Dear Addison

On your birthday, I am woken by a nightmare. Your dad and you and I are walking along a rocky logging road, and you are a toddler of maybe three, all giggles and wispy hair. I sense motion in the trees high above, and that’s when I see movement and glimpse the cougar. She is big, and sleek, and powerful, and she breaks through the trees as she starts loping, then running down the hill at us. Your dad scoops you up in his arms, and I pick up a rock and wave my arms to look big. I can see her gorgeous golden eyes as she is bounding closer and inevitably towards us. I wake Matt up with incoherent muffled yelling. 

This morning, we head to Corvallis for the “Out of the Darkness” suicide prevention walk. We have been given the task of presenting the “white beads”, the beads worn by a parent who has lost a child to suicide. Mercifully, there is only one other parent, a stout man with deep crags of sadness in his face, an army veteran hat. He looks at Matt and I with tears, and instinctively, we all put our fist to our chests as our faces scrunch with shared grief. A dad with the white beads. White beads are what have become of our children. I see your brothers off to the side, not looking at us, looking anywhere but at our faces. My brief anger rises sharp and hot at the risk you have put them at. Did you know the statistics, of how they are now at exponentially higher risk of death by their own hand, and would you have done it, knowing this? Probably not. But you did. I am wearing your favorite yellow sweater like a hug. Your mom let me have it, and when you are the stepmom, something like this is everything. It is the baby blanket I never held, it is fragments of you I clutch to me. I am reluctant to wear it at all because I am so afraid that when it is gone, another piece of you is, too. 

Tonight, we walk to the village. We eat a small meal, we toast a drink to you, to us, we vow to not let this break us. The night sky is a serenade of pinks and blues and oranges and then a deeper indigo, as we walk back in silence through the forest. I am straining hard to hear an owl, because I have come to believe that is how you visit me. There is nothing but soft rustling of branches and an occasional creak of limbs. But the forest floor is alive, and even in the hard dry spots of ground, I witness the darting earthworms in the headlamp. How had I not noticed these before? I notice everything now.

Almost home, we walk across the field at the abandoned Smith school. This is the place in the neighborhood where I come closest to being able to touch the sky. Tonight you were there, I felt you, and as I held your dad’s hand in my left, oh how I can feel the heat of your palm pressed to mine in my right hand. Just to the top of the stairs, you say. I feel this, I feel you there so real I can almost see your face in the shadows. And at the top of the stairs, you are gone. I have not said a word to your father but we both turn back to the field and just stare.

Walking back on the side street, there is the shimmer of glass and shine ground into the pavement under the streetlight. The hard line of your dad’s jaw, and the wet streaks on his face. This is how we mark time now, the glint of our tears embedded in the tarry path, frozen and forever. Everything a moment in time, nothing the same. Hands entwined, we keep walking.