18 Years Ago: May 18th--The day after

May 18, 2015: Simon's birthday fell on a Sunday this year. The big 18th birthday--the one I've been gearing up for, the one I wondered how painful it might feel, the one I've been writing up to--came at the end of a four-day weekend. We used the time as a lazy "stay-cation," and I'll admit I got used to the slow pace. Waking up for Monday again today was tricky, especially since it was a "home office" day for me, which means I can use my time as I see fit to get done what I need to do. Sometimes it's hard to un-pause.

It was a gorgeous day, and I spent some time in the garden--long enough to stake my peonies (they reach my shoulders) before they open their heavy blooms. Lunch on the back terrace and some reading time. Course prep. Invoices. By late afternoon I felt mostly back to normal. I wasn't sad today, but I experienced some blankness. I think that's one of the harder modes of grieving--it's vague and uncomfortable. It's not a time for tears; it's a loose-ends feeling. A gap.

May 18, 1997: After Simon's 2:30 pm birth on Saturday, we stayed one night in the birthing room. Markus must have had a fold-out bed. I was on the hospital bed. And Simon moved between the clear plexiglass bassinet thing and a place tucked in beside me. We never let him out of our sight and scarcely let him out of our hands. We chose not to circumcise, and we didn't want anyone to assume otherwise. On Sunday morning, the three of us followed a nurse to another station where she would prick Simon's heal to soak five quarter-sized circles on a paper card for the PKU test. We had tried to get out of that one but followed our birth teacher's advice not to get a mark against us in the State's records by refusing. We didn't like doing it, but doing it together made it feel OK.

Anne Adams

Before our discharge in the afternoon, we had three important visitors. Anne Adams, who had watched Gilbert Grape with us the night before my labor started, came to meet Simon. We were lucky to have her nearby. She was a huge support through pregnancy and labor, and she was a patient friend and willing babysitter later on.

Markus and I had thought a lot about our wishes for getting started as a new family, and we decided we wanted to be on our own in our home for the first two weeks. We wanted to learn from our baby and give ourselves time and space to bond. We'd encountered this recommendation in a number of readings and birth class discussions.

Grandad

This bonding time made sense with Markus' academic schedule, too. He was nearing the end of his first two years of PhD studies. As I recall it, we had two weeks before Markus entered a three-week period of intensive research and writing on three complex questions. The PhD students and their families talked of prelims with shudders befitting horror movies. (The Organizational Behavior department changed the process not too many years later.) We wanted Markus to get undiluted father-baby-mother time before that craziness started.

Grann

Soon after Simon's birth, we called my parents in Ohio to tell them the happy news. We wanted them to meet their tiny grandson, and we invited them to drive up on Sunday morning to meet Simon in the hospital and spend time with us after we got back to our apartment in Family Housing.

My parents did some grocery shopping, and my mother cooked a nice evening meal. It was lovely to have them there and to be taken care of. Respectful of our plan to move forward as a threesome for the earliest days, my parents drove home again that evening. Simon was the tiniest grandchild they had held in their arms (the others being born further away). That is, until my mom was right there in the room with us when I gave birth to Miriam (but that's another story).

Unglücksmaschine: The Germanwings Tragedy

The terrible loss of an airplane en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf on March 24th had no immediate explanation. First reports simply stated the plane had crashed in the French Alps. There were two babies on board and a group of tenth graders, among 150 people. Why a pilot with 6,000 flight hours, a freshly inspected plane, and a clear weather day would crash land in the mountains defied quick theorizing. Only after the remote site was reached and the cockpit recorder retrieved did a chain of evidence yield a conclusion that has distressed us all: the copilot had locked himself in the cockpit and set the plane for direct descent into a rocky canyon. The pilot died pounding on the door to be let back past the anti-terrorist lock system. Oh, miserable fate.

