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

Love and Marriage

For those of you out there who are starting to believe that marriage sucks, that it always ends unhappily, that the mere fact that Drew Peterson could find four women who wanted to marry him indicates an inherent problem with the institution: don't throw out the baby with the banns.

Yes, it appears to be true that marriage is in trouble. The stats on marriage are not hopeful: The divorce rate (3.6 per 1000) is half that of the marriage rate (7.5 per 1000), according to the CDC. (And why this is a statistic that the Centers for Disease Control collects, I have no idea.)

Please note: This does NOT mean that half of all marriages end in divorce. It means that half as many divorces occur every year as marriages--but that's not the same thing. Do I need to spell it out? Fine. If 1000 people get married, and 500 people get divorced, the divorces don't only come from the 1000 new marriages, but from all current existing marriages. Get it?

So articles like this and this are just not getting it right. This NY Times piece posits that "the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates." Nevertheless, as The Straight Dope points out, the stats are not good on the marriage survival rate even when they are interpreted logically.

Marriage is hard work even when you're married to a near-perfect specimen, as I am; and the problem is, most of us don't want to work that hard.

Fortunately, Mr. Peevie is willing to work very, very hard to make our marriage blissful; and so far (cross your fingers) he has not indicated that he will be seeking to replace me with a younger, cuter, lower-maintenance model. (Version, not runway.)

Here's a teensy anecdote that illustrates how sometimes, one person is giving, patient and peace-making, and the other person tends slightly toward cluelessness, over-reaction, misinterpretation, and general irascibility:

The day started with ten "Mommies" before 7:30 a.m. "Mommy, can you get me breakfast?" "Mommy, I need help with my math homework!" (Note: I don't do well on math after 10 a.m., let alone before 8 a.m.) "Mommy, what's the temperature going to be?" "Mommy, come look at my ginormous poop!" etc., etc.

Between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m., the "Mommies" expanded exponentially, as though there were 16 kids in the house and not just three. I was sick and tired, SICK and TIRED, of people needing something from me.

Then Mr. Peevie came home late after running a 3.5 mile race downtown and snagging some BBQ at the DePaul post-race chow tent. One of the first things he said were these words: "Did you wash any darks today?"

An innocent question, no? But what I heard was, "I need something from you. I need you to make sure my dark socks are clean." What I heard, my therapist cleverly pointed out to me, was, "Mommy!"

I detonated. "Everybody needs a piece of me!" I snapped. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I did wash darks today. In fact, I washed four frickin' loads of laundry, plus two loads of dishes, plus..."

Poor Mr. Peevie just looked at me. "E. Peevie, I just want to know..." he started.

"Yes, I washed your damn clothes!" I martyred, "and I'll go downstairs right this very second to make sure they're done in the dryer!"

Mr. Peevie, God bless him, chose not to repay evil with evil. This is what makes a marriage work: one person being a peacemaker when the other person is unreasonable and a teensy bit insane.

"Honey," he said gently, "I really just wanted to know the answer to the question. I'm not asking you to do anything for me." Talk about a soft answer turning away wrath! This guy lives the Bible, Old Testament and New, every day with me. Marriage is hard work--for him; but for me, it's easy. (Most of the time.)

His words threw sand on the blazing campfire of my hostility, and finally, I heard what he was really saying instead of what I heard through the filter of the irritating context of my day.

"Um, yes, I did wash darks today," I said cautiously. "I don't remember if the last load is in the washer or the dryer, though."

"OK," said my hero, "Thanks. I'll go check in the laundry room." See how easy that was?

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage. --Robert Anderson, Solitaire and Double Solitaire

Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. ~Mark Twain

Happy 25th anniversary, sweetheart. (Almost two weeks late...)

Eleven

Darling boy,

You are eleven. Daddy and I are so in love with you, so enraptured with your unique you-ness, so crazy happy that we get to be your parents.

Also: sometimes you frustrate the shit out of us.

But mostly, we adore you; and we're grateful that you are here with us. When you were born, Daddy brought C. Peevie, age 2.5, to the hospital to meet his new baby brother. He ran into the room, totally ignored me, and commanded, "Baby A. Peevie! Me hold him!" He's been warm and nurturing to you ever since.

Not.

On day ten of your ex-utero existence, we noticed that you were too sleepy to nurse. Daddy and I went Christmas shopping, and when we stopped for lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant, I tried again to wake you up to nurse you--but you would only latch on for a minute before falling back asleep.

By late afternoon, we were concerned. Ignorantly, we decided to wait until the next day to call the doctor if you were still abnormally lethargic--but then at 5 p.m. Daddy said, Let's just call the doctor to be safe.

He saved your life.

The doctor told me to pinch you to wake you up. You didn't respond. He said, pinch him again, HARD. I didn't want to hurt you, but he said, Pinch him HARD. So I did. You didn't even squeak.

"Bring him in to the ER right away," the ped said. My heart felt cold with fear.

At the ER, the in-take nurse said, "How long has he looked yellow?"

