Verbatim (reboot)

Edit: Sometimes when I'm missing Aidan, I go back and read blog posts about him so I can laugh and cry and remember his amazingness. Here's a post that captures an excellent example of his unique goofiness.


I was driving with A. Peevie, and I received a text from C. Peevie telling me that he had found a ride home from work.

"Text C. Peevie for me, and tell him, OK, good," I told him. Here is the actual verbatim text-versation that occurred:

C. Peevie: I got a ride.

A. Peevie posing as me: That's wonderful. What time do you expect to get home?

[Me to A. Peevie: That text sounds parental.
A. Peevie: That's how I wanted it to sound.]

C. Peevie: 7:30 or a little earlier

A. Peevie: Are you going to practice your dark magic?

C. Peevie: Yea...

A. Peevie: Good. When I get home I expect to see zombies attacking our neighbors. And I think you know which ones. Ass.

[Me: Ass? Why did you write that?
A. Peevie: I typed aargh, but autocorrect changed it.]

C. Peevie: Who is this?

A. Peevie: Dad.

C. Peevie: Immature? Ass.

A. Peevie: You know what a baby Amish person is called?

C. Peevie: No.

A. Peevie: An "Amlette!" Hahahahaha!

C. Peevie: -_-

A. Peevie: Aw schiznit! I spilled coke down my front!

C. Peevie: Im done. Im going back to work

A. Peevie: Darvit!

[Me: What does that mean?
A. Peevie: It's an Elvish swear.]

A. Peevie: I am secretly an elf.

Me, later, to C. Peevie: FYI, that was A. Peevie. In case u didn't figure it out.

C. Peevie: I didnt.

_______________________

I am so grateful for the worlds of entertainment and communication that texting has opened up to my family. Seriously, I feel bereft just thinking of those early days of parenting, before we had cell phones, before we had texting, when we had to rely on our limited periods of face-to-face conversation to communicate our deepest thoughts and intimate feelings to one another.

Flies, Fairy Tales, and Shakespeare

Somebody left the screen door open, and now our house is overrun with flies. I keep killing them with fat insurance envelopes and a TCF Bank flyer printed on sturdy coated stock. I wish I had a fly swatter, but thank gooodness we still live in a world where there's junk mail.

C. Peevie has killed a few flies also, and likes to brag about it. 

He walked out of the bathroom and said, "I just killed another fly."

"Me too," I said. "I added three more notches to my belt this morning."

"You put the notches on your belt?" he asked. "I put them on my knife." I pictured him throwing a Bowie knife and pinning flies to the wall, their tiny legs flailing. 

He is apparently unfamiliar with the Grimm fairy tale, The Brave Little Tailor--so I sent him the link.

"Read it," I told him. "Clearly, your education has been sadly neglected."

"OK," he said. 

We both know he won't. You might want to re-read this clever story, however. It's more entertaining than I remembered.

The flies, however, who understood no German, would not be turned away. 

When he drew it away, and counted, there lay before him no fewer than seven, dead and with their legs stretched out.

His heart wagged with joy like a lamb's tail.

I could go on--but I'll just let you read it for yourself.

There are good reasons to read fairy tales even beyond the fact that they're entertaining.  Albert Einstein is questionably credited with saying, "If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales."

Whether he actually said those words or not, the essence of the quote -- that developing the imagination is key to an educated mind -- correlates with his belief that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Others have extolled the value of the imagination for learning, success, and life as well. 

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night. --Edgar Allan Poe

Imagination rules the world! --Napoleon Bonaparte

You can find dozens of pages of quotes on BrainyQuotes, ThinkExist, and similar sites--but the chain of proper attribution on these sites unreliably begins and ends at "I read it on the Internet!"

I don't know how I got from a fly infestation to Shakespeare, but I leave you with these words from Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream:


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heavne to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. 

Letting Go and Holding on Tight

One thing defines 2013 for me: the loss of Aidan. He died in 2012, but we spent 2013 trying to learn how to live our Aidan-less lives.

I still have days, like Sunday a week ago, when I cry so hard and for so long that I'm exhausted and ready to go back to bed by 2 p.m. But then days go by when I only cry a little bit, like today. I shed a few tears when I write about him; or when I see something Aidan-esque, such as a manatee, a toy train, or a Pokemon; or when I walk past the table that holds photos, cards, and mementos. Mr. Peevie has moments, hours, and days like this, too.

Seattle

I think this is what getting through grief looks like. Midway through the year I said to the therapist, I don't know how to do this, how to walk through this dark valley. He said, "You're doing it." I suppose what he meant was that I was getting out of bed, working, taking care of my family--sometimes badly, and always with the constant presence of Aidan's absence, but I was doing it.

