I want to write about the guilt I have around my son Chris. When this picture was taken, I was only a year or two away from the trauma of having lost his brother Stephen, who was thirteen months old when he died very suddenly from spinal meningitis. Sick in the afternoon, dead that night. I wrote this post about it, so I don't need to go there again. But what I still feel bad about is how Chris' life was shaped so drastically by that experience.
I was never really able to be there for Chris for so many years of his young life. And then when he was 12, he went to live with his dad in Michigan, I was in California, and I basically pretended to myself that I was without any children, as I became enamored with the loose life of a hippie, traveling to Mexico and basically spending a few years bumming around until finally moving to Boulder in the mid-1970s and beginning to have a more stable life again.
Chris came back to live with me then, when we was around sixteen. He was like a stranger in many ways, because we never got over the rift of those years of separation. And I hate to admit it, but he reminded me so much of his father than I couldn't get past that. How awful is it when he would just be himself, and I would cringe at the image of his father staring right back at me through the years?
Once in Boulder, I'll never forget it, I was impatient with something he was telling me and I said, "you sound just like your father." He stood up in the coffee shop and at the top of his voice, he said, "when you can see me instead of my father, maybe we can have a conversation!" And he walked out. I sat there, embarrassed, but also stunned into reality about how little I knew about my own son.
He managed to make a pretty good life for himself in Boulder, and he lived with me at various times, sometimes for a short while when he needed to get on his feet, and sometimes for longer periods. He had jobs that gave him enough money to get by, but he never had much. He didn't seem to care, and there were times when he brought his latest girlfriend by the house. He finally went back to live with his father in Michigan when he was in his early twenties and worked with Derald, his father, in the construction business. We saw each other intermittently during those years. He would call me on Mother's Day and his birthday, and we would talk about our lives.
His father died suddenly when Chris was 29, and for a few more years he tried to make it in Michigan but decided finally to join the Army while he still could, before he got too old to be eligible. It was the best thing he could have done for himself, because he was starved for structure in his life, and the Army provided it. He came to Boulder for a few days before he headed off to Basic Training, and he crashed in our living room not long after Smart Guy and I had married. It was a tense time, with me trying to make everybody feel okay. It didn't help that Chris brought a fellow recruit with him. After that experience, any time Chris came to visit, or even other family members, I would put them up in a nearby hotel, and that way I could feel more comfortable with both sets of family.
The last time I saw Chris was before he shipped off to Germany, and he came to visit with his latest girlfriend, an older woman (not as old as me but darn close) who obviously loved him very much. They stayed in a hotel at my expense and we got together after breakfast, and Chris and I spent a lot of time together for a few days. He was a heavy smoker at the time, and he would need to go outside every twenty minutes or so for a cigarette. The girlfriend was left behind when Chris left the country, and she would call me, despondent, every few weeks for half a year. There was nothing I could do.
Then Chris called me, after he had been in Germany about a year, to tell me he wanted to get married to a German woman named Silvia, who had a young boy from a previous marriage. He didn't have a certified copy of his birth certificate and he needed me to get him one so that he could marry her. It took quite a while, but I was able to finally get it and sent it to him, and they were married and provided me with pictures. I never even spoke to her on the phone, because Chris said her English was not great and she was embarrassed to talk to me. But he was happy and fulfilled, and for the first time in his life he was really happy when we talked. This made me feel much better about him, his upbringing, my inability to launch him into adulthood the way the Army could.
He was in his early thirties when he joined the Army, so he wasn't exactly a youngster. He became a respected member of his unit, and he gravitated into duties in the Mail Room. I learned plenty about how important a position he felt this was. When he died of sudden cardiac arrest, just like his father had when he was 51, Chris was forty years old. He had quit smoking four or five months before that.
When I traveled to Germany to meet his friends, his wife Silvia, and to say goodbye for the last time in this life, I learned many things about Chris I never knew. He was known for standing up to the brass, far above him in the chain of command, if he felt it was an important issue. Once he walked right into the Base Commander's office and demanded that a wrong be righted. It was, and the Commander told me this story about him that impressed him, and me. After his death, the Mail Room was dedicated to his memory, and I attended the ceremony where a plaque and his picture were placed on the outside hallway.
I learned that he read palms and impressed many friends with his ability to predict the future. This amazed me, because he had never mentioned it to me, and he never gave me any indication of his interest in any area of the occult (if that is what it was). Just writing about him, remembering him, brings up such pain, because I never got a chance to tell him how much I loved him, not his father's image, but Chris himself. I think he knew it, but I'll never really know until the day comes when we meet each other again.
Perhaps this post will relieve me a little of the burden I carry around with me, every day, wishing I had been a better mother to my son.
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