(UPDATE BELOW) Tomorrow, Tanner will undergo a surgery that will, hopefully, prolong his life. But it’s a dangerous surgery, and he and his mom, my sister, have had to travel far from home and family for this surgery, and she’s scared, we’re all scared, and it’s hard. The struggle around the bullying before the holidays seems – for better or for worse – far away and insignificant; what matters now is that he get through this, that my sister gets through this, and that getting through this serves its purpose, that it yields more time with him, and good time with him.

Chrissie is scared, as I said, but she’s also resigned. In a good way, I think, which is to say, in a healthy way. It feels wrong to speak of resignation in the face of one’s child’s death as a good or healthy thing, but there it is. The better word, I guess, is acceptance. And acceptance is necessary, because Tanner’s fate will not change.

Still, still. It is so hard.

From Chrissie:

This is a test, a test of my strength and my family’s. Not of Tanner’s strength, he is the most courageuos person I know. He has not run marathons, nor done five Bikram classes in one day, and he can barely eat on his own now… but he is my HERO. I have done all of that in his name because I know the courage it takes for him and other children, who may not have DMD but who nonetheless face challenges, every day. Even on my worst day, I look at this gorgeous happy little man and I am in awe. Of the courage and strength and grace with which he faces each day. Mr Magoo, I love you.

Family is so important. I posted a picture today of mine, and out of the blue someone reminded me of how amazing my family was and is, the memories, of what molded me to be who I am… My parents, my sister, and all the of times we shared and laughed. My Mom and Dad gave my sister and I the world. They made us who we are. Thank you. Dad, you are always with us, with me. Mom, I can’t imagine a day where I cant talk to you… I strive to be that for my children. And to the friends in my life and the people I have met, I am blessed to have a list too long to name without making this note a few pages, but you know who you are.

And to Tanner, Booger, I love you. I know how hard it is every day for you. I know the courage it takes for you. To have lost your independance, slowly each day, to watch other children run and be free… I would lay my life down for you. So many people know you and love you..and others, well they will never understand the beauty and power of love. You have touched me and so many people… thank you, my baby. You were a cherub when you were born and you have blessed my life. xo

There are no words to add to that.

Please wish her love and strength.

UPDATE (from my mom):

Hi Cath

just talked to your sister – Tanner is out of surgery – he is in ICU but he appears to be okay.  He still has the breathing tube, but surgeon thinks it won’t be in too long. Tanner freaked out just before he went under – so his first words to Chrissi, after surgery, were “did I ask you if I was dead”.  In retrospect his freakout was probably good, because now the relief he feels about waking up is a big happy.

Love Mom

I love this guy. More than I could ever put into words. And it’s his birthday, which means that I really should try to put it into words, but then again, how many words do you need to say I love you? Just those three, really. Just those three.

Happy birthday, guy. I love you.

This week has been one of those weeks during which I find myself fully convinced, every hour upon the hour, that I am not cut out for this motherhood thing. Sure, I hear you say, but isn’t that every week for you? To which I respond, why yes, Clever And Careful Reader! That is indeed every week for me!

Here’s the thing, though: although I struggle with the slog of motherhood – the diaper-changing and the bum-wiping and the mopping up and the sibling-boxing-match-mediating and the struggling to not get buried under towering mounds of laundry and the cooking food that immediately gets rejected because this is not spaghetti Mommy you know that I wanted spaghetti and the chasing of naked batshit sprites WHO WILL NOT GO TO BED and the wrangling of snotty toddlers who are not well enough to go to preschool but totally well enough to turn the living room into Cirque Du Saggy Pants and the exhaustion, sweet hell, the exhaustion – and although I worry that I am keeping up adequately with the work of motherhood, I do truly love the love of motherhood.

