Charles

I think it's time to write a little post about my son. I have a lot of children. It can be confusing, especially when even though it seems like they won't hold still long enough to count them, you can't seem to get higher than six, but you're sure I told you I have seven. Where's the missing one?

He's in Heaven. He's up at the cemetery. He's in our hearts. We've explained it numerous ways to our children over the years, depending on context. And fielded all kinds of hilarious questions stemming from the difficulty in understanding the concept of Where Does Charles Live? Is the cemetery where Charles lives? Do I have a special place at the cemetery? Oh, he lives in heaven? Can I go to Heaven and see him? What if I lived at Heaven too?

Charles is my fourth child. Almost exactly six years ago, when he was two and a half, and my fifth child was a three-month-old infant, we were walking to the store, Jane strapped to my chest and Charles in the wagon behind me. It was two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and we were walking on the sidewalk in a school zone. A truck full of hooligans high on drugs made a bad turn at an intersection, drove up onto the sidewalk and struck the wagon. Charles was killed instantly, Jane and I were totally unscathed.

Wow. It's hard to know where to go from there. Even six years later, I have too many thoughts and feelings that I want to share to pick one out and go with it. Maybe at this point, I just want to tell you about him, and also to clarify something that I think people who know me might have been thinking for some time now:

Charles and Max, his grampa, who
we hope are back together now.

Bob has been around much, much longer than Charles. Of course, anxiety, guilt, sorrow, and the whole package are Meat and Potatoes to Bob, and he's grown strong on them, but Charles' death wasn't Bob's birth. If anything, it's provided me with more tools to defeat and shut out Bob than any other event in my life. Which is weird, and I'm not even sure I can explain that.

Since this is a craft and depression blog, I'll tell you something that makes me sad, something I don't think I've ever mentioned to anyone before (so what better place to air my secret than The Internets, where anyone can see and it will be here for all time): I never made anything for Charles. He was my first boy, but he was a surprise boy - that is, going by the ultrasound pictures, we named him Jane and had a bunch of pink stuff ready and waiting. So the pretty flowered baby blanket I crocheted for him stayed in the closet, the baptism bonnet with lace somehow didn't get finished, and when Easter Dress Time rolled around, he got a new shirt from Target. He didn't even like dressing up, and he was only old enough to go Trick-or-Treating one Halloween.

Four children turned out to take up a lot of my time. That was when my making-things-thing started to tail off a bit. For example, I used to make Pysanky (Ukranian Easter Eggs) for my children and Godchildren during Lent every year, with their initials and the year on each one. I think I started one for Charles when he was two,

determined that he should have at least one, but I didn't finish it; over a year after I started it, the egg carton tipped over in the closet and the egg popped, and everything in the carton had to be discarded, very very quickly. So, when I take up that hobby again, the first egg I make will be in his memory.

This is a photo of me that appeared in
the local newspaper coverage of
Charles' funeral - hundreds of
people were there.

Now I feel like I should end this post with something positive and lovely, but I'm kind of coming up blank. I have a new reflection from this year's Easter Season, though. During Jesus' Last Supper prayer, he says "No greater love has any man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends." I was sad, at times, that I didn't have even one second in which to try and save my son, even at the expense of my own life. People would say "wow, it's so lucky that you and Jane survived!" and I took it as graciously as I could, even though everything in me wanted to retort "Oh yeah? Lucky for whom?" I've never in my life been suicidal, but there have been long, long stretches of time where I wished I was dead.

And finally this year it clicked into place for me. One doesn't have to die in order to lay down one's life. Lucky for whom? For my children who were still with me. For Paul and Silas, who weren't born yet. For my husband, who may not have been able to take the loss of two children and a wife, but who bore up under the heavy loss of a son, with the help of his wife.

And for my friends. For all the people I love, I don't just die. I lay down my life by living it.