Dear Noah:
Your third death anniversary is full of simple moments and magical thinking. We get donuts from your favorite shop, where you once begged fresh ones in the middle of the night when they were still baking. We look through digital photos so Dad can post one on Facebook in your memory. I pick an album at random—1995—and immerse myself in your four-year-old cuteness. I’m struck by your soft, tentative gesture and pensive expression looking down at a baby tortoise, much as you looked years later holding a cat. You gravitated instinctively to animals, contemplated and communed with them.
So when a friend tells me she believes our souls
live on in others, I wonder if others can mean animals. And if that’s what was
happening in the last photo we have of you when you smiled in spite of
everything as you looked down at our new dog. An uncanny gold light rises from
your shoulders as if you’d been blessed. Was that the moment when you gave over
your spirit to Lobo, knowing he’d be our joy and solace after your death?
We bring jasmine and roses to lighten your stone at
the Children’s Memorial Garden. Your ex- girlfriend joins us, weeping quietly,
handing us a beautiful card. We sit with her and another friend at a café
in the old neighborhood, lingering on a sunny afternoon. There’s
a toast to you and reminisces; no one at this table is afraid to say your name.
Later, we stroll through a native garden just coming awake with lupine
and poppies. We feel soothed; the day isn’t as hard as we feared.
The next morning, we’re surprised and touched by a Facebook
post from your brother, who’s traveling in Nepal. His gloved hand holds up your
driver’s license in front of snowy Himalayan peaks; he writes, “remembering Noah in a place he would
have loved.”
We have a new custom to ease ourselves back into
life after marking your death: a trip to that little beach town you showed us
that we’ve come to love. We slow down, breathe deep, fill ourselves with the
sea’s churning presence. We watch Lobo frolic and bound after
sandpipers. I write hearts in the sand and gaze out at the water, hoping for a
glimmer of you.
In another photo from your teenage years, you’re
sitting in the breakfast nook, grimacing as you stretch your long arms out as
wide as you can to touch both walls; you nearly do. I picture you laughing at
me now with my mystical wish. You stretch your arms out impossibly wide over
the ocean, hovering there, as if to touch the ends of it; “See, Mom, I’m here,
OK?”
“We can always dream,” Dad says. “What have we got
to lose?”
You are in your dog’s foolish heart. You are in the
vastness of things I’ll never understand.
Each year two days after your anniversary comes the
spring equinox. I must remember that.
xx
Mom
xx
Mom
