Some days I miss you so much it hurts to breathe. With every new step Brady takes I am acutely aware it is a step away from you, from me, from us. It begins small, with awkward passes and toddling. Then while you clean dishes, make sandwiches and pay bills, he starts to run – full of glee and sweet abandonment like someone who’s accidentally discovered he can fly. And there is the beginning of the rest of his life. I can’t help but think every step he takes from now on is a step toward his own journey, one that will lead him further and further away from us over time.
The night started ordinarily enough. We were re-arranging our garage, making more room for all the small stuff you’re not supposed to sweat about. A family grows and its garage shrinks. There was stuff everywhere – photo albums, basketballs, candles with thick layers of dust caked on, remnants of hobbies taken up in great excitement and abandoned with even greater haste. I even found our old running medals from that crazy marathon phase. I wondered why we kept any of it.
My job was to sort it all out: throw away the useless, give away the maybes and find a place for everything else. It was a daunting task and I was still at it at almost midnight when I reached for a manila envelope sitting at the bottom of a very large pile. It was heavy in my hand and too fat to close. I wasn’t expecting the weight of it as I picked it up so the photos spilled out everywhere like marbles hitting the sidewalk.
There he was, the rabbi lifting Gregg only eight days old. The earliest picture I’ve ever seen of him. You looked on, still swollen from the birth, but the grin spread wide across your face glowed like a schoolgirl’s crush. A proud mother.
There were more photos of you and Ronnie, so young you looked like kids really.
Photos of your wedding day with a photographer making you pose awkwardly. In one of them you’re sharing a private joke – I’m pretty sure it’s at the photographer’s expense. Photos of Julie as a baby. Photos of a house and friends. Photos of your parents who would one day become great-grandparents before you even saw your first grandchild born. Photos of Gregg’s first day at school. Little League. Bat/Bar Mitzvahs. Holidays. Photos of you and Auntie. Photos of Julie’s wedding. Photos of a lifetime.
It was all there, tucked away in a faded yellow envelope. The very beginning of your own journey straight through to your fiftieth birthday. For the occasion, Julie and Gregg each wrote you a letter sharing how much you meant to them. Within three years of writing those letters Gregg would be reading your eulogy. I cried reading them. It felt so intimate – it was just you and I on a quiet summer night. I felt closer to you then than perhaps ever before. One mother speaking to another.
The voice was pretty clear: Cherish the stuff now -- all of it. The basketball is from Gregg playing hoops with his dad on the backyard court. The candles lit up our first Valentine’s Day dinner. The hobbies helped us get to know one another. The medals helped us get to know ourselves. And the photos are now priceless.
My mind raced back to Brady, learning how to make his way through this new world. I could hear her say, He will forever be running in one direction or another – sometimes with you, sometimes away from you, but hopefully always back to you.
