were born, Valerie often mentions the little benchmarks. “Today you were 3 months old,” one entry begins. “It’s hard to believe. The clichés of time passing are all true!” Our counting really began with the news of Valerie’s first pregnancy and a due date that November. At the moment of Emerson’s birth, ten days late but close enough, the clock started over.
It’s only human to track the past against the present, a measuring that continues beyond our own brief lives. I wasn’t alone in noting the first Sunday after Valerie died: I can’t believe it’s been a week… Like a wedding, or the first day in a new home, the morning of August 9th—that bookend to Valerie’s life—marked the beginning of a new, less joyous counting. A second week came, then went, and soon there were fifty more.
I hesitate to ask whether the most challenging months are behind us. Valerie’s death was our hardest loss, but there were others. Some were more or less expected, as when Valerie took the reins and led us through the heartbreak of saying goodbye to Daisy, our sweet and gentle dog, just five weeks before her own death. A thousand miles away, while my father became less independent and his dementia became more acute, there settled the grim fact that he wouldn’t live beyond the end of the year. His death in early November preceded the passing of Kristen, a dear friend and maid-of-honor at our wedding, after a courageous life with muscular dystrophy.
Other blows came as suddenly as Valerie’s death and included a phone call to let us know that Valerie’s brother died after suffering a heart attack. Here at home, each death meant searching for the right words—as if such a thing exists—to share the news with Emerson and Whitman. At the very least, I stressed how rare it is to grieve for so much in such a short period of time. As though these losses weren’t enough, in February we mourned our cat (cancer) and six weeks later, as we began to joke that our betta fish might outlive us all…
What next? I’ve let myself wonder. And naturally, when someone acknowledges how much our family has been through, I reach for a sturdy piece of wood and knock.
We know that our existence—all that enters the senses, plus everyone we know—will eventually run out of days. Many of us ignore that simple truth. For better or worse, I refused to linger long on the possibility of losing Valerie. Instead, I chose to approach her cancer one step at a time, accept the recommendations from each doctor, and hope for the best. Like Valerie, I also focused a lot of energy on our children. No parent will be surprised to learn that, for us, nothing was more harrowing than the thought of losing Emerson or Whitman. Thirteen months after Valerie’s death, knowing that they both carry the loss of their mother is devastation enough.
“If I wanted to win a crying contest,” I’ve admitted to friends, “all I have to do is remember what it’s like for them.”
In the unwritten agreement called “Parenting,” it’s understood (though not guaranteed) that our children will become adults and, ideally, need little of what we provide during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. In short, the goal is independence. Whitman turns seven this November and, a few days later, Emerson will leave her ninth year in the books. According to those numbers, our daughter is past the midpoint on her journey toward adulthood. The pages of the small diary offer proof that she is the same girl who sprouted her first tooth on an Easter Sunday and began walking a few days before Halloween. It’s astonishing nonetheless, and I’m tempted to repeat one of the many platitudes about time and how “the days are long, but the years move fast.” That statement is true to me as a parent, and it’s becoming equally true in my ongoing experience with grief.
Time is inescapable, even as I concede that much of our measuring has its basis in the dumb luck of our solar system. We readily calculate the intervals between events, follow the years by their seasons, and divide those years into smaller units like weeks and minutes. Meanwhile, right over there, Venus completes her orbit once every 225 days and we’d sing “Happy Birthday” to our friends the equivalent of every eighty-eight days if we lived on Mercury. Before imagining a lifetime spanning three hundred years, consider the less forgiving math from the surface of Mars, which takes nearly twice the time as Earth to circle the sun. And finally, if we could stop our more distant neighbor and rewind Neptune’s orbit but a single revolution, we’d find ourselves in an age without telephones, paperclips, or aspirin, but with several years to spare before the American Civil War.
These particulars, I realize, have no bearing on my personal, real-world experience with time. Although interesting and fact-checked, the scenarios above are hypothetical. They’re more rational than they are emotional, and I know I live each day in varying degrees between the two. True, the average year on Earth houses 365 days, but it’s as though I was born on Leap Day and the impression of one year remains while three others collapse into the past. The arithmetic says otherwise and, sure, my brain even understands that the importance I now attach to the Sunday that Valerie died could easily be a Sunday in March or a Thursday in June. But here in my heart…
The end of summer—officially this coming Wednesday—has been challenging. There are the full-time, in-person school schedules to manage, the transitions away from the warmer months, and—for those lucky to enjoy camping trips or travels more distant—the return to responsibility. Technically, this is our “year two” in navigating the world without Valerie, but it feels like a continuation of the first. The losses that my family experienced between July 2020 and June 2021 surface regularly. The grief is predictable only in being unpredictable and knowing this doesn’t make it easier. Each time my body registers the warm, slightly humid air that still hangs in Chicago, I’m carried back to last summer, Valerie’s death, and what memories I can find from the last days of her life.
I recognize by now that whatever my head thinks it knows, my heart knows better. Thirteen months after Valerie’s death, my heart wants to talk with her about everything that’s happened. I want to know, without doubt, that Valerie’s love is here with us and that I’m doing enough as a father. My heart wants Valerie’s reassurance that it’s a good thing, at night before the kids go to bed, that I read aloud from what she’s written in our diary. And in my heart I’d give so much for the chance—a few minutes, that’s all—for my family to hold Valerie close and say goodbye.