Scott

Both of my grandmothers have buried a son. My Mom’s mom, Gran, buried her son Scott. Her favorite story about him : when he was five years old on a picnic Gran took a picture of him holding a wild flower he'd plucked that was as big as he was. She loved it so much that she blew it up, framed it, and put it on display in the library. After Scott saw it, he felt so emasculated that he flexed in every picture anyone took of him through his mid teens. That story is the only way I could understand Scott being anyone’s “little boy”.

Maybe it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead but Scott grew up to be a bigot. Gran remarried my step grandfather, Danny, when Scott was very young and by all accounts Grans new husband was a stepmonster to him. Scott became an alcoholic and fell off a roof drunk working construction in his early 30s. He damaged his spine and, as an effort to manage his pain, became addicted to pain killers, cocaine, Xanax, and sleeping pills. His alcoholism progressed and in December of 2018, Scott OD’d and died in his sleep.

The bullet though,  was Grans voice. She said my name and then just started wailing.

My Grandmother is a character, a perfectionist, a control freak, and doesn’t have the strongest affinity for names — but her heart. She would do anything for her children. She saw the best in them. She brought Scott home every Christmas, no matter what he had done to her that year. Gran believes in family and she believed in her son.

My Dad’s mom, I call her Susie, lost her son Matt 30 years ago. He was 18 and died in a car crash. The only experience I have of Susie losing Matt, is a poem I found in the attic one Christmas she'd written a few weeks after his death. In his voice:

So when you feel the heaviness of grief

I will teach you

To find joy through suffering

To recognize the timeless beauty of a moment

When you have no words

I will listen to the songs you cannot sing and

hear the longing that resonates in your heart

And when you feel that you are alone

I will find you and

show you that (though small)

I am everywhere

In the faces of shiny pennies

In the music between words

In the quiet before thoughts

In your breath

In your heart

In your blood

I am everywhere

full of you

and you of me

For a long time I thought that being a parent would be the only way to get a kind of endless reciprocal love, maybe these women did too.

What they've shown me that loving is always a risk.

I don’t know if it’s a choice but it takes courage to feel it.

In the fantasy of man returning man always returns and there is pleasure. There is no recrimination or indifference, no struggle. There is laughter. There is trust. There is generosity. In the fantasy of man returning you open the door to your apartment and there he is. He doesn’t have a bouquet or roses, but sooner than you think, afterwards in bed, you realize, you are the rose.