Chapter 5. Still here

4 minute read

I’ve been processing my son Sam’s death now for several years. You may be seeing/reading this story for the first time, and so it may be shocking or uncomfortable for you. But I hope you’ll be brave and read or share Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss with someone you know who is trying to process their loss.

about this chapter

In Chapter 5. Still here, time, a recurring theme throughout the book, keeps moving on despite what has happened. I hate time for that, for moving only forward, for not stopping and allowing me to go back, to bring Sam back.

the morning after

Ready or not, our migration, the forced shift from who we were to Who are we now? was beginning.

(from Chapter 5. Still here, choices)

I don’t know how, but our bodies are walking, talking, even driving. Somehow, by late morning, David and I are sitting in a funeral home making unthinkable decisions.

Where are the child-sized caskets? I think, turning the pages of a glossy catalog filled with coffins. There are tiny caskets with teddy bears for babies, and bigger ones with golf clubs for adults, but nothing in between.

The funeral director explains that we have to decide this day whether to cremate or bury Sam. “Bodies are treated differently based on these choices.”

Choices? Freeze or embalm? Keep him or never hold him again? Burn his precious body to bits and ashes? Or leave him in a cemetery, in the dark, all alone?

The choosing permanently injured my mind. It’s only a body, I kept telling myself. His essence, his soul, is no longer in it. But it was his body. His sweet corn-niblet toes. His peaches-and-cream skin. His wavy, wheat-colored hair that smelled like apples.

(from Chapter 5. Still here: choices)

Driving again, we’ve left the funeral home with an assignment: to write Sam’s obituary.

Reducing Sam’s life to a column, a newspaper clipping, is not enough. There is so much more. He is so much more. I need to write more.

I want to scream

Thursday, the day of Sam’s funeral, the wildfires that have been burning for days converge into the largest recorded forest fire in the history of both Georgia and Florida. A thick layer of holocaustic smoke shrouds the city of Jacksonville, and it’s raining ashes.

I need to speak. Standing at a podium facing Sam’s closed casket, I’m not nervous, which is unexpected since I loathe public speaking. I wonder about this, how odd it is that I feel so calm, so unafraid. But I have no more fear. None at all. I’m indignant. I’m mad-angry.

Searching the synagogue, gazing out at the sea of faces staring up at me, I want to point to Sam’s coffin and keep pointing, punching the air with my fist. I want to scream at everyone.

Will you believe me now? This is what I was afraid of! THIS! Because—and you should know this if you don’t know this already—nothing, NOTHING, is ever what it seems! He was only a boy, but he was an old soul in the body of a child. A magician, a wizard—a genius! He was courageous, magnetic, unpredictable. A dreamer, a soldier, brave but sensitive, and fragile, too fragile . . .

(from Chapter 5. Still here, a funeral)

Instead, I read my speech, the one I’d written the night before.

I go off script and talk about how I’d started writing Sam’s Story just after he was born, but stopped when we found out about . . . I say that one day, maybe, I’ll start writing again . . . about this . . . about Sam’s heart.

After the funeral, outside on the sidewalk, standing beside Sam’s grown-up–sized casket, I don’t know what to do. I see my father sobbing, the rabbi holding him.

I turn back to Sam, and his coffin is being pushed into a dark hearse with tinted windows. I close my eyes and hear horrifying, high-pitched, wolflike howling that goes on and on until there is no sound at all.

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