We took a family vacation to Seattle in late June. We had a fabulous trip--as as perfect as it could be without Aidan. Everything is measured by that yardstick, now; everything is viewed through the lens of not having Aidan. Our photographs have two kids in them, instead of three. We asked for a table for four at dinner; we purchased four bus tickets; four people divide easily between two beds. 

Two kids rolling down a hill instead of three.

In August we attended the wedding of friends whom Aidan loved, and who loved Aidan. I started to cry from the moment the groom looked down the aisle at his bride as her father walked her to the front of the church. I cried for Aidan and for our lost future; I cried because Aidan did not get to see his friends' beautiful ceremony, because he won't have his own, or stand next to C. Peevie and M. Peevie at theirs.

I had lunch with a friend later that month, and our conversation covered many topics--but later she said she felt that every conversation should be about Aidan and about our loss, about our missing him. This notion felt exactly right to me. For a long time nothing else mattered except that Aidan was gone.

I think this is at the Space Needle.

His loss was a bleeding, internal wound that would never heal. It was chronic and debilitating. 

There are still times that nothing else matters except that Aidan is not here. Bereavement obstructs my work, my relationships, even my faith. In church, there are still times when I cannot worship, pray, confess, commune, or greet because all I can be and feel is that I have lost Aidan-- which feels incompatible with worship, and especially with confession. I can look at Jesus, but only as a sufferer, not as a sinner. It's like I exist on two different planes, or in two different dimensions; or I'm schizophrenic. If one personality has surfaced, the other recedes. 

But one year, one month and twenty-one days later, I can see that my grieving has changed from what it used to be, when it consumed most of my waking hours. It is still a constant presence, but it is no longer constantly debilitating. Bereavement has changed me--it has changed all of us--but this new, bereaved me is slowly re-learning how to do relationships, work, and worship all over again.

Part of me feels that this reduction in debilitation is a betrayal of Aidan, like I don't love him enough to keep on suffering the most intense and painful grief. But if I let myself go down that rabbit-hole of despair, I would spend the rest of my life not just grieving, but clinically depressed and possibly suicidal. So I remind myself that moving through grief and letting go of the empty despair of those first few weeks and months is the right thing to do for myself, my family, and for Aidan's memory.

Aidan and Mr. Peevie in Colorado, 2011.

Continuing to let go of debilitating grief, but holding on tight to Aidan, to my memories of him, to the things he loved and valued, and to the lessons he taught me--this is where I hope 2014 will take me. 

But god, I miss that kid.

One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, Aidan died. 

We had spent the afternoon with Manuel and his wife, Mrs. Manuel. (I wrote about Manuel here.) Manuel rudely moved to North Dakota in June 2012. We all missed him, but Aidan missed him most of all. Manuel and Aidan had a tender friendship: as the youth director at our church, Manuel gave Aidan spiritual insight and support, academic help and encouragement, and loving acceptance. Aidan gave Manuel—what, exactly? I’m not sure, but Manuel described their friendship this way when he gave a remembrance at Aidan’s funeral:

I have found myself treasuring the memory of a young man who quietly defied convention. Though our friendship was brief, I will forever be grateful beyond words that Aidan allowed me to be a part of his beautiful and complex inner world... Our friendship was initially established in the realm of the imagination--his mostly...

I discovered a boy whose favorite hobbies were creativity and imagination. These were not static nouns to him--they were his every waking moment. Dragon lore, reference manuals on mythical monsters, fantasy novels, and poetry all captured Aidan with a sense of wonder. It was a regular sight--Aidan staring off into space, only to whip out a spiral-bound notebook and begin drawing furiously; and then creating action statistics in case this new character made it into the card game he had invented.

I love that he was able to capture Aidan's essence so beautifully.

Two weeks before Aidan died (Aidan died. Will I ever be able to hear or say those words without receiving an emotional concussion?) he had told me several times how much he missed Manuel, wished he could see him, and wondered if he would come back to visit. “I need to talk to Manuel,” he told me at one point. I told him we’d be having lunch with him after church in a few days, and his face lit up. “How long will he be here?” he asked. “Probably for at least a few hours,” I said. “I’m sure he wants to spend time with you.” He smiled his curvy Aidan smile. I don’t remember, but he probably hugged me, because he rarely passed up an opportunity for a hug.