I love the cuddles and the rasberries and the sweetness of flushed cheeks and the powdery smell of freshly diapered toddler bum and the way that Emilia’s hair sticks up in the morning and Jasper’s ability to name every single train in the Thomas canon and the tiny clothes that get scattered everywhere because even though the fact they’re scattered annoys me, the moment that I pick up a wee sock or a pair of fuzzy footie pajamas I cannot help but smile, thinking of the tiny bodies that fill those clothes. I love Emilia’s lopsided smile and her crazy style rules and the way that Jasper yells OH HELLO MOMMY in a tone of delighted surprise every time that he sees me, even if I’ve only just stepped out of view for a moment. I love them with every particle of my being, and then some, and I love being their mother, and I love all of the loving that they bring into my life, and Kyle’s, and sometimes I love it all so much I fear that my heart will burst, and yes, I love all of this this much even in those moments when I am bitching about diapers and lack of sleep, maybe even especially in those moments, because I know down to the deepest darkest depths of my complicated soul that no matter how hard this gets, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

You know?

When Virgil wrote, in his tenth Eclogue, that love conquers all – omnia vincit amor – he was not making a statement about the power of love to overcome all obstacles. He was not suggesting that love can or should prevail over anyone or anything that might stand in its way; he was not asserting that love is subject only to its own rules; he was not saying, with the poet Bono, that love is a higher law. He was not saying that love conquers everything. He was saying that love conquers everyone. Love conquers us all – it defeats all of us, it claims dominion over all of us, it overpowers every single one of us – and so we really should just consider surrendering. Omni vincit amor et nos cedamus amori, bitches.

We all know this to be true, even as we happily misquote Ovid when we’re cheering each other through difficult relationships (if you really love each other, it will work out! LOVE CONQUERS ALL!) or reassuring each other about how love makes everything worthwhile (you’ll totally forget the pain of childbirth once you’re holding that squawling creature to your breast! LOVE CONQUERS ALL!), because we all know that even if love does conquer a whole great bunch of intangible things, including but not limited to fear of heartbreak and aversion to pushing a live being out of your nether parts, the reason why Cupid is usually depicted as a weapon-bearing toddler is because its raison d’etre is to take you down smiling. It points its bow and arrow at you and demands that you submit and play. And you cannot resist, because it has that bow and arrow and it’s sharp, and also, sweet lord, those chubby little legs! Those cheeks! You surrender happily and you ignore the arrow sticking out of your breastbone because there is nothing sweeter than Love and even when it shits its pants and screams for more cookies and that arrow gets wrenched from side to side you still submit willingly.

Because even when love is messy and chaotic and complicated (and isn’t love only ever this, even in its gentlest incarnations?) it still embodies the most exquisite sweetness and most irresistible beauty and because of this, really, there isn’t any better representation of this than the creatures who at once torment us and inspire our fiercest devotion, the small beings to whom we surrender in love, to whom we gladly surrender in love: our children, our hearts. Nos cedamus amori.

All of which is just to say this: we should endeavor to love each other – our spouses and friends and family and lovers and neighbors – the way that we love our children, in the spirit of patience and play and sufferance and joy. To submit to love, as wholly as we can, stinging arrows and shitty pants and all.

*thanks to the lovely Ms. Chookooloonks, for inspiring this train of thought today.

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Thus spake Martin Luther King. Sort of.

He actually said this:

I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer  to mankind’s problems. And  I’m going  to  talk about it everywhere  I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when  I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding  love.  For  I have seen  too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on  the  faces of too many Klansmen and  too many White Citizens Councilors in  the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear.  I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.

He’s right, of course. And he’s still right that talking about love isn’t popular in some circles, that for some, talk of love is just so much bosh and crap and none of us really believes that stuff, do we? Because talking about love is too easy, and real problems require real solutions, not sentimentalism, and isn’t everyone who prattles on about love at best a misguided optimist, of the cock-eyed variety, at worst an insincere manipulator, and shouldn’t we all just be getting angry?

