Something important is happening here, but I still can’t pin down what. It’s clear from my children’s happy days and satisfied sleeps that we’re making it. We keep making it. Each day arrives, and we’re still here, but now something new bids us forward into each morning. Is this joy? Is this hope?
We made Christmas cookies this week. It’s taken us a couple of days, but we did it. Saturday, I opened my recipe boxes to search for the tried-and-trues of all cookie options. I settled on some classics.
We started on Sunday with a batch of gingerbread cookies. On Monday we added sugar cookies. Last night we decorated them. The mess I let the kids make as we prepped each bag of icing felt unusual to me, but it felt like a privilege, an allowance, I was giving myself and my children. Sometimes to make the memory you have to make a mess. I didn’t see this until Charlie, hands covered in bubble gum pink frosting, said, “Thank you, Mommy, for us making these. I love us making them.”
Charlie helped me pick the colors. Sam taste tested along the way. Archie provided moral support from the living room couch. I announced the rule, “If a cookie breaks, you have to eat it.” A lot of cookies started breaking. I made an executive decision that dinner wasn’t a necessity, and the kids ricocheted off walls while I scraped frosting off chair legs. On my hands and knees under the table with the dust pan, I felt full. Satisfied. Proud.
I was proud of our little family.
Later as I laid next to Sam on his Ninja Turtle bed, I looked at the photo on his bedside bulletin board. I don’t know where Sam has learned the word “Daddy.” Yes, the kids and I speak of Eric often enough for Sam to have heard the word, but he’s only heard it in the context of stories. In the past tense. Sam has recently surprised me with those two clear sounds. “Dahhh-ee. Dahhh-ee,” he said, pointing at the picture of Eric holding infant Sam.
Eric was sick by then, when I took that picture of the two of them sitting on our couch. I remember, too, he was hesitant to hold him. “I don’t want to drop him,” he said. Still, I placed Sam in Eric’s arms, propped him so his baby-heavy head wouldn’t tilt, snapped that picture. “Dear Sam,” Eric said, before asking me to put Sam in his pack ‘n’ play.
That was May. The shine in Eric’s eyes tells me it was early in the month. He was tired but not quite defeated. He still had his hair. We hadn’t yet learned about the tumor being so extensive.
While Dear Sam took the final step into sleep, I tried to untangle the knot that sat at the back of my throat. The kids remember you, I thought to this portrait. We still carry you with us. He could never have imagined the season we’d be forced to survive without him. I didn’t think we would. Here we are, however. Still surviving. Maybe even living?
a scribble of jo 