It’s been 10 years. He’d be, what— 32 now?— and every year that passes, he seems to get younger and younger. I knew 22 was young when he died. I was 37 at that point, with a 9 year old and a 6 year old, and I definitely knew 22 was young. But I didn’t know how young. He was already a dad! His little boy was a year old. Now ten years later, with my oldest at 19, I can see how quick his 22 years of life were. So. Very. Young! My oldest nephew, gone forever in Afghanistan, and I never got to say goodbye.

Every year I think about how I should spend this date, October 25th. I didn’t actually get the news until the following day. That’s what happens with family estrangement: there’s a time delay on the relaying of news. So for me, October 25th, 2012 was the last full day of normal before my heart split down the middle. I was already in a bit of a post-trauma state since my husband and boys had been held up by gunpoint just a few weeks prior on a warm September evening. It was a brush with losing everything. I was just 30 feet away inside an art gallery while they waited for me outside, the daylight turning to dark blue as the sun fell. “Everything is OK,” I’d remind myself again and again, “You didn’t lose them!”. Reassurance didn’t work, because “ALMOST!” was too close. Then my brother called me the morning of October 26th. My boys were getting ready for school. I got the call, heard his voice and knew whatever it was, it was bad. He choked out the news; I screamed and crumbled. My little boys ran to me. I hold each frame of that moment, vivid time-slowed snapshots of realization and irreversible pain.

I’ve written about this before. I will probably write about it again. What is it about telling and retelling stories? The date was… And just a couple weeks before… And I got the call, he sounded… and then I… . Again and again. I can gather all the associated memories, too, like I’m going up to the shelf in my mind that has all of them together, and I can pick them up like little ceramic forms, to look at them as discreet events: the drive down to the memorial and the music I played, my boys making movies in the backseat; missing the full cavalcade because family estrangement and I-should’ve-been-there!; the ultra fights with my husband- one at home the day after, one the night of the memorial back in our room, the boys asleep at our feet, drawing lines, ultimatums, brokenness; the regrets, the what-ifs, the if-onlys; the music my surviving nephew picked out to play during the slideshow of growing up pictures- it was my music too!- look at us!; wanting to hug the coffin and missing the chance, him being driven away, then rewinding to Hurricane Sandy and his fraught arrival at Dover Air Force Base; fast forwarding back to the place where the memorial was held, me seeing his son for the first time in person, toddling around, seeing my nephew in him and wanting him to toddle around me again like when I was a teenage aunt playing with him on the driveway at the Murrieta house, pointing with him to the sky, look at the planes!

There’s more. Of course there’s more. So much I can’t delineate, all the old heartbreaks that came before, nothing to do with him, how they’d kept us apart. More followed as I embraced reconciliation without knowing how. It came with a cost. I returned to therapy, started medication (again). What made it worth it was when joyful connections re-established. Harder than the work of resolving is the pain that comes from not even trying.

And so it’s October 25th today.

Be sad, not forever. That’s what he said before he left for Afghanistan, and it’s what I thought about this morning as I drove to Lafayette with tears, my heart heavy. What’s this about? I asked myself. I felt the sadness inside of me, but I also stepped outside myself and looked back. Was I acting out sadness because it felt appropriate? I knew I wanted to write about it and post it, but for whom? Was it about roping in sympathy? Feel-sorry-for-me? I wanted to find a way to make things new. It’s been 10 years. There’s no time limit on grief. Mine was (is?) a grief complicated by family estrangement and all it entailed, and the suddenness, and his youth.

But today is new. And I can be different if I want to. Because I can. And I want to.

I went to the Lafayette Crosses to check on the one I made for him. I can’t remember the last time I went. I brought all the supplies i could think of to refresh it. It took me some time to find it, since I’ve neglected its maintenance. It turns out, someone removed the stone I made for him, probably years ago. At first, I was angry. Hurt. Who would do such a thing? But then I decided I could own up to having avoided this space. Not that my coming would’ve kept it from being taken, but that his spot wouldn’t have been empty for so long. I find relief in figuring out what might be in my power to acknowledge and change going forward. So as I weeded, swept, and brushed aside dirt, I decided I could really make the space ours again. My local place to come to remember him and everything about his life and our family, not just the hard things, but the good things we have now and maybe even the better things in years to come. His son is growing up and now he has two little beautiful sisters! There have been more marriages, and my husband and I have grown through this heartache and lots of others, too.

I’ll post a picture (and will I write more?) when I finish remaking his cross. Today I sawed and assembled and painted, but I’m not done. No in-between photo for you. But I can show you this: after sawing to size, I found that the 2x4 was from the heart of a tree. Which I think is pretty cool, don’t you? :)

P.S. Some of my other blog posts about this…

Goodbye from Here, November 2012

Breaking Waves, January 2013

Memorial Morning, May 2018