I first learned of the crash listening to NPR's All Things Considered in Ohio. I was in my childhood bedroom, sorting out the last of my old belongings to help downsize my parents' household. The news felt "close to home"--we flew Germany to Spain for vacation last summer. I had flown the previous day myself, Frankfurt to Detroit. More troubling, I awaited my daughter and husband three days later, also coming Frankfurt to Detroit. At the very least, a recent crash makes us uneasy to fly, even if we're reminded of the normal safety statistics, even if we try to realize the isolated nature of one event.

Away from German media, I still felt the disabling blow to the nation. What a sad loss! Miriam kept me up to date on the news flowing through her class message boards. She is in 9th grade and can readily identify with the traveling 10th graders. My heart hangs on the opera singer with the baby. Miriam was the one who first told me the news that the co-pilot had wittingly caused the crash. One German word for "intentional" is mutwillig. Mut means "courage" and willig means "willing." An awful courage underlies such an exercise of intention.

Like so many others, I followed the flow of reporting in the New York Times coverage of the crash. Interestingly, we heard a convocation address by New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet while visiting in Oberlin. He spoke of the Times' quick reporting of the story and the enormous number of readers coming to the Times website.

„Kölner Dom nachts 2013“ von Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de
Eigenes Werk. Lizenziert unter CC BY-SA 3.0 de
über Wikimedia Commons.

Now, three and a half weeks later, my family has completed our own plane travel and returned safely home to our lives in Flein. Gratefully. Today mourners gathered in the Cologne Cathedral for an ecumenical worship service followed by a state ceremony to commemorate the tragedy. If you have ever taken the train into Cologne, you've seen this building. As the archbishop reminded us, people have been gathering on that spot for 1,600 years. A protestant pastor, Annette Kurschus (with the title Präses, which I can't yet translate), spoke well and used a soothing phrase: God, let my tears fall into your cup.

An opera singer colleague of the two singers killed in the crash was brave enough to perform the Pie Jesu from Fauré's requiem. A collective choir, including many singers who appeared to be the age of the students who died, sang and sometimes shed tears.

During the state ceremony, of the many tender addresses, the words of Germany's president Joachim Gauck made the strongest impression on me. In contrast to the religious focus on eternal life and comfort in God, Gauck's speech took on the troubling role of the co-pilot. The link provides a written summary (in German) of his words, in which he talked about the wound to our sense of trust and the importance of healthy trust to enable our society to live.

With the extensive media coverage, I doubt many are searching for more material. Still, while livestreaming the ceremonies on ARD, I noticed two items to recommend, both in German. One is a brief summary video of today's events at the Cologne Cathedral. The other is a half-hour documentary about the lasting results of the tragedy, from grief to solidarity to airline safety. One commentator uses the fitting term of Unglücksmaschine, which means both "unlucky machine" and "machine of accident/mishap." A voice of experience comes from a mother who lost her child in the Winnenden school shooting in 2009. She speaks eloquently of her journey in grief. Now a new group of friends and family from 18 countries face the vertigo of incompression and the searing ache of absence. As the documentary reminds us, others already tread the same path. Perhaps we can help each other.

For November 17th, Simon's half-birthday

Another pumpkin-growing season ended in September. To be exact, I harvested pumpkins for the 9th time in my backyard garden, all of them descendants of the first pumpkin--Simon's Pumpkin. In the spring of first grade, 2004, Simon came home with a styrofoam cup of dark dirt and two small plants from sprouted seeds, a pumpkin and a sunflower. Both were moving past the initial two oblong leaves that emerged from a seed into the more differentiated growth of each plant's shapely mature leaves. I set the plants near one another in the backyard, and they grew all summer.

The sunflower opened a first bloom on August 7th, the morning after Simon died. The petals were a somber brown tinged in fiery red. The pumpkin sent one strong shoot straight toward the house, toward the room where Simon lay. At the time of his death, there was one sole pumpkin, dappled dark green. It was a hospice nurse who suggested saving the seeds. "Grow them every year," she said. "That's Simon's pumpkin."