We had lunch together around the kitchen table. We ate corn and wild rice chowder with polish sausage, and crusty Dutch oven artisan bread straight out of the oven. Manuel, a frequent bread baker, was impressed with the simplicity and ease of the Dutch oven recipe.

I want to remember every word of our conversation around that table. I remember that M. Peevie and C. Peevie dominated the conversation, and that Aidan was quiet but happy—but I don’t know if this is a true memory, or just a typical meal-time scenario. Whether he said much or little, I do know for sure that Aidan was happy.

Manuel left, and a half hour later Aidan collapsed, was rushed to the hospital, and was not able to be resuscitated. Manuel and Mrs. Manuel joined us in the ER, along with our pastors and several friends. We sat in shock; our friends surrounded us, and we clung to them. Mrs. Manuel wrapped her arms around M. Peevie. 

"I don't know how to leave this place without him," I said, over and over again. But we left, eventually, and went home to a house filled with neighbors and friends who somehow understood that showing up was the right thing to do. They came, with bleak expressions, offering their tears and embraces. I think 40 or 50 people showed up that night.

I cried a bit in those first few hours, but mostly I felt numb. My tears did not come until four weeks later, even though I desperately wanted to cry. 

In the weeks and months following, we have slowly re-learned how to breathe, how to laugh, how to somehow live our Aidan-less lives.

How often--will it be for always?--how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss until this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.                                                                                    --C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Thirteen

Hello InterWebs,

M. Peevie here. I took a year off from guest blogging my annual birthday post on The Green Room. I was working on my post last year, didn't quite get it done, and then my brother Aidan died. As Mim has said, we lost our whimsy--and since these posts are generally chock-full of whimsy, I just could not hit "publish."

(Mim, or Mimsey, is one of my nicknames for my mom. C. Peevie came up with it. I am also fond of calling her by her first name, and I get a small rush of pleasure when her friends overhear this and make a shocked and horrified face. Mim doesn't mind, she said, as long as it doesn't feel like disrespect to her. I guess so far it doesn't.)

Me, Aidan and C. Peevie, December 2011

So. Aidan. Yeah. It's really hard to talk about that. I love to talk about Aidan, and I miss him all the time. Sometimes I wish my friends would talk to me more about him, and ask me about him. The part I don't want to talk about is how I feel about him dying or about how much I miss him, because I don't really have words for it, and I don't know how talking about it is going to make it any better. So I just sort of go along missing him, and remembering him, and telling Aidan stories when I get a chance.

So much has changed in my life since my last post when I turned 11. I am nearly thirteen now, and I am a different person.

I left my little school where I had lots of friends, and teachers who love worksheets and who sometimes seemed to love rules more than children, and went to a big school, Whitney Young. I went from having two brothers at home to no brothers at home because C. Peevie left for college in August. I went from being a pre-teen who likes big words like "anthropomorphism" to an actual teenager who still likes big words like "precipitously" and "petrichor" and "sesquipedalian." 

I went from getting straight As in school without breaking a sweat to getting almost straight As but definitely breaking a sweat. When I was 10, I wanted to go to DePaul on a softball scholarship. When I was 11, I wanted to go to MIT to study architecture and engineering. And now I have determined that it makes more sense to get a liberal arts education first, so I want to go to DePauw University, and then maybe MIT, or maybe somewhere else, depending on where the liberal arts take me.

My school is great. I have new friends (Hi MK! Hi BB! Hi Beckham!). I like that my classes help me understand important topics in our country like the Affordable Care Act, the debt ceiling, and the government shut-down. I made advanced honors band, which keeps me awake at night with anxiety. I have to keep up with kids who are in high school and who have A LOT more experience than I do. 

I am riding the school bus for the first time (boo) with other seventh and eighth graders who are loud and obnoxious and immature and annoying and stupid. They make me envy deaf people. I also take CTA now (yay), and have my own Ventra card.

It might interest you to know, InterWebs, that I have become a Fangirl. Fangirls are girls (duh) who are fans (duh) of certain TV shows, movies, and actors--but we are more than fans. We are obsessed. My particular areas of obsession include Doctor Who, Sherlock (the BBC version), Supernatural, and the Marvel Universe. I'm pretty sure that Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, and David Tennant all love me as much as I love them, which is a lot.

Oh, and I am now a card-carrying Nerdfighter--one who is not ashamed to be intelligent, and who fights to decrease WorldSuck. Nerdfighters are entirely composed of awesome. I highly recommend that you check out the books of the Nerdfighter in Chief, John Green, and in particular, The Fault in our Stars, which I have read multiple times.

That is about enough for now. This is M. Peevie, signing off.

