Memorial Day

I woke up gasping for breath again today.

Where is Vinny? I can't find him.

My heart races. I brush the hair away from the back of my neck, cloying with sweat, and then as I emerge from the haze that is is a dream, uncommon because I haven't slept in 16 years, I remember that Vinny is gone.

Vinny is my son. Was my son. Was the little one that we worked to conceive and who has haunted me every day since we found out his little heart stopped beating.

Vinny's birthday was supposed to be July 14, 2009. He would be 11 this year. Something about that kills me...slays me like a dull knife to the back of the head where someone is sawing my skull off but doesn't have the strength or the perseverance and leaves me half hanging because they have run out of steam. Maybe it's that I love preteens with all of their bravado and their adult but not really adult-like ideas. Maybe it's because my most favorite part of my professional counseling experience was with middle schoolers and they trusted me and I adored them and we were so connected that I physically felt it when they hurt. Maybe it's because he would've been a scrappy and tough little league all star, following in the footsteps of his father. Maybe it's because he would have been a smart but stubborn boy with broad taste in music following in the footsteps of his mother. I believed he would have loved hockey and Christmas and nature and God and animals and he would have been the first to hop up and lend a helping hand, all in the footsteps of those who went before. Who cares what he looked like since looks have never meant that much to me, but in the cavern that is my soul I know he would be the perfect combination of all the genetics that were afforded him.

But Vinny never breathed air or cried. He never announced his gifts, or his presence in our world and I was too heartbroken and grief stricken and too fucking broke and tired and insane after two years of constant trying to try again. Broken and broke went hand in hand. And because we kept things private and no one was intimately involved, we inadvertently chose to have no network on which to rely for rallying and support and casseroles and cards, and it all ended with Vinny, though he also had a half dozen unnamed precedents who I am hoping he met in heaven. My daily prayer is that they are all together.

So memorial day means soldiers and it means the fallen and it means those who went before and it means cleaning graves and it means prettying things up at the cemetery which we faithfully do every year but it also means my son is dead and it means I never got to hold him and it means that because of this I ache for him every day in my heart which was actually shattered like a fragile wine glass dropped from a ten story building long before he existed. I suppose you aren't supposed to give a kid a job...I've read that...but Vinny was already at work repairing my heart when he died. Maybe he would have been a cardiologist. Maybe he would have been a bum. I don't know...but to me he is the little kid in the Memorial Day parade...the pumpkin with his hat on backward which I focus on a little too intently and hoot and holler and clap for even though he's not mine, because if I don't spread this love somewhere it will eat me from the inside out. It will devour all that I have to give and it will bury me.

And Memorial Day will be something more entirely.

(Thanks for reading this...I know it's dark as shit but I am, as my friend Patti recently remarked, finding catharsis in my writing. If this resonates with you in any way, I wish you peace and I wish for you to have closure, whatever form that takes. Also, many thanks to my friend Kim D-H. who gave me the encouragement to put this out there again after I published it and then retracted it minutes later.)

(PS. People were very good to us after we lost Vinny, I took a little liberty as a writer here with the no casserole, no card comment. I mean no harm to anyone who happened to know and who lovingly expressed sympathy.)

#mushroomtumbler

Fi Fo Fum Fe. I Smell the Scent of a Memory.

I really enjoy the company of adults much older than myself. I want to sit with them and hear their stories. I want to help them paw through their collections of clippings, photographs, and tchotchkes. The elderly have an altogether different "bouquet". Infused with what one might call the tincture of a  long and well lived life, they are earthier than kids and most younger adults. Or, maybe because they've had so many experiences, the scent of memory just seeps out of their pores.

Smell is the sense from which I get the greatest number of emotional residuals. You can tell me about your life and your experiences but if you describe the smell which surrounded you during a particular juncture or you are bringing me somewhere, either physically or verbally, to show or explain something and a scent finds its way to me, I will forever associate that aroma with whatever emotion I feel at the time. I also have one hell of a sniffer. My husband refers to me as The Bloodhound. I take it as a compliment.

You can tell a lot about a person by what they deem to be their most favorite smell: the air after a soaking rain; bacon frying in a cast iron skillet; the roses that we are supposed to stop and linger upon; old hockey equipment; night blooming jasmine...

Essences that make me happiest include:
the acrid static that comes off of a vinyl record album played over and over again;
the fermented gummy rubber smell of new sneakers right out of the box;
the sour drag of stale coffee left on a warm burner for an unknown number of hours;
and the chemical aura of a newspaper, unfolded and inky on the kitchen table waiting to be read.

But it seems I also have quite a sizable list of smells that make me sad.

While walking past some freshly built homes recently, and others in a state of unfinished construction, I asked hubs to pause for a thirty second stop with me so that I could press my sensitive nose against the just-hewn boards. He knows me well, so he does not question my compulsive, urgent need. Deliberately positioning my face near a flawless white blonde beam, I momentarily stand at attention. As expected, I feel the familiar surge of scorched memories travel the length of my spine. Heat rushes from my nose down to my hamstrings and back up to the front of my brain in a fraction of a second...and with closed eyes I see what I was hoping for, what I knew was coming, and what always appears when my beak is filled with the thickety reek of hardwoods; I see the house my father built when I was sixteen years old.

We never lived in it, which is a somber story in itself, full of loss and heartache and dreams coming undone; but before things went sideways, we had a summer of great anticipation thinking that we were going to have a new home, a fresh outlook. We had ninety odd sunrises and sunsets where we inhaled sealants, flooring, sheetrock and wood and, collectively, it smelled like hope.

Pushing back from the memory, faintly dazed and embarrassingly wrecked, I walked back to my husband and cried.

He's accustomed to my tears. He knows that olfactrilly speaking, I'm regularly in search of punishment.
I smell lumber.
I hold onto chain link fences in hot weather and then pull my hands off and huff the fumes of childhood hopping where I snuck into other people's swimming pools, lonely and closed for the season school athletic fields, and forbidden cordoned-off parking lots.
If I cut myself I calculatingly inhale the coppery tang of the wetness before the bandage gets applied.
I wear my mother's perfume from 1982, right before things went south with my parents. To me, it smells like funeral flowers.

This is why I don't enjoy e-books; I need a whiff of a century old library as I shelter myself in the story.
I can identify your brand of tobacco even though I don't smoke.
I know exactly where, within miles and miles of a familiar patch of woods, I am planted based solely on the smell of the verdant moss, how drenched and loamy and dank the roots of the heady oaks are, and whether or not a wayward teenaged troupe has recently sparked a celebratory bonfire.
Give me the low tide fetidness of the ocean with its decaying driftwood, stranded salty jellyfish and the reeking briny algaeic funk of seaweed.
The white towel of my love after he's mopped it across the back of his neck, post treadmill, gets pressed against my chest like our lost baby in whose crown I want to ensepulcher my grief.

Today I am bathing in self-imposed sadness. I am low-spirited. I am wallowing and I am languishing. I know how to feel some peace, though. I will grab some potent Vicks Vaporub which, with a single draw, transports me to early childhood and a set of doting and worried parents who teamed up to slather it on my collarbone when I was sick. I will hurriedly twist open its green plastic cap, which in woebegone days used to be a beautiful midnight colored metal.

And
I
breathe in,
I
breathe out.