No. No. Because nothing good was ever achieved through anger and hate. Because moving through the world wearing shit-colored glasses blinds us to the world-changing possibilities of hope and friendship and community and, yes, love. Because whether we’re talking about the assholes that wander the Internet looking for opportunities to spread ugliness and hostility or the pundits and politicos who put their enemies in crosshairs or the poor, miserable souls who think – or claim to think – that God tells them to hate – we’re talking about the same thing. We’re talking about the burden of hate. It drags us down. Whether it comes in small parcels or large, it weighs us down. It breaks our backs and it binds our arms and it (alongside, I would argue, apathy, which is just hate leached of its color and energy) is the thing that prevents us from seeing good and feeling good and realizing real change. It blinds us. It makes us ugly, and it makes it so that we can’t see how ugly we’ve become.

But. We can refuse it. We can decide to refuse the burden of hate; we can opt to not let it touch our shoulders. We can choose to stick with love, whatever that looks like. We can choose to stick with love. It’s not always easy – I get angry; I get lots angry and I get bitchy and I sometimes really struggle with the whole love thy neighbor thing because, seriously, the global neighborhood includes people like the Westboro Baptists – but still. We can choose to stick with love.

Let’s.

Please.

(Consider doing a kindness today. Consider doing two.)

Every visit to the doctor, now, brings bad news. In the early days, there were reassurances and messages of hope – some boys make it out of their teens, there are ways to slow the deterioration of his muscles, he might stay mobile for a long time, he might still get to enjoy some of his boyhood in the ways that other boys take for granted – but now, there are only somber descriptions of what will happen next, of what needs to be done to make things easier, of what use can be made of his diminishing time.

They want to put rods in his spine, she tells me. So that he can stay upright for a bit longer.

Rods in his spine. He won’t be able to bend, I think, before remembering, he cannot bend now. Not in the real, active sense of bending, anyway: he slumps, he droops, he slides forward in his chair, unable to hold his own weight even while sitting, a Pinocchio without strings. His spine is collapsing under the weight of his body, his muscles having deteriorated beyond the point where they can provide any support. He’s like a doll now, a puppet. But he has no strings by which he might be pulled up. He has no Blue Fairy to wave a wand and make such strings unnecessary. He has only surgeons, and rods.

Rods in his spine. I imagine steel, or rebar, those skinny ridged bars that are laid in concrete, because even concrete isn’t all that strong, even concrete needs extra support, and what are muscles compared to concrete? Even concrete sags, to say nothing of wood and fiber and the things of which dolls and puppets are made, to say nothing of people, made of flesh, made of muscle. This is not reassuring. This does not make me feel better. Muscles, concrete, steel, wood, puppets… this is a grim fairy tale.

I focus on the rods, of course, because they are so visual, so visceral, so evocative of things that are monstrous (Dr Frankenstein and his wires and bits) and things that technological (“we can rebuild him“) and things that are magical (Pinocchio’s stiff, wood-rod arms and legs, made flesh, made malleable, with one wave of a fairy’s wand). I focus on the rods, because they unnerve me, and because they are, in a twisted way, a symbol of some elusive hope. They will hold him up. They will support him. They will be his backbone, now that his God-given backbone has collapsed. They will defy God. They will hold him up, now that God is letting go.

******

His heart is going, too. They have him on medication, the kind of medication that they give to grown-up men, to men who have had heart attacks, to men who fall like thick trees, clutching their chests, lives flashing before their eyes. He is just a boy, and yet his heart is weakening, slowing, limping under the weight of years that he will never see.

I am trying to not think about that, because there are no rods for the heart.

******

The thing about the rods is, they represent, right now, everything that we worry we don’t have, everything that we worry we can’t give. Tanner’s body is failing and growing all at once; he becomes heavier and weaker, weaker and heavier, every day, and my sister struggles, alone, to care for him. To lift him is to lift limp bulk. Dead weight. Dead weight. She can’t do it alone. (What if he can’t die at home? — That can’t happen — But what if? — It can’t — What if?) She tries and she tries, but she is no Blue Fairy, she has no magic wand, only her arms and her back and her determination, and she fights with these, she fights through these, to lift her growing dying boy, and she is getting tired.