We Have Disappeared

I was making dinner and Mr. Peevie walked in the door from work.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said back. I chopped an onion for Indian Mother-In-Law Savory Ground Turkey.

"How are you?" he asked.

"Fine," I said, peeling and chopping a hunk of ginger.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said, smashing a garlic clove under the flat blade of a chef's knife.

"What are the kids up to?"

"I don't know."

He was quiet for a moment or two. Then he observed, "You seem to be kind of short with me."

"You seem to be kind of needy," I said helpfully.

"Well, I am!" he defended; and he had every right to be so.

I glanced up at him; he looked stricken. "Well, so am I," I said, with more than a tiny bit of coldness in my voice; and I was. I had no emotional energy to care for his wounded heart. I resented his neediness. I kept cooking, and Mr. Peevie walked out of the kitchen.

The loss of Aidan has changed us and broken us. We are empty, defeated, and fragile. We are facing what feels like a bleak future without our middle son: 40 years (give or take) of making new memories, none of which will include Aidan. It's unfathomable and wrong.

With Mr. Peevie, I find myself short-tempered, hyper-sensitive, and intolerant of the slightest offense. I can't stand his neediness, but if he were not needy, I would perceive that as a deficiency of grief, and would find a passive-aggressive way to punish him for it. I'm so messed up.

Clearly, bereavement strains relationships, sometimes to the point of breaking--but the research does not bear out that divorce is statistically more common among couples who have experienced the loss of a child. In fact, "methodological limitations associated with sampling and difficulties in tracking divorced couples make it impossible to draw clear conclusions about marital disruption" after bereavement, according to the National Institutes of Health. We just don't know.

But what we do know is that loss changes us. Our family has disappeared, and a completely different family has taken its place.

We have been snatched away from our most intimate relationships and have been deposited into a household that looks and sounds and feels alien. We are all changed; everything about our family has been touched and altered.

The way we relate to each other is different: Our hugs are longer. Our rituals are more prominent and precious. Our arguments are more rare and more painful; our apologies more tender. Our conversations, leisure activities, family events--everything has changed. Sometimes we seek each other out; other times, we retreat to our own forms of escape. 

We never stop thinking about the son and brother that we have lost, and he is with us, in us, bruising us with his absence.

Distance

Today, April 21, we remember our Caitlin on her birthday. She would be 19 this year. I wonder how old she is in heaven. I wonder if she and Aidan are buddies. I wonder if there are buddies in heaven.

Caitlin was born at 22 weeks, weighing only 13 ounces (369 grams). We wanted the doctors to take her to a hospital with a unit that specialized in micro-preemies, to work on her, to save her. They couldn't, they said. She was too small (less than 500 grams), they said, and her gestation (less than 25 weeks) was insufficient.

We held her for her whole life. We looked at her and wondered at the tiny perfection of her fingernails and wept at the transparency of her skin. We gave her the name of my grandmother, Libby, for her middle name. I told her story beginning with this blog post.

Since we lost Caitlin, I have wept with many other families who have lost their children. My friend Rock Star, who's little boy died at full term before he was born. My friend Rofu, who lost her twin boys well into the second trimester due to a rare genetic abnormality. My friend Donkey, who lost one of her triplets in the first trimester and the second at term, shortly before his sister was born healthy.

So many other families in our circle have experienced the devastating loss of a baby in late pregnancy or shortly after birth that it feels like it's nearly as common as having a healthy full-term baby. It's not, of course: 

Rates of pregnancy loss decrease as the pregnancy progresses. Overall, about 10 to 20 percent of all recognized pregnancies and 30 to 40 percent of all conceptions end in pregnancy loss. Miscarriage that occurs at 13 to 14 weeks' gestation usually reflects a pregnancy loss that happened one to two weeks earlier. Approximately 1 to 5 percent of pregnancies are lost at 13 to 19 weeks' gestation, whereas stillbirth occurs in 0.3 percent of pregnancies at 20 to 27 weeks' gestation, a rate similar to that of third trimester stillbirth. (Source here.)

You feel like you can't go on, when you leave the hospital with empty arms. You feel like the rest of the world should stop, because yours did. You feel like the most important thing anyone could know about you is that you had a baby, and she died.

And for the first few months, for the first year, maybe longer, this is your life. You pull the seatbelt around your waist and you think, "I'm not supposed to have a waist yet." You go to church or for a walk around the block, and you quietly resent the pregnant women and any woman holding a baby. You avoid going anywhere near the strollers and baby clothes at Target.

You feel like your face looks different, that anyone who looks at you can see in your eyes that you had a baby, and she died. Maybe they can.