In 2010, the one year during which I grew no crop of pumpkins because we left our Utah house, we moved to Germany. And here the project continues. On Sunday, November 17th, I halved two pumpkins, pulled out their seeds, and baked the halves face down in the oven until they were soft. With the drained cooked flesh I made a pie (and froze the rest). Miriam carved a dedication to Simon into the baked pie. Three heart shapes fill the space around: 16.5 Simon. He would have been sixteen and a half this week.

For a writing project this month of November (more on that soon), I am drafting a memoir about my early years as a mother, the years with a sick child, the years after his death. I want to present an excerpt here of the text I wrote on Sunday, after making and sharing the pie with Miriam and Markus.

A Simon's Pumpkin Pie, November 17, 2013

From a manuscript in progress, working title: A Partial Mother (please keep in mind it's a draft)

The juice of a pumpkin dries like a strange new skin on the palms of my hands. I can’t wash it away. I’ve just sunk both hands into the innards of two pumpkins, separating plump whole seeds from the stringy insides. I will clean, dry and save the seeds. As I work, I suppress the impulse to find every last seed, the pile inside my red plastic bowl already nearing the rim. I am saving the seeds to grow pumpkins again next summer, just as I have done every year since 2004. Well, except the year we moved to Germany (2010) when I didn’t grow pumpkins at all.

I scaled the project back this year, looking for the right perspective. I keep envelopes of seeds in the basement, marked by the year the pumpkin grew. Last year I set in seeds from almost all the prior years, starting with the 2004 Ur-pumpkin. Year after year, I grow seeds harvested from that first pumpkin. Year after year, I seem to come no closer to running out of those seeds. My garden choked last year under all those plants: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011. (I skip 2007 because those pumpkins were long, pale and strangely like zucchini, and because that year is one I prefer to forget.) I watch the plants grow with a misplaced pride: the 2004 pumpkin—Simon’s own pumpkin—sprouts first on the window ledge indoors, where I stick seeds into pockets of dirt in an egg carton I’ve labeled with the corresponding date. The 2004’s sprawl most confidently over the garden, burst open the first flowers, and nearly always create the earliest and best-looking fruit. As if it were a competition, as if there is some winning to be found in that plant—that vintage—being the best one. When I harvest a pumpkin, I trace its ridged and twisting vine back to its origin in the ground to find a little sign with the year of the seed. “2004” I notate in black Sharpie on the underside of the pumpkin, near the blossom stub—the flat navel of the fruit. In September I rescue the fruit from under mildewed and crumbling leaves, from shredded, rancid vines. I rinse the pumpkins off and set them to ripen in the sun, for Halloween or pumpkin pie.

Today will be pumpkin pie day, and it is fitting. November 17^th is Simon’s half-birthday. He would be sixteen and a half years old today. Or he is sixteen and a half years old today. I lack the certainty to say that he lives, that he is aging alongside the rest of us, that his development continues in a measurable way. Because I do not know where Simon is now. We do not speak. He does not come to me in dreams. My imagination falls weakly aside when I try to picture him with a deep voice, with a neck drawn taut by testosterone, with armpit or pubic hair, with dreams for his own adult life. Miriam is tall now, like Markus. She dwarfs me on the rare occasions she’ll accept a hug, all the while telling me how small I am. Would Simon be tall, too? Or was he going to be smaller, like me? When he died—when he was seven—the top of his head reached the base of my sternum when I hugged him to me.

My power of imagination meets another challenge. Do I picture Simon as a nearly grown young man, unaffected by illness? Or do I see him with the late effects of cancer treatment: stunted growth, cognitive deficiencies, the psychological legacy of a sick kid? I asked Markus the other day, in some situation where Simon came to mind, if he envisioned him progressed through time with no sign of cancer, or if he factored all that in somehow? It seems easier, we agreed, to imagine the entirety of Simon’s cancer away. Why not, if all we have is what we can imagine anyway?

