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| Jon's first day of kindergarten - 1978 |
What a whirlwind life has been since I last blogged. It goes without saying that regardless of how busy my life gets, I think of Jon hundreds of times a day. Sometimes those thoughts come and go like a blink, but sometimes they are poignant moments of remembrance, and last month brought one of those in particular. In September, as my daughter started kindergarten, I was looking through old pictures to find one of myself at that same milestone (per her request), and dug out the box containing photo albums from my and Jon's childhood that our mother had so carefully assembled. I found a picture of my 5 year old self on my first day of school, and then came upon one of Jon on his 2 years later. As I stared at the picture, trying to put it in context, I realized that just 5 weeks after Jon started kindergarten (which I only now understand to be a huge milestone in and of itself), he lost the foundation on which his life to date had been built - his mother. While I was able to look back at my baby book, in which my mother recorded copious notes about my first day of school, Jon's presented only blank pages after those dedicated to nursery school. The anguish I usually feel these days around our mother's untimely death (she was just 35) centers around the perspective of a mother having to leave her children long before she had a chance to do a fraction of what she hoped, planned and knew she needed to do for them. But at this moment, as a mother to a 5 1/2 year old, I have a deep understanding of the dependence a child of that age has on you, and I saw the tragedy that Jon experienced in losing his mother at that age more profoundly than ever before. Kindergarten is one of many steps in what should be a long and gradual process of separation between mother and child, and to think that while Jon was adapting to the separation that kindergarten represents, it suddenly and cruelly became necessary for him to experience all of the subsequent steps of separation in a single event - her death. I will never really know what role this tragedy played in the struggles Jon had later in life but it doesn't take a PhD to conclude that the impact was surely deep, profound and long lasting. I don't think Jon recognized its magnitude, nor knew how to reduce it. We did talk about it at times, but as was often the case with Jon, it was more of an intellectual conversation than an emotional one. I try not to live in the "if only"s or the "what if"s these days, but cannot help but wonder if there was some way this ultimately mortal wound could have been better treated and healed (notwithstanding the inevitable scars it left) for Jon. I would give anything to have this conversation with him, to acknowledge the magnitude of trauma that he experienced, and to offer anything I could do to minimize it even all these years later. But instead, since I cannot do that, I will try to find comfort in my belief that he no longer feels any of this pain, and my deepest hope that he rests eternally with the one he lost.