And gradually, but not linearly, you cry a little less, and then a little less. When you meet people, you are able to tell them that you grew up in Philadelphia, or that you still love to play softball. The conversation about the baby you lost is not always the first conversation any more.

Is it easier, or harder, or just different, to mourn a child with whom you never had a chance to create memories, compared to mourning a child that you've nurtured from infancy to almost manhood?

I think I need a little more distance from this present grief to really know.

Eulogy: Alfred Charles Meyer

I’m not an expert on my dad, but I can tell you a few stories that will give you a pretty clear picture of what we have lost and what heaven has gained with his passing.

First of all, we know that dad and mom had the most perfect of marriages, and never had an argument in 64 years, one month, and one week of wedded bliss—or at least, not one that they would admit to. Their marriage was a union of best friends, and they always presented a united front in parenting us five kids. This meant that sometimes they were both wrong.

Dad had some fun dating an identical twin. You’d have to look pretty close at mom and her twin, my Aunt Jean, to tell the difference. Somebody once asked dad, “When you go to pick Joyce up for a date, how do you know you’ve got the right twin?” and dad said, “Who cares? They’re both cute.” Mom hated that story. Probably still does.

Dad was not a believer when he first started dating his cute girlfriend, Joyce. After they had dated awhile, mom told him she could not go out with him any more unless he came to church with her. So he did, and he fell under the spell of the great preacher Donald Grey Barnhouse at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He heard the gospel, and believed it, and turned his life over to Jesus.

Dad loved to tell the story of how Pop-Pop, mom’s father, gave his permission for dad to marry her. Pop-Pop said he would not give his permission until dad went to Bible college for one year, so mom and dad both enrolled in classes at Philadelphia College of Bible. Dad ended up continuing there not for one year, or two, or three—but for nine years. That nine years laid the foundation for 40 more years of Bible study, and an unshakable faith.

Not only did mom’s influence bring dad to the gospel, but she took good care of him in every other way as well—and even at the very end of his life, as he held her hand in the Intensive Care Unit at Grandview hospital, he wanted to make sure she knew how much he loved her. “I love you, Daddy,” she said to him, and even though his voice was weak and blocked by a tube down his throat, we could all hear him say, “I love you, sweetheart.”

Dad was not a perfect parent, and each of his five children is messed up in his or her own way. But we don’t need him to be perfect to remember him with deep love and admiration, and miss him. He was ahead of his time as a hands-on dad who changed diapers and did housework. He would load all of us into the car on a summer Saturday morning, pack the cooler with sandwiches, fill the thermos with sweet iced tea, and drive us to Ocean City for a day on the beach. Every time he’d bring his garden spade and dig a giant sea turtle in the wet sand, and kids would come from up and down the beach to admire it and climb on it. The day on the beach would be followed by an evening on the boardwalk with bumper cars, skee-ball, Taylor’s pork roll, and salt water taffy.

I’m grateful for these kinds of growing-up memories of my dad. There are other images of dad emblazoned in my mind as well: Dad pulling weeds out of the yard, muttering about “bodacious dandelions” the whole time. Dad playing ping-pong with us in the basement. And then, in December, setting up what we called The Platform—that’s Platform with a capital P—a flat plywood table, with trains and winter scenery and battery-powered racecars with hand-held controllers. Dad setting up the artificial white Christmas tree year after year until it was actually sort of yellow, controlled by the kind of frugality comes from living through the Great Depression.

If you knew dad for very long, you learned that his faith was his top priority. I often found him, in his bedroom, on his knees, praying. Or he was sitting in his chair, reading his Bible, and perhaps referring to a devotional guide. He made some notes about his preferences for how we would remember him after he was gone, and these notes included a reference to I Corinthians 15. This chapter contains an eloquent summary of the gospel: Christ died for our sins. He was buried, and he was raised on the third day. And then this: “By the grace of God I am what I am,” Paul wrote, “and his grace toward me was not in vain.”

Maybe dad was thinking of this chapter in his last hours. He was resting peacefully; his eyes were closed. Mark said, “I wonder what he’s thinking about.” I leaned over Dad and asked him, “Hey Dad, Markie wants to know what you’re thinking about.”

He opened his eyes and looked in mine and said, “The cross.” Maybe he was thinking of these verses in I Corinthians 15:

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

 “Death is swallowed up in victory.”

 “O death, where is your victory?

  O death, where is your sting?”

Later that same day I asked him, “Dad, are you looking forward to seeing Jesus?” and he answered without hesitating: “Amen.”