I do not fault myself for projecting a mother’s pride onto the pumpkin Simon brought home in first grade. As I slide the seeds from their fibrous trappings, I marvel at nature’s prolific production. There are hundreds, maybe a few thousand, seeds inside one pumpkin. All of that (and the leaves and vines and any other fruit of that plant) grew from the power contained in one flat cream-colored pointy-ended seed. The pumpkin, like other plants, does not rely on bearing just one or two offspring (as we humans do), but creates these hundreds of seeds, all of which hold the potential to replace that one pumpkin in another year’s growing cycle. Think of a tree laden with apples. Think of the dandelion’s silvery head. I always also have to think of cancer: just one lousy mutation can perpetuate itself into a killing force. I used to fantasize that I could remove Simon’s cancer cells, by hand, carefully and doggedly, the way I sort through the slime and the seeds in a pumpkin. I would have persisted for hours, for days, forever until I cleaned out every last killing cell.

My fingers search. My eyes see another pocket of off-white seeds tucked like a stack of coins against the pumpkin’s flesh. I could get every last seed. I have to force myself not to try.

August 6th, part 2

With the perspective of two weeks, I want to share about the passing of another August 6th. This year marks the tenth time the date has scored my life directly, going far beyond the vaguer meaning instilled when I was a teenager in Japan. The actual day Simon died was Friday, August 6, 2004. That was the original mark. And the date has come and gone again nine times since then, with our lives growing new life rings around a jagged scar.

The anniversary effects of weather and location are diluted because we live in a different place now. Still, summer temperatures and long daylight hours work on the body and the mind surreptitiously. The night sky. The foods we choose to eat. The looseness of summertime. The season brings memories and feelings to the surface, although this year they haven't been "on cue" so much as slowly emerging. 

Yesterday, two weeks after the anniversary, I experienced my deepest crying. I occupied the living room for a yoga practice while the apartment was empty for a few hours. Lying on my back, hugging one knee to my chest, then the other, I felt a sadness squeeze out of me. It's always a relief when that happens. Why then? I don't know. I learned yoga when Simon was young, pre-cancer. Or maybe it was a muscle recollection of holding his infant body on my shins while lying on my back, thighs and knees raised in a 90-degree angle, doing post-baby exercises while he "airplaned".

I looked around me. Should I light the "Simon candle"? I drew the second knee close to my chest and let the tiny bit of moisture from my tears run past my temples, into my hairline. I looked for a photo of Simon in the room. His first grade picture, with the slightly frozen smile, sky blue T-shirt, short hair. Or another one, where's he's bald as an egg shell and playfully lifting a flap on his chest that opens the mouth of a grey wolf. I kept at my yoga.

October 2002 in Oberlin. Simon (5) was about six weeks post stem-cell transplant.
I love everything about this shot, including its view of his wide little hands (like his dad's).

Anniversaries strangely emphasize points in time. What's so important, actually, about a 50th birthday (mine was in June this year), for example? We humans are counters. We like to measure the passage of time as well as its accumulations. Disneyland Paris, which Miriam and I visited last week, is celebrating 20 years (oh, I remember how skeptical the Europeans were about that idea, back when Markus and I were living in Karlsruhe in the early 1990s). On the one hand: who cares? On the other: sure, we'll take that 20% commemorative discount on our ticket, thank you very much.

For those of us who are missing Simon, a tenth anniversary looms. Addressing a few things this year, in writing and photos, may take some pressure off how things will feel in 2014. If I were back in Salt Lake City, I would certainly want to visit his grave on the anniversary of the day he died. So, I have put together a slide show from my most recent visit to Mt. Olivet Cemetery. While visiting Salt Lake in June, I took a long, solitary afternoon to tend the grave and carefully clean the letters on the gravestone, drinking in the beauty of the cemetery and the truly perfect weather.