My heart breaks for her. My heart breaks for her, across and through and up and down and sometimes I worry that the pieces will shatter such that I won’t be able to put them back together and then where will I be, where will she be? There are no rods for the heart, but sisters can be rods, and I am trying to be hers.

It’s hard. I am not made of steel. And who wants to be, really? We want to be flesh and bone and blood and muscle. Our weakness makes us human. It is because of that weakness that we feel, that we ache, that we thrill. Pinocchio wanted that. Pinocchio did not want the wood, the strings. Pinocchio wanted to be real. Pinocchio yearned to be real.

We are real. Tanner is real. No amount of rods or heart medications or mobility devices can change that, but that means, too, that none of those things will save him.

Being real is precious, but it is sometimes hard to bear.

*******

I say there are no fairies, but that is not quite true, because so many are coming forward to help, to wave magic wands, wands that can’t give Tanner back his muscles, but wands that might give him, give us, strings. Please support these efforts, if you can – they’re outlined on my Tanner page, here, below his life list. (You can also follow updates on what’s happening by following the #TutusForTanner Twitter stream.) We need this magic. We really do.

And if you’re going to be in New York next week – or even if you’re not – will you wear a tutu? (FAQs on tutus at the bottom of this page.) It would be awesome if you would. I’ll be wearing mine all week. I might not be a fairy, but I can certainly do my damnedest to look like one.

It is, of course, our greatest fear. It is the bogeyman in our closet, the monster under our bed. It is the shadow that lurks behind every tree in the wood, it is the crackle of every twig, it is the sudden silencing of birds, the darkening of the sky, the unexpected chill in the air, the thing that stops our breathing, that quickens the beat of our hearts. And we cannot tell ourselves that it isn’t there, that it is just the stuff of fairy tales and scary stories; we cannot shine the flashlight into the closet or under the bed or out toward the trees and reassure ourselves, because it is out there, it is, maybe just as a possibility, maybe just as the faintest possibility, but that possibility is what gives it air to breath and matter to take form.

We could lose our children. Some harm could come to them. They could be erased from the landscape of our lives and our hearts could, would, break, shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces and we would never recover, not really.

My heart stopped when I saw Heather Armstrong’s tweet that Katie Granju – who I don’t know personally, but admire and respect from afar – had lost her son. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. My heart stopped, and when it started again, it beat with a different rhythm and I thought, it is not possible to go through that, it is not possible; one cannot survive, one simply cannot.

One’s heart would stop beating, would it not? How could it not?

It wouldn’t – it doesn’t – of course. The heart does, as the song insists, go on, even after the worst griefs. It restitches itself, it mends, it requires none of the king’s horses and none of the king’s men, just time and love and, I imagine, faith. But it always remains scarred. It is transformed.

My family is losing a child. You know this story. It is a slow loss. The ticking of the clock has been louder, faster, of late, but still: the loss will not be sudden. It will not be unexpected. We have watched its approach for a long time now. We see it coming. This monster is not under our beds or in our closets or in the woods. It stands in the corner, in plain view, tapping its feet. We have come to know it. Knowing it does not make it any less terrifying. I have wondered, sometimes, whether it would be better to not see the monster, to not know. My sister and I talk about this, a lot. It’s better to know, she says. It changes your heart in advance; it strengthens it, readies it. It teaches you lessons, the monster. You cannot ignore those lessons.

You hug your children more.

There are days when I question this, when my own grief about Tanner and my sorrow for my sister become overwhelming. When I’m forced to confront questions about life and death and heaven and love and the soul. When the monster is too hard to ignore. Don’t ignore it, my sister says. Accept it.

I can’t, I can’t. I look at Katie, suddenly facing the monster, and my heart shudders in terror, and I know, I know deep in my bones, that when the monster steps forward for Tanner, I will curl up in a ball and shove my fingers in my ears and sing LA LA LA LA and I will deny it, deny it, just like I did when it came for my dad, just like I still do when I think of my dad, and I will not be able to look up, I will not be able to move, I will not be able to help. I am ashamed, knowing this. I am so ashamed. I am struggling to get past it, but today, I am failing.

