Sorrow

Two years after PITT published my essay “Layers of Sadness,” sorrow is a stubborn shadow that still follows me around. When I brush my teeth in the morning and again after dinner, I think about my son. In the grocery store where I had made sure to buy my son’s preferred foods, I think about him. Sorrow lingers in my home and my town, where my son had lived since his birth. Sorrow goes anywhere I had visited with my son. Sorrow even goes on my vacations, especially during a July week at a cottage next to a pond which, for many summers, my son had enjoyed, too. But I refuse to let go of treasured time at my favorite pond. The most tender sorrow is seeing boys and young men. What was and what I’ve been cheated from are unavoidable as I go about my days. 

Perspective softens sorrow. Others lose children to accidents, illness, suicide, war, crime. I am grateful my son is alive, though lost in a cruel, ambiguous way: there, but not there. He is not forever gone, buried in the ground. I know what dead looks like: my mother’s lifeless body in her bed after hospice care; my father-in-law in an open casket. Both so still, forever. Dead people don’t reply to a sporadic email or, albeit rarely, talk on the phone. Dead people cannot meet a few times a year for a few hours. Sparse contact with my son at once relieves and exacerbates the pierce of sorrow. Though asleep to lies that are stealing his health and potential, my 22-year-old son still exists. While I have let go of short-term hope, I cannot bear to extinguish long term hope that someday my son may wake up.

My sorrow wrestles with subjecting myself to my son’s self-righteous narcissism. Obsessed with his delusion, my son’s dismissal of my frantic guidance devalues and mocks my active caring for him since the day he was born. That said, my son's autistic traits have primed him to be manipulated in devastating ways. Though thwarted, primal love for my son resists withering away. I miss my son fiercely. My husband misses him, too. He was a kind, invested father, and his loss of his one precious son to the horror of an obscene ideology is the most poignant part of my sorrow. 

Sorrow deepens its roots as time passes, and my son is more and more distant. Family gatherings continue without him. His grandfather died. I rescued a dog after my son’s childhood dog died (if only I could rescue my son.) The sweetness of my adult daughter’s holiday visits also include the sorrow of her brother’s absence at our dinner table. Though sorrow would still sully a family meal if my son was there with his disturbing appearance and absurd belief that he is a woman.

Sorrow spills into the past. Hovering between my husband and me is tacit resistance to share memories of our son. Still, we dip into the sting of the before. It’s too terrible for our recollections of our son to be taken from us, too. But when we say his name that he insists is dead, we endure again his callous charade that shuns the reality of him as our cherished infant son, little boy, and teenager. It’s as if a polluted tornado is determined to pull even memories of our son into cold outer space.

A friend urges refocusing on what my life can offer around the ache of sorrow. My mind tells me this makes sense, despite my heart’s resistance. I started playing pickleball and joined a book discussion group. I remember to savor a morning cup of coffee. Throughout the seasons, the natural world replenishes. Its essence is outside the defiling of reality and decency that has assaulted my son and my well-being. Winter eases into spring blooms, a red cardinal perches on a tree branch, the blue sky is a reliable treat. When my dog wags her tail during daily walks, my sorrow appreciates her zest, unburdened by human problems.

Despite efforts to move forward, sorrow blindsided me again this past January after routine blood work with my annual physical. Though asymptomatic, elevated white blood cells and a bone marrow biopsy confirmed a diagnosis of leukemia. My life in jeopardy crystallized both blessings that remain and how much I want to live. Existential terror subsided with a good prognosis due to Imatinib, a targeted cancer medication. Though my doctor discounts a link, my husband and I wonder if the stress of relentless sorrow about my son has precipitated cancer in my blood. 

Sorrow exacerbates anxiety about more sorrow. Will my husband or daughter also be taken away by illness or something else awful? Will my son decline further? The only “health care” he prioritizes is the debilitating farce of “trans'' care. I have wept when I consider that my son’s diligent effort to achieve A’s in high school and college have been derailed. My sorrow includes years of my own wasted effort to help my son thrive. I mourn, not just for my son in my life, but also for my son’s diminished participation in his own life. For now, he remains locked in a damaging fantasy. Sorrow seeps into the future when I imagine the possible trajectory of my son’s pitiful path. Could I bear my son living in abject poverty or worse, being homeless? Will we become completely estranged? When I consider that I may bury my child someday, a cloud of sorrow darkens. 

My sorrow looks for clarity. Do I hold on to sorrow as a way to stay connected with my son? Perhaps. But it’s also true that sorrow persists because a severed bond with my son is an open festering wound. It occurs to me that I would not choose to forget my sorrow by forgetting my son. My love has integrity even if he has turned away from it. While I think of myself as an empowered person, I cannot dislodge a mind virus sanctioning harm to sons and daughters while shattering families. Nor can I stop despicable others who are on the front lines of destroying healthy bodies, including amputations. No wonder my sorrow hunkers deep like a tangle of thorny twine. 

Sorrow lies in wait ready to pounce. A television episode includes a baby being born with parents overjoyed, as I once was, and I'm tearful. Though I welcome an escape, fiction can trigger sorrow about the inescapable nonfiction of how the life of my son and my family has imploded. In the evening, after I turn off the TV or put down a book, hoping I’m fatigued enough to sleep, my thoughts poke at the cavern of sorrow. Regrets that ruminate can still claw at the past about whether I could have somehow avoided the sorrow of today. If only time did not move in one direction. My sorrow yearns to have had my son before or after a mass psychosis. 

As the phlebotomist at a cancer care clinic drew my blood, I read a quotation on the wall that said, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” Sorrow is a lonely weight, and it was helpful to be reminded that to be human is to know sorrow. All any of us can do is live with sorrow as best we can. Sorrow is soothed by the compassionate company of PITT essays and readers’ comments. Writing this essay offers the solace of voicing the sorrow that lives underneath words.