It’s August. Year twelve. Thinking about Derek, and a quiet weariness whispers from the usual corner of the usual room, and my usual hands are lost in the box of slick photographs I thought I’d put away. I put my head down and suddenly I want to share them, not just frame them, and tell you what I’ve learned so far.
And guess what: What I’ve learned so far could fill barely an index card – a three-by-five, not even a four-by-six. But that’s okay: Look closer and notice that my script is tiny, concise, and the card is soaked with the ink of my learning. I write and write, cataloguing flowers and birds I know, books I’ve read, people I love, and before I realize it, I’m on to a second card, then a third, another and another. One thing I’ve learned so far is that black pansies are my favorite, the deep purple ones with a yellow eye, the ones that love the cool air, and now in the dreaded heat of August I wonder what they do at night to gather strength for the coming day. To survive. Are they drinking water, lifting their stems, stretching their leaves, braving their petaled faces just to endure the scorch of the sun? A workout like no other, this, night after night, just to live for one more day.
What I’ve learned so far is this truth: 144 months in, and missing Derek, the wondering, the longing for what should be, only increases with time. It actually gets worse. In the beginning I think my mind actually protected me by keeping me numb and in a state of disbelief for so long. And no wonder: it was an accident, until it wasn’t – then it became preventable. I was clear long ago, and I’m more so now: Time means nothing, and nothing makes sense. To hold a loss like this is the only way to know that there’s no healing, no peace, no ease. To heal comes from the Old English word for restoration of wholeness, so if I can’t ever be made whole again because I’m fundamentally missing a piece of myself – my son, my heart – how can I ever heal?
I’ve learned in these dozen years more about compressed heartache and heartbreak than anyone should. And in a breath, 12 years feels like 12 seconds.
Why?
Why in grief does time shift and become something unrecognizable? No longer a companion we resign to and endure, but now an utter foe whose only occupation is to separate me more and more from my son. All time does is unwind and unwind, spooling on forever. What will I do when more time separates us than what we had together? We’re already at twelve years. He was 22. He’s been gone more than half his life already.
I don’t understand any of this.
I must rewrite what happened. It’s the only way to fix this. To shift time back to when-how it should be. Aren’t there theories now in quantum physics and mathematics and how time folds upon itself until it’s unrecognizable? Add to that the memory iteration hypothesis, remembering and remembering, morphing and changing, until the original event possibly never even happened. Could I not mine those until I could measure and recalibrate and repair what’s been done? Lean into a parallel world where everything is as it should be?
Perhaps I should crumple this up and start over.
But in all of this shifting and confusion, as I keep careful track of dates and numbers and everything-having-to-do-with-Derek, there’s this: Dates on the calendar are more than mere dates. Grief is the calendar. Grief is the days of the week, the months of the year, the years of what’s left of my life.
And so tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, will come without labels, unlike these past seven days. But I will miss my son just as much. Every day wrecks me. I will love him today, tomorrow, as much as I will next year on a nameless Tuesday in the middle of March.
Sure, I can try to smooth the edges. Fix my hair, put on make-up, find something to wear. But I cannot leave my grief behind. It doesn’t fit in a drawer, hidden. Nor secreted in dark corners, crouched under the bed, or stored with my son’s clothes and trophies and CDs in plastic bins at the top of the stairs.
In my grief, I think about Derek. And in my grief, I’ve learned that neurons fire a certain way in the brain when you see, talk, and interact with a close loved one. This certain way of firing is a permanent wiring: All I have to do is think about Derek, or Keyton, or Ken, or anyone close to me, and poof, there they are in my head, in my thoughts. Simply because Derek existed in the first place, and we talked and laughed together, and we loved each other, that permanent wiring ensures he will always exist. There’s never any interruption, not even when he died. The wiring is the same. My brain lets me carry Derek with me forever. This continuation of his presence is like the tide, or even like breathing – there’s the rise and fall and wave after wave. Never stopping and everlasting.
