/ Partly Sunny

I went to my first wedding this year. It was lovely and uncomfortable because no one ever taught me the difference between the salad fork and the others. I just got back from my first funeral. It was heart breaking and uncomfortable because no one ever taught me the difference between life and death when you are only nine years old. Last night, Tristan’s friend Chaim spent the night, and they kept waking and waking us, and our dreams were unsteady and the light was too harshly filtered between tall reed grass and steep reflections off the water. We went to buy some books and stuffed animals to donate to homeless children, in the names of these kids who are gone. I was so tired.

Today is a birthday, isn’t that the way the old Sugarcubes’ song goes? Today is a birthday.

There are balloons at birthdays, no? There were at Tristan’s, and they guided, and there were today, and you could just barely snap the photographs in time to see the guidewires fade into blinding light. Today was his birthday, and he was late to his own funeral.

Tristan and Chaim went off into the little room where the 5 year old was held in an open casket, and they asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I said, ‘No, you go. I’ll be here.’

Does this make me a bad father, that I couldn’t muster the courage to see what I am working hard every day not to see ever? He described how his hair was combed, and the state of his eyes, and how he felt like being sick and crying at once. Was I supposed to be there at his side, at that moment, whispering words of encouragement?



During the prayer, he reached for my hand, and he grabbed on to my index and middle fingers and squeezed them to his cheeks and was crying, and I almost said, ‘This is why I cannot go in that room.’

We got lost in the cemetery, which is a terrible place to lose your direction, because the speed limit is just 5 miles per hour, so you wind up driving oh so slowly through all these tragedies and carefully manicured lawns and meticulous oaks.

Does it make me a bad person that I am jealous that he has been through all this tragedy already? I am not inviting sorrow, but there is something fulfilling about loss. If I had died at 9 years old and been buried on my tenth 25 years ago, my own father would still be oblivious, and not looked to the clouds and thought, ‘Maybe that shape means something.’

Yes, if it’s sunny, it means he is happy. But had it been overcast, I would have said something else.

It was so sunny today. We needed shade from all the happiness, how it burned.