3 minute read
What can I say about today?
April 30, 2026.
Since every day, almost every hour, I think of my beautiful boy, Sam. His name circles my mind, my heart, from back to front, a subtle loop, a recording, a continuous ticker tape, in the background a whirring, clicking, and beeping biotelemetry.
Sam Kassenoff
3/2/98 – 4/30/2007
Today’s not so different from any other day, really. Only a marker in time; nineteen years.
Time keeps on ticking, moving along. Time has taught me how to… It’s dulled my sorrow into a tolerable ache, which I’ve learned to live with and reshape, somehow, into words.
Then, in a flash, I recalled seeing Sam’s art project, his cartouche—images pasted into an oval frame on blue construction paper and colored in with magic markers—among the piles I’d gathered on the dining room table. The ancient Egyptians, I’d learned, believed a person’s name embodied their identity, and as long as the deceased’s name was remembered, spoken, and written, he would continue to survive and live on in the afterworld. It was the cartouche that marked the mummy’s tomb. I studied it then, Sam’s cartouche, his name—𓋴 𓅂 𓅓—in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics: the folded cloth for S; the sacred vulture for A; the magical owl for M, which made me think of Sam and the Firefly and how they made words out of light when the moon was full. And the moon was full this day, I thought, which had to mean something. Carefully, I positioned the mummy kit back on the bottom shelf and marked the tomb with Sam’s cartouche, propping it up just so beside it.
an excerpt from Willower: Rewriting Life After Unimaginable Loss: Chapter 6. Searching: a mummy.
And so, today, I want to see his name.
The way he wrote it in print.
The way he wrote it in cursive.
The way it looks as wooden letters, train cars.
His name in orange-glow painted on his pillowcase.
His name, his doodled face, in Sharpie marker on his snack-box.
His name spelled out in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics: the folded cloth for S; the sacred vulture for A; the magical owl for M.
…as long as the deceased’s name was remembered, spoken, and written, he would continue to survive and live on in the afterworld.
His name stamped over and over and over by him with his personalized blue lizard name stamp.
Certainly, this one will ensure he continues to survive and live on in the afterworld.
💚
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