It remains, as always, to say the usual things: hug your children. Hug them hard. Hug everyone you love. Know that you will lose them, or that they will lose you, and conduct yourself accordingly. Acknowledge the monster. Let your fear drive you to greater love. Let love be your soul-armor. Trust it to protect you.

Even though you live in doubt, trust it. It’s all you can do.

(You can find out about helping the Granju family through this terrible, terrible time over here. Please consider doing so. And then hug your children, again.)

Emilia is in love.

“Mommy, can I make a present for Josh? Because I love him.”

– “You LOVE Josh?”

“Yes. But it’s not love like getting-married love. And it’s not kissing-love. It’s FRIEND-love.”

– “Oh, good. Wait… what do you know about kissing?”

“That it makes your cheeks go red.”

OY.

“But I don’t kiss Josh.”

Phew.

“You only kiss the person that you find who is your one special person and that’s the only person you kiss and then you get married. I’m not going to marry Josh.”

Phew-phew-phew.

“But I love him anyway. Can I give him a present?”

She’s filled a gift bag, left over from Christmas, with cast-off bits of her artwork and stray stickers and ribbons and buttons and various what-nots that she has gathered and deemed precious. She comes to me with a drawing that she had presented to me as a Christmas gift and asks if she can take it back. “I think that Josh would like it more, Mommy. I can make you another one.”

I say yes – how many such drawings can a mother have, anyway? – and she adds the drawing – which was purportedly of me, but will now, I’m guessing, be explained as a drawing of the Tooth Fairy or the Eyeglasses Queen or some such to forestall any weirdness around giving pictures of one’s mother to the object of one’s affection – to the bag. She then  attaches a used iTunes gift card to the bag with an expanse of red ribbon. “That’s so he’ll he know it’s his,” she says. “Because that’s him.” She points to the dancing, iPodded shadow figure on one side.

“Really?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I’m just pretending.”

Emilia and Josh, by Emilia. Emilia is, inexplicably, the one with the long dark pigtails. Josh is the one that looks like a reconstructed Toady. Let’s not analyze that.

“Josh isn’t old enough to know what an iTunes card is, is he?” my husband asks, addressing no-one in particular. “Or will he just think that I-T-U-N-E-S spells ‘I Love You’ and overlook the fact that the purchase code is scratched off?”

Emilia rolls her eyes, and I wonder what it is that I’m more discomfited by: the fact that she is four years old and already rolling her eyes at us, or the fact that she is four years old and in love?

It’s the latter. By a mile, it’s the latter.

First love is adorable, of course. But she’s four. That she’s savvy enough to understand that her affection for Josh is not the same as the affection shared between me and her father is heartening, but still: love. Love is awesome, but it also, inevitably, involves pain, and I am just not ready for that.

That’s right: me. I am not ready for that.

Emilia is already learning that it can hurt to love someone in any capacity. She tells me that there are some days when Josh doesn’t play with her the most, and that sometimes Josh would rather be with the boys than with her. “It makes me nervous, Mommy,” she tells me, “because I want to play with him and I don’t like how it feels when he doesn’t want to play with me.” She tells me this, and my heart goes OOF.

OOF.

I tell her the usual things, give the usual advice – you have lots of friends, sweetie, lots of people to play with, don’t let Josh’s choices hurt you, just worry about having fun and not who’s playing with whom – but I know that it doesn’t make the feelings go away and I know that I shouldn’t want those feelings to go away for her. I know that this is all a part of the terrible, awesome beauty of loving friends and family and whomever else our heart finds itself drawn to. I know that we can’t experience the bliss of love without having some experience of the pain; I know that the joy of being close to a beloved only becomes more clearer when we feel the ache of being apart. I know that we all have to learn that love is both light and dark, I know that we are all immeasurably enriched by learning that love is both light and dark, even in its best incarnations (and I know that the time will come for teaching that too much dark signals an absence of love, but that is another story that I cannot yet even bear to contemplate), but she is four. Four.