I’ve learned that when I drive to Trader Joe’s once a week for food I don’t need, just a mile or so up the road, I park away from other cars, just to hear Derek’s voice in my head: You parked so far away from the store you should’ve parked at home.
And I’ve learned to carry what I bought into the house in one trip because that’s what he would do when I would get home from the grocery store, trunk laden with multi-packs of energy drinks and bags of snacks and veggies and apples and protein powder and chicken and fish, and ask him for help bringing everything in. Lucky was the day he’d slip on slides and amble out to the car, moving slowly as he pulled up his pants (he was always pulling up his pants upon our constant requests to do so, his pants pulled down on purpose to show off his boxers like every other boy his age did), but most often he was barefoot and quiet, likely thinking of a sarcastic one-liner to toss my way just to see whether I’d catch it and what I’d toss back. I’ve learned I can imagine him clear as day: He’d string the handles of the bags neatly over his fingers, one after another, a ridiculous number, really, enough to weigh the skin of his fingers down so much it looked painful, like when you wrap string taut around your finger, and I’d say, Let me carry some of those. He’d suck his teeth and say, Nah, one trip.
I will always think of him. He will always be with me.
Thank you for holding space for us this week. Thank you for thinking of Derek, my family, and me. Thank you for your kind notes and texts. Thank you for hugging me. And thank you especially for reading the words I string together. Your support holds us.
If you lose something, no matter how small, in a pitch-dark room, eventually you’ll find it again. Maybe first you’d stumble into furniture, cracking both shins into a low table. Maybe then you’d bump your forehead into the china cabinet you thought was a little to the left. Maybe then a knock to your shoulder against the doorjamb you thought was further away. No matter how slowly you move, crawling there in the dark room, feeling your way with your hands, what you’re looking for is always out of reach. Is it under something? Is it tucked away in the corner, hidden? You know what you lost is there, somewhere. People have told you so. People have said to keep looking until you find it. People have said there’s a reason – a plan, even – that explains where what you lost is. You’re not one who gives up – you’re no quitter – so you go on looking in the darkness for what you’ve lost.
I’ve been in the darkness for eleven years today. This is 574 weeks, 4018 days, 96,432 hours, or 5,785,920 minutes. Counting and counting and counting the days weeks months years the counting never stops. You don’t want to know how many seconds. In the dark room, the furniture, the doorjambs, the corners are so familiar to me I no longer fear the dark. I feel safe there. And I’m still looking for what I’ve lost. I’ll never stop.
Eleven years. Derek was 22. He’s been gone half as long as he was here. How is this even possible when these 4018 days can feel like it happened yesterday?
We had three large and three smaller photographs made for display at Derek’s service. (I don’t remember even choosing the photos, but I must have. A dear friend had the photos enlarged, mounted on foamboard, and placed on heavy tabletop easels.) Now those photos surround me as I write in my upstairs writing space. I’ve tried to hang the large ones near my desk using poster putty, but time has made the foamboard a gentle curve, inhibiting a strong stick. Yet another unfortunate detail in grief world I discovered one morning as I made my way to my desk to write and each of the three had fallen and now rested cockeyed against the floor. I don’t know when they fell or how long they waited on the carpet. Their descent had been silent. I felt sick looking at them, and sicker when I pressed them back onto the wall, one corner at a time, knowing they were obviously too heavy for the physics of the poster putty, but pressing harder just the same, because this time they will stick. They must. On one, Derek’s seventeen-year-old face smiles in his senior portrait, on another he is two, shivering and smiling in the night air in August atop Sandia Peak in New Mexico. In both, his blue eyes are just like mine, his smile mine. His smile is the broadest and best in the third photo, the one in front of the scoreboard on the football field, with the five captains holding the championship trophy aloft, the five captains covered in mud, exuberant, ecstatic, elated beyond belief at their victory over their arch rival two miles down the road. I remember that high school game-of-games. I was hugged by those five muddy captains right after the photo was snapped. I love those photos. They make me break. I simply break when I see them. Which is every day. And this is grief: Folding loss into every day is a complicated scattered mess neatly pleated into a small square.
