The day before the viewing, I pulled out his memory box, the cheap Rubbermaid box in which I’d gathered so many important items. I have a box for each of us in the family, to keep things that have been important in our journeys. As I knelt there on the floor of my kitchen, pulling out the newspaper from the day he was born, the birth announcement, his “going home from the hospital” outfit, his hospital bracelets, his first pair of AFO’s (leg splints), letters we’d written to him in hopes that one day he’d be able to read them for himself and realize what a miracle he was and how blessed we felt to know him…..As I pulled all of these out of this box, I started to cry. My first real cry since he died and it was of the soul deep, gut wrenching variety. Everyone else in the room looked helpless. My mom wanted to come to me, I could tell, to cushion me from the overwhelming grief that was tearing through my body. She couldn’t reach me. My husband got there first, and cried with me. But all I could do was say over and over, through the wracking sobs, “This wasn’t supposed to be for ME to go through! It was for HIM to see when he grew up! This was meant for him!” It’s a terrible thing…to realize a memory box would no longer be holding any new memories. To realize, the memories it holds are the only ones left.
I made a new, better memory box. Actually, I bought it. It’s an oak trunk, lined with cedar. A sort of hope chest. It looked out of place in my house for years, but it was important to me to have it. Inside it, the many things that were part of Sullivan’s life are carefully stored. The pajamas he died in, the sock monkey he loved, the baby toy he fought his cousin over just weeks before his death. There are more letters, blankets that were made for him, stuffed animals bought for him. So many THINGS; so many memories. So many things which are all I have left of Sullivan to love.
There are days my arms feel empty. I remember this feeling from when he was first hospitalized. For a month, I walked around that hospital with his baby blanket and a teddy bear in my arms. I slept with them. I didn’t set them aside, except when I was somehow touching him. You know what I do now? I sleep with that same teddy bear. Must be regressing….as a toddler, I had a teddy almost like this one. I know cuz my original teddy is sitting up on a shelf welcoming guests into my home. The blanket is gone, cremated with him. It seemed fitting to send his body to the fire, wrapped in the blanket that brought him home.
The blanket had brought him home again and again. Every time he was in the hospital, the blanket went with him. Sometimes it was just draped over a chair in the room, there for me to snuggle with through the long hours of being there for Sullivan. Sometimes, it was in the crib with him, wrapped around him as he slept. As soon as he woke, the blanket was thrown off! Even when he slept, he often couldn’t stand to have a blanket covering him. I can only guess that those little legs loved to move so much, a blanket felt like a trap, a hindrance to his energetic movements.
Now, five years since his death, it’s sometimes hard to remember it all. Life is so very different now. Boxes, blankets and bears are the keys to my memories.