She’s still just a baby. She’s my baby, which, yes, she will be forever, but for now she is still very much my wee darling baby girl, and she still needs my care and protection. And I want to protect her heart for as long as I can.

So, Josh: WATCH YOURSELF.

When was your first love? When did your *kids* first fall in “love”? What are you going to do when they do? OH GOD it just gets so much HARDER from here on out, doesn’t it?

(Also, THE GIFT – the iTunes-card-adorned catch-all Grab Bag Of Love that Emilia has put together for Josh – what do I do with that? She really wants to bring it to school for him, to present to him in the schoolyard, and I, every morning, move it discreetly out of view so that she doesn’t remember to ask to bring it, because, I don’t know. Because it just seems risky, a public, gift-enhanced declaration of love? Because the bag is gloriously strange and I don’t know that the strangeness that I think is so awesome will be so appreciated by a four year old boy – and all their classmates? Because I want to protect? Am I right to do this? Or should I just let her let freaky love-flag fly, in all of its wonderfully bizarre glory?)

****

Today is National Delurking Day, which, because I’m Canadian, I hereby declare it International Delurking Day. Comport yourselves accordingly.

****

I’ve been asked whether I might peg any donations I’m making to help efforts in Haiti to the number of comments that I get today. I won’t be doing that, for banal reasons that I’ve explained here. I’ll just be donating as much as I possibly can. You should, too. Canadians might consider the Canadian Red Cross or Unicef Canada or – one of my very favorite charities - Save The Children. Americans, you have lots of options, too, but the Red Cross is a good place to put dollars. And Compassion International (and Compassion Canada) does wonderful work, and has banners and buttons to help promote donating for Haiti. Or, just put your money and/or efforts wherever you think they’ll be put to best use. It’s the helping that matters, not the how.

But you should still comment. Just because it makes everyone feel good

I don’t believe in petitionary or intercessory prayer. I’ve written about my reasons for this at length, but it boils down to this: I don’t believe in, can’t believe in, a God who responds to such prayer. As I said some months ago, ‘why should God help us find a cure for cancer, and not for muscular dystrophy? Find one lost child, and not another? Help the Red Wings win while leaving children dying in sub-Saharan Africa? If God is a god who lets bad things happen, the only way that I can understand that is if the point of letting bad things happen is to compel us to cope with pain and heartbreak and evil ourselves, alone, to better understand those things. And that idea of a didactic God doesn’t square with a picture of God as a moody patriarch who dispenses favors to his children on the basis of who supplicates most fervently.’

So, no. I don’t, when I pray, plead for God’s intervention. But I do pray. I pray as a means of searching for some inner calm, some understanding, some peace with whatever is happening to me or someone I love. I pray, too – and I realize that this could be understood as a form of intercessory prayer – that they find the same. I was praying last night, for my friend Anissa. But it was hard, for the same reasons that it’s hard when I pray about/for Tanner: I can’t help but slip into pleading, into wishing, into childlike demands that my wishes – that he be made better, that she be made better, that it all be made to be okay – come true.

But that is not what prayer is for, I don’t think. It’s not a letter to Santa, it’s not a note to the Tooth Fairy, it’s not a solitary or collective clapping of hands to show that we do believe in fairies, we do, and please don’t let Tinkerbell die. Not that there isn’t some force or value in letters to Santa and notes to Tootherella and fervent Tink-saving hand-clapping: these are powerful expressions of our faith and our desire and our will. And when they are wrought collectively, they give us shape as families, as communities, as circles of love and hope and friendship. But wishes – even the strongest ones, even the ones that issue from a thousand hearts at once – don’t come true from the asking. They just don’t. And as go wishes, so go petitionary and intercessory prayers.

It sucks to write that. I wish with my all heart that I could make a difference by praying, for Tanner, for Anissa. Especially, today, for Anissa, who I simply cannot bear to imagine in any context other than humor and joy. But prayers for Anissa are not enough – prayers are never enough – and so set some time aside today to do something else, to act – to offer some real, tangible help to Anissa’s family, and/or (because my wishes are not necessarily your wishes; the fairies I clap for are not necessarily your own) to someone else, anyone else, who might – and you know that there are so many such people – need it, too. Do it in her name, or in your own, or in the name of whoever or whatever it is that you most pray or wish for. Take the energy that you might have put into praying or wishing and do something with it, something stronger than clapping, something real, something that helps.