I think of other photographs – the frozen-in-time images that don’t seem real anymore. We have books filled with them; I made collages of photos last summer of the four of us, the whole family, places we’ve been, four 16×20 frames full of us, but now it’s like none of it ever happened. The people there, they aren’t there anymore. I don’t recognize myself in those photos. Me: Before. Who is that? The sharp realization is brutal and foreign. She is gone. My son is gone. Nothing looks the same as it used to. So I look past things, past photos. I turn toward emptiness. Only in nothing am I able to feel everything. I look for the bleak; in the dark is where I can see my son the most clearly. I want the dark, I embrace the sorrow, for there is safety there. Derek is there. Why would I try to leave the dark?
And so, staying inside in the dark room, in the black house of grief, is the place I’d rather be than standing outside in the sun in the middle of a perfect day of warmth and light and possibility, when I know that nothing is possible anymore when your son is dead. I have to carry my broken heart with me every day, facing the world like this, and it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that Derek isn’t here. Half the time my heart is full and I feel loved by Ken and I read a book and pet my dog and enjoy the silence and I think of our upcoming trip to see Keyton and I feel hope and joy and excitement. Then, the other half of the time it’s dark, black, broken, splintered with pieces missing, and I’m looking looking looking for what I’ve lost.
I remember jumping into the deep end. Holding my breath as long as I could, bubbles clinging to my skin, my feet, my knees, my hands touching the very bottom of the pool. I tried to stay there as long as I could; down there at the bottom was complete silence, just my heartbeat in my ears that no one could hear but me. I fight the burning in my lungs, and I remember thinking, just wait…one more second…one more; I fight the pull back to the surface, where the air was, where the sun waited, until the last moment, and finally I stop fighting and let it just take me back to the top of the water, weightless. I was maybe eight.
I’ve been in the soundless deep, holding my breath for eleven years now. I’m comfortable there, but I rise to the surface often, needing to breathe, smiling even, alongside my grief. Feeling both at once is normal. The pull to see the sun is powerful.
But this is the week, the worst week.
And again, the days line up, obedient, ready to be re-lived.
Take a deep breath.
8/22 Monday: After moving Keyton into her dorm at Penn State, we were on our way home to Maryland when we got the phone call no parent wants. Three hours away, we’re told Derek had been injured, needed surgery, and was not likely to survive the surgery. He does, we see him, and later that day he is helicoptered to Shock Trauma in Baltimore. We’re asked if he was in a car accident. No; he was playing football. Wasn’t he wearing a helmet? Yes; he was wearing a helmet. We have to tell Keyton what happened.
8/23 Tuesday: Derek needs another surgery. Keyton is there. Visitors come. We go to the Ronald McDonald House to stay. An earthquake hits near Richmond, VA.
8/24 Wednesday: More tests. More visitors, so many we gather in a conference room and I walk them back, two at a time, to see Derek, who looks like he’s asleep. I know he isn’t.
8/25 Thursday: I don’t want to write about what happened today.
8/26 Friday: We keep to ourselves today, not allowing visitors, asking them to please come tomorrow.
8/27 Saturday: Hurricane Irene hits, but visitor after visitor comes to see Derek. We hear stories we never heard before from friends of his I never knew he had. He was so loved by so many.
8/28 Sunday: We spend the day talking and playing music, his favorites and ours, song after song chosen by Keyton. We cry and we tell him we love him. We let him go at 10:32 that night.
With just one week to go until Keyton and I run the Boston Marathon together (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!), I wanted to gather my thoughts and write something about this experience so far. Something interesting. Something profound. Yet all I’m thinking about this morning are questions. Did I run enough? What am I wearing on race day? How many carb grams can reasonably be crammed into my body in the 48 hours pre-race? Is Keyton ready? Am I ready?
So with these questions and more swirling around in my head, something interesting and profound did occur to me: gratitude. Being grateful and kind isn’t boring, nor is it something I take lightly. A sincere thank-you goes a long way, and it can change your rotten day into a not-so-rotten one, whether the thank-you is on time or late, whether it’s for the smallest of gestures, like holding the door for a stranger, or the largest and most sobering, like a letter we once received from a blind man who could now see thanks to our son.
