September 6th: Happy Heavenly Birthday, Philip!

September 6th marks what would have been the 25th birthday of Philip Anthony, my first-born grandson.   Bitter.  Sweet. Goodness! Time plays mind games---sometimes moving slower-than-sorghum-molasses, yet in an instant, speeding with lightning flashes.  The days after his Sudden Infant Deat, time stood still or blitzed seamlessly and so quickly that I'd look around and wonder where the months had gone, and how time had hopscotched from July to Halloween.

 I remember walking into stores festooned in orange and black crepe paper, carved plastic jack o' lanterns, candy aisles replete with orange and yellow candy corn.  White, attentuated cardboard skeletons held together with thumbtacks, seemed to be swaying every place I turned.  Suddenly, the thought of celebrating Halloween made my stomach roil.  I pictured  Philip dead, skeletonized: a grotesquerie.  That first Halloween, I turned off all the lights in my home, unscrewed the light bulb outside the front door, and cried my eyes dry.  Two decades later, I still try not to acknowledge Halloween, which challenges my senses, sanity, and stability.

while Philip's life here on earth was abbreviated, I nowdraw comfort knowing he enjoys eternal life in Heaven.  A consolation, surely, even when I'm missing him; I still imagine how he would look like as a teenager---how tall, how heavy, buffed, athletic or a brainiac? Hmm.  I wonder the choices he would be making, whether he would be immersed in community service or politics as his grandmother was.  We went everywhere together, my little running buddy and me, to churches, political rallies, and even school board meetings. We went to parks, grocery stores, and birthday parties. 

Because his Mom had gone away to college shortly after his birth,  I became an amalgam of the grandmother-caretaker-surrogate mother.  It didn't seem to bother Philip. I was  "Nana."  My grandchildren, who were born years after Philip, know me as "Grandmother" or "GMom" because I buried "Nana" with Philip.  Extensive counseling became my "Walking Cane," although it felt like I moved through grief at sorghum molasses speed or as a one-mile-per-hour, stalled hurricane

The quandary centered on defining  who  I was and how properly whoever I was grieved.  As grandmother? Caretaker? Surrogate mother? I tried to compartmentalize roles with feelings. Grappling with guilt or wrestling with weakness, I could not put to rest what I could have, should have done, to prevent his death.  Crazy? Yes! .The pain ebbs and flows, as surely as the waters of Lake Michigan mesmerize.  I suppose death's anniversary surfaces feelings thought to have been buried in secret places of the heart.  "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God"  (Psalm 42: 11)