Anniversary approaching

 The tenth anniversary of the day my seven-year-old son Simon died is near: August 6th, 2004. I register its approach in several ways. It comes heavily, and I feel the weight in the heat and stillness of summer air. Even though the climate is more humid and less hot in southern Germany compared with the Salt Lake Valley, the "anniversary effect" of the season still happens. The angle of summer light, the daylight lasting into the evening, the crinkly tug of sun on skin. The late July/early August season takes me back to the last weeks of Simon's life. I don't seek this effect. I barely notice it sneaking up. Then a late afternoon rain shower throws a rainbow in the sky. Or summer sweat dries on my neck like rubber cement and my mind is sent back to the pathways I took around the Utah house: the kitchen, outside in the yard (to the pumpkin), from bedside to bathroom and quickly back. Simon died at home, in a process as fully integrated with our daily lives as it was extraordinary. The memories feel like that, too.

I've been doing exploratory writing about the summer of 2004, looking at the two months of time that passed when we knew Simon was dying. That writing has also stirred up memories and sent me into the archives of Simon's life. In anticipation of the anniversary, I want to present a review. Some of the readers of this blog followed Simon's Place as events unfolded. Even if you've read some of these postings before, I think you will be amazed, as I am, at the extensiveness and beauty of the record.

The summer of 2004

Looking back, I've always identified early-mid June as the time we knew for sure that Simon's disease would run its course and he would die. Yet there seems to be no point in June at which we wrote "Simon is dying." Early in July, there's a footnote that explains his transition into hospice care to help him "die as peacefully as possible." I don't believe we were trying to protect the information so much as we were in a process. Even after the June conversation with Simon's doctor in which he predicted "weeks, a month, maybe two," I think we moved forward day by day. Simon was living, and we were parenting and caring for him as we always had. I don't for a minute believe we were in denial of his approaching death. But we couldn't know what it would be it until it happened.

Since the Simon's Place entries are reverse chronological, you may want to scroll to the bottom and work your way up on each page. I've written (RC) for those links. If internal links on Simon's Place send you somewhere, navigate by date. (Some pages have since become archives.)

What's Happening June 2004 - (RC) the month we learned Simon's cancer was terminal

Photo Gallery June 2004 - Simon looked and felt pretty great in early June but grew sicker

Celebration of Life Party on July 1, 2004 - Simon's chance to invite all his friends (posted one year later)

Celebration of Life Photos - the short version, note Simon's striped chair (I think of him every time I sit in it)

Celebration of Life Photo Gallery - lots of people, lots of photos (web photo galleries have come a long way since then!)

What's Happening July 2004 - (RC) using good moments despite advancing disease

What's Happening August 2004 - (RC) Simon died on August 6th

Grann's Prayer over Simon's Body, August 6, 2004 - a moving and brave offering of thanks

Simon Says June-August 2004 - (RC) especially here, scroll to the bottom and read chronologically

Simon's Memorial Service - the invitation says a lot about what was important to us; remember Mapquest?! Note the links Mary's Remarks at Simon's Memorial Service and Lullaby: Der Mond ist aufgegangen.

Simon the Dragon by Erik Troberg - Erik's tribute, read during the service, is one of many moving tributes linked at the bottom of the Tributes page.

Message Board at Simon's Place - (RC) July and August 2004 carry the sadness of many people. (You can still send a comment there via the link at the top of the archive page. The current page is here.)

Greetings for Simon from All Over the Place!  - if you sent one, you may remember

Anniversaries

For the anniversaries I'm posting something for each year. A few things I've never written about elsewhere, so I'm adding a few photos as well.

First anniversary 2005

Two of a Kind concert at the Hogle Zoo - sponsored by the Simon Craig Vodosek Memorial Fund

Second anniversary 2006

What's Happening 2006 - (RC) a lot of this writing is anniversary-ish

Simon's Way at Brighton Ski Resort - a commemoration in April 2006 (amazingly, the media links are still live)

Third anniversary 2007

What's Happening later years - (RC) I can't recall yet where we spent this anniversary. The bottom-most entry, 2007, is the original Simon's Pumpkin post.

Fourth anniversary 2008

Simon's grave monument (slide show 4) - erected on August 1, 2008 exactly. It took us four years.

Fifth anniversary 2009

The Simon Craig Vodosek Memorial Fund sponsored this cute guy on the new carousel at the zoo.

Conservation Carousel at the Hogle Zoo
in Salt Lake City: River Otter

Photos from August 3, 2009 remind me we were with the Craig clan in Ohio that summer, and we toured the Mansfield, Ohio factory where the carousel had been made.

Beginnings of a horse.

Another otter...

Sixth anniversary 2010

We placed a gravestone to mark the burial spot of the urn next to the monument at Mt. Olivet. Just in time before moving to Germany that summer. Miriam and I visited the grave (and Carl's mom's) with Carl and Natalia on August 6th.

Natalia, Carl, & Miriam

There was a rainbow.

Seventh anniversary 2011

After another Craig clan gathering in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, we visited in Utah and took a wildflower hike to Catherine Pass with Utah friends.

Eighth anniversary 2012

Posted on Facebook, August 5, 2012:

We joined the people of the Arlington Street Church (UU) for worship this morning and took part in their Joys and Sorrows (great format, by the way, with a half-sheet to fill out before the end of the first hymn and then it's read aloud by a minister who invites you to stand as he reads, over Spirit of Life softly on the piano). We shared: 

We remember our son and brother, Simon, who left us eight years ago tomorrow. We love you and we miss you! 

And we were lifted up by the caring of strangers. After church, we took a ride on a swan boat.

Ninth anniversary 2013

For the solemn date of August 6, part 1
August 6th, part 2

Tenth anniversary 2014

Stay tuned.

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.