Here in Flein, we have a physical connection to the Salt Lake City grave. Another sculpture by Chris Coleman, the one that served as the model for Simon's sculpture, stands in our backyard. (It traveled to Germany, just like the beds and sofas and piano, in the container when we moved.) This sculpture is titled "Flying Thinking Man". It's about 10 feet tall and constructed of salvaged rusting steel and a wooden mold for a concrete footing.

Overcast morning light in August, looking at our backyard from the deck.

As every year, the anniversary of Simon's death occurs close to Markus' annual trip to the Academy of Management conference. Over the years Miriam and I have sometimes joined him, putting us in Philadelphia, Anaheim, and Boston on or near the date. Once we were with my parents in Ohio at a park with a frog pond and river for skipping stones. A few times we were together in Salt Lake. Maybe we've had to be separated once or twice. At the first anniversary, Markus went alone to Hawaii for the conference.

What to do to commemorate the day? Markus was packing to leave for Florida on August 7th, and Miriam and I were headed to Paris for 6 days on August 8th. Nonetheless, we had a worthy list for the 6th, most of which Miriam had proposed the night before. At 4:00 we'd bike along the Neckar river into Heilbronn to an ice cream shop. For dinner, we'd recreate Simon's favorite Spaghetti Factory meal (spaghetti with tomato sauce and meatballs plus a family favorite of fresh garlic bread). Then we'd watch a movie and eat popcorn, like the old family movie nights for Pixar flicks with Simon. At some point we'd toss dried rose petals around the sculpture, something we used to do at the cemetery. Not a bad list, only here's how it went.

At 4:00 pm, on cue, the skies opened in a downpour. We scratched the ice cream trip. While Markus and Miriam ran errands, I followed a Joy of Cooking recipe for meatballs (make the German meatballs up to step three, but leave out the capers, then add…). Miriam made fabulous garlic bread with a baguette when she got home, and I finally had the sauce and meatballs ready for an enjoyable enough dinner. By then it was late, and Markus excused himself to finish packing for his early departure the next morning. For thirty seconds we scattered rose petals in the fading light. Miriam and I, too full for popcorn, set out to pick a movie to watch. It should definitely be Pixar. Which movie? We considered watching Brave, a pretty new one, but it felt more authentic to pick a movie Simon would have seen. Right there the passage of time becomes clear. Simon knew Toy Story and Toy Story 2. A Bug's Life and Monsters Inc. The last Pixar film released before he died was Finding Nemo. He never saw The Incredibles or Cars. Or Ratatouille or Wall-E or Up. Or Brave.

We picked Toy Story 2. And also watched the special short (For the Birds) and the Outtakes (I always smile at the memory of how Simon called them "Take Outs" and how he loved their silly ironies). But it was a strain to immerse in an old favorite. Miriam had trouble keeping her hands off her iPhone. Markus wandered in the background. I sat there feeling less engaged, too. Still, it's a stunning movie. And my favorite Outtake gag is when Woody sits on the roll of packing tape and his butt falls through the hole. Simon, buddy, I laughed with the memory of laughing with you!

Having all traveled well and having made it past the ninth anniversary of the day Simon left us, we are nearing a second August milestone. Three years ago (almost--August 25 to be exact) we arrived in Germany. We're moving forward into a new year.

A "moment of silence" meditation

For the bereaved parents of Sandy Hook Elementary

The whole world is thinking of you in your tragedy today. The flurry will one day settle down, and your lives will make their lurching way forward. I am on this road with you. You face your first holidays without your child. This year is the ninth without mine. Here are my wishes for you.

May you freely and fully inhabit your own lives.
May you feel perfect joy and delight when you think of your dear child.
And may you have the patience and resolve to grow whole again.

For the times when, temporarily, nothing at all seems possible,
rest in the great love that surrounds you today, and always,
until the flow of possibility returns.

Memorial Service for Simon, a boy who loved color, especially magenta
August 28, 2004

[For regular readers of this blog, I've made a related entry in Language & Such on the German word "Opfer", which means both victim and sacrifice.]