The World Keeps Spinning

Last Saturday, my husband Joe and I went out to dinner with our daughter Caroline for my birthday. I looked up at the wall behind our table where a massive photograph of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards hung on the wall. I proudly announced to our server that we had known that very professional photographer and that he had also taken some amazing photos of two of our children when they were little. She nodded, stifled a yawn and asked if there was anything else we needed before putting our order in.

Mitch took this shot of my son Christopher at age five and his sister Caroline, age three, about six months before William was born. Time flies. Mitchell Canoff died of cancer a number of years back and the little boy with his arm around his sister has been in Heaven since January of 2016.

And strangely, time both passes quickly and doesn’t pass at all when you’ve lost a child. You’re not sure you really want it to.

Two days after our dinner, Caroline and her boyfriend Paul showed up to announce they’d gotten engaged the night before. This little girl in her floral dress and dimpled elbows is getting married. And I couldn’t be happier.

Nor could I be happier for all of Chris’s friends who are married, getting married or having children of their own. Chris would be thirty now and likely married himself if he had lived past twenty-one. But I generally choose not to think about what he would be doing if he was here. I deliberately choose to focus on these milestones as the bursts of love that brought them about and the opportunity they provide to share in the love with them. I try to let what could have been my son’s future go.

And with every day that miraculously passes after I thought the world should stop, there is a natural beckoning to also let Chris’s past fade away and relinquish his presence. But I won’t.

Chris is still here for me now, he is ageless, forever young. I envision him guiding and helping all of the many people he loves from Heaven where he’s busy doing errands for God. He is an amalgamation of the sparkly boy he was on earth and the bright light his spirit has become.

As the world keeps spinning, I realize that with everyone else I have loved who has died, I have succumbed to the beckoning and allowed their presence to fade into the background on most days. I think it’s human nature. I bring them close only in my prayers or when I’m prompted by a memory, a photo, or a keepsake to honor them with a smile of gratitude.

With Christopher, it’s different. Time doesn’t really mean a thing. When his little sister gets married, (and she will always be his little sister), I have no doubt that he will be a part of all the celebrating in the year ahead. He will definitely be at the parties. He wouldn’t miss a party. And who knows? Maybe he even brought the gift of Paul Caroline’s way in the first place. He brings so many gifts our way. He would definitely approve. Will sure does. A friend just noted that Paul has a touch of the McQuillen look about him. He could certainly be “ours,” except, that is, for his height. And now he will be.