Dear Harvey,

Now, you are four. Here are four things your mom has been thinking about. 

1. My dad has a friend who has two daughters, each lost a baby. Some time after you died, my dad asked him when his daughters felt better. He said it took about four years until they were anything like themselves again. I scoffed, at whatever point my dad told me this, thinking I would never feel remotely like myself again and certainly not “better”. But here I am. And this anniversary is markedly different. I do feel better and I am a better “me” even. I prefer me now to who I was before you died.

2. I was talking to my best friend in San Francisco and she said, “Wow. After all you’ve been through in the past several years. . . now you are in love and buying a house together. . . Are you happy?”. I scoffed again, “No!” And then I stumbled. “Well, sometimes, I mean, sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m sad, sometimes I’m frustrated.” Tripping over myself, “I mean, it’s all relative, right? Compared to where I’ve been I’m happy. I mean, I never thought I’d feel like this again. But, I don’t know . . .we’ve all got somethin, I guess.” I realized after we hung up that I fumbled around while she patiently listened because I’m not trying to be happy anymore. I’m not trying to get somewhere. I’m not trying to find the puzzle pieces of an American life and put them together. I am stumbling and I’m also cobbling. I put things down on the table that don’t really fit and seeing if I might find a way to make them. I’m looking at my pieces in different angles and with new eyes. The path of college, career, home, marriage, children didn’t really work out for me. I don’t have the right pieces for that anymore and, actually never did, when I think of it. I stumbled into love. I found my person by mistake and with exceedingly poor timing. But we’re doing it anyway. We can just about afford this house and it needs work that we’ll eventually do with “car tires and chicken wire” as Ani Difranco croons, with a wing and a prayer. We’re going to cobble together a new little family. Figure out how to stepparent and co-parent and probably fuck it up left and right, like we all do. Or, at least us, interesting ones. But I have great love now. I have rebuilt trust and it has been earned. (Hard earned, poor woman!) And I’m going to go with that. Knowing I have my person with me and we have our girls and the ones that are gone and we have kept going so far and we’ll just keep going. Am I happy? Yes, I’m happy. But I’m also whole now. And that is, at this place in my life, more important.

3. I was texting with your Auntie Jenn yesterday and we were talking about how awesome you are and how much you have changed and influenced us. I was so pleased and content inside myself after the storytelling night I hosted on your anniversary and she and I spoke so broadly and poetically about you, because that’s how far we have come. Somehow, though, as I stood in the kitchen alone but “with” my best friend, I was overcome with longing for you. I texted her, rather desperately, that I wished you were here and that I wished I didn’t have any of the gifts and lessons I’ve received from your death and that I’d trade it all in a hot second to have you back. She wrote back and said she would too in a heart beat. She said she often “thinks about what some alternate universe in which he lives a healthy, long and totally non descript life”. And I felt the truth of that right to my very bones. To the unacknowledged value of a healthy, long and totally non-descript life. We strive to be happy and successful and all the things but looking at the alternative that I have now, this life without you, that sounds like perfection to me. Nothing grand. Nothing special. Just life. Her statement also speaks to your impact on so many of us here, your family and many of my friends and community, who think of you and have been affected by your death and my expression of grief and how lovely it would be to not have any of that and just have a four year old boy instead. But we don’t and we can’t, so the meaning we have made individually and collectively of your life and death and our grief is the experience we now welcomely receive. Or at least receive and do our best with it.

4. I’m buying bunk beds, after all. But not because you are here and we have to squish both kids in one room. I’m buying a new house with my new family and we still don’t need to make any space or plans or  accommodations for you. Still. And always. Somehow, I’m still waiting for the end of this. But there isn’t one. I’ll always notice what I’m not doing for you, how you are not here, and wonder would it would be like if you were. You know, that alternate, non-descript universe.

I love you.

Mom