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.)

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