Absence

I am not often given to the highs and lows of outward emotion.  When I am happy you can see it in my eyes.  When I am sad you'll have to look more carefully to find it there, too.  I laugh heartily when amused, but I won't patronize a banal joke with more than a polite smile.  When I am sad, I'm simply quiet and taciturn.  Sometimes I don't realize the sadness that dwells inside of me and am genuinely surprised to feel the emotion.  Without warning it percolates in my chest, rises up through my throat to my mouth and causes my lips quiver ever so slightly.  Only occasionally do I feel tears well in my eyes, but even more rarely do they overflow their banks.

With the recent earthquake in Haiti and all the television coverage of it, I cannot help feeling beaten down with anguish and grief for all those that have lost so much and so many.  It's beyond incomprehensible and at the same time so unambiguous.  It hasn't helped my mood that it's January - the dead of winter .  It has seemed especially gray here the last couple of days.  The trees are bare and the air possesses the kind of damp chill that beckons one to bed, inviting sleep until spring.  And silly as it sounds - and is, the sports teams I root for have greatly faltered of late.  The Patriots were summarily dismissed from the NFL play-offs and the UConn Men's Basketball team has lost three painful games in a row.  It just adds to the malaise.

I know I have much to be grateful for - and I am, but there are times when just feeling happy doesn't scratch my emotional itch.  It's times like these I tend to miss my stillborn son, Leo, most acutely.  Had he lived he'd be about six months old now.  I can't help but wonder what our son Max would make of having a little brother.  How jealous would he be if he had to compete for our attention?  How different would the dynamics in our family be if Leo hadn't....  We had a friend visiting with her daughter this weekend and Max was being so sweet with her, sharing his toys and giving the little girl her bottle of milk when it fell to the floor.  "Here you go," he said in his sweet, lilting voice.  I couldn't help but imagine him with Leo and feel both Leo's presence and absence at the same time.

Most days, most weeks even, I do okay with the loss of Leo.  It is and I cannot change it.  I try to derive lessons from and use the experience to help me live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.  And I do.  Cosmically speaking, I feel that I haven't really lost Leo at all - that he's with me, with us everyday.  But he's not tangible.  The pictures we have of him are the way he'll always look.  We have lost something that we can never replace.  What's often worse is that I don't even know exactly what it is we've lost - just what I imagine it might have been.  I don't and won't know him as a person.  And when I am given to this sadness as I have been in these recent days since the Haiti earthquake, it's that absence that I feel most profoundly. When I see the anguish on the face of a Haitian quake victim, I can't help but deeply empathize.  One moment it's there; the next it's gone.  A void forever gaping.

Yesterday I watched most of a program about the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of elderly singers from the Northampton, Massachusetts area.  The show on PBS documented the chorus as they prepared for a live concert.  Just a week before the show, two chorus members passed away.  But show business is show business and the show went on.  I ached for those singers and the loss I knew they felt.  Just as we've 'gone on' in the wake of our loss, I knew that in spite of their brave faces lay heavy tears in wait.  One of the chorus members, Fred Knittle, was to have sung a duet of Coldplay's "Fix You" with one of the recently deceased chorus members.  Instead he took center stage alone.  The poignancy was more than palpable.

For me, the combination of the immeasurable suffering in Haiti, the bleakness of winter, the collapse of my favorite teams, of seeing Max being so tender with a younger child who wasn't his brother, and the sorrow of these elderly singers losing their fellow chorus members set me up for what I should have seen coming.  As I watched Fred Knittle shuffle his aging body on stage, lower himself into that solitary metal folding chair, and heard the rhythmic 'shhh, shhh, shhh' of his oxygen canister fill the auditorium, I began to feel that rare but familiar tightness in my gut.  I felt the muscles in my face brace for the inevitable and involuntary contortion of sorrow; my eyes welled.  Tears didn't stream down my face and no sounds of woe emanated from my mouth, but then again, I am not given to the highs and lows of emotional displays.

Click here to watch Fred Knittle and the Young@Heart Chorus perform Coldplay's "Fix You."