That’s what I’ll be doing. And then, I’ll be praying some more. Because despite all that I’ve said here, I still pray. And I still clap for fairies. How could I not?

(Help for Anissa is being organized at the Aiming Low site, and at Izzy’s. Do what you can, if you can. Or help another cause – because there are always other causes, other hurts, other things to pray for – or just give someone a really big hug today. Or clap for a fairy. Or, best, do all of the above.)

(Pass it on.)

In the last year of my parents’ marriage, my dad had an affair. I’ve always known this, my mom has always known this, it was something that we all talked about, in later years: his regret, his remorse, over this thing he had done, its effect on my mother, its effect on our family, the fact that it led to a divorce that nobody wanted and that everybody regretted and that remained the great tragedy (and yet in some ways the great gift; this is a complicated story among many complicated stories, best left for another day) of both my parents’ lives.

He had an affair, and we knew it. But the fact that we knew it, and that we knew he regretted it, did not lessen the emotional blow of finding letters from this woman among his things.

It was my mother who found them, of course. I found the innocuous things, and the bizarre things,  the wonderful things – the pipe cleaners, the stash of pot, the robot – yes, the robot – and some terrible things – the suicide note from fifteen years ago, the agonized letters to my sister and I apologizing for his imagined failures as a father – but it was my mother who found these, these love notes from another time and another place, these pages that my father would have least wanted her to see of all his pages, all the pages of his story. We cried together, she and I, after she found them. We cried, and then I said all the right things about how that had been such a brief period, such a blip in a much longer history, and, too, how depressed he had been, what a mistake it was, how he had said so, how he had insisted so, and as I spoke it seemed to me – me, so spooked these days – that the very air rippled with tension and I wondered whether I was saying the right things, the truthful things. Had it been nothing? Had it just been a relationship borne out of his depression, a symptom of other problems, of deeper issues that had nothing to do with love? Or had it been more, something more, even for a moment?

Later, we found pictures of this woman. He had wrapped them in multiples layers of packing paper, and taped them up, tightly, and shoved them in a plastic shopping bag and stashed it at the back of his closet, under a bundle of old clothes, hidden, as though he couldn’t bear to be reminded of them, as though he very much wanted to forget them, but couldn’t bear to throw them away. My mother didn’t look at them. She turned away and said, trash them. Toss them in the dumpster. Trash them. And then she left the room.

I wrapped them back up in their paper and put them back in the shopping bag and tucked them back in the closet. I will trash them later, I thought. With the letters that I had stashed in my pocket. Later.

Later never came.

The pictures are still stashed in that bag, in the closet. I’ve been working around them, packing things away, taking things to Goodwill, sifting and sorting through the stuff of my father’s life. I’ve been working around them, pretending that they aren’t there, because I don’t know what to do with them. Do I throw them away? I can understand totally my mother’s desire that they be thrown away. I would desire that they be thrown away, if I were my mother, if it were the love of my life who had received such letters and retained the pictures of their author. I do desire that they be thrown away, or at least, that childish part of me that wishes to deny that part of my father’s history desires that they be thrown away. But therein is the rub: now that my father is gone (so suddenly gone, so absolutely gone), I recoil at the idea of denying any part of his history, any thing – any word, any image – that forms any part of the history that made him him. I don’t know whether or not he loved that woman. In a way, it doesn’t matter whether or not he loved her. She was part of his life for a short time and for whatever reason he chose to not erase her memory, entirely. So I feel – I think – that I should not erase her memory. For whatever reason. For whatever it’s worth.

So I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to keep them, but it feels wrong, somehow, to just throw them away.

I have these pictures, and these letters, and I don’t know what to do.

(What would you do?)