Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time. Arthur Golden
I spent last week working in Jimmy’s bedroom.
I had been first to claim his space for my home office, but I hadn’t spent much time in there since our dog Buster burst a disc in his back and could no longer climb. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost four years since my Border Collie shadow last raced me up the stairs in search of a patch of sunlight in between my desk and Jimmy’s bookcase.
Beyond giving a few items to Jimmy’s best friends just after he died, the room is essentially intact. The space feels frozen in time, preserved like an exhibit of artifacts from a long ago civilization kept behind glass. Without Buster’s eager energy, my grief seemed to fill every bit of the space as I surveyed what remains. A cadre of stuffed penguins on the floor by his bed, patiently waiting for their fearless leader to come back. A bookshelf full of well-loved books from the Harry Potter series and Paddington the Bear to A Wrinkle in Time and The Phantom Tollbooth. Jimmy’s clothes are organized as he left them, neatly folded in the dresser drawers. His desk is still cluttered with Bobbleheads of his favorite San Francisco Giants, reading packets from college and more pens and pencils than a person could ever use.
I had forgotten how quiet and peaceful the room is, tucked at the end of the hall in the farthest point of the house. The location Jimmy claimed in every house we lived in. Away from his parent’s observant eye and easier to defend from a little sister determined to riffle through his dressers, searching for basketball shorts and oversized t-shirts to “borrow” without asking.
How is it possible that more than a decade has slipped by since Jimmy last filled this room with noise and the sound of his laughter? So much has changed, shattered, mended, survived in our lives since then. The cherry tree we planted a few months after his death is covered in exponentially more taffy pink blooms every year. Oak trees have decayed; plants have died. Friendships and family have held, except for the inevitable few that have fallen away. Buster is more than a year gone, and our new dog Lucy has never been upstairs.
Over the past ten years, I have done my best to mosaic myself back together, while holding on to the best of my son. Paying attention when the moment calls for it, so I don’t miss the life in front of me. Looking up when the lightning flashes, pausing in place until the thunder roars. Watching the rain beat down on the red tile roof outside our windows as if the skies, too, were shedding tears for everything that’s been lost.
Perhaps it is the shattering that saves us in the end by teaching us to look for the light in the broken places, to choose only the most colorful fragments. Life and circumstance, unfair though they may be, forcing us to rebuild our world in a new and imperfect way. To stitch together what’s been torn apart. To notice how much sweetness remains.
Sequestered in the silence, I got more work done in Jimmy’s room in a week than I had in months in my home office, despite the distraction of our houseguests. Perched among the trees, surrounded by my boy’s belongings, I looked at the photos of him at different ages and watched the afternoon sunlight dance across his carefully chosen belongings.
The more I sat, the more of Jimmy’s energy returned, expelling some of my grief and helping me to see how sacred the space is. I discovered that his presence is here, if only I am willing to remain quiet long enough to feel it. The way the room continues to hold space for my memories of him at all ages. The way it, too, waits, despite the impossibility, for him return.
