Open our eyes and wish for dolphins
Asking for help
As soon as we saw the welcome crowd on move-in day, jumping around the entrance in matching t-shirts like they were advertising a car wash or apartments for lease, I felt a rush of emotion. Switched out my glasses to straight-up sunglasses, the ones that stay dark all the time. Grateful for this mask. Dropping my daughter off I didn’t realize ahead of time, but he went to college too, and some of those memories are sweet, but the fact that we’re all here, all us parents with all our beloved children, this feeling is loss, overpowering. Despair, and fear of having to talk to another parent: is this your first child/only child? No. No my son passed away. My son who ended his own life last year. I don’t want to explode that conversation for me, for them, on this expectant day.
Write your nametag. Get your lanyard. Here’s a mom bag, here’s the school shop. I am anxious, deeply sad, writing the “letter to your student” all I have to say to her is I love you. I love you so so so so so so much, which is a thing she used to say to me, goodnight hug so sweet and strong, and I’d say it back: I love you so so so so so so much. And I don’t mourn that, her child self, his child self, I don’t want them back as children but try not wanting a dead one back: try.
I keep my sunglasses and my facemask on, I walk one foot in front of the other from one place to another, car, dorm room, cafeteria. I hand in my lunch ticket and follow the path to the line. I point at a sandwich and nod yes to a salad. I take a spoonful of fruit. I don’t have any space for dessert. I’m going to sit down and drink this water and feel this sorrow. We are here, and he is gone. But she is here, and we are here, and I don’t want to ruin this day for her or for me. I want this day to be the day of this new part of her life, not some dark cloak of loss and grief we breathe through and lay down as we walk on. Some things we have control over and some we do not. Here we are.
It’s a lovely campus. The people are helpful. Staff, students. And she’s got a dorm room and suite mates and a course schedule. We’d planned not to be the lingering kind, to respect the check-in window and the stay-for-lunch then presumably go, but now we’re running errands with all the other parents, no one with energy or attention for anyone but their own freshman, it’s clear, so all I have to navigate is my self and my part-whole family.
I text a college friend — joking about the one person in our old dorm, maybe on the whole campus back then, who had a mini-fridge, while we’re driving to pick one up — remember her? We trade memories by text, and I text another friend, the one I met when our older kids were three weeks old, who’s good with grief, who can hold it all. I send her little pressure valve releases that start with this intensity I’m feeling, and also like a little baby: you know how they look at you until it’s too intense and then they turn away? I pepper my texts with other little bits, I tell her how I began my day: I swam in the ocean and there were *dolphins*.
This morning I swam through the surf with a friend who talked me through how to time the big waves, when to wait and when to dive under. She told me exactly what to do. When we swam out toward the buoy and I had my head in the water, I thought: I want to see a dolphin. I lifted my face and she called out “Dolphin!” And it took me a little while between big swells and choppy waves and then I saw it too: a dolphin, then two of them, maybe a hundred yards from us, black fin and back curving out and into the water. The joy that welled in my body, buoyed in the water like an aquatic version of an ant in the universe of the ocean: “Magic!” I shouted, and I told her I’d wanted to see one just before and she said beaming at me: “it’s George!” Like he can answer my little natural prayers, and my heart swells with hers: if he sends me a dolphin I’ll take it. On the way back she told me how to swim fast, looking backward, watching for the big wave and the smaller ones between, and treading water she demonstrated if you get tumbled in a wave pull your limbs in tight like this, arms in an x across her chest. I swam just like she said and then we were out laughing with exhilaration up the beach, talking dolphins and waves. I told her she was a good guide and she said one of her regular group is blind, and sometimes she swims with him, attached by a tether at the waist, and just like with me this morning, tells him when to wait, when to dive, when to swim.
After we move the minifridge in I keep my sunglasses on and we help unpack the stuff and when our daughter is ready we go, we’ve talked already, we’ve said out loud things that need to be said this time: that we thought were obvious unspoken but we’re taking no chances, the three of us, the two of us parents: if you need us, for any reason, do not hesitate: call. For anything. Any time. Do not hesitate. Ask for help — and we’ve talked through what you might be thinking: it’s not Don’t kill yourself. It’s way before and also: we’ll never know. There is no way to go back and help him through, make him stop, if we could, we thought he knew he could call on us: we’re his parents for fuck’s sake.
We take our family photo, the three of us, so I can savor this day, and we drive away.
A while back — grief has its waves and phases, and I’m in one now that is full of new memories, new photographs, of things I’ve done with friends and family in this new year without my son — but the first time my daughter and husband left, and I didn’t go with them, I had a near panic attack. I anxietied my way forward to the worst — thinking how could I let them go away, together?! And I made a plan for that worst, because I knew I could not survive, I knew I could not get up off that floor, I thought I knew exactly what it would be like if they were both gone — dead — and my answer was: no.
I would write an email telling everyone I love how much, a single big loving email, and I would go down to the water to swim. Past the first shock of discomfort and a few minutes later the used-to-it cold, and then to the next phase which is shivering cold. Your feet are already numb, from the soles up, and the pinkies of your hands separate and you can’t get them back until you’re out and warm — it’s called “the claw,” like a lobster’s — I’ve felt that through the winter, I’ve felt and seen the graph of that, for me twenty-five minutes at 51 degrees, and the blue of my fingernails and the yellow of the soles of my feet. I’ve always gotten out before the next one, the place on the graph I’ve never felt, the warmth that comes after the cold, the dangerous place that leads experienced mountaineers and lost hikers to strip off their clothes as the body and the brain miscommunicate, and one leads the other to feel hot, too hot.
And that was my plan for the worst. But now, based on survival and experience, this is what I would send: Help. Help me, I need your help.
There’s a lot of it out there; I know. A lot of loving hands that know how to do things like: hold yours. Walk you across the street in the first acute ripped-from-your-body loss when you can’t make sense of the walk signal on the streetlight. Hold you with their words like a tether to your body, and say; walk now, swim now, wait now, dive now, surface and swim now. The helpers know. Life is full of things that happen, and it is a fact I feel in my heart on this day of possibility and loss: everything changes. Everyone born will die. All of our children; all of us.
And I can hold these two; possibility and loss. Grief lives in me, comes in waves over me, passes through me. It’s hard to argue there are not too many people on the earth, but that also means there are enough to ask for help from, more than enough: to take a walk with, hold hands across a broken heart, a street. If the brain can convince itself the body is boiling up when it’s really freezing to death, before it gets to that, we can hold cold hands in warm ones, we can open our eyes and wish for dolphins, we can be, just be, alive and breathing, alone, together.
