An ordinary Tuesday

An ordinary Tuesday

“There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.” —President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)

There are chapters of the Bible you study, chapters you underline and chapters you discover, sometimes rather inconveniently, that you have lived.

Job 3 is one of mine.

Sunday’s sermon in our current series on The Book of Job dealt with the moment when Job, having endured about as much misery as one guy ought to be expected to endure for a lifetime and then some, finally opens his mouth after a week of silence.

What comes out isn’t pretty.

He curses the day he was born.

He wishes his birthday could simply be erased from the calendar.

I sat there listening on a gray, drizzly September morning and found myself thinking about a little boy who never had a birthday.

His name was Samuel Christopher. Sammy.

We lost him to miscarriage on August 12, 1998. Had everything gone the way we expected, he would have been born in March 1999.

Which means he would be 27 years old now.

Twenty-seven.

That’s the peculiar arithmetic of losing a child. The calendar keeps doing calculations you never asked it to perform.

It is one thing to grieve the baby you lost.

It is another to realize, many years later, that somewhere in your parental heart the baby kept growing up.

Samuel isn’t frozen in 1998 for me.

Time continued moving even though he wasn’t here to move through it.

There should have been a March birthday in our family every year.

Maybe there would have been balloons when he was little. A cake with three candles, then five, then 10.

At 13, he probably would have considered himself far too sophisticated for whatever ridiculous birthday tradition his parents insisted upon maintaining.

At 16, there might have been car keys to a Dave Ramsey “hoopty.”

At 18, graduation.

At 21, another threshold.

And this past March there should have been 27 candles.

There weren’t.

There were no birthdays at all.

No first Christmas. No pictures with Santa and Mrs. Claus at Boulder Junction Christmas Walk.

No Thanksgiving dinners with Sammy sitting somewhere at the table between his older sister and younger brother, jostling for a slice of Dad’s homemade pumpkin pie.

No kindergarten.

No school pictures.

No lost teeth.

No report cards.

No riding shotgun with Dad in BJVFD Brush One, tossing candy to the smiling, waving crowds lining Main Street on the Fourth of July.

No Little League games or band concerts or school plays.

I don’t even know whether he would have liked baseball, played trumpet or clarinet, or regarded both activities as barbaric customs inflicted upon children by well-meaning adults.

That’s part of the loss, too.

We never got to find out.

There was no first crush.

No first date.

No prom.

No graduation.

No first apartment.

No first real job.

No phone call asking Dad how to fix something.

No phone call asking Dad for advice and then ignoring it, which I understand is one of the ancient privileges of being 22.

No wedding.

No possibility of someday standing beside my grown son, straightening his tie before he married the person he loved.

No grandchildren from Samuel.

Those are the obvious milestones.

But sitting in church Sunday, I realized the greatest absence may be something much smaller.

There was no everyday life.

No ordinary Tuesdays.

No cereal bowls left in the sink.

No shoes in the middle of the floor.

No arguments over bedtime.

No slammed bedroom door.

No laughter coming from another room.

No complaints that there was “nothing to eat” while standing in front of a refrigerator containing enough provisions to sustain a small Wisconsin municipality.

No teaching him to drive.

No stupid jokes.

No family arguments and reconciliations.

No texts saying, “Hey Dad.”

No sitting together saying nothing at all.

No 27 years of discovering who Samuel Christopher actually was.

That may be the cruelest trick of losing a child before you know him.

You don’t only lose the child.

You lose the person he might have become.

I have no idea what Samuel would look like at 27.

Would he look like me? His mother? His brother or sister?

Would he be tall?

Would he have a beard?

Would his hair already be retreating, providing him with something else to blame on his father?

Would he live nearby or have scattered halfway across the country?

Would he love road trips and history the way I do?

Would he humor his father’s peculiar fascination with old two-lane highways and postcards?

Or would he spend three hours on old U.S. Highway 51 before finally asking why we couldn’t take the interstate like normal people?

Would we be close?

I don’t know.

And the not knowing is part of mourning him.

There is grief for what happened.

Then there is grief for everything that didn’t happen because of it.

That second grief can last a lifetime because life keeps producing new things to miss.

The grief of 1998 was losing our baby.

Later came the realization that there should have been another little boy running through the house.

Then there should have been another high school graduate.

Another 21st birthday.

Now there should be a 27-year-old man.

Someday, if I live long enough, I may find myself thinking that Samuel should be 40 and then 50.

The empty chair grows older with the rest of us.

Maybe that’s why grief can surprise us decades later.

It isn’t necessarily that the wound never healed.

It’s that life keeps revealing another dimension of what was lost.

Most days I don’t walk around actively grieving Sammy. Life would be impossible if I did.

His loss has become part of my geology, buried beneath nearly three decades of work, children growing up, moves, vacations, friendships, careers, deaths, birthdays, holidays and thousands upon thousands of ordinary days.

But deep doesn’t mean gone.

Every once in a while something reaches through all those layers and touches it.

Sunday morning, it was Job.

And suddenly Samuel was close again.

I found myself wondering what his voice would sound like.

What would make him laugh.

What he would do for a living.

Whether he would root for the Brewers or Cubs, or torment his father by caring about neither.

Whether, at 27, he would still hug his dad.

I’d like to think so.

There are no answers to those questions.

There never will be.

But perhaps after all these years I’ve learned that not every grief needs an answer.

Sometimes remembering is enough.

Sometimes saying a name is enough.

Samuel Christopher. Sammy.

Our son.

He should be 27 years old.

There should have been birthdays and Christmas mornings and first dates and graduations and perhaps a wedding and grandchildren.

But Sunday morning I realized what I really wanted wasn’t any of those grand occasions.

I’d settle for an ordinary Tuesday.

Just one.

Maybe that’s what love does after someone is gone.

Eventually it stops asking for the extraordinary.

It would give almost anything for the ordinary.

Vilas County News-Review freelance columnist Eric A. Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.