Gratitude, like kindness, is magical and free. I was grateful to see that donations to Project Hope Boston, the charity Keyton and I are running and raising money for, were coming in, slowly but surely to our fundraising page. Our friends have big hearts. We had a long way to go to reach our goal, and I started to worry that we’d run out of time. But recently I was overwhelmed with kindness from another group of people I hold very dear to my heart. To say I am grateful for these incredible friends is an understatement.
I’m grateful for my Orangetheory Fitness State College community for coming together this past Saturday. These wonderful people, this “OTF Fam,” not only chose to donate to Project Hope Boston, but also they crushed a 90-minute workout, and then they donated even more to this amazing cause. Over $2,000 was raised! Thank you OTF Fam!
OTF Fam!
I’m grateful for Coach Amanda for planning the event and bringing the members together. When I told her that Keyton and I committed to raising $15,000 for Project Hope Boston so that we could run in the marathon, she asked, “What can we do to help?”
Coach Amanda & me!
I’m grateful for all of the coaches and staff for promoting the event and securing donations. What a generous group!
I’m grateful for the incredible members who attended the class with me: Alexis, Val, Tam Bam, Coach Amanda, Anna, Sydney, Shane, Bailey, Beth, Scott, Sarah, Cait, Coach Cheyanne, Sam, Samantha, Chrissy, Dana, Coach Quinn, Olivia, Dave, Emi, Nicole, Nhat, Farnaz, Gina, Meaghan, Mallory, Haider, Jen, Lorena, Lizzie, Jennifer, Juliet, Kiara, and Kate. Thank you!
I’m grateful for Coach Calista for ‘crushing our souls for a great cause’ for 90 minutes. Your energy lit up the room!
I’m grateful for all the generous members who donated in lieu of attending the class.
Thank you all for supporting me and Project Hope Boston. I’m grateful there are such kind people like you in the world. Your kindness and generosity is making a difference in the lives of others, and I’ll be thinking of each of you as we run from the Start in Hopkinton to the Finish in Boston.
I’m also grateful for my husband, who has supported countless whims of mine over our 35 years together.
More than anything, I’m grateful Keyton asked me to run this race with her.
Indeed, gratitude is magical. This warm feeling centers me as I think about those questions earlier that seemed so important this morning, and now are filed under “We’ve got this.”
See you at the finish line.
Thank you.
I love you, Derek.
Please come home.
P.S. If you’d like to donate to Project Hope Boston and support the important work they’re doing to lift women and children up and out of poverty, click here. Thank you.
I hardly can believe this myself: I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run the Boston Marathon this April 18 with Keyton! We caught two coveted bibs a few weeks ago, and now we’re charity runners*, raising funds for a nonprofit that empowers women and children on their journeys up and out of poverty. We’re grateful for this opportunity to run this most storied race and to help others.
While I have run five marathons, a bunch of half-marathons, shorter 10Ks and 5Ks, and even directed our 4-mile Lead the Way run/walk for Derek from 2012 to 2017, I haven’t always been a runner. Running is hard! After all, who needs to run when you can drive? And training for a marathon, especially Boston, is physically taxing, time-consuming, and actually pretty crazy. For starters, beginners like us have to learn to stay on our feet for likely five hours in unpredictable and often wild New England weather, negotiate fast downhills, and finally climb affectionately known “Heartbreak Hill,” a half-mile incline late in the race at mile 20. But we’ll get a medal, a shirt, and bragging rights, so in the twisted world of running, the blisters, bruised toenails, and battered legs are worth it.
