Regaining Your Mojo After a Nightmare & Counting One’s Blessings

As you might have been able to surmise by my last post, it’s been a very rough period in the Picket Fence Post household. After the untimely death of one of The Eldest Boy’s friends, at 12 years old, it’s been difficult for everybody to just pick up where things were when we learned about this unthinkable turn of events and simply carry on, even though that’s what we’re told we’re supposed to do.

In the days immediately following the loss, the kids had lots of sleepovers. Lots of friends hung out together. The Spouse and I chatted with parents over coffee and tea, glasses of wine. We sat together with friends at our many youth games and got hugs from folks at our church. We enjoyed watching the Patriots punch their ticket to the Super Bowl with my brother's family while we ate junk food and talked via Facetime with my parents. We all drew comfort from one another.

But still . . .

As I’ve been keeping a hawk eye over the kids, trying to check in on them without being smothering, trying to give them a chance to talk if they want to, I’ve found myself completely out of sorts. Trying to get back to “normal” seems a challenging task because I keep thinking about the family in town for whom “normal” will never again be a resident of their home. I keep thinking about that family and feeling guilty that they have pain while I have the luxury of getting super annoyed that no one put a new role of toilet paper in the bathroom, that the boys won’t stop fighting over the stupid video games (I hate video games) or because one of them is being mouthy. One parent with whom I spoke at a youth basketball game yesterday confessed that she too feels guilty simply because she still gets to give her son a hug while the family of the boy who has passed away does not have that opportunity. Perhaps empathizing a bit too closely with a mother who had a child our children’s ages, we cannot stop thinking about her and her pain. It kind of freezes you in place.

When I’ve sat down at the laptop to write, it’s been challenging to be whimsical or wry, something I like to do in this space and on my other pop culture and politics blog. Aside from the pieces I’ve needed to submit in order to meet deadlines – reviewing TV shows like Once Upon a Time, Parenthood and Grey’s Anatomy – I’ve found the creative well dry. I’ve not much felt like being snarky on my blogs so I’ve been busying myself by observing the increasingly insane, unpredictable roller coaster of a presidential election and by pouring through books upon which I’m going to be writing columns. (Just finished Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas.)

Little by little, I know that the shock will fade but I hope that through the everyday nuttiness and insanity of going 10 rounds with The Youngest Boy over why he needs to wear a winter coat when it’s 10 degrees outside, why The Girl needs to put athletic tape around her tender ankle before basketball games, why The Eldest Boy is going to church whether he likes it or not and when I wake up at 4 a.m. to let Max the dog go outside (only to discover that he wanted to simply chill out on the deck and bark into the darkness), that we never forget that we’re lucky, that not all parents are as lucky as we are, and that we shouldn’t relegate the ones who aren’t to the dustbins of our minds.

Out of Tragedy, a Stirring, Powerful Discovery: Community Matters

For several days I was perpetually choked up, felt as though there was a lump in the middle of my throat after learning that a young boy – who was friends with my oldest son – had suddenly passed away.

But as I forged on, pushing through the heavy sadness and unmooring shock of the news, I realized that there’s power in something about which we don’t place nearly enough emphasis these days: The power of being a physically present in a community, not just being a part of an amorphous, sometimes antiseptic community online.

The horrific news about the 12-year-old boy’s passing circulated throughout my town in dribs and drabs. Initially, cryptic, mass, automated phone calls were made from the schools to students’ homes telling parents to check their e-mail for an "important" message. After reading the stunning e-mail, some parents went old school and called one another on the telephone, then quickly turned to local web sites and Facebook to share their collective grief as they prepared for their crestfallen children to come home from school and melt into their arms. No one could quite believe that a young, seemingly healthy seventh grader could really be gone. He just couldn’t be. It made no sense.

He had just been playing basketball the night before, some said. He’d been online with friends the day before too, added another. He seemed fine at school yesterday . . . this didn’t compute for anyone, not for the students or their parents who fearfully eyed their own children wondering, “What if?”, not for the educators who cared for these children or for the church community which spiritually embraced the boy’s devastated family.

I read and re-read the note from the middle school not quite believing its contents. There was no way that a child – a polite, smart, talented shining light about whom no one had a bad word – as young as he was could’ve gone to bed and then passed away because of complications due to a seizure. There was no way that this was happening to his nice family, particularly to his mother, about whom the most frequently invoked adjective when her name came up in conversation around town was “sweet."

Parents literally clung to their children, holed up in their homes as after-school activities and practices had been cancelled. At first, we all marinated in our grief from behind our computer screens or on our phones, in an electronic isolation of sorts, sharing despondence, warm memories and effusive compliments about the boy and his bereaved family online. People, particularly the children, texted one another, exchanging sentiments as simple as, “I am so sad” that conveyed an ocean of heartbreak.

The next day, however, the community began to stir, to rise from the ashes. In school hallways throughout town and at the regional high school, students donned a commemorative color – green – in honor of the child who was universally well liked and respected. One of the boy’s classmates labored to make hundreds of green ribbons and distributed them to willing takers. It was a sea of green, people said, a sea that coalesced around that vacant space where the lost soul used to be because that’s all that the people wearing green could do, because they couldn’t bring him back.

Then, as the children and their parent-coaches eventually resumed their sports activities, this boy’s name became a clarion call from indoor soccer arenas to youth basketball courts, a rallying cry, a cause: He will not be forgotten. His easy smile, his talents, his kindness would guide them through, no matter what it said on the scoreboard. He will help us go forward.

Parents bought green socks and handed them out to players in his memory. Kids texted their teammates suggesting that they don green T-shirts under their uniforms. Green duct tape was adhered to the fronts of basketball jerseys, and, band-like, around the upper arms of coaches and the parents in the stands who teared up every, single, time a parent from an opposing team asked what was up with all the green. Girls took makeup pencils and decorated their cheeks and their hands with their classmate’s initials and shouted, “Go Green!” at the beginning and the end of their games. This is for him, they said. And, for the first time since I could remember in my very athletically competitive town, it didn’t matter who won, who scored, who fouled. All that mattered was that we were all together. We were one. And our hearts were broken.

People came out of their homes, out from behind computers and cell phones and spent time with one another in person. Children hung out and played video games together or watched the Patriots’ game in groups, drawing comfort from merely being in one another’s presence while their parents embraced and tried to console one another, remarking about how rare it is these days for them to just ditch their packed schedules and hang out together. Parent after parent said that this grab-you-by-the-lapels moment which shakes you to your core has taught them that, no matter how insanely busy they are, time with friends, with one another, in the flesh, is important. Checking in on Facebook, while comforting and a useful source of information, was not enough. Not by a long shot.

“I’m really glad we live here,” my daughter said to me the other day. “People really care about one another.”

Out of this tragedy, my children, as well as almost every person with whom I’ve spoken, seemed to have stumbled upon something basic, something that we all too often take for granted in this era of instant digital communications and over-scheduled lives filled with the busy-ness of child-rearing: Being together matters. Community matters. Everything cannot be done via electronic or cellular forms of communication.

This sudden, grief-stricken coming together, this recognition of the importance of just being together as a community was one final gift from a boy whose short life was a gift to all of us who were lucky enough to meet him.