Fireworks Give Us Everything

Ohhh Summertime. It’s when I feel him nearest which means I also feel him furthest away. I realize this only makes sense if you’re grieving. Filled with paradox is grief. But my son Christopher, is simply all that is free and easy. The Fourth of July always gets me. It feels like it ushers in the heart of summer. It comes straight for the heart. The intensity of stimuli on this day of the year makes it ripe with spirit. And my boy was spirited. Red, white, and blue flags speckle the neighbor’s lawns, children laugh, people gather for a parade. The heat. My senses are heightened with vivid recollections.

I picture Chris, maybe two, his big eyes wide, crying in his daddy’s arms when the fireworks popped in the night. Then, age ten, oblivious to their loud rocketing sounds on the same village lawn we’d had to depart years before. He is rushing off away from our family blanket to buy glow stick necklaces to gather around his neck and throw back and forth with his buddies. Years later, at nineteen, he’s come home for the summer and gotten too caught up in his wildness, had to decide he’d better head back to Tucson on the Fourth, so as not to find himself carried away again in his inability to know how not to celebrate too hard. A firework himself, I often said. I said that when he was still alive before I could fully appreciate just how much.

This year, eight years after his passing, I looked up at the sky and it clicked. Standing next to my eighty-three-year-old mom, so much like a kid herself as she excitedly took in the bursts of color above the trees. Suddenly crystal clear whereas all the years I’ve watched without him it hadn’t hit me yet.

Like the fireworks, my boy was so very here and then so gone.

For those first years, I’m pretty sure I hid inside on the Fourth, his absence too glaring for me to bear. I spent so many days writing to him, trying to get him back. Pulling him close, seeking his spirit, threading it into my broken heart. I yearned so deeply I couldn’t touch him enough yet.

And then I found him. He has always been here! I insist wordlessly into the night. I feel him in pure moments such as these. The sky brightens with streams of white fountains of light pouring down on us, his grandmother and grandfather, Joe, Caroline, Paul, Lovie, and me. Chris must also be looking down on Colorado where Will and Linnea are also looking out at fireworks from their apartment. On this night of celebration, how could I not celebrate both our country and my son’s light. My heart explodes like a firework when I picture him here with his family, with all his friends, his loyalty and big love.   

A firework gives us everything doesn’t it? We get it all. He was it all. All in. In that sacred minute, the sky is lit up with colors, music plays, and we watch flowers in high speed go into bloom. Pure emotional excitement, joyful sprays of starry dandelions jumping in our direction. It feels like him. A hit of his laughter, innocence, and love in a flash. That is Chris. He is a streamer, a sparkler, flickering fast. He is my favorite firework forming from white to the bluest twinkles raining down before they dissolve. And I keep taking pictures as if I can capture the moment, hold it close. But it can’t be held. It is even more beautiful because it can only be deeply felt in the moment.

And the next day, my husband and I are reflecting on the night before, and the years Chris was here, and we are coming down from the bittersweetness of his presence and our missing. We are tired, grateful, and sad as we quietly remember. Then Joey says the perfect thing, “Sometimes when you are in the middle of sweetness, you don’t even know it do you? Not until you look back.”