"Since birth," I said truthfully.

"Well, you should have brought him in sooner. He's very jaundiced," she said helpfully.

Fortunately, the rest of the ER staff was appropriate, kind, and professional. I do not know the name of the doctor who put his arm on my shoulder and told me as gently as he could that you were in very serious condition with and needed to be moved to a hospital with a Level IV trauma center--but I will never forget that he was as kind and gentle as he could be under the worst of circumstances.

By this time, your tiny chest was heaving, and you were struggling to breathe. The ER staff debated whether to intubate you right then and there, or to wait for the ambulance trauma team to do it. Meanwhile, Daddy called Roseanne, who was keeping C. Peevie for us.

"A. Peevie is very sick," he managed to choke out, before he burst into tears.

The first ambulance that came to pick you up was not equipped to handle a tiny infant in heart failure. There was a flurry of phone calls and conversations; we considered the possibility that you might die because of a failure to communicate. When the second ambulance came, at least 10 emergency transport personnel surrounded you as they rushed you out to the waiting vehicle.

I started to follow, but one nurse held me back. "You can't go in the ambulance," she told me; and I looked at her with despair. "There's no room," she explained gently. "Everyone in the ambulance has a job to do. Get in your car, go home and get your things, and meet us at the hospital."

Daddy and I just knew we'd never see you alive again, that you'd die in the ambulance on the way to the trauma center. We drove home in a daze, packed a few things, and called our pastor before heading up to the hospital.

The next time we saw you, tubes and wires stuck out all over your chest, arms and even out of your scalp. The intubation tube taped to your face kept you breathing in a regular rhythm; and for the first time since we brought you to the hospital, I started to cry.

I'll finish the story tomorrow; but let me just say for today that I'm glad you're still here, still growing, still being your own one-of-a-kind self. Happy birthday, darling boy.

Love, Mommy

One Hand, One Heart

Remember, honey? Remember Jim and Susan singing "One Hand, One Heart" from West Side Story at our wedding 24 blissful (ahem) years ago? Does it make you misty to hear these lyrics?

Make of our hands one hand, make of our hearts one heart, make of our vows one last vow: Only death will part us now.

Make of our lives one life, day after day, one life.

Now it begins, now we start: one hand, one heart! Even death won't part us now. Make of our lives one life, day after day, one life. Now it begins, now we start: one hand, one heart! Even death won't part us now.

Me neither. It's a pretty song, but it doesn't really say much. I'd probably choose a different song today to capture our epic love and hopeful future. But my point--and I do have one--is that I'm incredibly glad we hooked up.

I could not have known back then, in my youthful ignorance, that you would turn out to be the kind of husband and father that other women only dream about. I thought I knew; but then again, I thought I knew a lot of things that it turns out I was wrong about. (We won't go into that here--but now that I think about it, that would be interesting, wouldn't it, to talk about the things we were so sure we were right about 20 or 25 years ago, and now it turns out we couldn't have been more wrong?)

And here's the thing: I can't even take any credit for having chosen well. I'm not saying it was luck, of course. I'm much too Presbyterian for that. I'm going with grace, with really and truly undeserved favor. God gave me the best gift that God can give a human being on this pock-marked earth: a spouse who is my my spiritual soulmate, my best friend, my partner in the richest sense of the word.

Henry Ford said, "My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me." You're my best friend; you bring out the best in me, by overlooking or quickly forgiving my faults and weaknesses and inadequacies, and by telling me over and over again what you love and like and appreciate about me.

(OK, hold on. I'm feeling a bit verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves...)

All right, I'm back. You know that DeBeers commercial that always makes me teary? The one where you see an older couple walking along a path, and then a younger couple overtakes them, passes them, and then the woman looks back over her shoulder at them, and you see the older couple smiling and holding hands? I used to identify with the younger couple, but now I'm getting closer to seeing myself, seeing us, in the older couple. We're not there yet--they're probably in their 70s or 80s, probably married for 50 years or so. But we're halfway there, anniversary-wise.

I'm looking forward to the next 24 years, holding hands with you, and laughing.

Happy Blogiversary To Me

Today marks the first anniversary of my virgin blog post.

Since then I have written 140 posts about fruit flies, my garden, books you should read, books you shouldn't bother reading, hilarious movies, confusing movies, really bad housekeeping, my first husband, impassioned parents, memes, language, plucky people, faith challenges, heroes, and glorious food.

My 100th post was about one of my favorite writers, Roger Ebert.

I've written more posts about my above-average kids (18--posts that is, not children) than anything else. Second place goes to life anecdotes.

The post that got the most comments was Why I'm Voting for Barack Obama. Surprise, surprise. That's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at its best.

My most frequent commenter was the self-appointed president of my non-existent fan club, Jeanie, followed closely by HPaul and Boy George.

I think this is my favorite post , but this post written by a local princess is a close second.

To all six of my faithful readers, thank you for your support. Stay tuned for more blogging fun.

And, as always, remember that I am a comment whore. This means that the more comments you leave, the more I love you.