I Promise

It is my beautiful son Ari’s birthday, sixteen years old today.  I am always proud of him, even when he’s being impossible, but on his birthday I remember how much I wanted him, how clearly I heard him knocking from the other side.  I fought with everything I had to bring him here, now here he is indeed.  I feel such fulfillment and awe to have cleared the way for this intricate being, always unfolding, so fiercely himself. 

It is also seven months and a day since his father died, and I am incapacitated with sadness and loss, knowing that the only other person in the world who knows can’t share this day with me.  Others may have had tiny windows on our experience, but no one else really understands what we went through together, our little family of three.  Of all the things I know I will never have again with Michael, the brutal realization that I will never again exchange proud and bewildered wonder with my son’s father hurts me more than any grief I have experienced so far.    

I sat feeling ruined, weeping on my couch after Ari left for school, when I noticed that my right hand was clutched tightly, as if it held the last seed of something immeasurably precious.  The feeling was so familiar.  I felt it when I answered Ari’s call to life, I felt it when I was in labor.  I felt it when I nursed and cared for Michael, and I felt it as his spirit left his body.  I have felt it all my life, each time I’ve decided not to let myself drift too irreparably far away. 

I found myself swearing over and over, “I’ll take care of it, I promise.  I promise.”  I felt privileged to have been entrusted with this, and certain I would never, ever let it go.  I don’t think I could, no matter how much I might want to, at times.  I wasn’t sure, exactly, of what I was speaking, the identity of the thing to which I had pledged my service.  But I knew, after 56 years, four months and two days of this life, that I meant it.