Life can hand you difficult concepts to try and make
sense of. A young mother with a
tow-headed little boy and his dark eyed sister wandered into the Peet's
coffee. I followed their wanderings over
the top of my laptop and grinned as the mother procured piecemeal information
from them regarding flavor of milk, muffin or no muffin, this table or that one
- conversation I'm familiar with. At one
point the brother was trumpeting through an absconded coffee filter as his
sister rifled the rest of the display for an instrument of her own.
They were obviously good kids. They needed little prompting to keep the
peace, and once seated, remained, and made a good showing of it. Their visit was short, and of course the
muffins were unfinished if not altogether ignored. The chocolate milk was squeezed dry.
What was unremarkable was that such a charming trio was so
peacefully occupied on this bright morning.
What was remarkable - and only to me - was that this
little boy weaving about the tables and chairs could have been me - if my
childhood photos are any indication - and for that matter, he could have passed
for my son. But that is where the
difficulty came in, since the girl also reminded me much of my 4 year old
daughter. You see, I have a son whom I
have never taught to connect Legos, or sound out his letters, or ride a tricycle. He was taken from us about 4 years ago, even
before he was born. The first light on
his little eyes found them closed and lifeless.
We visit a little piece of ground in memory of him and 2 sisters who
were taken from us in similar fashion.
Our oldest daughter shares some of this pain with Bec and
I. She was young and understands the loss but our youngest, our daughter
conceived "inadvertently" and only months after that deep loss, is
still ignorant of the loss of her brother.
And there's the rub. Those 2
beautiful children playing together while amusing me and the other idlers as we
sipped our latte's represented an impossibility for me. If our Ezekiel had lived, there would be no
Gianna - an impossible concept to resolve. Nursing and caring for our son Ezekiel,
would have made conceiving Gianna practically impossible.
Can you resolve such a confluence of thought and
emotion? Bec and I love and crave both
of these children yet recognize that we could never on this earth have them
both. If you say that our daughter was
God's gift to two broken hearts, I say you are correct. And you profoundly miss the point. We want them both. We are human and we want
all of the happiness we perceive to be due us.
We have seen both the son lost to us, and the child only made possible
by the remaining void. And we want to
hold them both - together.
This is a joy reserved for later, I know. I know.
And yet I feel.
