Who made the choice to cremate him on his birthday? Was he naked, or was he dressed in his favorite Paul Frank monkey pajamas? And if he was cremated naked, then where are the pajamas he wore last? Nobody can tell me. My son was burned, and I do not know what he was wearing.
Karen sat across the table from me while I cried openly into my tomato bisque, her hand over mine the whole time, my free one going uselessly to my face and coming away wet. Fall light through the mall windows, a waitress delivering food to the table in front of us, someone calling out an order for a latte, and me coming apart in the middle of all of it. The couple beside us looked uncomfortable, but if they had known why I was crying, I am certain they would have understood. I think one of them would have gotten up and hugged me.
I can ask Karen these questions out loud, in a Nordstrom Cafe at the mall in Denver, because Karen has been in my life as another mother, a sister, a best friend, because she loved Ronan with every fiber she is made of and she still does, because she is godmother to Liam and Quinn, because she was a mother to Ronan the whole time he was sick and walked every step of it beside us. She knows the answers to some of these questions, and the ones she does not know, she still knows how to hold. She has been my safe place in so many ways. So crying in a Nordstrom Cafe feels fine to me, because she is the one on the receiving end of my tears.
I keep going with my questions, and the questions turn into the stories of how badly Ryan House failed us. She already knows every one of these stories, and she lets me tell them to her again anyway.
Ryan House is a hospice center for children. A place built entirely for this, and it still could not do this. Why did nobody sit us down and talk to us about the process of our child dying? Why did nobody ask us: Would you like his handprints or his footprints in cement, so you can have them forever? Who would you like to see him after he has died? Would you like him cremated in certain clothes? Would you like his brothers to be with him after he is gone? And why did nobody tell us that we could hold him and rock him for as long as we wanted, that nobody had to come and take him away?
I would have held him all night. I would still be holding him if I could.
Karen does not let go of my hand.
None of those things happened. So I carry extra layers of trauma I should never have had to carry. Wounds that will never heal.
Do I train to become a death doula for children? Because I do not know what else to do with all of this. I have to put it somewhere. I have to use the pain to help others.
The soup has gone cold in front of me.
I cry so hard that at one point I have to cover my face.
And here is what is behind my hands.
My unrelenting, fuck with you in the middle of the day, or the night, or whenever it wants to rear its head, grief.
I was his mother. I AM his mother. I was the one who knew him best, the secret dimple on the side of his little cheek, the way he smelled after his bath, the things we whispered to each other in his last moments. So I should have fucking known. I should have known to ask for the handprints and the footprints. I should have known to ask what he would be wearing. I should have known that I was allowed to hold him afterward, that I could have sat in that room and rocked him for as long as I wanted, that nobody had the right to take him out of my arms until I said so. Because I AM his Mother.
I failed him in life because I could not save him from dying. I failed him in death because he was not honored the way he should have been. Where were the rituals? Where was the ceremony for a boy who was the whole of my life? Why did Woody and I not lie down on a bed together with our son between us and weep and hold him for as long as it took? Why did nobody tell us we could?
Except I did not have the wherewithal to know any of it. I did not even understand what was happening. I was out of my mind and out of my body, numb all the way through, my brain doing the only merciful thing it knew how to do, which was to trick me into believing this was not happening. Not to him. Not to us. Our miracle was still coming. Even in the days before his death, our miracle was moments away. Or so I thought.
And so now I sit in a Nordstrom Cafe and weep openly about things I can never go back and change. I carry regrets I will carry until I die.
And underneath every single one of them is the one that never moves, the one all the others are just decoration on top of.
I do not have my son.
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