The Divine Sense of Sameness

Emma's friend J lives a couple blocks up the road from us. I'm not sure when they became friends, but we first became aware of J.'s presence in Emma's life when Peter was driving Emma to high school in the morning during her freshman year. J. would be standing on the corner of his street as Emma and Peter drove by and he would raise his hand to his hat and salute them as they drove by. "Who's that?" Peter asked the first time they received the salute. "Oh, that's my friend J," Emma answered. "He's in band with me." One time Peter pulled over to offer him a ride, but he politely declined, choosing to continue to salute people he knew while waiting for the school bus to arrive. 

Later, Emma also began to ride the bus in the morning and we gather that they became frequent seatmates. J was a year older than Emma and when he got his license, he would drive Emma to school whenever he could snag the family car for the day and regularly drove her to their evening jazz band rehearsals. Every so often, however, Emma would head off to the bus in the morning and 20 minutes later the doorbell would ring. J would be standing at our door, often loaded down with a large quantity of bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches he'd picked up to sell at school and a sob story about how the deli didn't have his order ready on time. The punchline was always the same, "You think you could give me a ride?" he'd say. "Sure," I'd answer. "I'll grab my keys. Meet me at the car." During the short ride to school he would thoroughly entertain me with tales of his exploits and interests. I usually missed about half of his references, but his gusto kept me interested and amused. I was almost sorry when we arrived at the door of the school and he had to hop out.


The thing about losing a child is that it changes every aspect of your life. So much of your time is devoted to doing things with that child and for that child. When they disappear from your life, they leave not just a big hole in your heart, but a hole in your day. Your daily routines and rhythms change: the way you set the table; how much dinner you cook; what you cook; what you do in the morning, the evening and all the hours in between. Everything changes. And at some point you realize it's never going back to normal. Grief counselors urge you to embrace the "new normal."  It's sound, but frankly, unwelcome advice because I liked the old normal. I wasn't in the market for a new normal. 


That's why when something happens that makes me feel like I've retained some small piece of that old normal, I genuinely feel like celebrating. 


A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around the house in the afternoon with Sarah when the phone rang. It was J who had recently returned home from college. "Hey," he said. "Could you do me a small favor?" "Sure," I said. "What do you need?" "Could you give me a ride home?" I picked him up about a block from our house. He was loaded down with some groceries he had purchased at a nearby store without thinking about how heavy they would get during the walk home. On the short ride to his house he regaled me with stories about the WWF and the WWE. I'm woefully uninformed on these matters, but that didn't discourage him. He was happy to carry the conversation and I was happy to listen. More than happy, actually, because it was a little piece of that old normal and I had captured it.  Ahhh, the divine sense of sameness.