Broken Country

It’s strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing us, as if such a thing were possible.

You have to fool yourself into thinking you already are the thing you want to become.

For Frank, Love Beth If the man could hear me, I would tell him this: It was instant, Dad It was instant. No pain The sorrow was all your own. Enough now. I would tell him that. Lives should be measured in intensity. Remember mine For its glory-stretch of furious light and wondrous beauty. The world we love-lived Is earth Is dust Is me, Dad.

This is a love story with too many beginnings. I refuse to think about how it is going to end.

Frank and I dance around each other’s sadness. Any couple who has lost a child will tell you the same. You see it in the other, of course you do, but it’s like you’re on a seesaw of grief, and all you want is to avoid tipping the other one down.

Lives should be measured in intensity. Remember mine For its glory-stretch of furious light and wondrous beauty.

Do you think, Gabriel says, if we are careful, we could have this for a little while? Because, what we had before, you and I, it was more than most people ever have.

The swoop of disappointment as I watch him walk away is almost as pronounced as my relief.

There can be no greater intoxication, no purer feeling, than the moment when you meet your child after all the months of wondering and hoping and dreaming.

We didn’t take enough photos of Bobby, we didn’t understand photos would be the only thing we’d have left.

Lives should be measured in intensity.

I feel my face flush with anger. Day in, day out, men are admired for their sexual prowess, for the “conquests” notched upon their bedposts. Whereas women, who dare to do the same, are derided, and, most often, it is other women dishing out the derision.

You can never change back once you’ve had a child, even if that child no longer exists.

Why do adults do this? Why do they promise things they have no way of being able to deliver?

This is a love story and it is better, by far, than any of the ones I have dreamed up in the past. If I’m allowed a wish, just one, then it is this: I wish for our story to have a happy ending.

I find myself in this situation often: managing other people’s awkwardness around my grief, my loss.

I’d forgotten how young children, much like animals, can sense your pain without being afraid of it.

He is facing away from me, but I hear the smile in his voice. “Our siblings know us best, don’t they? They know exactly how to hit where it hurts.

Is it normal to love one person your whole life like you and Daddy?" Bobby asks me out of the blue. "Or can you love other people first?" - "It's simplest when you do," I say. "But the only thing that matters is finding the right person to spend the rest of your life with. However you get there.

Perhaps that’s what it is, this feeling never experienced before, elation, excitement, a furious kind of happiness. Perhaps this is love.

But we are not who we once were. He is a father, and I was a mother, our identities as merged as they once were separated. You can never change back once you’ve had a child, even if that child no longer exists.

When the tree is a foot in the air, I see the first flash of red cotton and the sound that comes from me has no human in it, spirit shriek, ancient, guttural cry.

Ours was a complicated tale with many pieces to fit together. All of us were to blame in some way—Gabriel and me, Frank, Leo, and Jimmy too. Everyone played a part in the tragedy. And everything was about Bobby, really, when you dug deep enough.

Pause after the recounting, take the time to taste again the euphoria of that day, when everything was ahead.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about it. Part of me craves a newborn, that blissful, insular vacuum, coexistence in a sleep-deprived parallel universe, as closely connected as you were when the tiny creature was in your womb. The scent of them, the shape of them, the warm weight cradled in your arms, the delicate sound of their breathing.

she does before she falls asleep. She pauses for a second or two, assessing the man walking up the field toward us. Then she screams, “Daddy!” and she begins to run, her sheep abandoned. I watch her racing down the field, elbows pumping. She is wearing pink shorts and red wellies and her hair trails behind her in a dark cloud. I watch Frank as he opens his arms, as she flies into them. As he swoops her up and spins her around. I can hear them laughing. I watch as Frank throws his head back and yells at the gray clouds passing overhead. “I am home. I AM HOME.” As Grace tries it, resting her neck against her father’s shoulder, face upturned to the sky. “I AM HOME. I AM HOME.” As they laugh and yell and laugh some more, this father and daughter who are meeting for the first time. Then they turn to me. Frank stretches out his right arm and Grace, cottoning on instantly, holds out her left. A giant man and girl scarecrow.

The pain of that. There is nothing I can say. My whole life moving forward will be filled with people who never knew my son.

Don’t say that. You have to fool yourself into thinking you already are the thing you want to become.