The grandeur of Boston aside, this race, indeed this training, feels different to me. Of course on race day, Keyton and I will run together, but leading up to that day in April are miles and hours by myself in the cold air. Alone on the road, alone with my thoughts, I think that always with April comes the closing in of the world because that’s Derek’s birthday month, and Keyton’s, and mine. Just like August, with his death anniversary, April brings a hushed and profound awareness that nothing is as it should be in our family. We’re getting older…without him. And so on these long runs, all I can do is run with grief, not away from it. Running is an endurance sport, just like grieving; and grief is the epitome of a long run – it’s the longest run because it never ends. Grief takes and takes and takes, and all we can do is just keep running with it. Sure, you might hit the wall, but you do what you have to do to keep going.
Focusing on Keyton keeps me going. This will be her first marathon! And this year’s 126th Boston Marathon is going to be on Patriots’ Day for the first time since 2019. To say I’m honored to be running with her is an understatement (hopefully she won’t notice that I’ll likely cry at the start, cry at the finish, and be choked up for the many miles in between!). We’re a team, but we’re training separately, as she’s in Boston and I’m in State College. I’m no expert, but since I’ve done this before, I’ve shared tips on preparation and recovery that have worked for me. And I’m confident we’ll finish. She’s fit, young, and healthy; her go-to is SoulCycle. I’m fit, not-quite-as-young, and healthy; my go-to is OrangeTheory. Keyton is very goal-oriented and purpose-driven. She ran cross-country in high school and played lacrosse and soccer, so she’s competitive, especially with herself. She’ll be ready.
Focusing on my husband keeps me going. Ken’s my cheerleader; he always has been. He tracked my progress in my first marathon in Bethesda in 2005, then in Marine Corps the next year. The Mt. Nittany marathon in 2014 was so low-key he was able to drive the route and pull over when I needed water, jelly beans, or dry socks. I ran that one again the next year. He’ll be my handler on race day, carrying my gear and guiding me to the Common where the bus will take us to the Start out in Hopkinton, and he’ll meet us at the finish. He was there for me for all my other races, and now he’ll be cheering both Keyton and me on as we run America’s oldest marathon. Wow – I have goosebumps!
Focusing on Derek keeps me going. You can call them mourning runs, you can say I lose myself in every mile, you can say running brings peace and healing, but the truth is that I carry my grief wherever I go. I carry Derek with me every step. His loss is heavy, so very heavy, every mile can feel uphill. If running worked to heal me, I’d be out there all day every day. Running might lend a quiet even hopeful confidence on even the worst days, but it does not bring peace. Nothing does that for me, not even hoping for Derek’s hand to be on my back, pushing me along. Running is simply something I can control when everything else around me seems out of control. Running helps me process emotions that I keep hidden for the most part – maybe the endorphins that fire on a long training run bring everything to the surface. Maybe on a run I can be myself after all: I’m alone, and whatever comes up I can let out, unlike when I’m around other people and have to pretend to be fine and strong and “normal.” Some days I can be so overcome with emotion I have to stop and walk. And these intense emotions are fine on a long run, they really are, because it’s much better to think about all the things I should’ve said, all the things I should’ve done, and my mind just keeps going, going, going, playing that Derek reel on a constant loop that slows and speeds up, because these thoughts distract me from the one-step-at-a-time of my rhythmic feet on the ground, my methodical arm swing, my 1-2-in and 3-4-out breathing, my pace, how many miles, how much longer, why are there so many hills, my feet hurt, my legs hurt, I’m thirsty, and then all of a sudden I’m done, and I can breathe: Look what I just did — I just ran 14 miles!
