Coming of Age

Thirteen years ago, you slipped from my body into the hopeful promise that greets perfectly formed infants with only the future ahead of them. The occasion of this milestone is more difficult than the two that preceded it, ringing with an extra hollowness in your absence. Under the pressure of this moment, I came to understand how this is different—not in the way that the heft of grief normally undulates—but in a way that is singularly attached to this age: thirteen.

I watch your friends cross the threshold into teendom, one by one, getting lankier, adultish, and truly becoming who they are. Every parent watches this process in amazement and horror, powerless to accelerate or slow the pace of change.

But Colin, dear Colin, will always remain a child. We never had the luxury of imagining you grown up, nor have I ever entertained fantasies of a version of you that never collided with ependymoma. To cope with reality, I had to remain in the present and not indulge in dangerous games of what-if. I can imagine pieces of your personality expanded into the fullness of adulthood: gregarious, fun-loving, witty.

These snippets are not even remotely close to the fully formed humans who are sprouting in either your brother or your budding peers. The dissonance between the unimaginable and the raw truth of pubertal emergence is, to put it in a single word, heavy.

The world spins. The sun rises and sets as it will for longer than humanity will tarnish the earth. And a birthday becomes a monument to the distance between the present and the past. It is also more than that; it is an occasion to remember and celebrate the guffaws and cuddles and the fullness of a life well lived, if short.

But for a minute, I ask permission to sit with the weight of this number, 13, and its indifferent mockery. Maybe the solution is to ignore the numbers and focus only on the sunbeam smiles and indominable spirit that now gambol nimbly in the ether, freed from their corporeal bonds. Let it be so, the birthday wrapping in a fantastic bow the triumphant perfection of tragedy that willfully sheds its own misfortune. And let that delightful gravity pull stronger than the light-sucking grief that turns our heads to loss more than Colin’s legacy: perseverant light and the embodiment of hope.