One Year On

Funny, last Tuesday, I was so proud of myself and totally thinking that maybe I’d get on a roll. I had a really thoughtful, expressive post planned for Wednesday, which I outlined in my brain on Tuesday, and I even knew what I was going to write about Thursday and Friday and with a jam-packed weekend planned, I figured I was golden for at least a couple of posts after that.

Turns out, it was one thing to outline last Wednesday’s post, but it was a whole other thing to write it. I was doing so well that day, especially compared to how I did on Oliver’s birthday, but then on my lunch break, as I walked to Pike Place Market to pick up a sandwich, a screaming, flashing ambulance roared past me, and at that moment, I was transported back to February 20, 2006…

And the nee-nah nee-nah of the siren rings in my ears as Oll-lee oll-lee. Oliver is spread out in a pod surrounded by wires and beeping machines, and I’m watching the crew as they sleep, their head bobbing side to side as the ambulance weaves through the heavy rush hour London traffic. “You’re supposed to be watching my son!” I scream silently even as I feel the overwarmth and movement of the speeding vehicle start to lull me to sleep as well. But I shake myself from it and jump each time the machines squeal for attention, but the female sleeper only picks up the cane next to her and uses it to turn off the alarm from her seated position. My eyes bore holes into her head, and I wonder if those alarms mean anything. Alarms by their very definition are alarming, and I am very definitely alarmed, but they carry on sleeping, and we carry on weaving through London traffic. I tear my eyes from the scene before me and gaze out the window. I watch as curious drivers crane their necks for a glance at the occupants of the ambulance, and I think back to all of the times I’d done that very same thing, and I wished with all my might that I was merely a commuter on her way to a job no matter how dismal rather than working my way to Great Ormand Street Hospital with the hopes that they could do what Northwick Park Hospital could not, figure out what the fuck is wrong with my son and fix him. Even as we sped past cars stuck in traffic, the ride still took over an hour, and I know that it will be a long time before Steve will make it, so I sit alone, sequestered to a cold, harsh waiting room, wearing the same clothes I tossed on the day before when I’d only thought I was heading to the hospital to have my back pain checked out. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would instead be watching my son’s life slipping away before my eyes.

I rode that ambulance all through the day Wednesday, every time I sat at the computer to write, I heard the sirens, I saw the pod, I screamed at the ambulance crew. I couldn’t get past it. So I couldn’t get past the first paragraph of my post, so I couldn’t post, and then I couldn’t write, or at least finish anything, but I will finish my Oscar post dammit. I don’t care how yesterday it is.

Steve and I dealt with this dreadful anniversary so much differently from his birthday. This time it isn’t silent understanding and comforting hugs that takes us through the day. We snap at each other and yell, and I cry. We take our pain out on each other. We’re mad and don’t know what to do with that anger. We had plans, and they got me through the day at work, but by the time he picked me up, he was so grumpy and my head hurt so much that we just growled at each other the rest of the way to Bellevue, cocktails at an upscale restaurant in Seattle no longer on the table. When we’d said what we had to say, I sunk into myself and my headache and stared out the window waiting to get home, waiting for the day to be over, waiting for the final hours of the worst year of my life to tick into oblivion.

It was a good two hours before Steve and I were done storming at each other. We capped off the evening with pizza and beer and American Idol and miserable calm. A February 21 so very different from the one a year before.

In 2006, early that morning, we let them turn off the machines, we held our son when he breathed no more for as long as they let us, we let him go only because they needed to run more tests to find a diagnosis, posthumous though it may be. We went home, where we hadn’t been for 2 days and cried afresh, for everything was as we left it. His bed, still beside our bed, his diapers and wipes still in the basket, his laundry still hanging on the radiator, dried to a crisp. It was all wrong. I mourned that we had washed his laundry, thus losing the precious baby scent. I took a bag and packed the freshly washed clothes and everything he hadn’t a chance to wear. Steve moved the Moses basket into another room, and I gathered the couple of sleepers that hadn’t been washed, his hats, his blanket around me and inhaled deeply and sobbed. I wrote the post for the website. I downloaded various versions of “Baby Mine” and “You Are My Sunshine” because I sang those songs at his hospital bedside and listened to them all on repeat until Steve made me turn them off. I wandered listlessly about, my purpose gone.

One year later. The first year is the hardest, they’ve said to me. After the first year anniversary the pain will subside a little, it will get easier. I think I need another year.

I end with the lyrics of a song by an artist from the London playlists. It is the song that quintessentially sums up this year.

"I Cried For You"
by Katie Melua

You're beautiful so silently
It lies beneath a shade of blue
It struck me so violently
When I looked at you

But others pass, they never pause,
To feel that magic in your hand
To me you're like a wild rose
They never understand why

I cried for you
When the sky cried for you
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter
But this life was not for you
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper

I'll cross the sea for a different world,
With your treasure, a secret for me to hold

In many years they may forget
This love of ours or that we met,
They may not know
how much you meant to me.

I cried for you
And the sky cried for you,
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter.
But this life was not for you,
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper

Without you now I see,
How fragile the world can be
And I know you've gone away
But in my heart you'll always stay.

I cried for you
And the sky cried for you,
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter.
But this life was not for you,
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper
That beauty need only be a whisper