Focusing on “my why” keeps me going. I’m running the Boston Marathon with my daughter. Holy shit! This isn’t for everyone, and even if it is, it’s not magical. It takes a great deal of discipline, and the idea of depending on yourself is daunting when sometimes all you feel is so damn tired. I remind myself that I can’t quit when it gets a little bit tough (think of the medal!), but sometimes I just don’t feel like doing it. I look at my training calendar, bargaining with switching a day here for a day there, counting the miles to calculate whether I can fit in a run tomorrow or the next day instead. I check my weather app to see when it’s supposed to snow or sleet or rain again. Can I again justify that my beloved OrangeTheory is as effective a substitute? I start to question everything: Am I strong enough? Am I too old for this? Is there a rock in my shoe? And while I love running outside, with the mountains, the trees, birds, horses if I go a certain way, my music, and being alone, running isn’t always poetic. Just one suggestive beckoning from Netflix and the comfy couch next to my warm greyhound sounds way better than a run on a 33-degree day. Training in less than ideal weather isn’t the greatest – snow on the ground, grey skies, inevitable frozen hands, then sweaty hands, then wind, then tears running down my cheeks. Am I crying? I usually do from time to time, which is fine, but now my nose is running and it’s hard to breathe, and sometimes my chest is on fire and my quads burn – why am I doing this again? Crying is therapeutic, yet running through a fog of tears with snot running down my face, my breath lost in gasps, isn’t. There’s a ton of suffering and self-doubt – after all it’s twenty-six-point-two fucking miles – but Keyton is counting on me, and we’ve been through much worse.
And focusing on hope will take me to the finish line. Even though I can’t see or quantify hope, it’s everywhere. I know I’m picking it up and carrying it with me while I run. Maybe I drop most of it when I’m done, but a tiny bit, a crumb of hope, stays at the bottom of my pocket for my next run, and I share it in some small way with people I care about in my corner of the world. I hope we raise enough money*; I hope it doesn’t rain/snow/hit 89 degrees; I hope we finish. And when we cross that finish line, oh yes, I’ll be crying. It’ll be amazing to run the Boston Marathon with my brilliant daughter. I hope we hold hands and raise them high. After all, hope is why we’re running.
I love you, Derek.
Please come home.
*To donate to our fundraiser, click here. Please message me if you’d like more info — thank you!
Thank you for holding space for us this week – for thinking of Derek, my family, and me. Thank you for your random cards and texts throughout this year. Thank you especially for reading my words when I find the courage to share, since the only thing I want to write about is the dark thing no one wants to hear about. I still have a lot to say about these very dark places.
The photograph is of the two of us. Our faces are pressed together, and we’re smiling. I’m wearing sunglasses, but he isn’t; my face shades his a bit so he’s not squinting into the bright sun. I’m kneeling and he’s sitting on my knee; my tanned arms are wound around him; my right hand presses against his small chest, my fingers stretched open. His left hand is on my knee. He’s wearing a black t-shirt with a howling coyote on the front. I remember the back read Ow Ow Owoooo. He wore that shirt a lot. I still have it. The sun is on our hair, turning his curls blond and mine lighter brown. The sky is a curious shade of light blue. Behind us are yellow flowers, likely a weed, but still beautiful. They’re small blooms but on tallish stems, a clump, a bush really, random loveliness in the rough grass. Behind the flowers is a low wall of ancient rock. We’d visited a ruin that day, I don’t remember which one. I should though. The builders of that jagged wall deserve at least that. Perhaps if I sifted through all of the photos from that summer I might be able to piece it together; finding all of the photos of gorgeous sunny days when I wore a green shirt and flowered shorts wouldn’t be difficult.
My husband took this photo in 1991, the year we lived in New Mexico for three months.
Derek was two.
Flash forward twenty years, to 2011, when we get the phone call that our son is dead.
And now it’s ten years later, and I’m trying to make sense of all of it, and the time passed and lost, and none of it aligns with what I see in the photograph. The smiling little boy and me. I’m 22 there, the same age Derek was when he died, and how I’m just now realizing this terrible truth I do not know. I’ve more than over-analyzed the minutia of everything I can think of, every single thing he’s left behind, every single thing that resembles a memory of him, but I failed to put this together until literally just now. And this is the photo I look at – that I stare at – every day. I missed it. Tears do nothing to describe the feeling of despair that fills me. Our smiles didn’t matter, and my arms wrapped around him didn’t protect him. The one job a parent has: to protect the baby, and I failed. Massively. This is beyond survivor’s guilt. Beyond what is ever acceptable. Beyond words. So beyond, that there’s no word for it, no word for what to call someone who’s lost a child. There’s no name for this grief.
no name for this grief 