Birthday Wishes

Happy birthday, my little brother.  Today we celebrate your life.  It doesn't feel like a very happy occasion, as I know many birthdays didn't to you, but I want you to know more than anything how much meaning your life had, and how much we honor it.  None of us would trade the pain we feel now for having had you in our lives.  Your profound depth, sensitivity, humor, brilliance, and even your struggles touched so many people - especially me.  I hope wherever you are, all the love and thoughts that go out to you today can reach you, and that you are now able to let it all in.  I wish you did not have to leave this world to gain that ability, but hope with the peace I believe you have found, you now know above all that your life really is worthy of celebration.

Fall

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.

One Year

As the one year anniversary of Jon's death approached, I found myself feeling dismissive of the occasion, because it seemed to imply that the 365th day without Jon is somehow more significant than the 100th or the 247th. Yet I am constantly looking for ways to honor and remember Jon, and an anniversary presents itself as a hard-to-ignore prompt to do that. But how?  

Last week, I was doing some reorganizing in my (home) office and came across a newspaper that I had found in one of the few boxes of Jon's things that I have been able to go through.  I reopened the Ipswich Chronicle dated July 10, 1997 to page 6, where there is an editorial that Jon wrote with his reflections on the sudden and unexpected loss of his schoolmate, Josh Nove.  His opening paragraph spoke so clearly to me:  

As petty and belittling as words are in this situation, a time of remembering a fallen contemporary, there're all we've got.  There is not too much more we can offer another in consolation than the meaning of combined words, hoping they somehow can articulate what the lost person embodied upon living amongst us.  

Well said, as usual, Jon.  So, at this one year marker, I will offer some words, since that's all I have.

Reflecting back on the last year, I of course remember a great deal of sad times.  We buried Jon's ashes. We didn't get to celebrate his 40th birthday.  We lived through all the holidays for the first time without Jon. Even more sadness lived for me in the everyday moments - finding a coffee shop that I knew Jon would have loved, imagining his commentary on a current issue, or swimming in the ocean and realizing that he will never do that again.  While I look back with a lot of sadness, I can also see that some healing took place too. I don't think that any of us will ever truly understand or accept how Jon's life ended, but over time the focus has started to shift to his life versus his death. And that's how it should be.

I would suggest that one of the best ways to honor someone's life is to learn from it...to essentially make that life eternal by carrying on the marks it made.  With this in mind, I have been thinking about what Jon's life taught me, and while I could write volumes, I offer just a few here that stand out the most: 

Live simply.  Less than 2 weeks after Jon died, we had to clean out his apartment.  Everything he left behind in this world fit into the back of a few pickup trucks. If you ever had the difficult task of buying Jon a present, you know that he did not value "stuff". It wasn't because he didn't have the means to accumulate more things, but rather he had the wisdom to know that accumulating more stuff doesn't buy you anything except more stuff. He knew that true value was in the things you can't buy.  Now that he's gone, I see that the best gift I ever gave him was my time.  I wish I had given him more.  

Keep on learning.  Another way I think we can honor Jon is to take inspiration from that insatiable quest for knowledge he had. Most of us will not be able to learn at the pace or level that he did, but I think we can all draw inspiration from the passion with which he constantly tried to learn new things and challenge himself in extraordinary ways (like teaching himself Russian!).  Over the coming year, I will read a book that I would not normally read (perhaps from the hundreds of his that sit in boxes in my basement), and challenge myself to do something that is way outside of my comfort zone...in Jon's honor.

Cherish people.  Finally, and sadly, I think we mostly learned this from Jon's death, but he taught us a whole set of lessons about the importance of recognizing other people's pain, of loving people even when they are hard to love, and as the minister at his memorial service emphasized, the value of staying connected to others. I know this more than ever now.

Thank you, Jon, for teaching me these things, among so many others. I pray every day that you know, wherever you are, how much meaning your life had.  As I use this mere set of words to try to express that, I realized that there is one more thing we have:  actions.  I will continue to honor you by putting into action the things you taught me in all your brilliance, and know there are many others that will do the same.  

Books

Jon and Kaya ~ Florida 2011

Saturday was my daughter's 5th birthday, and while it was of course a very happy occasion, the sadness of Jon's absence found a new way to reveal itself.  As Kaya was opening her gifts, it suddenly hit me - no more books from Uncle Jonny (as she called him). From when she was born, and each of the 4 birthdays after that, Jon gave her a bunch of carefully chosen books as a present.  I always loved that he did that, for so many reasons.  First, and probably not surprisingly, he picked out the best books - from the classics like Make Way for Ducklings and Bluberries for Sal, to some really unique picks that he selected I think for the appeal to his own inner child. He clearly reconnected with his own childhood when he picked the books, which we laughed about when he gave her Paddington and many Curious George stories- I so vividly remember him loving that bear and that monkey as a kid. It's so bittersweet to picture Jon in the bookstore (the local one of course, not the chain), eagerly sorting through the options to find the perfect books for Kaya. I think for Jon, giving a book to someone was a very personal thing, for reasons you already understand if you knew him. I guess when you love something so much, you want the people you care about to experience it too - Jon loved what books did for him, and tried to share this passion with others, including Kaya. In the letter he wrote me hours before he left this world, he asked me to make sure Kaya knows how much he loved her and that were he around, he'd still be bringing her books. Whenever I read one of those books to her, I do just that. I hope he knows how much we will always cherish the many books he lovingly gave her, and forever wish there would be more.

The Magnifying Glass

Despite the fact that the past month was largely consumed by the crazy rush to complete the holiday to do list (and that's my less cynical view), Jon has been ever present in my mind and the sadness of his departure seemed to take on new magnitude.  The holidays are a tough time for a lot of people, and an image popped into my head last week that I think characterized this truth quite well.  The big and significant occasions or milestones have this effect of figuratively putting a giant magnifying glass on whatever it is that's going on in your life at the time.  On the positive side, if you're feeling happy about something like finding new love or expecting a baby, the holiday magnifying glass increases the happiness many times over and amplifies the promise that the future holds.  But on the other hand, if you are feeling the absence of something significant in your life, the magnifying glass over these special occasions seems to truly enlarge the pain and create an image that's very hard to look at.  When I thought about Jon over these holidays, I tried to focus on the happy memories of being a kid with him on Christmas morning, but was mostly reminded of how very tough the holidays were for him especially over the past few years.  The magnifying glass did its thing on Jon for sure.  For me this year, it increased the anguish of feeling I did not do enough to shield him from those effects.  But while I continue to feel that heartache, I remain determined to try and find the lessons in it, in an attempt to give meaning to Jon's struggles.  The most significant thing I take from it is this:  Even on your busiest days, take the time to consider what the magnifying glass may be doing to others, recognize loneliness and pain, and play your role in creating something positive for those who are struggling so that when the amplifying effect takes place, it may hurt a little less.  If the positive things are also magnified, then perhaps the effort could make a bigger difference in the life of someone struggling so much.